2. The Personal Christ
CHAPTER 2
The Personal Christ
Man remains in me, and I in him… apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)
A missionary has stated that the Chinese have learned to differentiate between nominal Christians and true disciples. Every European resident is called a Christian, but they have learned to take those who bear this name on their merits and demerits and often have good reason to say, “If these drunken, blasphemous foreigners are Christians, then save us from Christianity.” But they have found the difference between the true followers of Jesus and mere nominal Christians and they call the former not Christians but “Jesus people.” They have been taught to discriminate between the outward name of Christian and true Christlikeness.
This may serve to illustrate the difference between Christian life and the Christ life. Christian life may be nothing more than the acceptance of certain ideas and principles and the observance of certain forms and rites. Christ life is a vital and divine experience through the union of the soul with the living Christ Himself. Christian life may be an honest attempt to imitate Christ and follow His teachings and commandments, but Christ-life is the incarnation of Jesus Himself in your own life. It is the Christ reliving His life in you and enabling you to be and to do what in your own strength you never could accomplish.
The first thing suggested by this thought is personality. The things we value most in the history of the past are not so much the records of events as the revelation of men and women. A country is great not through its magnificent scenery or delightful climate but because of the men and women that give it its national character. More than our traditions, memories, poetry, literature and art are our personal heroes. And in our own private life what we value most is not our houses and lands, our commerce and wealth, our culture and progress but our friends, our loved ones. You would give all the world for one frail little life that is hanging in the balance, and your dearest treasures are the persons you love and call your very own.
And so in the higher realm the greatest conception in the universe is the conception of the personal God. We rejoice to know that He is not an abstraction or principle but a living Person whom we can touch with our consciousness and embrace with the arms of our faith and love. A lady, just saved from the delusions of Christian Science, exclaimed as she apprehended the personality of Jesus Christ, “How strange that I never realized the awful error they taught me, that Christ was only a principle and not a person. I might as well try to love the grapevine on my trellis as the divine principle. Oh, I am so glad that Jesus is as real as I myself, my own blessed Savior.”
The Personal Christ
As we read the story of His life, back of all His wonderful works and words is the Living One Himself, and so lofty is His personality that even infidelity has been compelled to say that the hardest thing to explain away is not the Bible but the Christ of the Bible. What other man ever talked so much of Himself or so often used the personal pronoun and yet it all seems so natural, so becoming, so majestic and so consistent with His character and personality that we listen with awe and admiration as we hear Him say, “I am the Bread of Life,” “I am the Light of the world,” “I and my Father are one,” “Without me you can do nothing.”
We instinctively feel that He has a right to stand without egotism, always in the front of the stage, and that He Himself is greater than all the truths He revealed and all the works He accomplished. And not only so, that personality is still a living Presence. “Lo, I am with you all the days.” “Behold, I am alive for evermore.” He walks through all the generations as really as in the days of Galilee. He is the Heart as well as the Head of Christianity, “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
The healing of His seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life’s throng and press,
And we are whole again.
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet,
A present help is He,
And faith has still its Olivet,
And love its Galilee.
Salvation through Personal Union with Christ
The personality of Christ is intimately connected with our salvation. We are not saved by embracing a creed or believing a doctrine but by accepting a Person. “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus …” (Romans 8:1). Our relation to the Lord Jesus Himself settles our destiny. Jesus Christ is Himself the Father’s Gift to sinful men, and the acceptance of that Gift brings us into fellowship with God and makes us partakers of all the benefits of redemption. Just as Adam was the living personal head of our fallen race, so Christ is the Living Head of the redeemed race and “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).
Christ Our Life
So also our deeper life is through union with the personal Christ. The apostle has expressed this in the sublime paradox, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Holiness is not personal character slowly attained but union with the Lord Jesus, so perfect and intimate that He Himself has described it under the figure of the vine and the branches and adds: “If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5b). We have not to climb by slow and painful ascent the heights of holiness but to receive the Holy One Himself to dwell within us and lift us up to all the heights of grace and glory which He Himself has attained. “It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Our part is not to struggle after ethical culture but to receive Him, abide in Him and have Him transfer to us day by day and step by step His own excellence, His own qualities, His own graces, “grace for grace.”
Christ Our Physical Life
Our physical quickening comes from the same personal source. The apostle Paul declares that the life also of Jesus was manifested in his mortal flesh. Paul had his own natural life but it was limited and often exhausted by the strain of his excessive toils and trials. But he had a second life, “the life also of Jesus,” and that enabled him to sustain the pressures for which his own strength was insufficient. The resurrection body of our glorious Lord is the source of physical energy for all His trusting people, and as we abide in Him and draw from Him His sustaining strength, we may “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood” and so “dwell” in Him that it shall be true of us as it was of Him, “because I live, ye shall live also.”
Christ Our Hope
The glorious doctrine of His Second Coming would be nothing without the personal Christ Himself. It is not the reward which He is to bring or the crown which He is to bestow which inspires the supreme longing of His followers. But it is the person of the Lord Jesus in that blessed place and time when at last it shall be true, “They shall see his face,” (Revelation 22:4, KJV) and “… the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water” (7:17). The very heart of the advent hope is this, “I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (John 14:3).
Now God has specially qualified His Son to be the sum and substance of the believer’s spiritual life. We are told in Colossians 2:9, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” God has put in Christ everything that man can ever need. He has just concentrated and personified in this blessed Man all His own strength, love and help for you and me. In the Vatican at Rome there is a beautifully painted ceiling so high up that it is impossible to see it; the visitor strains his eye in vain to find it. To meet this difficulty, they have constructed a mirror, so reflecting it that all you have to do is to walk up to a little glass, and there the minutest touches of the fresco in the dizzy heights above are reflected right under your eyes. So He took His glory, and beauty and help, and put it down on the level of human ignorances and helplessness. He just put it all in the mirror, Jesus Christ, and said, “Is there anything in God you need? There it is in miniature.” And then He puts it in your hand, and says, “I have put in Jesus all I am, and now I give Him to you, and you can claim Him for your own.”
The Ideal Man
Not only is this blessed Christ the embodiment of God’s riches, but He is the pattern and sample of what men ought to be. One Man and only One has lived a perfect human life. With tender pathos God says in one of the prophets: “I looked for a man among all their tribes, and I found none.” He looked for someone that could meet the requirements of human character, and found none. But at last there came One, and He looked again, and said with delight, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight” (Isaiah 42:1a). He met God’s expectation and became a pattern for all men. So there has lived One on earth who has idealized manhood and womanhood and childhood; the sample of a perfect character, of a woman’s heart, of a man’s manhood—a pattern for the workman at the bench, for the preacher, for the teacher, for the friend, for the sufferer, for the tempted one—wherever a man may be placed, Jesus has been.
And now this blessed Man is given to you. He says, “Accept Me; not as an example to follow afar off but as a life to come into you and impart to you My very nature and make it second nature to your heart, spontaneous in your choice, victorious in your will and interwoven with all your emotional life.” This is the Christ life. This is the Christ that comes to you today and offers His personal fullness and all-sufficiency.
In Harmony with Our Nature
A thoughtful, intelligent woman who was not a Christian but had a deep hunger for that which is right, posed the question, “How can this be so and we not lose our individuality? This will destroy our personality and violate our responsibility as individuals.” I said, “Your personality is incomplete without Christ. Christ was made for you and you were made for Christ, and until you meet Him you are not complete; He needs you as you need Him. Suppose that gas jet should say, ‘If I take this fire in, the gas will lose its individuality.’ It is only when the fire comes in that the gas fulfills its purpose of being. Suppose the snowflake should say, ‘What shall I do? If I drop on the ground I shall lose my individuality.’ But it falls and is absorbed by-the soil, and the snowflakes are seen by and by in the primroses and daisies. It is glorious to lose ourselves and rise again in new life in Christ.”
Created for Him
It took us days behind a swift engine to cross over the barren plains of the great West. Day by day nothing was seen but sand and sagebrush growing along the track. When I asked about it I found this was the best soil in the country; where the sagebrush grows, anything will grow. Only one thing was lacking. What was it? Every once in a while we came to an oasis where the grass would be greener than elsewhere; the fruits of the tropics—the fig tree and the orange groves—were growing. What made the difference? As we walked around these farms we found ditches which had caught the mountain stream and irrigated the land by covering it with water. It needed but one thing to bring it out—water.
So you may have all the possibilities but you come to nothing until you let in the water and become fruitful. The desert needs the water, and the water needs the desert. You need Christ, and Christ needs you. It is this union, this abiding in Him and He in you, which will bring forth much fruit, for He has said, “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).