Chapter 7: The Immanence of Christ
Chapter 7: The Immanence of Christ
OUR RELIGION IS deeper than is commonly supposed. It is a great loss in every way that we are accustomed to speak of faith in Christ, forgiveness, and cleansing from sin as if they were the crown and climax of Christianity, instead of being its outworks, its outer-courts, the staircases and corridors to its throne-room, its reparative processes preparatory to its essential life and heart. Christianity fails of its chief end in any life that it affects, unless it produces there, so far as may be possible, the life of the Eternal God Himself, as it is resident in Jesus Christ and communicated by the Holy Spirit.
In regeneration, at whatever time it takes place, and under whatever circumstances, the principle of a new life is inserted in the human spirit. As the animal has a higher life than the plant, and as man, in his moral nature, has a higher life than the animal, so the man who has been regenerated by the Spirit of God has become possessed of a life to which the ordinary man can lay no claim. He has become, as the Apostle Peter puts it, "a partaker of the Divine nature." Whatever be our differences as to creed or Church, they are comparatively unimportant, so long as we possess within our spirits this Divine life, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory. "Know ye not," said the Apostle, as though it were an anomaly to be ignorant of this primal fact, " that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?"
The whole scheme of redemption, the entire work of Jesus Christ, His birth in which He brought the Divine under the conditions of the human, His death by which He acquired power to pass it on, His resurrection and ascension through which He bore it regnant and triumphant to the throne, His gift of the Holy Spirit by which He makes it available to all who believe-all tend to this as their flower and fruit, that He should reproduce Himself in us. And if year by year we are not becoming more pure and strong and Christ-like, we may gravely question whether we have not deceived ourselves in thinking that we have received Him into our nature.
The true seat of the Divine indwelling is the spirit. We are rather lax in our use of terms, and fail to divide between soul and spirit. In clear and accurate thinking on these deep matters we should conceive of the soul as the seat of the ego, of our individuality, and of all the attributes of thought and love, of hope and imagination, with which we are endowed; but the spirit in man is the Holy of Holies of his nature, the inner shrine, the natural residence and resort of the Spirit of God, with whom it has a native affinity. We worship God in the spirit. Probably the heart is the Hebrew correlative in the Old Testament of the spirit in the New.
There, in the spirit of man, in depths below the play of self-consciousness and energy and emotion, in the temple of the inner life, the Divine life literally dwells. Strengthened by might through the Spirit in the inner man, Christ dwells in our hearts by faith; and as the discipline of life proceeds. He is increasingly formed within us. It is a great moment in a man's life when this conception first breaks on him, or to adopt the Apostle's phrase, when God reveals it to him. He suddenly awakens to the fact that he has within him that eternal life which was in the Father, and was manifested to the world in His Son, and is now communicated by the Spirit. Bitter and deep are the regrets that he has not recognized it before, that he has been too monopolized by the play of his own life to give way to its holy promptings and inspirations. It is as though a man who for years has been working some heavy machinery by hand-power, at great strain and cost to himself, should suddenly awake to find that in his factory for years there has been a handle which, had he but touched it, would have connected his machine with a powerful dynamo, and would have saved him all his expenditure.
We must distinguish between the conception of the Christ-ideal, or the enthusiasm of the Christ-spirit, and the literal indwelling of the Son of God, through the Holy Spirit. In all ages the minds of men have been sensitive to influences like these. Some lofty ideal, like that of the Virgin Mother, which inspired the knighterrants of the Middle Ages; some Divine enthusiasm, like that which led the rich and high-born to abjure all that they might resemble Christ in His lowliness and poverty-such lofty inspirations have visited and possessed men, nerving them to sublime and heroic lives. But these do not fulfill the measure of this conception, that Christ is actually resident in the regenerated soul. They may proceed from that indwelling, but they have existed apart from it, and in comparison with it they are as artificial flowers to the exquisite texture and fragrance of the sweet nurselings of spring.
We cannot understand it. It is, as St. Paul says, a great mystery. But then all life is mysterious, and whatever is connected with God is mysterious to us. We might well question whether our religion were of God, if it did not touch on regions of mystery, if its paths did not after a while become tracks on the illimitable expanse of His being, presently fading from view. But we have all learnt to distinguish between mysteries we cannot solve and facts we gladly recognize and accept. We know not what life is. We sit beside our dying friend until the death-rattle or the gentle sigh announces that life is gone, but what is it that goes out? What is the life which we possess when we live, and lose when we die? These are questions we cannot answer, but we still accept the fact of life throbbing within ourselves or our fellows. And thus we think of the mystery of Christ's indwelling; it baffles thought or speech, but we reverently accept it as a fact, and as we do so we find that it explains many another fact in our own consciousness, and in the history of the Church. It should, however, be our aim to yield to this life as far as possible. We must not be content with knowing that within the chambers of our heart there dwells this Mysterious Guest, in whom all wisdom and strength and love reside; we must often tread the corriders that lead to His apartment, consult with Him, interchange ideas and thoughts, lay before Him our intentions, purposes, and plans; nay, we must ask Him to step forth into the dwelling of the soul, tenanting every room, and affecting even the members of the body with the glow and radiance of His presence.
Two things are needful before we can realize the full benefit of this Indwelling: (1) We must curtail the manifestation of our own energy. This is by no means easy. Our Lord spoke of it as the daily cross, as laying down our lives, as losing our very souls, for the word translated soul is really life. We fight hard to hold our own; we have planned, managed, wrought so long that we are inapt in reining in our self-life, so that the Christ-life may become dominant. We are willing enough to adopt any theory of life that gives foothold to the spirit of self still to keep the government of our lives in its hands, such as the rightness of strict obedience to the law and spirit of Christ. We are willing that He should be constitutional monarch, if only a religious self may be His executive.
But whatever partakes of self is inimical to our true interests. We must stand aside. There cannot be two dominant principles within us. One must give way. John the Baptist must decrease if Christ is to increase. The marble must be chipped off if the fashion of the image is to grow. The first Adam, who is but a living soul, must give place to the second Adam, who is a life-giving spirit.
All this needs constant watchfulness. Whenever we are sensible of the forth-putting of energy, we must be on the alert that its source should not be self, but Christ; and that Its one purpose should be to manifest Him more perfectly, and to attract to Him more of the admiration and love of men. There is no merit in the deepest self-denial. We do not lop off the branches, shoots, and tendrils of our own life because of any virtue in the act. but only to curtail anything that might drain the energies of our nature away from the Christ graft, or interfere to the least degree with the manifestation of Christ's own royal and glorious Being.
(2) We must have times of silence, of waiting only upon God, of retiring from the murmur and hubbub of human voices, that the still, small voice may be able to make itself heard. Such hours are not lost. We are arrested from taking paths which otherwise we should have to retrace with slow and weary steps. We escape the useless expenditure of energy which we might better conserve. We become conscious of the rising up within of that great fountain of life, which, having come from God, proceeds to God, and that bears us forward, like Mary, to do the one great act of self-sacrifice which lives when the many things of the bustling Martha life are forgotten.
It may not be necessary literally to sit still, or to go apart from the ordinary avocations of life, in order to detect this voice. The boiler-makers can talk to each other amid ceaseless hammerings. Those who are accustomed to the roar of Niagara are sensitive to noises that would not be audible to the unaccustomed ear. So, when once we have caught the tone of the voice of God, we shall detect it amid the rush of daily business. We shall make a great stillness in our heart, enter the inner temple, and wait there, until the word of the Lord shall come to us; and all the while to the eyes of our fellows we shall be busy with the occupations and amenities of life.
The one aim, however, of existence should be to give an opportunity to the indwelling Lord to assert Himself, and possess the entire realm of spirit, soul and body, so that we may in our measure be able to say with the Apostle, "Daily delivered to death for Jesus' sake, that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our mortal flesh."