Christian Fellowship Community Group
A safe place for Christians who Love Jesus Christ to meet and ask for prayer and share scriptures from the bible. We value the posting of Christian music, poems, stories and also personal testimonies. Please let us know your needs, concerns and have some fun getting to know each other. We treat each other with respect.
"The wisdom of the fathers"
ABIDING IN HIM
We are familiar with the words of the Lord Jesus, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). Let us consider them for a moment. First they remind us once again that we have never to struggle to get into Christ. We are not told to get there, for we are told to stay there where we have been placed. It was God’s own act that put us in Christ, and we are to abide in Him.
But further, this verse lays down for us a Divine principle, which is that God has done the work in Christ and not in us as individuals. The all-inclusive death and the all-inclusive resurrection of God’s Son were accomplished fully and finally apart from us in the first place. It is the history of Christ which is to become the experience apart from Him. The Scriptures tell us that we were crucified “with Him”, that we were quickened, raised, and set by God in the heavenlies “in Him”, and that we are complete “in Him” (Rom. 6:6; Eph. 2:5, 6; Col. 2:10). It is not just something that is still to be effected in us (though it is that, of course). It is something that has already been effected, in association with Him.
In the Scriptures we find that no Christian experience exists as such. What God has done in His gracious purpose is to include us in Christ. In dealing with Christ God has dealt with the Christian; in dealing with the Head He has dealt with all the members. It is altogether wrong for us to think that we can experience anything of the spiritual life in ourselves merely, and apart from Him. God does not intend that we should acquire something exclusively personal in our experience, and He is not willing to effect anything like that for you and me. All the spiritual experience of the Christian is already true in Christ. It has already been experienced by Christ. What we call ‘our’ experience is only our entering into His history and His experience. Oh it is a great thing to know the facts of Christ as the foundation for our experience.
So God’s basic principle in leading us on experimentally is not to give us something. It is not to bring us through something, and as a result to put something into us which we can call ‘our experience’. It is not that God effects something within us so that we can say, ‘I died with Christ last March’ or ‘I was raised from the dead on January 1st, 1937,’ or even, ‘Last Wednesday I asked for a definite experience and I have got it’. No, that is not the way. I do not seek experiences in themselves as in this present year of grace. Time must not be allowed to dominate my thinking here.
Then, some will say, what about the crises so many of us have passed through? True, some of us have passed through real crises in our lives. For instance George Muller could say, bowing himself down to the ground, ‘There was a day when George Muller died’. How about that? Well, I am not questioning the reality of the spiritual experiences we go through nor the importance of crises to which God brings us in our walk with Him; indeed, I have already stressed the need for us to be quite as definite ourselves about such crisis in our own lives. But the point is that God does not give individuals individual experiences. All that they have is only an entering into what God has already done. It is the ‘realizing’ in time of eternal things. The history of Christ becomes our experience and our spiritual history; we do not have a separate history from His. The entire work regarding us is not done in us here but in Christ. He does no separate work in individuals apart from what He has done there. Even eternal life is not given to us as individuals: the life is in the Son, and “he that hath the Son hath the life”. God has done all in His Son, and He has included us in Him; we are incorporated into Christ.
Now the point of all this is that there is a very real practical value in the stand of faith that says, ‘God has put me in Christ, and therefore all that is true of Him is true of me. I will abide in Him.’ Satan is always trying to get us out, to keep us out, to convince us that we are out, and by temptations, failures, suffering, trial, to make us feel acutely that we are outside of Christ. Our first thought is that, if we were in Christ, we should not be in this state, and therefore, judging by the feelings we now have, we must be out of Him; and so we begin to pray, ‘Lord, put me into Christ’. No! God’s injunction is to “abide” in Christ, and that is the way of deliverance. But how is it so? Because it opens the way for God to take a hand in our lives and to work the thing out in us. It makes room for the operation of His superior power—the power of resurrection (Rom. 6:4, 9, 10)—so that the facts of Christ do progressively become the facts of our daily experience, and where before “sin reigned” (Rom. 5:21) we make now the joyful discovery that we are truly “no longer... in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6). (by Watchman Nee)
ABIDING IN HIM
We are familiar with the words of the Lord Jesus, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). Let us consider them for a moment. First they remind us once again that we have never to struggle to get into Christ. We are not told to get there, for we are told to stay there where we have been placed. It was God’s own act that put us in Christ, and we are to abide in Him.
But further, this verse lays down for us a Divine principle, which is that God has done the work in Christ and not in us as individuals. The all-inclusive death and the all-inclusive resurrection of God’s Son were accomplished fully and finally apart from us in the first place. It is the history of Christ which is to become the experience apart from Him. The Scriptures tell us that we were crucified “with Him”, that we were quickened, raised, and set by God in the heavenlies “in Him”, and that we are complete “in Him” (Rom. 6:6; Eph. 2:5, 6; Col. 2:10). It is not just something that is still to be effected in us (though it is that, of course). It is something that has already been effected, in association with Him.
In the Scriptures we find that no Christian experience exists as such. What God has done in His gracious purpose is to include us in Christ. In dealing with Christ God has dealt with the Christian; in dealing with the Head He has dealt with all the members. It is altogether wrong for us to think that we can experience anything of the spiritual life in ourselves merely, and apart from Him. God does not intend that we should acquire something exclusively personal in our experience, and He is not willing to effect anything like that for you and me. All the spiritual experience of the Christian is already true in Christ. It has already been experienced by Christ. What we call ‘our’ experience is only our entering into His history and His experience. Oh it is a great thing to know the facts of Christ as the foundation for our experience.
So God’s basic principle in leading us on experimentally is not to give us something. It is not to bring us through something, and as a result to put something into us which we can call ‘our experience’. It is not that God effects something within us so that we can say, ‘I died with Christ last March’ or ‘I was raised from the dead on January 1st, 1937,’ or even, ‘Last Wednesday I asked for a definite experience and I have got it’. No, that is not the way. I do not seek experiences in themselves as in this present year of grace. Time must not be allowed to dominate my thinking here.
Then, some will say, what about the crises so many of us have passed through? True, some of us have passed through real crises in our lives. For instance George Muller could say, bowing himself down to the ground, ‘There was a day when George Muller died’. How about that? Well, I am not questioning the reality of the spiritual experiences we go through nor the importance of crises to which God brings us in our walk with Him; indeed, I have already stressed the need for us to be quite as definite ourselves about such crisis in our own lives. But the point is that God does not give individuals individual experiences. All that they have is only an entering into what God has already done. It is the ‘realizing’ in time of eternal things. The history of Christ becomes our experience and our spiritual history; we do not have a separate history from His. The entire work regarding us is not done in us here but in Christ. He does no separate work in individuals apart from what He has done there. Even eternal life is not given to us as individuals: the life is in the Son, and “he that hath the Son hath the life”. God has done all in His Son, and He has included us in Him; we are incorporated into Christ.
Now the point of all this is that there is a very real practical value in the stand of faith that says, ‘God has put me in Christ, and therefore all that is true of Him is true of me. I will abide in Him.’ Satan is always trying to get us out, to keep us out, to convince us that we are out, and by temptations, failures, suffering, trial, to make us feel acutely that we are outside of Christ. Our first thought is that, if we were in Christ, we should not be in this state, and therefore, judging by the feelings we now have, we must be out of Him; and so we begin to pray, ‘Lord, put me into Christ’. No! God’s injunction is to “abide” in Christ, and that is the way of deliverance. But how is it so? Because it opens the way for God to take a hand in our lives and to work the thing out in us. It makes room for the operation of His superior power—the power of resurrection (Rom. 6:4, 9, 10)—so that the facts of Christ do progressively become the facts of our daily experience, and where before “sin reigned” (Rom. 5:21) we make now the joyful discovery that we are truly “no longer... in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6). (by Watchman Nee)
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