To be identified with the Lord is to be one Spirit with Him. It is a fact that Jesus today is the Spirit waiting to enter into anyone who believes in Him. If a person exercises his inner being to call on Jesus, regardless of his race, color, or culture, Jesus comes as the Spirit and enters into him. Following this, the person must be baptized. To be baptized is to be put into Christ, signifying what we have received through our believing. To be baptized is also to put Christ upon us. In baptism there is a two-way traffic. We enter into Jesus, and we put Jesus upon us. This is not a form or ritual; it is a fact. When we baptize people, we should tell them that we are not putting them only into the water; we are putting them into Jesus Christ as the Spirit. From the time that he is baptized, the baptized person is in Christ, and Christ is upon him like a garment. This is a fact in which we must believe, and we must have the assurance and boldness to tell this to people.

Matthew 28:19 says, "Go therefore and disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." It is easy for us to believe that we are baptizing people into water, because water is visible; but because of our lack of realization, we may not have the boldness and assurance to tell people that we are baptizing them into the Triune God. Because of our weakness, the Lord did not say here that we should baptize people into the Triune God directly, but that we should do this indirectly by baptizing people into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In reality, however, the name is the sum total of the Divine Being, equivalent to His person. To baptize someone into the name of the Triune God is to immerse him into all that the Triune God is. If we go out to contact others without this assurance and boldness, we will have no power. We ourselves must have the experience that we are really in Jesus and that Jesus is really in us. Then we can go out to preach what we have experienced with boldness and full assurance.

We must believe what we preach, and we must believe that when we baptize people, we put them into the Triune God. The baptized one is in the Triune God; he is in Jesus and Jesus is in him. Now he and Jesus, Jesus and he, are one. They are two persons united together to be one person. Therefore, the baptized one is identified with Christ. If we are those who have this assurance, we will not preach the gospel in a poor and weak way to others. Before we go out to preach to others, we must first pray ourselves into the Spirit and into the Word of God. We should pray for at least twenty minutes, not mainly for sinners to be saved but for ourselves. We may pray, "Lord, be merciful to empower us. Put us into Yourself. When we go out, go in us and cause us to go in You. We do not want to go out without being in You." After twenty minutes, we will have the assurance that He is in us and that we are in Him. Then we will have the genuine boldness and power. This assurance, boldness, and power added together, equals the Spirit.

After a person has been baptized, we should go back to him to tell him that he is one with Jesus. Jesus died on the cross, and since we are one with Him, we died there also (2 Cor. 5:14). We are identified with Him in His death in order that it may be no longer we who live. This was the reason that we died with Him. We needed to be terminated, and now we have been germinated. Now Christ lives in us. This is the higher gospel that we need to preach to the newly baptized ones. We must believe that people are able to understand such a gospel.

Christ's living in us must be a fact, not merely a doctrine or a declaration. When we awake in the morning, we should call on the Lord a number of times before we do anything else. If we will do this, by the time we have made our beds, we will be different persons. Calling on the Lord in this way will help us to experience Christ living in us. Copying two verses from the Bible after our morning revival and taking them in a little at a time throughout the day will also help us to experience Christ living in us. We should not care merely for the doctrine of Christ living in us. We should care for the fact.

According to Galatians 2:20, the life which we now live in the flesh we live in the faith of Christ. We live a life in the flesh, but we live this life in the faith of Christ. We do not live such a life in our faith but in Christ's faith, even in Christ as our faith. When we live in this way, we enjoy Christ and appreciate Christ, and Christ within us becomes our present faith. This means that we put ourselves absolutely aside. Nothing is left within us but Christ. Christ is everything to us to such an extent that He even becomes our faith. This is a great matter.

We all need to see that our believing in Jesus and our being baptized into Him means that He comes into us and we are put into Him so that He and we become one. He is in us, and we are in Him. This is possible only because of the two spirits. He is the divine Spirit, and we have a human spirit. The divine Spirit is in our human spirit. Therefore, in our spirit we are one spirit with Him. He died, and we died in Him. We live, but He lives in us. We are still living, yet we live this life not by anything of ourselves but by Him as everything, even as our faith. We all need to see this. This is not merely a doctrine; it must be our experience.