In previous messages we covered many aspects of the believers’ experiencing and enjoying Christ as the Son in His grace. In this message we shall cover four other matters related to this and then go on to consider the believers’ experiencing and enjoying the Spirit as the consummation of the divine Trinity in His fellowship.
Christ lives in the believers for them to apprehend His breadth, length, height, and depth. In Ephesians 3:18 Paul speaks of being “strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.” The Greek word translated “apprehend” means not only to know but also to grasp, to lay hold of intensively. In order to grasp the dimensions of Christ we need all the saints, for we apprehend these dimensions not individually but corporately.
In Ephesians 3 Paul prayed that we would be strengthened into our inner man with the result that Christ would make His home in our hearts and thereby occupy, possess, permeate, and saturate our whole inner being with Himself. In this way we are filled with Christ and we become strong to apprehend the dimensions of Christ.
The dimensions of Christ are the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth-the dimensions of the universe. We can measure the distance from one point in the universe to another, for example, from the earth to the moon, but we cannot measure the universe itself. Only God knows the measurements of the universe. Now the very dimensions of the universe are also the dimensions of Christ. This indicates that Christ is our real universe, for His dimensions are the dimensions of the universe.
In our experience of Christ we first experience the breadth of what He is and then the length. This is horizontal. As we advance in Christ, we experience the height and the depth of His riches. This is vertical. First we experience Christ spreading as the breadth and the length, and later we experience Him rising up as the height and then descending as the depth. Eventually our experience of Christ becomes three dimensional, like a cube.
If we have only the length of Christ, without any breadth, our experience will be a “line,” that is, an experience that is long and narrow to an extreme. Our experience of Christ, however, should have not only one dimension, like a line, but two dimensions, like a square, and then three dimensions, like a cube. If we have only a line experience of Him, this line will continue until it reaches an extreme. But if we experience Christ properly and normally as the breadth and the length, we shall be kept from going to an extreme.
In order to experience Christ in His universal dimensions, we need the church life. We need to experience Christ with all the members of the Body. As we experience the dimensions of Christ in the church life, we find that His breadth and length are immeasurable. Christ is immeasurable in His spreading forth. As we experience Christ in His spreading, we come to see that the dimensions of the universe are the very dimensions of Christ.
After we experience the breadth and length of Christ, we begin to experience the height of Christ and then the depth. The proper understanding of the experience of the height and depth of Christ is contrary to our natural concept, which places depth before height. But in the experience of Christ we first ascend and then we descend. This means that before we can have the depth, we must have the height. The spiritual experiences of the depth of Christ come from the experiences of the height of Christ.
In our experience of Christ we should go on from two dimensions to three. Our experience of Christ in the church must be cubical, three dimensional, with many lines going back and forth in all three directions. When we experience Christ in such a three-dimensional way, we become solid. Because Christ is the universal “cube,” our experience of Him needs to be cubical. As we go back and forth and up and down in our experience of Christ, we eventually have a solid, cubical experience of Him.
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