God is not interested in giving you instruction. He is not out to develop your personality. He does not care about your self-improvement program. He is not trying to make a better person out of you. Rather, He wants you to come to the dining table and feast! The dining table is the Bible. You need to come to it at least three times a day. By pray-reading this book you will be nourished by the rich Christ, and God will have a way to fulfill His purpose.
The matter of eating is alluded to many times in the Epistles and in Revelation. In these final books of the Bible we find the outcome of eating. From the previous messages I believe you have seen that God would have us take Christ Himself as our life supply into our being. Now we shall consider what happens to us when we thus receive Him.
The Apostle Paul prayed, “That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith...that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17, 19). The issue of our enjoying the riches of Christ is that we become His expression. When this unlimited One has been wrought into us so that He can make His home in our heart, fully possessing our mind, emotion, will, and conscience, we shall be filled. To be filled means to have something added into us. When we are filled with the riches of Christ, the result is the expression of God.
God is not expressed by our good behavior, nor by our doctrinal knowledge, nor by our self-improvement. His expression is solely the result of our receiving the riches of His Son by eating. This organic, subjective receiving results in Christ’s becoming part of us, similar to the way our digested and assimilated food becomes part of us.
When Paul said, “To me to live is Christ,” He was describing the outcome of his day-by-day eating of Jesus. The result, then, of feeding on Christ is that God is expressed.
“And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, that you may prove by testing what the will of God is” (Rom. 12:2). This verse gives us another result of our taking Christ into us as food: we are transformed. I like the word transformed. There is no religion which aims at transforming us. At best, religion’s goal is to develop or improve what we are. This is not the case with God’s salvation. He has no interest in helping us to be better behaved. His desire is to add something into us which formerly was not there. We were born with only a human life; when the divine life is added into our being, transformation can be accomplished.
The renewing and transforming can be likened to grafting. Paul used grafting as an illustration of God’s salvation in Romans 11:17-24. We were the wild olive tree, grafted into the cultivated olive tree.
Grafting is an organic mingling. This is what our Christian life is. Bible teachers have called it an exchanged life, but this is the wrong way to describe it. We do not hand our poor life over to Christ for Him to discard and have Him give us His life to treasure. No transformation would be involved if that were what happened. Rather, we have been grafted into Christ, and Christ has been grafted into us. We are being transformed, not only by Christ, but also with Him.
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