It is difficult to explain our Christian life. For many years I have considered what the nature of the Christian life is and how it can be described. Is it a human or a divine life? In our previous message we likened it to marriage. However, in marriage the wife does not have her husband’s life; thus, this illustration is faulty. The Father and the Son had only one life. The same is true of Christ and the church. What Christ has as life is the life of the church.
The ethical relationships described in Ephesians 5 and 6 cannot be worked out in ourselves. We cannot carry out these relationships by our natural life. We may have thought before that we could, but actually it is beyond our ability. Does this mean that whatever the Bible tells us to do is in vain? No, but we cannot fulfill its exhortations in and of ourselves. The love in Ephesians 5, for example, does not come from us. It is from the Lord. Christ has to be our life.
Many Christians are still under the natural concept that now that they are Christians they must improve their behavior. This concept of seeking to live the way God’s children should live must be dropped.
The basic revelation in the Bible is that you must take Christ as your life. You are to do this not because you are evil, or weak, or defeated. Christ took the Father’s life not because His own life was weak but in order to fulfill the Father’s desire. “I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him Who sent Me” (John 5:30). This was His commission. It may sound like Christian teaching to say that you need another life because your own life is inadequate, but actually such a teaching is religious. Even if you have the best life, God does not want it. Even if you can put Satan under your feet, God is not interested. God wants Christ to be lived out by you.
“As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me shall also live because of Me” (John 6:57). How many times we have read or recited this verse! Notice that there is no mention of weakness, sin, or better behavior. There is simply the desire of the living Father to live in the Son. Why did this living Father send the Son? It was not to establish an empire but to live Him. To live by the Father was the Father’s commission. Jesus did not accomplish any impressive work. He merely lived a life to express the Father.
“So he who eats Me” tells us that the Lord wants to be eaten by us. I did not see this until 1958, some thirty-three years after I was saved. In the spring of 1958 I gave three consecutive conferences in Taipei on the eating of Jesus. The messages were new and fresh. After the first meeting, a brother who was a professor came to me, protesting that to use the words “eat Jesus” was too barbarous and uncultured. My reply was that this term was not initiated by me but by Jesus. It was He who said “he who eats Me.” I told the brother to drop his cultural mentality and come back to the pure Word. The Lord’s concern is for our eating of Him, not for the dictates of culture.
Your life must be Christ, and Christ must be your life. To try to improve your behavior is of no avail. Live Christ. The Son came not to live Himself, but to live the Father. Jesus came, not primarily to save sinners, but to fulfill the Father’s commission. It was for this purpose that He went to the cross. If the cross had not been the Father’s will, Christ would not have accepted it. You remember His prayer in Gethsemane, “Not as I will, but as You will” (Matt. 26:39). He came not to seek His own will, but the will of Him who sent Him. That He went to the cross to save sinners was to do the Father’s will.
The Son did not live another life of His own. Though He and the Father were two Persons, They had only one life and one living. The same should be true of us. Though we and the Lord are two, we should not have two lives, nor should we have two livings. The one life that we both have is His, but the living is ours. Our living must be by His life, expressing Him, not ourselves.
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