Christ in Us – Key to Our Cleansing and Victory

By Neil Earle

According to C.S. Lewis, the central miracle of the Christian faith is the Incarnation.

Considering all the obstacles facing the Christian in this chaotic world, how will he or she ever win through to victory? St. Paul reported at the end of his life that he had finished the race, kept the faith, fought through to victory (2 Timothy 4:6).

Yet somehow these examples of people who stayed faithful through thick and thin and encouraged us to do likewise – somehow these passages can have a different effect than intended.

We Christians are not the strong and mighty, not the all-conquering heroes (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). We are described as weak, foolish, lacking in steadfastness which is how the apostle James described faithfulness (James 1:3).

God in Charge

Maybe you have felt that way. I know I sure have. Well, here’s great news. It is crisply summarized by that very Paul of Tarsus in Colossians 1:27 which reads “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Now we are not saved by pithy slogans but that short phrase in Colossians can be upacked with much profit. It relates to a major New Testament theme which is usually expressed in the technical phrase “the vicarious (in our place) ministry of Christ.”

This phrase, in turn, is related to another teaching some Bible teachers love to expound, namely incarnational theology.

When we get inside these themes we find much much encouragement. We learn – oh joy of joys – that the call to see it through till the end is rooted in the depth of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Simply put: When Jesus Christ comes to live inside us through the Spirit we have all that we need to endure to the end.

Outside the door of our GCI home office in Glendora, California there is written on the wall a text from John’s Gospel. It reads: ”On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me and I in you” (John 14:20). This seemingly mystical phrase Jesus explained later in a powerful promise: “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).

These verses are a beautiful tonic when we feel daunted by the stresses and strains of the Christian life. This is because they explain forcefully the miracle of God the Father and God the Son coming to live inside us through the indwelling Holy Spirit. They are a reminder that, thank God, our claim to salvation does not begin or end with us. The great Reformers of the 1500s were adamant on this: the initiative in salvation does not rest with us but is a feature of the Father, Son and Spirit calling us, leading us to repentance, and helping us, every day, to endure in the Christian life.

Let’s see how that works.

Even John wondered why Jesus requested baptism.

Jesus working for us

When Jesus was baptized the Spirit descended like a dove upon him and the Father’s voice was heard. That was a trinitarian experience. Wherever Jesus was, the Father and the Spirit were also. That is why he was never alone (John 16:32). But hold on – Jesus got baptized, you ask? Jesus didn’t sin, he didn’t need to be baptized. John the Baptizer said as much: Why do you come to me I should come to you? Jesus said because it was necessary for him to fulfill all righteousness (Matthew 3:13-17).

We sometimes forget that we never would have started out on this Christian life unless we had been called by God. Our repentance was the gift of God (Romans 2:4). Oh, how we tend to forget that when we sometimes look down on other people who have not yet responded.

A leading trinitarian theologian of our time, Thomas Torrance, alluded to all this when he described how Jesus’ life in the flesh was a thorough demonstration of taking into himself our weakness and carnality and perfecting it by his own obedience. That is the great regeneration, the divine cleansing God worked out inside Jesus as he obeyed his Father and is now working out inside us. This is why it is good to review the subject of repentance ever so often. The payoff here is that we begin to remember how God was involved with us even before we ourselves responded.

St. Paul put it this way: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (Ephesians 2:1-4). This remembrance of our divine rescue by God and Christ gives us hope, hope that we can finish the race as well.

Thomas Torrance

Says Torrance: “Repentance is the submission of the sinner to the divine judgment and pardon – this was the repentance into which Christ was baptized at the Jordan and into which he stepped in his temptations in the wilderness where he fasted and prayer while suffering the assault of evil and chose the way of the cross.” (Torrance, Atonement, page 68).

Jesus repented and was baptized on our behalf. Just think. We could never mount a “perfect” repentance in 100 lifetimes but we don’t have to. God accepts Jesus as our vicarious substitute i.e. in our place. “Far from meaning that we do not have to repent, Christ’s vicarious repentance demands us of an even more radical repentance,” says Torrance, “for it demands the total recognition that his is the only true baptism, baptism into repentance.” And this can humble us and call us back to reality and dependence once again on Christ our Rock.

The Author and Finisher

Our start on the Christian road was a gift of Christ – the goodness of God led to our repentance. He will clean us up from the inside and see us through to the end if we never forget that our Christian life from beginning to end is by the faith of the Son of God. This is why Jesus is called the Author and Perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).

“Faith” and “faithfulness” are not exactly the same but they are close enough so that we can see that only in faith and by the faithfulness of Christ will we see it through.

First Pentecost: The promised Holy Spirit coming to dwell inside Christians is the key to our cleasning – "Christ in us."

In our stead, with us in mind, Jesus lived his whole life through, renewing, sanctifying and cleansing us from inside as the incarnate Son of God. He passed through all the stages of the human life cycle on our behalf. It is a staggering truth but even before birth while still in his mother Mary’s womb, his presence stirred the baby John inside the womb of his mother Elizabeth (Luke 1:41-44). As a baby Jesus was a target of a coup, eventually fleeing to Egypt, escaping the trauma of early childhood by a hair’s breath (Matthew 2:13-15). He took upon himself our human suffering. At twelve he confounded the learned doctors of the law and startled his parents with the wise-beyond-his-years saying, “I must be about my Father’s business.” As a man he interacted with men and women, children and centurions, lost souls and crippled lepers, sinners and drunkards and yet no one could convict him of sin.

This is why some call the Incarnation the greatest miracle. Jesus, God in the flesh, redeemed and cleansed all flesh from inside by his perfect obedience and now dwells inside us through the Spirit by the will of the Father doing the same regenerating work. Thus he imparts his own faithfulness to us. This is a trinitarian work of God in human flesh going on every instant of every day.

Why the Lord’s Supper

And yet, as Torrance well knows, we still have an everyday Christian walk ahead of us in this fallen and evil world. This is why the church needs to stress the future dimension of the Gospel. And here is where the distinctively Christian ceremony of the bread and wine comes in. Jesus gave the Lord’s Supper not only as a reenactment of his life and death for us but also as a pointer to the future, to the coming Kingdom, a Kingdom which exists in some measure now already but which will come in its fullness at the Second Coming.

To endure to the end without the physical presence of Jesus, the teacher from Nazareth, among us as among the early disciples indeed takes faith and is even a challenge to our faith. But to see Jesus manifested symbolically through the bread and the wine and to take in these symbols on a regular basis, is to call us to a perpetual vision of the Kingdom. The spiritually focused reenactment and orientation to the future through eating and drinking with Christ, this allows us to more easily counteract the “cares of this life.” St. Paul said it well: “for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26).

This is an often forgotten aspect of the Lord’s Supper – the pointer to the future reconciliation of God and humanity, the future union of mortal and immortal, visible and invisible, spiritual and material. As Torrance says. ”Baptism and the Communion service make it clear that the kingdom is among us not in word only, not in Spirit only, but in deed and in power, as a real act in time enacted in our flesh and blood”(Incarnation, page 340).

Feasting on Jesus

The Lord’s Supper, then, reminds Christians once again that so much has been done for them. The table is prepared by others, the wine and bread are placed on the table by others, the call to worship is performed by others, the invitation is offered by others. The whole setting recalls words which Jesus said to his disciples on the beach in Lake Galilee when he offered them his invitation: “Come and have breakfast” (John 21:12).

In the words of one German theologian, showing the different between the symbols of bread and wine and their real inner meaning: “What we have to do with his flesh and blood is not just to chew and swallow but that we recognize in his crucified body and poured out blood the ground of our life, that we hang our faith and hope on that body and blood and draw from them all our acting and thinking and willing obedience.”

Baptism and communion serve to remind us that our ongoing salvation and cleansing begin and ends in Jesus. We are ultimately carried to our appointed destination by stronger arms than ours. “Underneath are the everlasting arms” as it says in Deuteronomy 33:27. It is Jesus who begins the work of God inside us and it is he who made the perpetual reminder of his saving work available through the Supper.

Love first and last

How great was that service and how noble was that endeavor! Torrance sums this up when he explains what God had in mind in sending his son among us: “God in Christ is burdened with the griefs and pains of men and women…in Christ Jesus, his incarnate Son, God himself enters into the destructive power of evil and so hazards, as it were, his very existence and being as God for the sake of mankind.”

Ultimately then it is divine love that moves God’s plan forward and explains his actions on our behalf. This is why Christ in us cannot, will not fail. All of this is expressed in a very moving hymn titled "O the deep, deep love of Jesus” which ends with

How he watches o’er his loved ones
Died to call them all his own;
How for them he intercedeth,
Watches o’er them from the throne.”

Our salvation begins and ends in Christ. Understanding that full assurance we are able to live in victory. Thanks to God for his remarkable plan.