Ephesians 7

Chapter 7. The Mystery of the New Life: The Indwelling ChristThat Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…. that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17, Ephesians 3:19)In our last chapter we found ourselves carried forward to the great thought of Christ’s indwelling in the believer’s heart, “a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21), and “a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). These were the two figures under which this heavenly relationship was described. In the present passage Paul takes up this transcendent thought and works it out to its fullest development. This was the great secret which God had specially revealed to the Apostle Paul, and which was the glory of his ministry. A secret it was which had been “kept hidden for ages and generations, but now,” at last, was “disclosed to the saints…. Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27). Look back for a moment and mark the superb sweep of the apostle’s thought. At the close of the first chapter the scene was laid in the “heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:20), and there we beheld the ascended Christ in His risen glory as the great “head over everything for the church” (Ephesians 1:22), and the Type and Pattern of the exalted life to which his own people were to be raised. In the following chapter we see the believer exalted to the place his living Head has already reached, and we are represented as resurrected from the dead and raised up conjointly with Him to sit with Him in the heavenlies. But now the scene is suddenly changed from heaven to earth, and that glorious throne on which we have been gazing in the heavenlies is transferred to the believer’s heart, the dwelling place of Him whom the heavens cannot contain. First, he takes us up to heaven and makes us sit with Him on the throne; then He takes heaven down to us and brings God down to sit upon the throne of the consecrated heart to make that heart a heaven within. Let us dwell for a little upon the inspired unfolding of this great theme, and may a living experience lend a new touch of reality to the vision of truth and faith. The Indwelling Christ There is nothing in human experience to interpret this extraordinary relationship. It transcends all other bonds, and is the very mystery of life and love. Human Figures There is a sense in which the father lives in his child, and the mother and her babe are, in a measure, one. There is a sense in which the memory and the name of a Washington or a Garibaldi are enshrined in the nation’s heart. But these are all figurative. This is a literal and real fact that God does dwell in the heart of the believer. It does not mean that the doctrine of Christ, the influence of Christ, the example of Christ, the memory of Christ, but the very person of Christ is united to the person of the believer so that there are two persons in living touch and conscious fellowship. The strange phenomenon of hypnotism by which one mind can control another and seem to possess it; the still stranger fact of demon possession by which one wicked spirit becomes personal and controls the mind of a human being—these are mere vivid and literal approximations to the truth of the union of God with the human soul. Certainly if an evil spirit can possess a human being, there is no reason why a Holy Spirit cannot control the will and the affections. That Christ does really do so is the most precious promise of the New Testament: If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. (John 14:23) I too will love him and show myself to him. (John 14:21) He who loves me will be loved by my Father. (John 14:21) We will come to him and make our home with him. (John 14:23) I will put my dwelling place among you, and… walk among you, and be your God, and you will be my people. (Leviticus 26:11-12) And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36:27) These are some of the promises that very distinctly express this sublime fact of the indwelling Christ. I remember an incident in my early ministry when my own heart was very full of this new-found joy of the Lord’s indwelling. God had given me the precious soul of a young businessman. For some time after his conversion he used to call on me every day at noon, taking half of his lunch hour for conference and prayer with his pastor, and saying, as he went away, “I feel stronger now for another day of Christian life.” One day I said to him, “Will, suppose that I should be able to enter into your mind and heart, and go home with you to your office and your house and live in you for the rest of your life, what would you think of that?” “Why,” said he, “that would be splendid, for I would think just as you think, feel as you feel, do as you do, and it would be so easy to live a Christian life. But, of course, this is impossible.” I had got the thought I wanted into his mind, and so I turned the figure around and said, “Will, what is it that makes me a help to you? It is not my natural mind or even my personal love to you, but it is the fact that there is Somebody in me more than myself who enables me to bless and help you. Now, Will, the same Christ that lives in me and makes me what I am, is waiting and willing to enter into your mind and heart to relive His own life in you. I cannot enter into your brain and go home with you in your soul, but my Christ can.” He saw it in a moment, and we knelt together for a little season of tender, consecrated prayer; and when he arose, a new light was in his eye, a new glory was upon his brow, and the tears that were moistening his eyes were the softening tears of love. He pressed my hand, left me, saying quietly, “God bless you. I shan’t need you so much now.” Beloved, have you received Him? Do you know the greatest secret, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27)? The Agency of the Holy Spirit in This Union That “he may strengthen you… through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 3:16-17). It is the special mission of the Holy Spirit to bring about this union with Christ. The Spirit’s work does not terminate directly upon Himself, but always leads up to the personality of Jesus. Therefore, Christ in His parting discourses in the 14th chapter of John explained to His disciples that it was necessary for Him to go away, that the Counselor might come and bring Him back to them in another form as a spiritual Presence. Then He added, “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). Now, the Spirit has come to bring about the relationship. Part of His work is to make Jesus real to us, to give us a conception of Him, and the witness of His personal union with us. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit that once dwelt in Christ, and He brings to us a spiritual Christ with a new touch and a higher form of manifestation than when He walked the earth of old and touched the bodies of men with His living hands. Part of His ministry is to prepare us on our side to receive the indwelling Christ. Our coarse and fleshly natures cannot understand, much less enter into this high mystery of the heavenly life. Therefore we are told here that we need to be “strengthen [ed]… through his Spirit in [our] inner being” (Ephesians 3:16). First, our “inner being” must be quickened. This is not the intellect of the scholar, nor even the sensibilities of the emotional nature, but it is a new spiritual self, created in Christ Jesus, with senses and organs that know God directly, and that can enter into the realities of the heavenly world. But even this new life must be strengthened by the Spirit in order to be able to stand the power of this divine addition to its experience. Many people are crying for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, who would not be able to stand it if they received it. It would be like putting a great charge of dynamite or powder into a sheet-iron pipe. It would burst into a thousand fragments. When the naval department attempts to fire a large shell a number of miles, it takes a ponderous mass of steel, and for months it forges and twists it until a mighty mass of metal comes forth, many tons in weight. Then, through this mass of tested steel a shell of half a ton in weight is hurled many a mile, and falls in destroying havoc upon the foe. So God prepares us to receive His power. He deepens us to hold His fullness. Slowly often the Holy Spirit leads us through the depths of testing experiences, awakening spiritual desire, slaying the strength of our own self-conscious life, separating us from our self-confidence and all earthly help, burning out the emotional and ephemeral life of the fleshly mind, and settling us down into God where we can let all go but Him, and step out in naked faith to trust and obey Him. So, perhaps, He is testing and preparing some of us today. Let us trust Him in the dark. Let us lie yielded in His hands. Let our one cry be, “Take me, break me, make me what Thou wilt; empty me and fill me, crucify and quicken, prepare me for Thy perfect will, and fit me to receive the indwelling Christ, and to be filled with all the fullness of God.” The Instrumentality of Faith in This Relationship “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 3:17). This does not mean that the relationship of Christ’s indwelling is mere make-believe, as some would teach us; that He only dwells there by faith, but that He is not there in reality. There is nothing so real as the things we believe; for “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). It simply means that faith is the organ by which we receive Him, the new sense of the soul which reaches out to apprehend and appropriate Him and then to communicate with Him. Christ does not come to us through our feelings, but through our convictions. His union with us is not a sensation, but a fact. I once asked a young lady after I had married her to her husband, “Do you feel married?” She looked at me in surprise, and said, “Why, no; I don’t feel anything; I am married.” The fact existed, and she had never thought of the feeling. So we take Christ by an act of faith, believing He does come to take up His abode within us, looking to Him in all our need, recognizing Him as an actual Presence, bringing to Him all our difficulties and trials, and living in actual habitual dependence upon Him as our All in all. Thus the act becomes a habit as natural as breathing, as spontaneous as the circulation of the blood. And then, in due time, the habit develops the senses of the new life. A whole group of spiritual organs and senses grows up as a channel of communion between us and Him. They are like the rootlets of a little plant after it has become imbedded in the soil. If you look at them through the microscope, you will find a thousand spongy pores open to receive the moisture and nourishment of the soil, and drinking in at every pore the sustenance which nature so richly supplies. So the Spirit grows into an organic life, and every fiber of our being becomes a channel of communion with Him. We know Him by an inner sense that we could not explain. Just as the sailor is conscious that the land is near, just as the dog scents his master’s presence, and just as the bird of passage knows where southern breezes blow, so we become intensely sensitive to the presence and voice of Christ. Like faithful sheep, we “know his voice” and “follow him” (John 10:4). We are “of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:3). Our ear is open to hear His faintest whisper. We know the touch of His presence, and the breathings of His quickening love and faith have become a heavenly organism of a thousand sensibilities through which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) in Him. The Element of Love Into Which Faith at Length Develops and Matures “That you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:17-19). After faith has reached a certain point, it changes its character and becomes love. This is not a new fact. The natural world is full of it. Heat that water in a steam boiler up to a certain temperature, and you lose your water, for it has all become steam and has changed into a new and mighty force that propels your machinery and revolutionizes your industrial life. That little seed that you plant in the ground after a while becomes a stem, and the stem becomes a flower, and the flower breathes out its life in fragrance. The little dry seed has become a vial of richest perfume. So faith when it has reached its fruition grows into a heavenly life of love. For faith perfected is just the confidence of love, and the best trust comes from a loving heart. When I get completely united to Christ, I do not have to reason out my faith. I do not have to ask, Does He love me? Do I love Him? It is so deep and spontaneous that I never think of asking. It is like the action of my joints. When they are healthy, I have no feeling in them, and I do not realize that I have any joints. To feel your joints is rheumatism. To be unconscious of physical conditions is health. So faith reaches that stage at last where the intellectual element is lost in love, and the heart so fitly falls into Christ that its attitude is that of the disciple who leaned on Jesus’ breast and who artlessly told us, without thinking there was any self-consciousness in the statement, that he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. Love feeds upon the love of Christ. At first we reach our apprehension of this love by some sort of intellectual process. We try to take its measure, its breadth, its depth, its height, but soon we get lost in the fullness that no fathoming line nor geometric measure can express, and we just sink back into the immensity of this boundless and fathomless flood and say, “It surpasses knowledge.” When a soul has reached this blessed experience, it dwells in a summer land of peculiar sweetness and rich maturity. There is a point in our Christian life where the tone of our character is legal, moral and marked by conviction of sin and the struggle of right against wrong. Farther on comes the element of surrender, of choice, of submission of the will, of singleness of purpose with which we cleave to God. Then comes the intellectual side of faith that believes on the testimony of the Word, that holds its ground against the assaults of temptation. All this has in it the element of struggle and effort. But as we go farther on, we enter into the spirit of rest, of trust, of gladness and of confidence. The winter gives place to spring; and still farther on we come to the summer land of love, where the soul is lost in God, where even experiences are forgotten in the consciousness of Himself, and “rooted and established in love,” we begin to fully “know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:17, Ephesians 3:19). Next Comes the Fullness of God It is one thing to have Christ; it is another thing to be filled with Christ. It is one thing to receive the Holy Spirit; it is another thing to be filled with the Spirit. It is one thing to come to Christ, and to have Christ come to us; but it is another and a greater thing to have Christ bring us to God. When the disciples were filled with the Spirit, then something came to pass. There was power, and there was an overflow from their hearts and lives till the world wondered and believed. Oh, for Spirit-filled men and women! Oh, for a Spirit-filled life! Finally, the Outcome of All This Is Power “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). This is no mere self-centered, self-complacent experience of blessing. It is something that leads to practical results and accomplishes definite things. There is power in it. It takes hold of God until something is done. If God is reigning in us, He will rule over everything around us. If we have the Holy Spirit within us, we will see the providence of God in His marvels of answered prayer and accomplished results. The limits are all on our side. We must ask. But He “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask.” We must think and intelligently ask. But He “is able to do immeasurably more than all we… imagine.” There is one limitation: “according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). He will do as much for us as we let Him do in us. “On the day I cleanse you from all your sins, I will resettle your towns… This land that was laid waste” will be “like the garden of Eden” (Ezekiel 36:33, Ezekiel 36:35). This was His ancient promise, and it means that as fully as we receive Him as our Guest and Friend, so mightily will we know Him in the wonder-working providences of life, and the power that can meet every emergency, overcome every adversary, every circumstance, and “meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).