Scripture: "Christ liveth in me."—GAL. ii. 20. "Christ is our life."—COL. iii. 4.
Christ’s life was more than His teaching, more than His work, more even than His death. It was His life in the sight of God and man that gave value to what He said and did and suffered. And it is this life, glorified in the resurrection, that He imparts to His people, and enables them to live out before men.
"Hereby shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye love one another." It was the life in the new brotherhood of the Holy Spirit that made both Jews and Greeks feel that there was some super-human power about Christ's disciples; they gave living proof of the truth of what they said, that God's love had come down and taken possession of them.
It has often been said of the missionary, that unless he lives out the Christ life on an entirely different level from that on which other men live, he misses the deepest secret of power and success in his work. When Christ sent His disciples forth, it was with the command: "Tarry till ye be endued with power from on high." "Wait, and ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost, and be My witnesses to the ends of the earth." Many a missionary has felt that it is not learning and not zeal, and not the will¬ingness for self-sacrifice in Christ's service, but the secret experience of the life hid with Christ in God, that enables him to meet and overcome every difficulty.
Everything depends upon the life with God in Christ being right. It was so with Christ, with the disciples, with Paul. It is the simplicity and intensity of our life in Christ Jesus, and of the life of Christ Jesus in us, that sustains a man in the daily drudgery of work, that makes him conquer over self and everything that could hinder the Christ life, and gives the victory over the powers of evil, and over the hearts from which the evil spirits have to be cast out.
The life is everything. It was so in Christ Jesus. It must be so in His servants. It can be so, because Christ Himself will live in us. When He spoke the word, "Lo, I am with you alway," He meant nothing less than this: "Every day and all the day I am with you, the secret of your life, your joy, and your strength."
Oh, to learn what hidden treasures are contained in the blessed words we love to repeat: "Lo, I am with you all the days."
