Scripture: "That life which I now live in the flesh, I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Him¬self up for me."—GAL. ii. 20. R. V.
If we ask Paul what he meant by saying that he no longer lives, but that Christ lives in him, what now is his part in living that life? he gives us the answer: "The life that I now live in the flesh is the life of faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself up for me." His whole life, day by day and all the day, was an unceasing faith in the wonderful love that had given itself for him. Faith was the power that possessed and permeated his whole being and his every action.
Here we have the simple but full statement of what the secret of the true Christian life is. It is not faith only in certain promises of God, or in certain blessings that we receive from Christ. It is a faith that has got a vision of how entirely Christ gives Himself to the soul to be, in the very deepest and fullest sense of the word, his life and all that that implies for every moment of the day. As essential as continuous breathing is to the support of our physical life, is the unceasing faith in which the soul trusts Christ, and counts upon Him to maintain the life of the Spirit within us. Faith ever rests on that infinite love in which Christ gave Himself wholly for us, to be ours in the deepest meaning of the word, and to live His life over again in us. In virtue of His Divine omnipresence, whereby He filleth all things, He can be to each what He is to all, a complete and perfect Saviour, an abiding Guest, in very deed taking charge and maintaining our life in us and for us, as if each of us were the only one in whom He lives. Just as truly as the Father lived in Him, and worked in Him all that He was to work out, just as truly will Christ live and work in each one of us.
Faith, led and taught by God's Holy Spirit, gets such a con¬fidence in the omnipotence and the omnipresence of Christ that it carries in the depth of the heart the abiding unbroken assurance all the day: He that loved me, and gave Himself for me, He lives in me; He is in very deed my life and my all. "I can do all things through Christ Who strengthened me." May God reveal to us that inseparable union between Christ and us in which the consciousness of Christ's presence may become as natural to us as the consciousness of our existence.
