Scripture: "It was the good pleasure of God . . . to reveal His Son in Me."—GAL. i. 15, 16.
In all our study and worship of Christ we find our thoughts ever gathering round these five points: The Incarnate Christ, the Crucified Christ, the Enthroned Christ, the Indwelling Christ, and Christ coming in glory. If the first be the seed, the second is the seed cast into the ground, and the third the seed growing up to the very heaven. Then follows the fruit through the Holy Spirit, Christ dwelling in the heart; and then the gather¬ing of the fruit into the garner when Christ appears.
Paul tells us that it pleased God to reveal His Son in Him. And he gives his testimony to the result of that revelation: "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20). Of that life he says that its chief mark is that he is crucified with Christ. It is this that enables him to say, "I live no longer"; in Christ he had found the death of self. Just as the Cross is the chief characteristic of Christ Himself—"A lamb as it had been slain in the midst of the throne" —so the life of Christ in Paul made him inseparably one with his crucified Lord. So completely was this the case that he could say: "Far be it from me to glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which I am crucified to the world."
If you had asked Paul, if Christ so actually lived in him that he no longer lived, what became of his responsibility? the answer was ready and clear: "I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me." His life was every moment a life of faith in Him who had loved him and given Himself so completely that He had undertaken at all times to be the life of His willing disciple.
This was the sum and substance of all Paul's teaching. He asks for intercession that he might speak "the mystery of Christ"; "even the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. ii. 2; i. 27). The indwelling Christ was the secret of his life of faith, the one power, the one aim of all his life and work, the hope of glory. Let us believe in the abiding presence of Christ as the sure gift to each one who trusts Him fully.
