The life of Christ is now your life, and all that is true of Christ is true of you

Our union, or oneness, with Almighty God is way beyond the grasp of our natural minds, but it is absolutely vital so let us press into it - and to not give up. Our minds and bodies may scream: “No! How can I possibly be one with God if I am ill, feel depressed, keep failing, struggle so much with life?” May I urge you to continue doing whatever is needed or helpful at the physical level, and then make a decision to look into the truth of God’s Word - to find out what it says about you.

Yes, God’s Word speaks volumes about you. If you look into it, you will find that it is an accurate, never-changing mirror, reflecting back to you exactly who you are and to whom you belong: “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself” (1 Cor. 6:19, NLT). In his letter to the Colossians, Paul describes your identity very succinctly: “you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).

The life of Christ is now your life, and all that is true of Christ is true of you. Christ is now your own identity. As we say “Yes” to this fact, and start to walk in faith in our new identity, the truth of who we really are will begin to emerge into our experience. It does require that we look into the Scriptures and meditate upon them, taking them into our days and nights, and applying them in our lives.

It means resisting the temptation to give up when nothing seems to be happening. It helps to remember that there is One who is infinitely more desirous that you come to know and experience who you are in Christ than you are - that is your righteous Father; and He gives you a constant supply of the Holy Spirit to teach you, to encourage you and to guide you.

A stumbling block for many is a key verse which actually gives us entry into this new life: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). We find it extremely difficult to identify with this verse because we are still breathing - clearly not dead. We look at our limitations and failures, and conclude that these cannot be signs of the indwelling Christ. So it remains at the level of theory, very much a mystery; “maybe others get it but I don’t.” And the power of the love of God is stifled - right there.

But wait! There is a way through this. Look at the verse from this perspective: It is your separation from God that was crucified with Christ, including all the sinful consequences of separation. That is what has died and has been destroyed forever. “Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 5:18). On the cross, Jesus crucified everyone and everything that was not of God, including your “old Adam” nature. That was your separated, sinful nature - the one that causes so very many problems and pains.

A totally new realm of being

Seeing the verse from this perspective helps to set us free from being preoccupied with our little “i” that was crucified with Christ. Instead, we can start to give thanks and praise to God for setting us free from the curse of separation, and for bringing us into a totally new realm of being. That new realm of being is invisible at first, but the more you look into it, the more it becomes real and tangible in your experience. The new realm of being is Christ Himself.

Please look at your inheritance in Christ! It is awesome, and it is available for you here and now. It is waiting to be acknowledged and quickened and manifested in you and through you. It will never be forced upon you, because love never exerts force. Force is a power that the world uses, but the power of love is the opposite of force. The power of love is humble, long-suffering, kind, and patient. Love beckons us, looks out for us, and never stops waiting for us. We should never doubt the invitation, and never fear that we have missed it. It is always there, waiting for us.

But the invitation is about relationship, and for any relationship to grow - and not remain stagnant - it needs to be nurtured. The way to develop relationship with the Author of love is to come to know Him through His Word. Jesus beckons us to Himself, urging us on - ever deeper into love: “Abide in Me, and I in you” (John 15:4).

Jesus could not have given us a more intimate invitation, could He?

I think many of us would like to accept His invitation to step into the Holy of Holies (that is, into union with God Himself) but find ourselves trapped in physicality. We find it hard to let go of the temporary physical form of the Son of Man and to identify with the eternal spiritual substance of the Son of God. Perhaps this metaphor would help: The Lord spoke to the prophet Jeremiah about a potter who made a new vessel out of the clay of the original vessel, which had become spoiled: “And the vessel that he [the potter] made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make” (Jer. 18:4).

The Lord God is the potter, and the first vessel that He made was humankind. Humankind fell away from God and became most terribly marred. God could have destroyed that first vessel - or mold - and started again. But He did not. Instead, God chose to come down to earth as Jesus Christ, and He took upon Himself the covering of the marred mold. Another name for the mold is “old Adam” - and we were all included in “old Adam,” as we saw in chapter 3. On the cross, Jesus, “the last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45), was crucified and the mold was obliterated and reduced to its original substance. Separation was obliterated, and yet the basic elements of that substance remained, ready to be reformed into the new creation. In the same way that a potter melts down the clay and uses the same substance to create a new vessel, so God “melted down” the particles of the old Adam, returning them to the quantum field.

God then purified and scoured clean the entire quantum field with the shed blood of Jesus, so that when God raised Jesus from the dead, He could create a completely new vessel that had no trace of sin, separation, or entropy. The new vessel is the new creation, created through Christ: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17, NRSV).

The thing is, we appear to be human, and God gives us the freedom to choose to call ourselves human (that is, to identify with the old Adam). But that is the lie and the truth is that we are no longer mortal human beings and must not regard ourselves in this way, because “from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16).

Furthermore, the Word confirms that “as He [Jesus] is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). After His resurrection, Jesus appeared to His disciples in a body, but it was no longer a limited human body. It was a spiritual body—Spirit made manifest in three-dimensional form - and it could penetrate walls, and travel through space, in an instant. It was no longer subject to decay and death.

As was His body, so are our bodies, even now. For this our Savior died. This time round, in contrast with His first creation, God ensured that this new creation would remain perfect forever, because Christ is immanent in every part of it: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe” (Eph. 4:10, NIV). Paul reiterates this truth in his letter to the church at Colossae: “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11).

Someone may ask, “If Christ fills all things, then why do we not see more Christlikeness? Why do we not see more expressions of love in the world?” As we saw earlier, love never forces itself upon anyone, but looks for hearts that are open to receive and to believe. It is faith that quickens the things of Christ and brings them into manifestation. Faith is the “sixth sense” by which we perceive invisible spiritual truth and call it into visibility. So let us waste no more time and let us move toward seeing. Let us come alongside Augustine of Hippo who said “Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of that faith is to see what we believe.”

Set free from entropy and the bondage of time

The only power strong enough to abolish entropy from the universe is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Christ reconciled all things to God, who is omnipresent Life, entropy lost its stranglehold on the universe: “For it pleased the Father... to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross” (Col. 1:19–20).

It is entropy that leads to death and therefore, by definition, when Jesus set everyone free from death by “tast[ing] death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9), He also tasted entropy and abolished it completely. In its place, He ushered in the eternally life-giving Spirit and the fulness of life that He had planned to give us: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10, NIV).

The Son has also set us free from space and time, which are linked to entropy and which are the cause of untold suffering. The limitations of space have been swept away by the omnipresent Spirit, as have the limitations of time and gravity. Our freedom from the straightjacket of time is key here because entropy, decay and death are all dictated by time.

So where are we? And how did we get there?

God the Father placed us in His Son: “of Him [God] you are in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:30) the very Son through whom the Father created the universe and everything in it. Several scriptures testify to the fact that everything was made in and through Jesus Christ: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17, NIV). In John’s gospel, Jesus Christ is referred to as the Word through whom all things came into existence: “In the beginning was the Word... All things were made through Him” (John 1:1, 3).

Jesus Christ was the singular point at the time of creation. This is the first step in the Father’s movement toward self-expression in a three-dimensional form. It was from here that the quantum field emerged, providing the substance of three-dimensional creation. All the elements that were to constitute the entire human race, and everything else, were contained in the Christ.

Many, if not most, cosmologists now agree that the universe was created at a singular moment called the Big Bang. All that can be observed in the universe - the 100-plus billion galaxies and everything we see around us on our own planet earth - began as a miniscule point that was small enough to fit through the eye of a needle. The universe emerged and rapidly spread out from that point. From the moment of creation and the expansion that followed, all that was to be required for human life (and everything else in the universe) was created.

It is an astounding fact that all the subatomic particles and elements that now constitute you and me were already in existence from the creation of the world. To put it another way: The subatomic particles that now constitute you were already contained in Christ at the point of creation.

How all of us died when Christ died

When Christ became incarnate on earth as Jesus of Nazareth, He was fully man and fully God. Therefore, in His Godhead, He still contained all that the Father had placed within Him at the beginning of creation. That is why, when He hung on the cross and died, He was able to take all of humanity and the world down to the tomb with Him: “if One died for all, then all died” (2 Cor. 5:14); “God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).

Because we had been placed in Christ by the Father, wherever Jesus Christ went we were with Him. When He went to the cross, we went with Him and died with Him there.

Knowing our position in Christ also sheds invaluable light on the fact that when Jesus was raised from the dead, we were raised together with Him and in Him. That is the whole purpose of the Incarnation: “God... made us alive together with Christ... and raised us up together... in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4–6).

It is significant that the New Testament refers to our being “in Christ” at least 160 times. These references also include slightly different expressions such as “in Him” and “in the Lord,” but the meaning is the same. Knowing and actively resting in our position and identity in Christ is vitally important, if we desire to see the power of God released within us and through us.

We are now infinite, spiritual beings

It means that, in Spirit, we have been set free from the limitations of our finite, mortal bodies and are now spiritual beings. We are fully united with Christ: “the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17, NLT).

A completely new kind of life is now available to us: “We were dead and buried with him in baptism, so that just as he was raised from the dead by that splendid Revelation of the Father’s power so we too might rise to life on a new plane altogether” (Rom. 6:4, PHILLIPS). On that “new plane” we are joint heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17) and now share in His infinity, His immortality, His purity, His righteousness, and His overcoming.

We have the very DNA of Christ operating in every cell of our beings, and we have His blood flowing in our arteries, veins, and capillaries - the blood that overcame the world, that burns up every trace of sin and that imparts the very life of God wherever it flows.

We have all this at the level of Spirit. Spirit is our true nature, and our three-dimensional bodies are a part of it - not the other way round. The problem is that, for more than two thousand years, there has been a tendency to place an enormous, unbalanced emphasis on our limited, physical bodies, and the true gospel has been distorted in order to make it fit with human philosophy. This has been at the cost of stifling the immeasurable power that God has made available to us - if we would but believe His Word and act upon it. “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27) is often quoted but it can only be understood in terms of infinite Spirit. How can Christ - who has all the attributes of omnipotent and omnipresent God - be contained within a human body? The “you” in this verse must refer to the “you” that is infinite Spirit, the adopted son or daughter, made one with the Father.

We are told that the Holy Spirit lives within us: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16). This is a most glorious truth but, again, it points to infinite Spirit. Wherever the Spirit of God is, He is there in all His fullness - He cannot be divided.

The poet Alfred Tennyson expresses such profound intimacy in this way: “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” Language restricts us at this point, because the word “closer” and the scriptural phrases “in Christ” and “with Christ” all imply duality, whereas there is in fact no duality. You are one with Christ. As a member of the body of Christ, wherever He goes, you go, and whatever happens to Him happens to you.

Christ is infinite. You, too, are infinite.