What Then Has Happened? (5)

 

“…and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” (John 14:23b)

 

In 14:17 we have the promise of the Holy Spirit living within us. Here, in 14:23, we have the promise of the Father and Son living within us. In John 15 Jesus gives us the marvelous image of the Vine and the branches, with the branches drawing their life from the Vine. Throughout the Upper Room we are given the promise, again and again, of the Trinity living within us and of us living within the Trinity.

 

“In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” (14:20).

 

This, my friends, is Christianity – God living within His People and His People living within Him. In our communion with the Trinity, loving obedience, treasuring and obeying the commandments of Jesus Christ, is our Way of life in Him. God’s enabling grace, and His very Spirit, live and breathe within us – and obedience produces obedience produces obedience – for our delight is to please the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our joy is to serve God and to serve one another. If we would serve God we must serve one another, and if we will serve one another we will find ourselves serving God.

 

This is the principle we find in 1 John 4:20 - 21, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.”

 

Just as Jesus lived by the life of the Father, so we learn to live by the life of Jesus, for if Jesus did nothing out of Himself, surely we also must learn to do nothing out of ourselves – but rather to live by His life (John 14:10; 15:1 – 5; Gal. 2:20).

 

One of the distinctions between the Old and New Covenants is that under the former, obedience is impossible, while under the latter, obedience is the norm. Under the Law, we are powerless to keep the commandments of God, under grace we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to keep His commandments as our natural – supernatural Way of Life in Jesus Christ. How have we failed to see the glory of the New Covenant? Why do we insist on thinking that we are still in slavery? Why do we deny the glorious reconciliation that our Father has accomplished in Jesus Christ?

 

As messed-up as the Corinthians were, Paul nevertheless addresses them as “saints” who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus; affirming the grace given to them in Christ Jesus, testifying that they have been enriched in Jesus and that they are not lacking in any gift. Paul affirms that Christ “will also confirm you to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:1 – 9).

 

Why can’t we see our glorious present-day inheritance in Jesus Christ? Why do we insist on wearing grave clothes (John 11:44)?

 

O dear ones, the creation is awaiting and yearning for the manifestation of the sons and daughters of God, it yearns to be set free from the bondage of corruption into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:18 – 25; 2 Cor. 3:17 – 18).

 

When will we finally say, “Enough of Egypt, enough of Babylon, enough of living like bottom-feeders; let us live in that day in which we know that Jesus Christ is in His Father, and that He is in us, and that we are in Him”?