What is our role in God’s grand purpose? It is huge, and it is this: we are partners with God. His part is producing the life—his life. Our part is being the channel for the life. We do that by simply believing God. The Holy Spirit reveals to us the things God has freely given us. The primary truth is Christ in us. We live, counting on the reality of this truth. We count on him. And as we do, Christ lives through us. We are both living this life.
The bottom line is that there’s no formula, or series of steps, to deeply experience the reality of Christ in you. God doesn’t work that way. Ultimately, it’s his work. He will accomplish it. Look at Ezekiel 36:25-27 again:
“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes …”
What phrase leaps out from that passage? “I will”! Over and over, God says “I will do it.”
I found that when God made “Christ in me” a deeper reality for me, I knew perfectly well that God, and God alone, had done a work in me. It wasn’t due to me doing “Christian” things—other than believing the truth God has already revealed. It was simply the Holy Spirit revealing to me more of what I’d already been freely given: That Jesus was the One living through me. He reveals this to us not just on an intellectual level, but a heart-knowing. And when he did for me, I start to live in this reality as never before. I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. It was too good!
Everyone who believes in Christ has been given everything in Christ already. All of God’s free gifts are already ours. We may simply not know it yet. God is teaching us to walk in the truth of all that he’s given us, and all that he is in us.
That’s the key to walking by faith in Christ in us. The Holy Spirit shows us what is already true, and in our heart we embrace it. We say, “Yes, that’s the reality. I’ll relax into that.” When we’re settled into God’s reality, Christ flows freely through us.
So the work is God’s. We’re not being asked to pull this off ourselves. That’s a huge relief! But we aren’t robots. God has chosen to express himself through living people. He has chosen to partner with us. We cooperate with him by opening ourselves to receiving what the Holy Spirit has for us. We embrace the truth he shows us, we make ourselves available for him to live through, and we trust him living in us. It’s not difficult. It’s natural. It’s exactly how God designed the new us to live.
When you step back and look at God’s entire new arrangement with us, it’s amazing. God has completely removed anything that would get in the way of our oneness with him, and of God himself living through us.
He’s given us perfect forgiveness, perfect cleansing, a perfect new heart, perfect new desires, perfect oneness with him—and thus perfect fellowship with him, which simply means sharing his life. He’s come inside us, to live his perfect life in us. None of that ever goes away. None of that ever changes. We don’t have to worry about any of those things anymore! God has completely freed us to focus on his Son, who lives in us, and loves us perfectly.
How, then, do we cooperate with God in this process of, as Paid said, Christ being formed in us? Here are four ways we cooperate with him.
AGREE WITH GOD
Just agree with him. When he says he’s done all of these things in you, agree with him.
“But I don’t feel clean,” you might say. “Look at what I just did. I have to somehow get clean again!”
God says you are clean. Jesus made you clean. Who are you going to believe: God, or your fleeting thoughts and feelings?
Agree with God that you died with Christ. Your old man was crucified with him. The old you no longer exists. That means you died to sin. Your spirit connection to it, and its power over you, is gone. You died to the law. You live by the Spirit now. You died to yourself as your point of reference. Christ living in you is now your point of reference in everything.
It’s vital that we agree with God about the old us. It’s vital we know that we died with Christ. If the old you is still alive, you’re still in the game of trying to correct yourself, straighten yourself up, change yourself, make yourself acceptable to God. You have to produce for God. And when your focus is on you, it’s not on Christ in you. When we see that we died to ourselves as our point of reference, we begin to participate in the life of God in us.
Seeing that we died to ourselves as our point of reference leads to something else that’s critical: we agree with God that we are his asset, not his liability. We are always accustomed to seeing ourselves as a liability to God. If only I could change such and such about me, we think, then God could really use me, Then I would be an asset to his kingdom.
As long as we see ourselves as a liability, we have no choice but to focus on ourselves, try to improve ourselves, try to get our act together. We always feel inadequate.
But when we embrace that the old us died, we stop seeing ourselves as a liability. We are not a liability to God. We are his precious assets. We already are what God wants us to be: vessels containing him, channels through which his life flows to others. We become established in the fact that living waters are flowing out through you. When you make peace with who you are, you can begin to experience the realm of life God has destined you for. He has accepted you. He is pleased with you. He uses you, lives through you, speaks through you, loves through you.
We are the means by which the invisible God expresses himself. If that’s what we are designed to do, that’s not hard to do. Living the life has an inner ease to it. We operate from this inner Person, who is able to do, through us, what pleases him. Previously, we could only do what we thought might please him, what we hoped would please him. The latter is hard work. The former is easy.
Make peace with yourself. Take back your humanity as the dwelling place of the Most High God. When God shows you that it pleases him to live in you, have to be satisfied with who you are. You are no longer a liability asset to God; you are a wonderful and beautiful and necessary asset. You are the vessel by which the world drinks, and sees the life and love of God.
We agree with God on two more vital things. First, there is no condemnation. That’s what God says: there is never any condemnation for us. He doesn’t ever condemn us for anything. He may correct us. He may check us. He wants us to grow into the fullness of who we already are. But he never condemns us. When we see that, and agree with him, it gives us the freedom to stop condemning ourselves for anything.
Finally, there is no separation. You are one spirit with God. That is permanent. Nothing you do can change that. So there is never any separation between you and God. You may feel like there’s distance between you and him. “I just don’t feel close to God.” God says you and he are one. You can’t get any closer. When we agree with God about that, we stop trying to work our way back to God, and rest in the reality of our oneness with him. We live as a faith person.
BE WILLING
The only way to make life work as God intended is by faith in God’s “I wills”. He will do it. The Christian life is totally grace. God initiated it, God fulfills it, and God will complete it. He’s the One who lives it in us. But if we don’t know this, we will assume God does part of it, and it’s up to our effort to do the rest. That throws us back into the flesh, into self-effort, onto a religious treadmill we were never supposed to be on.
Jesus has to live the life in us. We can’t. We never could. But we do have a vital role: to be willing. The only thing we can do is be willing and cooperate with the Person that can cause it to happen. God won’t override our will. He loves it and caresses it and draws it to himself.
God does it all. Our part is to be willing. When we are, he will cause us to walk in his ways. We are not the point of origin, but the willing outward expresser of his life.
This is the excitement of life. We are inwardly involved with all that he is doing in the world, through us. God is willing, you are willing, it’s done. He will live the life.
Jesus always does the will of the father. His purpose in us is the same as it was during his earthly walk. The Holy Spirit continually lines us up with the Person who lives in us. That’s the true desire of our heart. Previously, we were trying to produce this ourselves, Now, we’re watching him do it. More and more, without any kind of striving, our whole will, indwelt by the Spirit’s will, is just flowing with Him. Our will has been captured by God.
The Holy Spirit’s role is to bring us to a complete knowing of who Christ is in us and how Christ lives through us. When that has been done, He will fulfill his purposes through us. But it will be his living, not our striving. We say, “I am willing for You to be living Your life through me this day, and I am trusting You to do it.”
Our role is availability. We are available to the Lord to live his life through, like Mary (Luke 1:38). Mary was willing; God did it. Our availability releases God’s ability. So we trust the Lord to do it through us.
Understanding that our role is simply to be willing takes us off of a religious treadmill that God never intended us to be on. We stop trying to produce for God. We stop measuring ourselves by how much religious stuff we’re doing. God says that we are “holy and blameless and faultless.” Are we going to become more blameless and faultless by reading our Bible more? Praying more? Going to church more? God says he has “perfected [us] for all time” (Hebrews 10:14). How are we going to improve upon that by doing religious stuff?
I spent years judging myself by all my religious stuff. What a waste! Not that the activities themselves weren’t profitable. Being around other believers was a good thing. Reading the Bible was a good thing. Memorizing scripture was a good thing (and something I highly recommend). The activities were profitable. What wasn’t profitable was judging myself by all of that. I know a lot of scripture, but memorizing scripture didn’t make God love me more. It didn’t make me more acceptable to God. It didn’t make God happier with me. And it never should have made me happier with myself.
I was perfectly fine all along. I just didn’t know it. I was completely forgiven. I was completely clean. I had a new heart. Christ lived in me. I was perfectly loved at all times. I couldn’t get more OK with God!
If God lays on your heart to memorize scripture, memorize it. If he gives you a desire to pray more, pray more. But don’t judge yourself by these things. They don’t make you more OK. What Christ did is what makes you OK, and you can’t ever add to that.
Just be available to God. Be willing. And see how he lives through you. That’s what you were designed to do. It’s natural. It’s easy. Being ourselves is easy. Forcing ourselves to be someone we aren’t, that’s what’s hard. Jesus has freed us from that.
LEARN TO HEAR THE SPIRIT
The Apostle Paul admonished the church at Galatia to keep walking in the freedom they had in Christ. He wanted them to learn to operate in that freedom. How? By walking by the Spirit. And how would they do that? By being led by the Spirit. And how would they do that? They would have to learn to hear the voice of the Spirit as he spoke to their own spirit. That’s how Jesus lived: by hearing the voice of the Father in him. Repeatedly, Jesus told people, “I only say what I hear from the Father. I only do what I hear from the Father.”
We have to learn to distinguish the Spirit’s voice from all the hubbub in our soul, all the random thoughts and feelings that course through us. He will lead us, but we have to learn his voice. Jesus said that his sheep would hear his voice. We are meant to live that way. When we do hear him, we will follow him, because that’s what our heart wants to do.
Don’t just read the Bible. Listen for God. This is how God has set up his kingdom. He has joined himself to our spirit, the deepest part of us. He wants to manifest his life through us. He does that most fully when we learn to hear his voice and obey it.
Learn how God speaks to you in your way. Trust the Spirit of God. He is your teacher. He is your guide. That’s his job, to teach us and to guide us. That’s what he wants to do.
So how can we cultivate our ability to hear the Spirit? There’s no formula, but I have found that the thing that helps me most is simply spending time with Him alone, just listening. Take time in silence to listen. He will speak. And you will hear, and do what he prompts you to do.
God wants us to live a spontaneous, Spirit-directed life. Our inner man is always in agreement with God. Deep down, we want what he wants. The more we come to know and hear him, the more we will manifest him through our spontaneous living. That’s what you most deeply want, because your heart is for God.
WALK BY FAITH
That’s it. We live by faith. Jesus told his disciples that this was the work God gave them to do: trust in him. Paul said that in the exact same way we came to Christ (by faith), now we are to live in him.
We walk by faith!
So what does that mean exactly? It means that we live depending on and trusting in Christ who lives in us, and who lives his life through us. We believe what he says is true: he is living in us, and through us, right now. We aren’t waiting to get “spiritual enough” to make it happen one day. We trust that it is happening now.
We are focusing, right now, on Christ and what he has already done, instead of focusing on ourselves and how we are doing with God. Through Christ, God has completely cleared the deck of anything we have to do to be OK with him. He has bypassed all that spiritual navel-gazing. He’s set us free from that! There’s nothing you can do to be more OK with God. You are OK with him—permanently. It has nothing to do with your performance. It’s because of Jesus’s performance. If you never do any “spiritual” things the rest of your life, you and God are fine. He’s thrilled that you are his son.
We are focusing, right now, on Christ’s ability, not ours. God himself lives in us. That means our whole life operates in the realm of the supernatural. It’s hard to love unconditionally, we think. Not for Jesus, it isn’t, and he lives in us. Not only that, he has given us hearts that want to love others. We make ourselves available to him, and he does it through us. It’s hard to forgive, we think. Not for Jesus, it isn’t. We make ourselves available, and he forgives through us. But I don’t want to forgive, you may think. Yes, you do! You have a new heart, birthed by the Spirit. Your feelings may not want to forgive, true. But your new heart, your inner man, loves to forgive. That’s who he is.
Right now, we live by the Spirit, not by external rules. Our mindset isn’t rules-based. It’s relationship-based. We follow the Spirit. He leads us. He guides us. We ask him how he sees things, and he speaks to us in our new spirit. “Holy Spirit, here is this situation. Here is this emotion. Here is this temptation. What truth do you have to show me right now? What’s the reality that you see?”
He does show us the truth, in this very moment. He reveals the things freely given to us. He reveals Christ in us. We embrace it, we make ourselves available to him, and Christ lives through us. The Spirit of Christ bears his fruit through us.
Walking by faith means walking in the truth, which means seeing things as God does. Our hearts have been made new, but our minds still need to be renewed. We still believe a lot of lies. “I’m no good! God will never do anything through me! He doesn’t even like me!” The life of Jesus won’t flow through lies.
Replacing lies with God’s truth is vital. We embrace what God says is true. “I’m a righteous new creation. I’m the vessel God himself has chosen to live in. I’m his asset, not his liability. He loves me perfectly, and he is living through me right this minute, in these exact circumstances.”
We are free, right now, to operate in complete liberty. That’s why Jesus set us free! You’re free to pursue the desires of your new heart. You’re free to hear and follow the Spirit. You’re free to let Jesus live through you in all his fullness. You’re free to live the life God intended for you!
Here are some of the places in the Bible where God explains what we just discussed:
We are the channel for God’s life: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves …” (2 Corinthians 4:7)
The Holy Spirit reveals to us the things we’ve been freely given: “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God …” (1 Corinthians 2:12)
Our part is believing: “Therefore they said to Him, ‘What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.’” (John 6:28-29)
Also, “‘I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.’” (Galatians 2:20)
We’ve been given everything already: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ …” (Ephesians 1:3)
Also, “… seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” (2 Peter 1:3)
We are holy, blameless, and beyond reproach: “… just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.” (Ephesians 1:4)
Also: “… yet He has now reconciled you in His body of flesh through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach …” (Colossians 1:22)
We have been perfected for all time: “For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:14)
The Christian’s goal is not to stop sinning, but to start walking by faith in the Spirit of God inside: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16)
Also: “You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:1-3)
God has freed us to be Christ-conscious: “… fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith …” (Hebrews 12:2)
We live in freedom: “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”(Galatians 5:1)
We are led by the Spirit. “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” (Romans 8:14)
God intends for us to hear his voice: “‘My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me …’” (John 10:27)
Jesus heard from the Father. “I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent me.” (John 5:30)
Also, “I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, But He who sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these I speak to the world.” (John 8:26)
Also, “I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these thigs as the Father taught Me.” (John 8:28b)
Also, “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.” (John 8:38)
Also, “But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God.” (John 8:40a)
We walk in God’s truth: “I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth.” (3 John 1:4)
Also: “‘But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.’” (John 16:13)
God works in us to will and do. For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)
We are a completely new creation. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. (Corinthians 5:17)
We died with Christ. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)
God lives in us. Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you? 1 Corinthians 3:16)
There’s never any condemnation for our sins: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)
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