Having "a bigger Christ" will take some explaining. The use of a comparative word like "bigger" implies that the standard apprehension of Him leaves much to be desired. Gaining a bigger Christ involves delving into what many have come to call "the deeper Christian life". When people speak of the deeper Christian life, they are trying to articulate a deficiency that they sense in the standard fare of Christian teaching and preaching. They feel that they are "spinning their wheels" in a sort of "rat race," always in motion yet never moving forward. Their hearts ache from a lack of direction and purpose. Their churches are a constant flurry of activities, ever in pursuit of the newest, hottest fad in Christian spirituality. They do not like being told that, if they miss out on this next great thing, they will miss God's will for their lives. They feel pressured to conform according to superficial standards of outward behavior. For some, the standard is evangelism or service to God; for others, it is Bible study and theology; for still others, the key to everything is to have a certain supernatural experience so that they will reach a new plane of Christian power and maturity. Always the emphasis is on "doing the right things" to make oneself pleasing to God.

Such an environment makes us ask, "how are we different from any other religion which defines itself in terms of ‘doing the dance' to appease the relevant god?" Jesus denounced just such a practice when he said, "You people honor me with your lips but your hearts are far from me"(Matt.15:8) As with those to whom he was speaking, our worship—in fact our entire relationship to God—consists primarily of rules made up by men. We did not start out intending to lose the centrality of knowing and loving God in these things, but that is what has happened. Each tradition has its own peculiar preoccupation, but the same fallen human tendencies undergird each of them in all of us. This illustrates an age-old displacement of priority from "being" to "doing".

Where It All Started

To explain what I mean, let me take you to the Garden of Eden. Here God placed Man and Woman with a task to accomplish: "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over everything . . . including the creeping things (among which was the serpent)" (Gen 1:28). But we will see from this garden story that the task that God gave to them was not an end in itself. More important than the mere completion of the task was how they were to accomplish it. God placed before them two trees with very interesting names: The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God had a lesson in mind for Man and Woman which would not be clearly summarized until Romans 3:2 (also Gal 3:11) finally proclaimed: "Through the works of the Law will no flesh be justified." For what is the Law if it is not the knowledge of Good vs. Evil? This dualism undergirds every major religion in the world, and is expressed in every novel and movie created by any culture. Good vs. Evil has been wired into human nature ever since our predecessors listened to the rationalization of the very serpent they were sent to subdue. What their experience has taught us is that evil cannot be subdued by a preponderance of goodness, because both evil and good come from the same tree, and that tree always leads to death.

What is needed is a source of life that is higher than the realm of "doing good" vs. "doing evil". When accused of being "good", Jesus abruptly countered , "There is no one good except God" (Mark 10:18). He refused to allow anyone to identify him as the source of his own activity. Instead he consistently pointed to his Father, indwelling him and moving him to do whatever he did (see The Fellowship of God). He was showing us the priority of "being" versus "doing". Jesus knew this battle well, as the Tempter had challenged him three times before in the desert over the same issue: "If you are the Son of God," he dared, "then do something to prove it." There was no question whether or not Jesus was who he said he was. But the Tempter wanted Jesus, the "last Adam" (1 Cor.15:45), to constitute his being by his doing. This line of attack was so central to God's purpose that this battle continued to the last moment on the cross: "If you're the Messiah, come down off of there!" But Jesus had learned from his Father that you need not by your actions make yourself something that you already are.

Go back to the Garden of Eden. This very same trick prevented the first Adam from accomplishing the task he was given. The serpent challenged Adam that he must first become "like God" to accomplish the purpose for which he was created. But God had already said that He had created Man in His own image. The serpent's scheme was to cast a shadow of doubt on what God had said ("Did God say . . .?"). For the same reason that Israel would later fail to enter the promised land (Hebrews 3:19), Adam failed to enter into God's desires for him—he did not believe what God had said. But the righteous live by faith (Rom.1:17), and faith affirms what we know about who we are in Christ. Our actions issue forth from our identity in Christ, not vice versa. To reverse this order is to repeat the error of the Garden of Eden. What we need is not Good battling Evil, but Life superceding both.

Meet the Tree of Life

So what is this Life and where do we get it? It is the Life of Christ within us, growing in an outward direction all the time. We need not be "seekers" hoping to stumble upon it in the next new workshop we attend or gimmick we purchase. We simply need our eyes opened to see that we are in Christ, and that He is in us. The Bible tells us that both of these things are true: that we are simultaneously in Christ, and indwelt by Him. But have you ever considered that this is impossible? Two separate things cannot both be "in" each other, unless they are not separate things at all. Here we are bumping up against the central truth of Christianity: that we are one with Christ so completely that whatever is true of Him is true of us. Christ has become our center and our circumference, our content and our context, our All in All. He has become for us exactly what His Father was, and is, to Him. Just as Jesus lived merely by being indwelt by His Father, so we live by being indwelt by the Son.

This is the "deeper" Christian life, or as Watchman Nee pointed out, it is the "Normal Christian Life." Nee called it "normal," not because it is commonly understood or experienced by believers, but because it is the standard of God's desire for our experience. There is nothing novel or "secret" about Christ becoming our everything. But this type of life cannot be reduced to a twelve-step program and therefore it has never appealed to a large number of believers. We do not like things that we cannot pin down into "something to do." So we are always picking up things of secondary importance and treating them as primary, rather than the by-product that they are. C.S. Lewis called this the "principle of first things."

We will have a bigger Christ when we see that He is the Beginning and the End of our faith (Rev.1:8) He is the sum of all spiritual things. (Eph1:10) Like Brother Lawrence, we must drop the superfluous activities and traditions which do not grow out of the intimate experience of our union with Him. Our only pursuit is to know Him well—we have no other pursuit. This must be our starting point: To learn to fellowship with the Lord so that anything He wants us to do will naturally flow from our relationship with Him. If doing what He asks ever becomes a "chore," then we can be sure that we have left the feet of Jesus, where Mary sits, and have joined her sister Martha in becoming distracted with something that has not been given to us by the Lord. "My yoke is easy and my burden is light," He says (Matt. 11:30), and that should tell you that if your Christian walk is a burden then you did not receive your instructions from the Lord. We can know Him with the utmost simplicity of learning to experience that we are in Him and that He is in us.

In Christ . . . In Us

To be in Him means that the physical world around you is not your only location. Like the characters in the movie "The Matrix," what you see playing out around you is real, but only in a secondary sense. There is another reality, another realm, which Paul calls "the heavenlies," and which he says is more real than the realm that you see with your physical eyes (2 Cor.4:18). In this realm you exist, seated with Christ at the right hand of God (Eph.2:6). You are so one with Christ (1Cor 6:17) that whatever has happened to Him has happened to you. He was crucified, buried, raised, and enthroned; therefore you have also been crucified (Gal 2:20, 6:14), buried (Rom 6:4), risen (Rom 6:11, Eph 2:5), and enthroned (Eph 2:6, Col 3:1-3) with Him. But lest we think that these things can only be true of us in some far away, hypothetical sense, let us remember that "the heavenlies" is not really a "place" somewhere, but a reality which coexists with the present physical world in which you "live and move and have your being." We need not wait around for these things to become true of us after we die, for they are always spoken of in scripture as present realities.

To bring this even "closer to home," the other side to a bigger Christ is that He is in us. He inhabits our very spirits and personalities in ways that cannot be neatly dissected and analyzed. Like water mixing with water, when His Spirit mixes with our spirit, it becomes impossible to distinguish between His and ours (1 Cor.6:17). From God's perspective, that means that when He looks at us He sees His Son. Are you burdened by guilt because of something you have done as a believer, so that you are sure that God is displeased with your performance as a Christian? Then answer this question: Does the Father have anything against the Son right now, or is He displeased with His Son in any way? No? Then the same goes for you! You are "accepted in the Beloved" (Eph.1:6). That should affect the way you approach the Lord, and move your prayer life from groveling to praise. When you raise your eyes to find the face of your Father in Heaven, you will always find a smile fixed on you.

But what about your own subjective experience of oneness with Christ? This is where people get confused and lose faith that Christ has done what He says. Christ has become your source of Life—the new core of your existence. He is the new heart that was promised to you in Ezekiel 11:19. Christ is still on the earth today . . . in you! You are His means of entry into the modern world today. He goes to your job or school every morning. He interacts with your coworkers and family. He helps with household chores. He bathes the children, mows the lawn, does His homework, and even watches your favorite TV shows! You cannot separate Him from you, and He is not "up there" somewhere watching you do things "down here." He is "down here" inside of you. And you cannot distinguish between that which is "spiritual" in your life and that which is not. Did you think that God was involved only when you went to church or prayed or read your Bible? We are greatly restricting our understanding of the activity of God when we reduce Him to these activities.

Not What You'd Expect

Has it ever struck you that for the first 30 years of Jesus' life, he spent all of his time doing "ordinary things"? Before his famous ministry began around age 30, Jesus spent his whole life just being a human being. He had parents and siblings (do you imagine they always got along?). He worked from childhood as a craftsman. His hands were thick with callouses and scars from all that scraping, cutting, hammering, chiseling, carrying, and bending. He got sweaty and worked with his hands. He dealt with irate customers and dishonest merchants. He did not spend his days away in a castle somewhere, reading spiritual books and contemplating God and Heaven. He was on earth, and lived such a normal life that when he announced to his hometown that he was the promised Messiah, they were shocked! He was an ordinary guy, in terms of outward activity. Yet this was God on earth! Not what you expected, is he? Jesus' whole life, beginning with his undistinguished birth, is a testimony to the "normalness" of God's activity on the earth. The life of Christ shatters every ancient assumption about "being spiritual." The source of his life was not in what he did, but in who he was, and by whom he was indwelt. So, you see, "Christ in you" doesn't look like what you'd expect. He manifests His presence in ways you cannot predict. Do not look for Him to transform the world around you into a magical "spiritual" experience. Look for Him to hide in the details and everyday interactions of your ordinary, secular life. That is where He prefers to dwell.

Now we come to the greatest source of confusion about "Christ in you": the enduring presence of sin and selfishness. I have personally struggled with this one a great deal, because of the apparent contradiction between "Christ is your life" and "wretched man that I am" (Rom. 7:24). In fact, the "schizophrenic" experience of Romans seven is every believer's experience. We have died with Christ, risen with Him, and He is in us, but that doesn't seem true by our actions. One reason for this is the above-mentioned misunderstanding of what the life of Christ looks like. But the other reason is that you are a complex being who will not easily fit into an "either/or" existence. God has redeemed you and has given you a new spirit (Ezek.11:19), which is Christ. But He did not give you a new body, or a new brain. He deposited this treasure in an "earthen vessel"(2 Cor. 4:7) that feels the effects of years of fallen choices and experiences. He did this on purpose. He desires for you to remain dependent on Him for your life and joy, therefore He leaves you in your weak and needy state for you to learn to turn to Him for everything. Even Christ had to undergo a process of learning his Father through what he suffered (Heb. 2:10).

But He does not want us to focus our attention on the fallenness of our "flesh." Our task is to look unto Jesus (Heb.12:2) and "set our mind on things above," where we really are (Col.3:2). This physical world is like a vapor, and will quickly pass away. As fog disappears in the heat of the morning sun, so will this world vanish before we know it. And so we find ourselves in a dualistic experience. We are new creatures clothed by something old, but we must never stop reminding ourselves that our clothes are not us! For this daunting task, we will need the assistance of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Back to the Church

So we come once again to the proper translation of that great verse: "Christ in y'all, the hope of glory." This life will not maintain this balance if you are out on your own somewhere, trying to hold these things in tension with your own two hands. You need brothers and sisters who know these things, who can remind you daily that you are a "holy one," accepted in the Beloved. By yourself you will either forget, or else you will misappropriate these truths and not face the present reality of your flesh head-on. Many who laud the "victorious Christian life" can only do so because they do not live in close community with other believers, so that their worst faults remain unexposed among the glitter and sparkle of the often pretentious traditional church setting. I am convinced that the main reason we "dress up" for church is to feel better about ourselves, to hide the gore of our weaknesses. At "church" we smile and greet one another pleasantly, knowing that we will only have to interact briefly before the service begins, at which time all such personal interaction will cease. Then we will be safe in our pew, guarded from the revealing light of "Body Life."

<on to Chapter Two>

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