The Secret Geography of the Christian Life | Christ Living Within You

Now, if I’m losing you, that’s okay. I just want you to get a little delivered from time and space. I want you to be a little less Aristotelian. I just want you to be conscious of your Lord’s spiritual growth. Of these two things, I am certain: He heard his indwelt Father, and He reestablished as He grew up, He reestablished the eternal bond of fellowship that had been established throughout all eternity. They were living again that wonderful fellowship in the Godhead with a difference. One of them was visible. One member of the Godhead was visible, and maybe one was in time, and the other was in eternity; I don’t know, but He’s growing, He’s getting older, and at age 20, He’s learning about God while the priests are down in the temple learning about the Bible. When He’s 30, it’s time for Him to become a true priest. He reaches the age of the priesthood. You can stop your training now. He graduated from seminary. He has now come into a full, may I say, reunited fellowship with the Lord. Not reunited of natures, but a full maturity of that which had been only now it’s on earth. Now listen to me, saints. I am talking to you about the Christian life. I am talking to you about the first experience of the Christian life on this planet in time and in space.

The other day, I said to you that the deeper Christian life began in God. Maybe the Father being the first Christian; at least the Son being the first Christian. And now this experience, together, has been brought into our realm and is known again in a measurable place: Galilee. The Christian experience is now living on this side of the door.

I like to go around and shake every one of you and say, “Do you understand what I’m talking about?” Well, I’m going to repeat it. Obviously, the Lord Jesus said, “That’s great for my Father and me, but my followers will read the Bible and pray and witness and tithe and go to church. They can’t have what my Father and I have got, fellowship with one another. I didn’t come to give them what I’ve got; I’m going to come give them something else because these peasants down here have all sinned and fallen and this and that and they’re going to sit on pews for an hour every Sunday morning till their bones ache, and they’re going to obey me or I’m going to strike them dead, and they’re going to find all 11,493 promises in the Bible and trust me for them, and they’re going to find oil 6650 quadrillion commandments, and they better know them and obey every one of them. But my Father and I will fellowship together.

Two Christian lives, the one that my Father and I have, and the one I’m going to curse this human race with. Now, that I tell you, that’s where we end up if we follow logic. I’m telling you that whatever was happening to Jesus Christ in Galilee, He was about to pass it on. Whatever was going on between Him, the Son of God, and His Father, He was about to pass it on to others. If that’s not true, then we need a great big page in the Bible in the New Testament that says there’s a double standard: God the Father and God the Son; you can’t touch that. You, Buster, are going to live a real objective… on the physical plane… life, existence, and ignore what went on between God the Father and God the Son; you’re stuck with something worse. I need that right out in plain view, because either the Lord was coming to give an eternal relationship, or He ended up with the oddest thing on earth, coming to give us something that He invented right out of thin air somewhere around the crucifixion and the resurrection, and we’re totally lost as to what it might be.

I really want to press my point. I ask you this question. When Jesus Christ got out of bed in the morning, by what means did He live the Christian life? By what means did He live the Christian life? If you would tell me by obedience to the word of God, by fasting and by prayer and by seeking the will of God, and by going to the synagogue, by obedience to the Old Testament or whatever else you’re going to come up with, and you tell me that’s how my Lord lived the Christian life, then I stand in utter shock and amazement. I tell you, I might as well be a Muslim. To say that my Lord came to this earth and wrestled out by human gut what He went through?

No, there was something within Him that He could lay hold of. There was something real going on there, folks. When a bird gets up in the morning, it lives by bird life. When a dog gets up in the morning, gets out of bed, and lives by the strength of dog life. And when the old man gets up and gets out of bed in the morning, and every bone in him creaks, and he faces Babylon and Egypt and the world system and the religious system and recreation and government and politics and powers unseen and he faces that life, that day, for 24 hours, he creaks out of bed and he lives by fallen human life. But when my Lord got out of bed in the morning in Galilee, He had a body that had no sin in it. He had a soul that was not distorted nor twisted. It was the perfect soul. And He had inside that soul a human spirit like Adam had, but inside His human spirit, He had another spirit…forget that…He had something else inside His spirit. He had the life of God.

Now, if you got up in the morning and you had a body that was not indwelled by sin, and if you had a soul that was undistorted, and if you had a living spirit within that, and if you had the Life of God inside that spirit, what would you live by? What would you live by? What would your choice be? I would live by the Life of God, given the choice, would you not? I would not live by rules, nor demands, nor fasting, nor prayers, nor the expectations of men, nor the expectations of God. I would be motivated, impelled, and I would draw my source from God Himself. What was living out in Galilee and in Judea and in Jerusalem in those last horrendous hours was a man living by a life not human. Hallelujah. And having done all that so gloriously and so successfully, He rose from the grave and said, “Tough about you. I’ve got this. This is all mine. You can’t have it. Here’s a Bible.”

Boy, I know I know this is rank heresy. There’s nothing theologically wrong with what I’m saying. It’s just that it’s heresy. It’s heresy by our mindset, not scriptural heresy. I was told recently that, and I don’t want to get off on the scriptural end of this thing, but I was told recently that a brother was talking to a Russian Christian who was going through these dark persecutions in Russia from what is called the underground church, and the Christian saw the Russian’s Bible, and he was commenting on how wonderful it was to have the scripture, and he was expecting the Russian to answer back how wonderful it was, and the Russian said to him, he poked him on the chest and said, “You know something, what is really wonderful that the church in the first century didn’t have one.” You have 90, 95, 98, 99% illiteracy, and you have a church that does not have a Bible.

Listen, it was in the 50s A.D. before the first piece of Christian literature was ever penned: Galatians, and it was probably before 100 A.D. before it was widely distributed. That’s the first one. The second piece of Christian literature, probably the book of James, was also mostly distributed around Jerusalem and Judea. 1 and 2 Corinthians, probably down toward the end of the century, before it was widely distributed. I’m not putting down the Bible. You folks listen to me. I got something to say to you. If there’s a Biblicist out there who is having a running fit, I’ll tell you something.  I know two kinds of Christians…committed Christians. Those committed to the Bible and those who are committed to Jesus Christ. Those who make the Bible the center of their ministry and claim that Christ is the center of their ministry, and those who make Christ the center of their ministry. Those who make Christ the center of their ministry are consistently more obedient to the scripture than those who make the scripture central to their ministry. They are more obedient to it. They live it more. They experience it more, and they are closer in their church experience, as well as their personal experience, to that which the scripture unfolds.

You do not do damage to the Bible, the inspired scripture, the word of God, by making Jesus Christ the center of your faith. But that’s not my point. My point is that the Lord Jesus Christ had an internal relationship with His Father. We speak of the indwelling Christ. Well, Christ would speak of the indwelling Father. And He lived by His Father within Him, not out there, not objectively, not something seen, not addressed this way. He lived by the life of God within Him, and His relationship went internally, and if you will simply reread the Gospels, you’ll find it from one end of the four evangelists to the other, over and again, just open your eyes. You’ll see, you can almost sometimes read into…if you’ll read the parables from this viewpoint and stop looking for what you’re supposed to do with a parable, that parable will jump out at you, and you can almost see the day the Lord discovered that parable. And He will tell you again and again and again and again how He lived with His Father. And those men who lived with Him, 20 of them, 30, 40, 12, however small that number was, when they lived with Him, don’t kid yourself. They were watching and were fascinated by His internal relationship with His Father more than everything else put together. They could sense it. I’ve known a few godly Christians in my life. You can feel what’s going on inside them if they’re standing on the other side of a brick wall. You can feel it. And to live in the presence of the Son of God…those men may not have had an indwelling Christ as they walked around the hot streets and highways and byways of Galilee and Judea, but they watched that life in front of them. And later, when they got that life, they knew how to relate to that life.

Now, I want you to look at the biology of this new species. I’m talking about the history of the spirit. No problem in the body, no problem in the soul. A living spirit because He’s never known sin, and within His spirit, another form of life, the highest form of life on the biological chart. Whoopee. God has got His purpose in the creation of man. He has moved man from the third place on the biological chart to first place. Here is a species living by a life not human. That’s the destiny God had prescribed and planned for Adam and has found in Jesus Christ. Praise the Lord.

Well, He died for our sins, but He did more than that. He died to be able to pass on that relationship. I don’t know if you fully understand what I mean. If you want to know what happened on the cross and how the Lord died, I would ask you to read the crucifixion account in The Divine Romance and the resurrection as well. But there’s a story that isn’t in The Divine Romance that I will tell now, the way I told the story of The Divine Romance. I’ll take it and make it a little larger so you can see it clearly.