Ephesians 1:3; 2:6
To be in the new covenant is to be part of a community that lives day by day in a heavenly dimension, in a literal spiritual locality that is the person of Christ.
Paul again addresses this when writing to the Romans. We should remember that he had never met the Roman believers and knew nothing of their spiritual condition. He therefore writes what he believes to be true of every believer:
Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
Romans 6:3-6
He is speaking of what happened to them at their baptism at the beginning of their Christian life, not of an experience beyond baptism or second blessing. He does not present it as something to be prayed about or prayed for or sought after but as something that is true of every believer. He is saying, “I am talking to believers; therefore, you know what kind of people you are—those who are part of Christ and share His history.”
He is reminding them of what is their status as believers and what constitutes the basic facts of their faith in Christ. The most basic fact of who they now are as believers is that they are in Christ, united to Him, and share His history; and this has been true since the first act of their faith in Him when they were baptized.
The believer is together with Christ in His history and at this and every moment is in Him sharing His life. As you sit and read this book, know that the Spirit has included you into the history of the Lord Jesus. You have died with Christ and risen with Him, and you now are seated in the heavenly realm of the Spirit. That is not something you go forward for hands to be laid on you that you might “get it” but something that is, upon which you build your life and behavior.
Many believers live in the frustration of trying to arrive at where they already are! Imagine the confusion of the person who is sitting down while continually being told to sit down! Yet in meeting after meeting believers are urged to die with Christ, and they go forward to pray and be prayed for instead of realizing that the Spirit placed them in Christ and, therefore, into His death and resurrection when they believed upon Jesus.
The knowledge that we are one with the living Christ, His body on earth, is the missing factor in the experience of many believers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We have been taught to think of God as “up there” and “over there.” Our evangelical church language is peppered with statements that back up that thinking. Enthusiastically we tell each other “God was really here today,” or we are exhorted in song to “reach out and touch the Lord as He goes by” and to testify that “He touched me.”
I know what the speakers and songwriters mean—they speak of special moments when the presence of the Lord is unusually felt. But we have expanded the meaning of their words to define our everyday relationship with God—a relationship in which at best we believe that He is alongside us and, for most, so far away that we have to call out to Him to come from distant heaven and solve the problems that we have. He is the specialist called in to handle the tough problem. After He has worked His wonder we thank Him, He goes back to heaven, and we get on with life.
The believers of the New Testament knew nothing of this, for as we have seen above, they were “in” Him and He was “in” them the same way each cell of one’s body is “in” the body and one’s life is “in” every cell of the body. They prayed and worshipped Him as objective to them at the right hand of the Father; but at the same time, they knew that through the Spirit they were united as one with Him. The language of the New Testament continually points to the union of the believer with Christ. The expression “in Christ” and its parallels “in the Lord,” “in (God’s) love,” and “in the Spirit” or the words of Jesus describing life in the covenant “I in you and you in Me” are to be found throughout the New Testament.
We are in Christ—the “in” of being inside something—and He is “in” us. We are immediately present to Him and He to each of us. There is never a second in which we are apart from Him. I am now “in” the atmosphere of planet Earth. In that atmosphere, I find light and life and the food to sustain the life. Likewise, we are placed in Him who is our atmosphere, our very life.
The physical cells of my body are “in” my presence, even as my presence is in them. Each cell is present to me; I am present to each and all the cells. When I leave, the body disintegrates into dust, for I am its life. So we live in Him: He is our life, and we owe our true life to Him.
In the World, But Not of It
One day I sat by a pond meditating on these things, and I saw a water spider clinging to a reed. Then it disappeared into the water. It had gone to its home at the bottom of the pond made of many bubbles of air that had been captured between the spider’s legs and carried and lodged at the base of the reeds. It lived there in the water while breathing the air of the world above. Although it lived in the water, it was not a creature of the water; it breathed air from the world above the pond.
We are not speaking of a fantastic imagination! In His glorified humanity, Jesus is literally and truly present to us, and we actually are joined to and share in His humanity. The person who said and did all that we read of in the accounts in the Gospels is in this room with me, but more than with me—He is in me and I am in Him; we are joined as one.
In my own life, it was one of the great moments of freedom when I discovered this truth. I had struggled in many prayer meetings to die with Christ, but the more I tried to die the more alive to self I felt! Then I realized that the beginning of faith was to realize that I had been included into the covenant, into Him who is the covenant, Christ Jesus. At my new birth, I had been joined to Him; and since then, I shared His history. He lived in me, His life was my life, and all that He had achieved was mine. My problem had been that my uninformed faith was looking into the future for something to happen to me, instead of biblical faith looking back to His death and resurrection and resting in the fact that I was there.
The New Testament believer is one who looks at the whole world through the reality that he or she is in Christ. How we work out our relationships, how we face all the challenges and opportunities of life, all the way to how the believing slave works at his meaningless task—all of life is understood and accomplished because we are in Christ.
If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:1-3
The believers of the New Testament did not live by rules and laws but by His presence in and with them. He dictated their lives from within. Any law was not an imposition but arose from the life within.
Learning To Live in Christ
Jack wrote and told me what it was like for him to discover the life of faith, and I quote it here as he wrote it to me. Jack is a missionary in the Philippines. He shared with me how his life had been transformed the summer before his final year in theological seminary.
He described his Christian life up until that time as a struggle. He disciplined himself to live the life he thought of as being a successful Christian life. But his spiritual exercises were not working! His strict regime of Bible reading and prayer, his days of fasting, his list of books by spiritual giants to be read each month, left him cold and empty inside. In moments of facing the stark truth about himself, he knew that on the surface he had the appearance of spirituality; but just below the surface, he knew he was a million miles from what the New Testament demanded. H
e kept a strict time of prayer but knew he could not begin to keep the command of Jesus to love others as He had loved him. He could get an A+ in his examinations in theology, but if ever anyone tested his true walk with God, he would get an F.
When summer vacation rolled around, he took a job at a builders’ yard assisting customers. One of his rules for his idea of a successful Christian was to listen to Christian radio, and so at lunch time he went into a nearby park and listened while munching on a sandwich. The first day, he tuned in to my daily program. He tells what happened to him:
“I don’t believe I was a know-it-all, but I was head of my class in theology and believed I had a good grasp of the Gospel and the various theories of the Atonement and did not think anyone could teach me something I didn’t know in that area. That day in the park, I heard that the death and resurrection of Jesus, His ascension, and His sending of the Holy Spirit, were the making of a covenant on my behalf. I had never heard it before and was stopped in my tracks. For the next six weeks, I planned my day to be in the park every day to listen and take notes.
“I was forced to confront what Jesus did on the cross in terms of what He was doing for me. In my head I knew how to describe what He did to pass an exam, but this was utterly different—my heart was getting involved. If asked, I would have told you that Jesus died and rose again to save me from eternal death; I had made Him Lord of my life and was doing my best to obey and serve Him.
“As the days passed, I was confronted with a totally new concept: that He was my representative making a covenant with the Father as and for me. His obedience to the Father in His going to death, His rising out from death, and His return to the Father was as me: I was included in His action. I had thought that I was to produce the perfect obedience and to somehow die to my selfishness. Now I was confronted with the Gospel that said He had obeyed as me, He had died as me, and in His resurrection I had risen from the dead. It was not a matter of my trying to obey and failing, but of trusting His obedience and trusting His death for me; no longer my trying to keep a regime of spiritual exercises, but believing that He had carried me to the Father in His ascension and that I lived in the heavenly realms in the Fathers’ presence.
“I realized that I thought of the fullness of my Christian life as being experienced in some act of obedience I would do some day or some experience of God that I would achieve by hitting on the right set of spiritual exercises. I believed and worked toward that “something” that would happen to me so that I would feel and act dead. It was always in the future, and I was always striving to do whatever it would take to make me dead with Him.
“Now I saw that I had been working backwards—trying to achieve what had already been done instead of moving from it as the starting point of life. I had been looking for the experience that would catapult me into an experience of God instead of realizing His resurrection and ascension had carried me into the covenant friendship of God.
“My baptism came alive to me. Prior to this, it had meant very little in my life. Now I understood that it was the physical expression of my faith in His action for and as me as the Spirit joined me to Him.
“One day it was so plain to me that I had died and risen again in my representative. It was accomplished history never to be reversed. I was dead! I had risen from the dead. I was a man who had returned from his own funeral alive in the power of an endless life. And it had all happened in my representative. I wanted to run back to tell my customers I was a resurrected person, but I restrained myself!
“I had always thought of my relationship with God as being between God and me, which made it very shaky and conditional, being dependent upon my current spiritual state. I cannot tell you what it meant to know that my relationship to God was based on and dependent upon Jesus, who was acting as me. My relationship to God, then, is as strong as that of Jesus’ to the Father.
“Now my whole existence depended on Jesus. Apart from Him, I have nothing and can do nothing. Apart from Him, I have no history with God and no hope of living the Christian life in the here and now. Looking back, I realize that my Christian life was a struggle to try and fit the image of what I thought a Christian should be. Jesus was the One I tried to imitate. Now, for the first time, I understood what Paul meant when he wrote, ‘For me to live is Christ.’
“As my return to seminary drew closer, I realized that a great load had been lifted from me, a load I had not realized I had until it was taken away. I had never thought of myself as a candidate for Jesus’ invitation for the laboring and heavy laden to come to Him for rest; but in that six weeks I found He was talking about me, and I came to Him and I rested. I felt like laughing with relief.
“Since that time, I have learned and still am learning to stand in the truth in the daily situations of life, to face life as a man who has passed through death and now lives in the life of Jesus.”
The Hidden Mystery
That we should be united to Christ, His body living by His life, is the “wisdom” and “mystery” that Paul spoke of that was hidden from past ages but is now revealed to us by the Spirit.
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory.
But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
1 Corinthians 2:7,9-12
Apart from the enlightenment of the Spirit, the truth is more than we can take in. United to Jesus, we have been granted to share in the love relationship of the Trinity. As the Father loves the Son, so He loves us, for we are in Him. We share His glory and, therefore, are no more of the world than He is.
“That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
“And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
John 17:21-23,26
Many believers are so removed from the New Testament and the practice of the early church that their experience of entering the covenant spans months or even years, when it was intended and originally enjoyed at the beginning of the Christian life. Many believers come to faith and only later are baptized and then, at an even later date, experience the fullness of the Spirit. In the early church, entrance into Christ was at baptism and was attended by the convert’s being filled with the Spirit, a glorious entrance with great joy into the new covenant.
But God loves us; He is on our side and is merciful to us in our confusion. This chapter is not to suggest that those who waited months or years to be baptized or who have not yet awakened to the Holy Spirit within them are not in the covenant. What I am seeking to point out is that the pattern of the New Testament is the path that brings us to the immediate and fullest understanding of the dynamic working of the covenant in our lives.
Let us not be shy! Nor let us present our unbelief as humility. All He is, all He has won, and all His authority on the earth is made manifest in and through us. He is now our sphere of living. He faces life in and through us. He responds to the challenge of the age in and by us, and we face it in and through His life.
Chapter 15: How To Walk in the Spirit
But how does this actually work out in life? How do we live from Christ our lives day by
day? We have seen that the believer stepping out of the baptismal waters is in a new world in Christ, with new potential that he or she has never known before. Limitations known in the old life have gone in the resurrection of Jesus; signposts that directed us in life have been removed and new ones erected. We can never think about life in the same way again.
We look at our world that has been our comfortable home since we can remember, all we took for granted as part of life— the selfishness, greed, anger, and envy—and see now that it is finished and passing away to give way to the real in Christ. We are coming alive to the new creation built on the infinite, unconditional love of God, in which all the expressions of love—the kindness and compassion, the forgiveness of our enemies—are the normal behavior. In baptism, we have been joined to this world in Christ; in the covenant meal, we are embraced and participate in Him who is the life of this new world.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 22