A Brief Summary of the Christian Life
by Arthur J Licursi

 

This would be my synopsis of the progression of the experience of the Christian life.

The progression is such that …

• Christ would not only be believed upon by us to be our Saviour,
• but also He would be recognized and received by us as the Spirit of life within us,
• and, He would then be trusted by us…such that He would be free to spontaneously live His life in and through us, as He may desire.

We are saved not only because we have a Savior who died for us to save us from judgment by His precious blood that blots out the past, but also we have Christ as our Savior who has come to indwell us. Our gain of His resurrection life within us imparts to us the first touch of all that is of His life. He Himself is The Life (1John 5:11-12), which happens to be the eternal life. So we have immediately gained the eternal life in our innermost spirit man, by Him who is the resurrected eternal life. We’ve gone from possessing only temporal life, to become possessors of Christ as the limitless life, in an instant.

 

His life then progressively becomes revealed to be within us as we learn to trust and rely upon Him within us. His life is impressed and deposited upon the film of our soul day by day (2Cor 4:16), much as camera film would develop after the initial flash of the lighted image. As we progress in our “seeing” the light of Him and all that we now possess by the resurrected “Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” now in us, we come to trust Him and His life in us as our sanctification, replacing our old independent self with His very Self.

Christ thus begins to live His full life in us, His liberated life. “What do I mean by a liberated Christ?” I mean a Christ who now is freed to be His self in me. The trouble Christ has had with me is that He can’t be Himself in me because I’ve resist Him. But, as I begin to co-operate with Him by receiving Him and all that He has done for me on and through the cross, I see my old self being crucified with Christ. He then can be His freed self in me and through me. When He begins to be free in me, then He begins to be able to be Himself expressed in me. He begins to be His own holiness, His own love, His own meekness, His own purity, His own vision, His own power, His own passion; to be Himself and express Himself in these different ways in me. He can live His purity, power, passion, compassion, love, and faithfulness through His agent and channel, that is through my faculties. His believing becomes active through my believing faculty. His love becomes active through my loving faculty, His deeds are carried out through my body, His words through my speaking faculty, His thoughts through my mental faculties, and so on.

So there’s a hidden union that has taken place, and yet continues to take place our daily life. Thus, as He divides our soul and spirit, we may simply and naturally begin to realize that when we are thinking thoughts, they are not really our thoughts; they are Christ’s thoughts. Surely we each can recognize that at times we have had high thoughts that are not of ourselves – they were His thoughts. Likewise, we recognize that their have been times when we have spoken a timely word to someone, and then asked our self “Where did that come from?” It was His words that we spoke; they were not our words, they were God’s words. This is the function of the normal Christian life as we are progressively sanctified by the life of Christ working within us.

 

In this way Christ is becoming freed to be all He is in us. Galatians 2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

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