Union With Christ

[the mystical union in which Christ indwells us] ... has a nature peculiar to itself; it may be compared to other unions, but it can never be fully explained by them. Wonderful is the bond between the body and soul; more wonderful still the sacramental bond of holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; equally wonderful the vital union between mother and child in her blood, like that of the vine and its growing branches; wonderful the bond of wedlock; and much more wonderful the union with the Holy Spirit, established by His indwelling. But the union with Immanuel is distinct from all these ...

It is a union invisible and intangible; the ear fails to perceive it, and it eludes all investigation; yet it is very real union and communion, by which the life of the Lord Jesus directly affects and controls us. As the unborn babe lives on the mother-blood, which has its heart-beat outside of him, so we also live on the Christ-life, which has its heart-beat not in our soul, but outside of us, in heaven above, in Christ Jesus.

Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri De Vries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946), 337.

The Faith Life

Here we have the simple but full statement of the secret of the true Christian life. It is not faith that rests only in certain promises of God or in certain blessings that we receive from Christ. It is a faith that sees how entirely Christ gives Himself to the soul to be his entire life and all that that implies for every moment of the day. Just as continuous breathing is essential to the support of our physical life, so is the unceasing faith in which the soul trusts Christ and depends on Him to maintain the life of the Spirit within us. Faith always rests on the infinite love in which Christ gave Himself wholly for us to be entirely ours and to live His life over again in us. By virtue of His divine omnipresence, by which He “filleth all in all” (Eph. 1:23), He can be to each what He is to all—a complete and perfect Savior, an abiding Guest, taking charge and maintaining our life in us and for us—as if each of us were the only one in whom He lives. Just as truly as the Father lived in Him and worked in Him all that He was to work out, so will Christ live and work in each one of us. . . May God reveal to us the inseparable union between Christ and us, in which the consciousness of Christ’s presence may become as natural to us as the consciousness of our existence.

Andrew Murray, God’s Best Secrets (New Kensington: Whitaker House, 1998), 141

In Christ,

Dick Moes