"To Live"

    "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory" (Colossians 3:4).

    People define life in many ways.  We think of it in terms of physical process, or in regard to circumstance, situation, or condition.  If our heart beats and brainwaves exist within our organ of thought, we consider ourselves to be alive.  Or if we find ourselves able to do the things we most enjoy, we perceive ourselves to be truly living.  "My family is my life... My job is my life... My hobby is my life... My freedom is my life." 

    God, conversely, defines life in terms of One, that is, His Son.  "To live is Christ" declared the Apostle Paul (Philippians 1:21).  Paul knew that human beings actually exist as temples, "temples of God" wherein the Holy Spirit alone can fulfill the reason for our existence (I Corinthians 3:16).  God made us to serve as His dwellingplace.  He only can fill and fulfill our hearts.  "I am thy God" He proclaimed to Israel (Isaiah 41:10).  No one and nothing else can truthfully make this claim because, again, He alone exists as the Deity whom our hearts were made to welcome as our very life.

    A.W. Tozer referenced this truth in a sublime, but greatly challenging truth in his book, "The Pursuit of God."

    "God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful, that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature."

    Beautifully stated, these words may first elicit admiration and enthusiastic agreement, as well they should.  This is truth and reality.  However, further consideration must elicit the honest acknowledgement that our native fleshly tendencies do not flow with the current of this River of life.  "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit" (Galatians 5:17).  Left to ourselves, we are all polytheists in the sense that we naturally perceive fulfillment to exist in many aspects of experience, condition, circumstance, and situation.  The Bible counters this false worship by declaring Christ to be our life, and the Holy Spirit takes residence within our hearts when we believe for the purpose of establishing one God as the abiding Divinity of our innermost being.  This we must believe, regardless of conflicting experience, evidence, and sensibility.  "The deepest demands of our total nature" require but One for their satisfaction and abundant fulfillment.  "He is thy life" (Deuteronomy 30:20).

   We must build an altar within our hearts whereupon we sacrifice the idolatries of believing that anything or anyone other than the Spirit of Christ can serve as our life.  Indeed, we could lose everything, but if Christ remains, we have, in terms of a fulfilled heart and reason for existence, lost nothing.  God made us for Himself, and He will not rest until we know and embrace this most important truth as the holy light burning within the inner sanctum of our spirits.  No truth more challenges our capacity for faith.  And no truth more blesses is with joy and peace than the discovery of the Lord Jesus alone as the Life of our lives.  Again, to live is Christ.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Nothing else.

"I am the the way, the truth and the life."
(John 14:6)

"In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him."
(I John 4:9)