In Christ

With every day, I enter further into the discovery that my life is in Christ, and is not bound up in my personal history as I have often supposed. I have found the substitution that I have needed for my personal history, and with it, I have been able to take hold of joy in place of anything that I might be sorry for - namely, sins, whether my own or someone else's, and the ignorance in which sin thrives.

The history of my life, and I suppose that of any human life, is largely a collection of my sins, mistakes, and careless wandering in ignorance. God is showing me that he is able to dismiss the whole of it in one act - in introducing me daily to the truth that I am in Christ, abolishing the merit of my personal experiences altogether. Because I am in Christ, and my identity is in Him, I am wholly able to go on in life, from any point, looking only to Jesus, and I need not carry the weight of any other experience with me. I am discovering that my life is in Christ, and this is true because I am in Christ; and I am in Christ because that is where God has placed me:

"It is by Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption." (I Corinthians 1:30)

I was in Adam, and now I am in Christ: but I do not mean that I was in Adam a few years ago, and now I have somehow gotten into Christ - That is not how it works. I mean that the sum total of humanity was once alone in Adam, at some point in history, and I was bound up in that experience so much that it has had effect on my behavior, thoughts, nature, and character here in this life - the life in the form of Adam. Now, the same total of humanity has been summarized in Christ by the cross, and I am also bound up in that experience, which is having an effect on me through faith.

So the glory of God in my life is not to put me into Christ, for I am there. This was accomplished, and cannot be accomplished again in any way: I was included in Christ when Jesus' blood was shed for sins, which was for God, and this can never be re-established or expanded as though to be applied to me more exclusively, individually. When Jesus pleased God on the cross, He pleased God regarding me, and there is no second act of atonement. Faith applies the cross to me, and with it, salvation; but the truth of my being in Christ is of God. It cannot be undone, nor accomplished any more thoroughly.

The glory of God in my life is to diminish the effect of Adam, while that nature is able to have any effect at all. This includes getting me to where I do not try to integrate who I have become in Adam with who I am becoming in Christ; and this demands that I dismiss the whole of my personal history from being a point of reference in seeking God, or in thinking about myself in relating to God.

I need not live accountable to any other historical fact except that God has placed me in Christ, and the present fact that I am in Him. If I am in Christ, then my life is also in Him; if my life is in Him, I need not find it elsewhere: not in what I have done, nor in what I have become in Adam.

Adam is a total loss, and I need not think of myself as being a loss with him, because God has accounted for me elsewhere - in Christ. I am learning to see myself in Christ where God has placed me, and to let every other idea about myself go unattended to until it fades to nothing.