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In this lesson we will continue to see the remaining aspects of the experience and enjoyment of Christ living in us in the grace of the Triune God.
Christ living in us enables us to do all things in Him who empowers us. In Philippians 4:13 Paul said, “I am able to do all things in Him who empowers me.” To be empowered is to be made dynamic inwardly. Christ dwells in us (Col. 1:27). He empowers us, makes us dynamic, from within, not from without. By such inward empowering Paul was able to do all things in Christ. Paul was a person in Christ (2 Cor. 12:2), and he desired to be found in Christ by others. Now he declared that he was able to do all things in Him, the very Christ who empowered him. This is an all-inclusive and concluding word on his experience of Christ. It is the converse of the Lord’s word in John 15:5 concerning our organic union with Him: “Apart from Me you can do nothing.”
All things in Philippians 4:13 refers to all the things, mentioned in verse 12, that we have learned to be content with in the course of our human life and to the human virtues listed in verse 8. This means that by the empowering of the Christ who lives in us we can have a life of contentment, knowing both how to be abased and how to abound. Furthermore, we can live out all kinds of virtues, such as being true, being dignified, being righteous, being pure, being lovely, and being well spoken of.
Paul’s word concerning Christ as the One who empowers us is especially suitable in His empowering us that we may live Him as our human virtues and thus magnify Him in His unlimited greatness. If we desire to experience Christ as the One who empowers us that we may be able to do all things in Him, we need to allow Him to live in us (Gal. 2:20), to be formed in us (4:19), to make His home in us (Eph. 3:17), and to be magnified in us (Phil. 1:20). In this way, by the empowering of the indwelling Christ, we are able to live a satisfied life and live Christ as our human virtues.
Ephesians 3:17a speaks of Christ’s making His home in our hearts. This is a deeper work of Christ’s living in us, and it is also our more advanced experience of the indwelling Christ. Our heart is the totality of all our inward parts—the mind, the emotion, the will, and the conscience. When Christ makes His home in our heart, He controls our entire inward being and supplies and strengthens every inward part with Himself. When we were saved, Christ came into our spirit. Now He also wants to spread into every part of our inward being. As we are strengthened into our inner man, our regenerated spirit, the way is opened for Christ to spread in us, from our spirit to our mind, emotion, will, and conscience. The more Christ spreads within us, the more He settles down in us and makes His home in us.
We may liken our heart to a house with many rooms, including the rooms of the mind, the emotion, the will, and the conscience. Although we have Christ in us, we still need to allow Him to settle down in our heart to saturate, possess, occupy, and fill every room within us. For this cause, we need to pray to the Father that He would grant us, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into our regenerated spirit (v. 16) that we may receive the divine dispensing. Thus, Christ will spread into every part of our entire being and make His home in our heart.
Ephesians 3:17b goes on to say that this Christ who lives in us and who is making His home in our hearts will cause us to be rooted and grounded in His love. Our being rooted and grounded in love is related to our being God’s cultivated land and God’s building (1 Cor. 3:9). As God’s cultivated land, we need to be rooted for growth, and as God’s building, we need to be grounded for our building up. Thus, our being rooted and grounded is a matter concerning life and building, indicating that we believers experience Christ for life and building. When Christ makes His home in our hearts, He saturates all our inward parts with Himself. By such a divine dispensing, we are being rooted and grounded in His love, and spontaneously there will be life and building.
Ephesians 3:17 mentions faith and love at the same time. Christ makes His home in our hearts through faith that we may be rooted and grounded in His love. To experience Christ we need faith and love (1 Tim. 1:14). Faith enables us to apprehend Christ, and love enables us to enjoy Him. Neither faith nor love are ours; they are His. His faith becomes our faith, by which we believe in Him, and His love becomes our love, by which we love Him. The love in which we are rooted and grounded is the divine love realized and experienced by us in a practical way. With such a love we love the Lord, and with that same love we love one another. When we are rooted and grounded in Christ’s love, we grow and are built up in His life.
Ephesians 3:18 says that we “may be full of strength to apprehend with all the saints what the breadth and length and height and depth are.” When we have been strengthened into our inner man, Christ can then make His home in our heart and thereby occupy our whole being and saturate it with Himself. In this way, we, being rooted and grounded in Christ’s love, are full of strength to apprehend the dimensions of Christ.
The dimensions of Christ are the breadth, length, height, and depth, which are the dimensions of the universe. To apprehend such dimensions of Christ we need all the saints, not individually but corporately. In our experience of Christ, we first experience the breadth of what He is, and then the length. This is horizontal. When we advance in Christ, we experience the height and depth of His riches. This is vertical. First, we experience Christ spreading as the breadth and the length. Then, we experience Him rising up as the height and descending as the depth. Thus, our experience of Christ is three-dimensional, like a cube; it is not one-dimensional, like a line. We must go back and forth and up and down in our experience of the Christ who lives in us, that eventually our experience of Him may be a solid “cube.” When our experience is like this, we cannot fall or be broken.
When Christ lives in us, He not only enables us to experience and enjoy Him making His home in our hearts, to be rooted and grounded in love, and to apprehend His breadth, length, height, and depth, but He also enables us to know His knowledge-surpassing love (Eph. 3:19a). The love of Christ surpasses knowledge, yet we can know it by experiencing it. According to our mentality, the love of Christ is beyond our understanding. Our mind is not able to know it. But since we have Christ living in us, we are enabled in our spirit to know the love of Christ through our experience and enjoyment of Him.
Actually, the love of Christ is Christ Himself. Just as Christ is immeasurable, so also is His love; hence, it is knowledge-surpassing. Even so, we can know it in our spirit, not by knowledge but by experience. Christ in His universal dimensions and in His immeasurable love is like a vast, limitless ocean for us to experience and enjoy adequately.
Ephesians 3:19b says, “That you may be filled unto all the fullness of God.” When Christ makes His home in our hearts so that we, being rooted and grounded in love, are able to apprehend with all the saints the dimensions of Christ and to know by experience His knowledge-surpassing love, we will be filled unto all the fullness of God, which is the church, the corporate expression of God for the fulfillment of His heart’s desire.
The fullness of God implies that the riches of all that God is have become His expression. When the riches of God are in God Himself, they are His riches. But when the riches are expressed, they become His fullness (John 1:16). All the fullness of God dwells in Christ (Col. 1:19; 2:9). Through His indwelling, Christ continually imparts the fullness of God into our being that we may be filled even unto all the fullness of God to be the practical manifestation of the church, in which God may be glorified in His expression.
In the New Testament the fullness is the expression through the completeness of the riches. The riches of Christ are all that Christ is and has and all that He has accomplished, attained, and obtained. The fullness of Christ is the result and issue of our enjoyment of these riches. When we enjoy the riches of Christ, these riches, having been assimilated into our being metabolically, constitute us to be the fullness of Christ, the Body of Christ, the church, as His expression. First, in Ephesians 1:23 this expression is the fullness of Christ, and then in 3:19 it is the fullness of God, for the fullness of Christ, the embodiment of God, is the very fullness of the Triune God. Hence, to be filled unto the fullness of God is the issue of the believers’ deeper, higher, and richer experience of Christ.
The last aspect of our enjoyment and experience of Christ living in us in the grace of the Triune God is that we may be built up in Him. Colossians 2:7 says that we have been rooted and are being built up in Him. This shows that, like plants, we the believers are living organisms. As such, we have been rooted in Christ, our soil, our earth, that we may absorb all His riches as nourishment. These riches become the element and substance with which we grow and are built up. To be rooted is for the growth in life. This rooting has been completed already. To be built up is for the building of the Body of Christ. This is still going on. Both these matters are in Christ.
This verse puts rooting and building together, indicating that rooting is for growth, and growth is the genuine building. Growth is not only for building, but is actually the building itself. Since we have been rooted in Christ, we need to remain in our spirit to absorb the nourishment of the riches of Christ that we may grow. By this growth we are transformed into precious stones (1 Cor. 3:12) for the building of the church, the Body of Christ.
When we experience and enjoy Christ living in us in the grace of the Triune God, He enables us to do all things in Him who empowers us. He empowers us from within that we may be content in whatever circumstances we are and that we may live out all kinds of virtues to express His human virtues. He also causes us to have Him making His home in our hearts. We need to be strengthened into our inner man that He may spread in us, from our spirit to our mind, emotion, will, and conscience, so that He may fill and occupy our every inward part and thus settle down, make home, in our heart. He also causes us to be rooted and grounded in love. This indicates that we believers experience Christ for life and building. When Christ saturates all our inward parts with Himself through the divine dispensing, we are being rooted and grounded in His love; that is, we are growing in His life and are being built up. He also enables us to apprehend with all the saints His breadth, length, height, and depth that, step by step, our experience of Him may be a solid “cube.” He enables us also to know His knowledge-surpassing love. The love of Christ is knowledge-surpassing; it is beyond the understanding of our mind. However, we can know the love of Christ in our spirit through our experience and enjoyment of Him. He enables us also to be filled unto all the fullness of God. Through His indwelling, Christ continually imparts into us the fullness of God, which dwells in Him, that we may be filled unto all the fullness of God, which is the church, the corporate expression of God. Finally, He enables us to be built up in Him. We have been rooted in Christ as the good land, and we are absorbing all His riches as our nourishment. By this we can grow and be transformed into precious stones for the building of the church, the Body of Christ.
