It may be that your need is still that of a sinner seeking forgiveness; you need to be redeemed, and you are still trying to find your way back to God and godliness. Christ is saying to you now, as He said to His disciples of old in the Upper Room, after he was risen from the dead, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself” (Luke 24:39); in other words, “I AM – all that a guilty sinner needs! The wounds in My hands and My feet are the hall-marks of My Saviourhood; put your trust in Me, and I will save you!”

All you need to say to Him is this, “Lord Jesus – Thou art! For me – Just what I need! My Saviour and my Redeemer – for ever!”

You will be redeemed, and He will give you life; by the gift of His indwelling Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ. He will give you His Life, and this is what it means to “live in the Spirit”; but “If we live in the Spirit let us also walk in the Spirit: (Galatians 5:25), and this is what it means to “walk in the Spirit” ­ to take one step at a time, and for every new situation into which every new step takes you, no matter what it may be, to hear Christ saying your heart, “I AM!” – and then to look up into His face by faith and say, “Thou art! That is all I need to know Lord, and I thank Thee; for Thou art never less than adequate!”

True godliness leaves the world convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only explanation for you, is Jesus Christ ­ to whose eternally unchanging and altogether adequate “I AM!” your heart has learned to say with unshatterable faith, “Thou art!”

To live “to and for yourself” is to “walk after the flesh”!

To live “to and for Christ” is to “walk after the Spirit”!

These are the two principles of human behavior. It is not just a matter of degree, it is a matter of kind; to be dominated by the “flesh” is to be dominated by the devil; and to be dominated by the Spirit is to be dominated by God.

Two men doing identically the same thing may at the same time, by their identical act, be demonstrating two different principles of behavior, which are diametrically opposed to each other.

What is the principle that governs your behavior?

I am not asking you the nature of your behavior; I am asking you the principle from which it springs!

Remember sin is defined in the Bible as independence: “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23), an attitude of “lawlessness” (I John 3:4); what then does repentance involve? It involves stepping out of independence back into dependence – and the measure of your repentance will be the measure of your dependence!

Christian living is not a method or technique; it is an entirely different, revolutionary principle of life. It is the principle of an exchanged life” not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).

This is all part of our Gospel – it is not the Gospel plus! We must not get our terminology wrong. To divorce the behavior of the Christian from the Gospel is entirely false and is not true to the Word of God, yet all too often such is the characteristic of gospel preaching.

I would like to explore with you what is the true spiritual content of our Gospel ­ not just heaven one day, but Christ right now! Christ in you, on the grounds of redemption ­ this is the Gospel! To preach anything less than this must inevitably produce “Evan-jellyfish” ­ folk with no spiritual vertebrae, whose faith docs not “behave!”

Do you remember what James says in his epistle? “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead” (chapter 2:26). The “spirit” there means breath, and a body without breath is dead. Stop breathing ­ and folk will bury you! In other words, a living body breathes, and a living faith breathes, and a living faith breaths with divine action. A living faith breathes with the activity of Jesus Christ. That is why the Lord Jesus, in John 6:29, said, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.”

That is the work of God. It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you. It is the kind of activity that the Bible calls “good works,” as opposed to “dead works.”

“Good works” are those works that have their origin in Jesus Christ – - whose activity is released through your body, presented to Him as a living sacrifice by a faith that expresses total dependence, as opposed to the Adamic independence (Romans 12: 1,2).

It is only the life of the Lord Jesus — His activity, clothed with you and displayed through you, that ultimately will find the approval of God.

“It is not hard for man to live the Christian life,” somebody once said, it is impossible!”

A sheer impossibility, that is, without CHRIST ­ but for all that He says, you have all that He is, and that is all that it takes!

If the way you live your life as a Christian can be explained in terms of you, what have you to offer to the man who lives next door? The way he lives his life can be explained in terms of him, and so far as he is concerned, you happen to be “religious” ­ but he is not! “Christianity” may be your hobby, but it is not his, and there is nothing about the way you practice it which strikes him as at all remarkable! There is nothing about you which leaves him guessing, and nothing commendable of which he docs not feel himself equally capable without the inconvenience of becoming a Christian!

It is only when your quality of life baffles the neighbors that you are likely to impress them! It has got to become patently obvious to others that the kind of life you are living is not only commendable, but that it is beyond all human explanation! That it is beyond the consequences of man’s capacity to imitate, and however little they may understand this, clearly the consequence only of God’s capacity to reproduce Himself in you!

In a nutshell, this means that your fellow-men must become convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ of whom you speak, is essentially Himself the ingredient of the Life you live!

There are few things quite so boring as being religious, but there is nothing quite so exciting as being a Christian!

Most folks have never discovered the difference between the one and the other, so that there are those who sincerely try to live a life they do not have, substituting religion for God, Christianity for Christ, and their own noble endeavors for the energy, joy, and power of the Holy Spirit. In the absence of reality, they can only grasp at rituals, stubbornly defending the latter in the absence of the former, lest they be found with neither!

They are lamps without oil, cars without gas, and pens without ink, baffled at their own impotence in the absence of all that alone can make man functional; for man was so engineered by God that the presence of the Creator within the creature is indispensable to His humanity. Christ gave Himself for us to give Himself to us! His presence puts God back into the man! He came that we might have life – God’s life!

There are those who have a life they never live. They have come to Christ and thanked Him only for what He did, but do not live in the power of who He is. Between the Jesus who “was” and the Jesus who “will be” they live in a spiritual vacuum, trying with no little zeal to live for Christ a life that only He can live in and through them, perpetually begging for what in Him they already have!

There is something, which makes Christianity more than a religion, more than an ethic, and more than the idle dream of the sentimental idealist. It is this something, which makes it relevant to each one of us right now as a contemporary experience. It is the fact that Christ Himself is the very life content of the Christian faith. It is He who makes it “tick.” “Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it” (I Thessalonians 5:24). The One who calls you is the One who does that to which He calls you. “For it is God which worketh in you, both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). He is Himself the very dynamic of all His demands.

Christ did not die simply that you might be saved from a bad conscience, or even to remove the stain of past failure, but to “clear the decks” for divine action. You have been told that Christ died to save you. This is gloriously true in a very limited, though vital sense. In Romans 5:10 we read, “If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” The Lord Jesus Christ therefore ministers to you in two distinct ways – He reconciles you to God by His death, and He saves you by His life.

This, however, is but the beginning of the story, “for if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, (now an accomplished fact,) we shall be saved (as a continuing process) by His life” (Romans 5:10). The glorious fact of the matter is this ­ no sooner has God reconciled to Himself the man who has responded to His call, than He re-imparts to him, as a forgiven sinner, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and this restoration to him of the Holy Spirit constitutes what the Bible calls regeneration, or new birth. Titus 3:5 and 6, ­ “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour.”

I spent the past year examining the Churches of Christ, and soon discovered how badly they are plagued with sectarianism.  I knew it was bad, but I had no idea how bad.   Probably, what stood out mostly, is how each sect within the Church of Christ seems to ignore each other.  You have the conservative side condemning any and all who disagree with them, even calling others in the Body “wayward brethren.”   There are many sites/blogs with writings that are straight forward, even denying a Moderate and Liberal as part of the Body, calling them Church of Christ denominations.   But, what amazed me more than anything, was how they write articles with opposing views, and rarely do they comment and dialog with one another. 

The Conservative church of Christ demands one understand the bible perfectly, while the liberals tend to accept our inability to agree upon everything.   The Conservative views are often called legalistic by the Liberal Church of Christ, and the Liberal views are seen as not following the pattern.   The division seems to mainly come from the Conservative side, who insist on patternism – those who think that they have arrived at some level of understanding, which serves them the right to demand one understand everything as they, or be dis-fellowshipped for not following the pattern.   Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not denying patterns, standards, and guidelines.   Even these are to be followed out of a loving heart, not a heart bent towards legalism.  The patterns I am denying are those created from inferences of fallible men and then made law.  

I doubt there are many brethren who can truthfully say they are in 100% agreement with every other Christian in their congregation. I’m not sure there are even any two of us who are in total agreement on everything taught in Scripture. Yet, we are quick to divide over just about anything.  Our unity in Christ should  be more enduring than that; it shouldn’t crumble whenever two people/groups differ.  But, it does … and when it does, the Devil wins yet another battle, and the Body of Christ is weakened just that much more. We must work to overthrow the oppressive shackles of sectarianism, legalism and the Pharisaic practices that are so prevalent within our brotherhood.