“Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.” (2 Corinthians 4:10)
In this final part of The Cross, Warren takes us into the very heart of the Apostle Paul in the hopes that his gospel of grace will take hold in the hearts and minds of those who hear it.
Without Paul’s writings, we would never fully understand what exactly happened at the Cross. Paul was the only one raised up by Christ Himself to explain it.
Paul’s gospel explains the abundant life Christ promised to us by His death on the Cross. As believers in Christ, we are now complete in Him, by the uprooting of the sin-nature passed down through the curse of Adam by Satan, replacing it with Christ’s nature, His Incorruptible Seed.
By His very life within us now, we can now truly live free, free to rest in Him and experience and know His Peace “that passeth all understanding,” even amidst our inevitable sufferings. By Christ in us now, we stand perfect before God as His bona fide sons and daughters. There is nothing we can do to be perfect. Christ is our perfection. Paul’s gospel of grace tells us that even when we fail, God only sees Christ.
In 2 Corinthians 4:10, Paul expresses his intimate love for the Christ within him by acknowledging our need to bear the suffering in our bodies and death to ourselves as the only means by which Christ can be manifested through us as believers. Just as by Christ’s death we have been given new life, so too, by our own suffering and death to our old lives, Christ’s life can now come through us. Life comes through suffering and death. The suffering and death to ourselves manifests His life through us to others. The trials and tribulations in this life are meant to cultivate a deep and unique relationship with Christ, one that becomes a love affair as we continue to live and breathe in Him.
Through Paul, God’s ultimate plan for us is revealed: To know and live Christ as our new life, to live and rest in Him knowing everything is in His hands, and to reciprocate His perfect love for us by making Him our first love each and every day and through every single suffering.
His death ushered in our new and everlasting life. Christ in you and me, the hope of glory!
“Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.” (Colossians 1:26-28)
