~ Introduction ~

Paul said in Ephesians 3:17 that Christ lives in our hearts by faith. This is an extraordinary concept: salvation means that another Person has taken up residence inside of us. 

Let’s think that one through. My body-soul-spirit contains two persons. One of those persons is me and one of those persons is Jesus.

Then, in Ephesians 3:19 Paul claimed that the purpose of Christ living in our hearts, the goal of salvation, is that we would be filled with all the fullness of God. John confirmed that same incredible reality as he remembered Jesus’ words in John 14:23, that Jesus and the Father both would come to us and make Their home in us.

So now it is three persons, all sharing the same body, soul, and spirit. And we must not leave out the Holy Spirit, for Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6 that the Holy Spirit lives in our bodies, yes, but even more incredibly, that our spirit and the Holy Spirit are one spirit.

So, I am sitting here at my computer desk, typing these words onto the page. I look down at my form. The form that I see contains me, of course, yet, according to the gospel, this same form also contains all of Almighty God in Person.

How does this work?

And if this be true, why is no one in Christianity wondering what it means?

I want to challenge you to show me the verse in the Bible in which God states that salvation means that we “go to” heaven after we die. And please, don’t twist the words to force them to say something other than what God actually says. 

I am confident that you will find no such verse. The concept that salvation means where one goes after physical death is not from the Bible. I can argue, quite convincingly, that it comes out from gross unbelief and the victory of death over the church of Christ.

Now, I am not suggesting there is no heaven, nor that believers who have lost their physical bodies are anything other than tucked into Christ in the heavens right now.

BUT – that is not Biblical salvation.

I have taken this brief detour away from the primary topic of this text only because I know that the idea that “salvation is ‘going to’ heaven after death,” stands as the mightiest enemy inside the church of Jesus Christ right now, preventing almost all Christians from even thinking about what God might actually mean by salvation.

Let me give one definition of salvation.

Salvation means that Jesus lives inside of me, and I know this salvation by faith.

And Jesus is in me by the Holy Spirit, and with Jesus comes the Father.

I have zero thought of a “Jesus up in heaven.” Those who think in such a way are oblivious to the Person alive, personal and real filling their hearts with all of His glory. I cannot imagine such a state of gross blindness.

But not us. We see Jesus; when we look down at our chests, when we consider our own hearts, when we look in the mirror in the middle of the night, all we can see is Jesus. And His glory and wonder, HIs joy and goodness simply consume our every thought.

But what are we saying? Let’s think this through.

How many Persons inhabit my form? Well, that’s a bit much, and God knows it’s a bit much. For that reason He sent His Son to come into my heart first, that I might know the Father through Jesus. Jesus is at my level; Jesus I can comprehend and know. I am well able to lean my head against Jesus’ breast, having lived that way for years.

The Holy Spirit never speaks of Himself, coming first only to prepare the way for Jesus. The Father is always and only inside of Jesus, who Himself is inside of Father.

But it is Jesus that we must know, this One who lives in our hearts.

How does that work?

How can two persons share the same form?

How can two persons share the same body? The same mind? The same heart? The same emotions? The same will? The same spirit?

How do we live in the same body with God?

Paul was audacious and daring when it came to declaring his take on God. He found two tiny phrases in the Old Testament, just two. And he used those tiny phrases – Abraham believed God and He accounted it to him as righteousness and the just shall live by faith – to obliterate every commandment to obey found in the Old Testament (Galatians 3).

Paul also invented a number of words, right out of thin air. He did so, probably, because no word in his knowledge of the Greek vocabulary came close to fitting the burning reality of what salvation IS that consumed his heart.

And so, as Paul was writing the most important chapter of his career, Romans 8, he was thinking, deep in his spirit, hardly even knowing what it was he was seeing, Paul was thinking about this question of Jesus living in our hearts and us living only in Him. He was thinking about two persons sharing the same form. 

But there was no Greek word to express any such thing, so Paul made one up.

Symmorphos.  — Sharing the same form.

And Paul place this newly coined term at the center of the most important verse in the Bible, the verse that declares the purpose and determination of God - Romans 8:29.

Conformed with the image of His Son.

As I have been thinking and writing about Jesus alive in my heart, about Father filling me full with all of His fullness, for several years now, this same question has grown in my own heart that filled Paul’s. How can two persons share the same form?

Quite a number of Greek words became English words simply because they were in the Greek New Testament translated into English, words like agony and energy, crisis and pathos. 

The English word “conformed” cannot reveal to us what the Spirit of God really meant when He breathed the word symmorphos through Paul’s mind and fingers. For that reason, it is my intention to bring Paul’s invented word at the heart of his gospel directly into English.

Symmorphy.

Symmorphy and all that it means will become the most important single word in all human language. Symmorphy is the only source of the new creation.

You in Me and I in you. 

Jesus and us, utterly together, sharing the same form.