5.3 Live inside of Jesus
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
The Tenth Most Important Verse
John 14:20 & 15:4 & 17:3. At that day you will know that I am in My Father and you in Me and I in you. — Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. — And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
This set of verses is not the “last,” rather, it is the only and most precious reality inside of which all the rest of the Bible is found, now and through all the ages to come. This “verse” is the rear guard; it is the One who always carries us. Much of what has come before is simply too much. How can we bear the reality of being filled full with all of God?
Carried by Jesus. How can we sustain mighty rivers of God flowing out from us in every direction? How can we sit boldly inside all the authority of God over all? How can we throw all darkness off of this planet? In all ways, at all times, we lean our heads upon Jesus’ breast. He is the One who carries us.
Abide in Me, and I in you. Precious, precious words. I tell you what. If you are receiving from any direction teaching that does not contain these words in all that they mean all the way through all, then I would suggest that you kindly and quietly separate yourself from that teaching. We don’t have to explain; we just have to know Him.
Just as Jesus is IN the Father, so I am in Him and He is in me, every part of me in Him and Him in every part of me.
Fitting Three Together. Let’s position these three verses, included together as one large thought, how they fit together. John 14:20 is the entirety of God’s salvation now and forever. Our goal is not to live “in heaven,” but to live in John 14:20. In actuality, we live in both now. John 15:4, abide in me and I in you, is our part of living in John 14:20, the same as Romans 13:14, put on the Lord Jesus Christ. And John 17:3 is the only definition God gives us of “eternal life,” placing that life entirely into John 14:20 only.
Today Is the Day. We know God only by knowing that we are inside of Him and He inside of us; we know Jesus-Sent only by looking out from His eyes in the way by which He was led to life. For we are entirely and only inside of Him. Declare it to be true. Speak Christ.
Today I know that Jesus is in our Father and I in Jesus and Jesus in me. Today is that day. Today we know, today we see that everything that we are right now in this world is IN the Lord Jesus and the Lord Jesus Christ fills every particle that we are. Absolute and today.
Eternal Life. This relationship, this union, IS eternal life. Eternal life is nothing else.
Abide in Me and I in you. The life of the vine is God Himself filling us full; the fruit of the vine is God Himself going out from us. Jesus is the Vine; He is the only life we are. And the Lord Jesus Himself, filling our hearts with His glory, our very and only life, this Jesus fulfills all that the Father speaks in our lives and through us into all the concourses of the universe.
And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. This is the ONLY definition of eternal life given in the Bible.
To Know God. Eternal life cannot mean “living forever,” or “going to” heaven upon the destruction of our physical form. What a misnomer, clearly of the serpent, the idea that “eternal life” begins by the victory of sin and death against us!
Life, the life of Jesus that we are defeats sin and death. The goal of the believer is zoe aeonian, the life that brings forth the ages to come, now in us today. – To know God. – To know Jesus-Sent.
Let’s bring in three companion verses that enable us to understand this very special verse.
Knowing God by Heart. The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23). – Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life… (1 Timothy 6:12). – And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1 John 5:20).
The gift OF God. God Himself is the gift, come in Person to be our insides and our outsides. We know God as the One who fills us with all of His fullness. We know Him as the One who flows out from us as rivers of living water. We know God only by heart.
Seize Life! Paul instructs Timothy, a mature believer, filled with the Holy Ghost, to SEIZE HOLD of eternal life with all the fight that is in him.
But John tells us something beyond all belief. God has given us a dianoia, a mind, an understanding – to know God. God did give us something, not separate from Himself, for this gift is the Holy Spirit, but God gives us the ability, the capacity, the faculty to KNOW God.
As we see God, as we know Him, we discover that we are just like Him. We love as He loves, we forgive as He forgives, we are perfect as He is perfect, we overcome as He overcame, we are one just as God is One.
What Is God? There are two purposes for our present lives, on the inside to KNOW God, on the outside to set creation free. On the one side to know the One who fills us with all of Himself. On the other side to know Jesus-Sent, as rivers of God flowing out from us, bringing life and healing to all. Every breath we breathe, every word we speak, every step we walk is God going out from us. Know Him.
But what is God? God is invisible and unknowable. Yet we have been given the capacity to know Him. We cannot begin to know God except that we see Him in all ways first through the most important thing God says about Himself: I am meek and lowly of heart. God is always lowly; He is always gentle and tender and kind.
Our One Picture of God. At only one time in all the history of heaven and earth, in one place only, one circumstance, does God show Himself as He is for all to see. — A Man laying down His life for His friends. The walk of the Lord Jesus through the path of the Atonement is the only knowing of God granted to the universe before now.
Picture a Man stumbling under a cross He cannot carry, then combine that picture with these words – seeing Me is seeing the Father – I am the same, yesterday, today, and forever. This walk was not something God did; it was God Himself as He is. There is no other God.
We cannot define God; He is not found in any human ideas. But we can describe Him by the only visible knowing of God that exists.
Describing God. – God always reveals Himself through weakness, swallowing up into Himself all that we are including our sin and rebellion, becoming us in our present state, limiting Himself by our weakness. Thus, carrying us inside Himself, stumbling and falling along the way, He arises out of death into life, ascending on high, and we inside of Him. –
This is God; know Him. But we can know Him only as our equal in heart, eye to Eye, sharing the same heart. And thus the most incredible part of knowing God are found in these three words: AND WE ALSO. By this we know love [that is, God], because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren (1 John 3:16).
Two Bound Together. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17). – Put on the Lord Jesus Christ… (Romans 13:14). Picture the joining of two beings by direct connection in which the mind and consciousness of both are inside of one another. I am bound person to Person with the Lord Jesus Christ through a direct connection, a total fusion between His Spirit and mine. As a result, His consciousness, His mind, is inside of me. And my consciousness, my mind – and every other part of me is literally and substantially inside of Him.
Does He not say that? — In that day you shall know that… you are in Me and I am in you. To what degree are these words not literally true?
Put on Jesus. Christ is made perfect in our weakness. All of me, in all of my ups and downs, my ins and outs, my fears and distresses, I am always and totally fused together with the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ and He with me in an intimate union of the complete immersion of my spirit into His Spirit and His Spirit into my spirit. His consciousness is inside of me, my consciousness is inside of Him, and we walk together in an utter sharing of life.
We put on, we sink into, Christ Jesus, spirit, soul, and body. Jesus shares our life in all that it is, and we share His life in all that it is. We are saved by His life (Romans 5:10).
Containing All Else. Even though John 14:20 is placed in spot number “ten,” in actuality, it includes in itself all the others. Romans 8:28-30 is properly called the ruling verse of the Bible because it gives us God’s ruling purpose as well as giving us the broadest range of defining qualities one could hope to find in any small set of words. Nonetheless, John 14:20 is the only place inside of which Romans 8:28-30 could ever be known.
KNOW that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you. This relationship of Jesus in Person inside of our persons and we in person inside of His Person is drawn from the essential being of God and includes you and me inside the fellowship of Father and Son.
Living in John 14:20. These short lessons are insufficient hardly even to scratch the surface of the meaning found in any of these verses let alone John 14:20. And of truth, John 14:20 is the most important rule for us personally in determining whether to hear any teaching or not.
There is so much in Christen thinking and in the reading of the Bible that neither comes out from John 14:20 nor takes anyone into John 14:20. If either one of those two are not the essence of any teaching, it CANNOT take us into the only place we wish to live.
Let me say that more specifically, if anyone reads any Bible verse from any other place than John 14:20, living inside of Jesus and Jesus inside of them, in all completion and only by faith, that person IS reading that verse in a manner contrary to God’s meaning, contrary to living in LIFE.
LIFE – We inside of Jesus and Jesus inside of us.