Christ in Us - Part 1 — Norman Grubb

It's not ours, it's yours. Family fellowship with yourself. Invisible to us by the Spirit. Know that you're with us and we're with you. It's really you talking through your word by your Spirit. Showing us more.

The total truth about yourself and ourselves. Our friends have invited us to be here. Be together tonight. Thank you. Thank you for Jesus Christ who made all this possible. We've been trying to establish him on this throne among you.

Some of us have met before, I think some of us have not. Kind of you to open your home to us again. We were here before that little one turned up. Some sacrifice to come here. We're busy people. It's because we're meant to be whole people.

The Complete Life and the New Birth

Which means we've got the answers to life. And deep underneath we're satisfied amidst all the pressures and problems of life. We've got it in focus. Usually we haven't. Find out what is a complete life.

A few of us meet like this where we take something for granted. That we started on the root. Have found eternal life through Jesus Christ. Perhaps that's a very big thing to say. So many haven't. But when we come together like that I rather take it for granted.

It is different from ordinary living. And that I take for granted. When a very sincere and utterly well taught person came to Jesus, Nicodemus, to be a teacher, he said you don't want a teacher, you want a new birth.

That's a shocker. He was a top religious. What do you mean new birth? You know Jesus said when a baby is born in this world all he sees is this world. Putting his toes, that which is born in the flesh is flesh.

And that which is born in the spirit is spirit. What does that mean? And I take it we have to find that out. And it isn't some outer attachment to some religious faith. It's something which is happening inside us.

We have a new consciousness, a new relationship. I found that out when I was 18 years of age. That's a good many years ago compared to what I am today. Of course I had the outer religion, I had a good background.

My father was a clergyman as we called him in England. A good family, good folks. Outer religion, but that doesn't grip you. You don't grip by outside things. That doesn't grip a young man. My father taught me when I went to our school chapter and heard about Jesus Christ and the Bible.

But I had a football accident when I was just at the end of what you call high school, what we call public school in England. And so I was in hospital. And I had my study books of course. I was preparing to extend my scholarship to university.

And one of the books was a book by a philosopher of those days called John Stuart Mill. When these men maybe don't know it too clearly, they use words that long. And he used a word called utilitarianism.

I said, what's that? Of course I found out it meant enlightenment, self-interest. Maybe enlightened, maybe for better purposes. I do it because I do it for myself, really. It makes you do things for other people.

Enlightenment at the bottom is for the self-satisfying me. Self-interest. And they got me. I said, that's just what I am. I have a whole lot of self-interest. I lived to be the best boy in the college, which I wasn't.

The best of this, the best of that. Full of self-ambition. I had a good father, a good mother, but everything was for me. And I felt consciously something was wrong. Of course I know now why. Because the person who bought this universe into being is a person of other interests.

His nature is to bless everybody. Not to be blessed, but to bless. Not to get people for himself, but to give yourself to other people. Another kind of person. But deep down we know we ought to be for each other.

In our politics, we know we ought to be for each other. We know they work too well. So there's that deep down in us. That's why, thank God, we are a dissatisfied humanity. So I had that. Also I had a sort of faith, an outside faith.

A certain friend I had who was a retired army man. And he had a tennis court, a glass tennis court. And he'd invite us lads over to play tennis. We went to the tennis, he went for us. And he got me in his living room and he asked me a simple question.

Do you belong to Christ? Now belong is a personal word. If he said believe, yes, I've been to fours of my church. Believe, sort of believe. Belong to makes something personal. There is a moment of truth, isn't there?

And when you're young age, when you're very embarrassed about anything, I feel very embarrassed. But there is a moment of truth that I couldn't honestly say it. So I said I couldn't, that problem. Thank God I had my teachings.

I needed a saviour and I had my sins and there's a hell and a heaven. And when I said I couldn't belong to Christ, it suddenly dawned on me that if I can't say Jesus Christ my saviour, I don't know where I got myself to go to hell.

So I woke up. You wake up from inside, don't you? I suddenly said, that's what I am inside. I'm going the wrong way. What the Bible calls the fear of the Lord. You start from the fear of the Lord, you end in the fun of the Lord.

You find a bit of fear but you stop by fear. So for the first time this is real to me. So the first time I went back, he did make me pray. Pray didn't mean much to me at that time. I went on my streetcar back to my home.

I was just terribly sorry. So when I got to my little room, the first time in my heart I recognised I had my sins. I saw heaven and hell. I saw Jesus died to be my saviour. I hardly knew what I did. I asked him to forgive my sins.

What happened? Suddenly Jesus Christ became alive. Now it became alive inside of me. I said, that's why he shed his blood. Well I heard that for years. Of course I've been in Africa, I don't know anybody.

But that's why he shed his blood. When you want a thing, you have it. It's there available when you want it. When I really wanted the saviour, then he became my saviour too. What struck me was this at the time.

From Self-Interest to Other-Love

My whole point was that everything for me. For the first time in my life I was conscious of loving somebody else more than myself. That was something new. I couldn't help loving the saviour. By shedding his blood, of course, it saved me from going to hell.

And I became a father. I was just a young fellow. I had my first good girlfriend. The first one was pretty real to you. She was a church girl. When I talked about Jesus Christ being... Oh, I don't want that kind of thing.

I don't want church on Sunday or something. She didn't want that kind of thing. There is a basis of truth to life. It's like the spirit of God. Somebody said to me, don't fool yourself. You can't have two loves inside you.

Don't fool yourself. If you've got a new love for Jesus Christ, you can't also have a love for the anti-Jesus Christ. It won't work. And life is serious. That was tremendously serious to me. World War I was just starting, just before most of you were here.

I think not World War II. We'd just got our commission. We'd just been caught up to what became cannon fodder a little later on. So I was just preparing to join the battalion. But the thing that disturbed me inside was this.

If I keep that going, I'll lose Jesus Christ. Well, my theology was very good. It was good enough for me at that time anyhow. And that was tremendously real to me. Life is going through a thing which makes things real to you.

And it's the negatives which make it real to you. The challenges make life real to you. This was real to me. I couldn't have both. I couldn't have both. What should I do? I was really sad. I was more sad inside about that than I was getting ready to go and order our uniforms, that kind of thing.

And the day before I went up by train to join the battalion I joined was in training. And I spoke a word to my mother. Mothers can sometimes see a word which is a point. Some of you said to me, sure, I couldn't have two.

Well, I couldn't have two. Out went the girl, in came my Christ. That was totally opposite to me. The girl was for me. Me for Christ. Other love for Christ. My self-love. The self-love was the girl for me.

Other love for Christ. Out went the self-love, in came my other love. Something new happened to me. And the new thing was that having found this secret, this peace with God, eternal life with Jesus Christ my Saviour, the big drive in me came to give Jesus Christ my fellow soldiers.

That was the exact opposite of the kind of person I'd been. I would have been there just for me, for me, for me. I'd be for them. So much so the colonel didn't like it. He said, you're too good a Christian, you're too bad a soldier.

It wouldn't provoke me, first of all, to be a better soldier. But my point was, a new drive was in me. This love for Christ who died for me, the Father who sent him for me, and other people should have this.

So, facing death in a few months time, I should have this eternal life. I didn't know then, I didn't know the Bible much then. I thought that was just, I had a new kind of love in me. I found the Bible says, isn't that?

The Bible says, when you get into certain conditions, God's love is shed upon your heart by the Holy Spirit, given to you. So it wasn't my love in me. It was God's own spirit of love expressing His other love by me.

That was something new to me. I didn't know that. Because I didn't understand what we humans are here for. This, in those early days, was the real Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord. And wanting other people to know Jesus Christ was a real thing in me.

Missionary Calling and the Need for a Complete Life

And after World War and other preparations, I read a magazine about a man who had been an English great cricketer, which is our great English gentleman. He was a top man. But he had found Jesus Christ through the evangelist of that generation who came over here, Neil Moody.

His father found Christ and he found Christ. And he said, that's so caught fire, that although he's making the top average, he's at the top of all the orders they make of cricketers. He said, it's better for me to win men than Christ.

Win men than games. And so he dropped his cricket and went to take Jesus Christ. I never heard about it. First to China, then to India. In the 60s, by that time he was in the heart of Africa. That's where I heard of him.

And as I read about him, the joy he had in what he called the black gold and bringing Christ to the Africans, that it was really God moved me to go and join him. So I did so. Then I began to get out there and began to get my, of course, the language and so on, began to get my relationship with him.

Very primitively in the forests of Central Africa, which was, of course, 50, 60 years ago. Get among the people and reach them. But I came up with a problem in myself. I had as a young soldier, and in my student days, I had helped fellow soldiers to receive Jesus Christ as their saviour.

So I had myself create eternal life. I could do that. But when I was going out to live among Africans, there's no good just telling them how their past is forgiven. I had to tell them how to live a right life.

So there comes a time when it isn't enough just to have a saviour, how about your own right life? And I can't tell Africans how to live a right life unless I knew how to live a right life myself. By that I mean I had Jesus as my saviour and lord, but there was so much about me which I put as such failure.

Tensions and selfishness and sins and lust and problems. So I had Jesus Christ as my saviour and lord, but there was a great deal in which I was dissatisfied, dissatisfied with myself. How could I show an African what a full, satisfied life was when mine wasn't satisfied?

How could I help them get their problem solved if I hadn't got my problem solved? And so I didn't understand in those days that the purpose of God is to have humans to whom he can entrust his universe, who act as a universe, and who can be the right person to whom he can entrust his world to.

There must be right persons, and the right person must be a person whose whole being is a self-right by thought, a self for self. So they had some ways which I found myself having to gather dissatisfaction.

I don't know how it is with you, but I say, be a lord to the lord, and yet there's a great deal about me which isn't complete. The Spirit has ways which brings us up to a place where that confronts us, and that did me at that time.

I said to myself, how can I help an African to be a fully right person if I'm not a fully right person in my daily life myself? Just have a faith of past sins and future attorneys, what's my present day life?

So even though I was in Africa, I was searching out how I could have my own problems solved before I could solve their problems. And I read some things in the scriptures which I hadn't really seen before.

Of course I knew Jesus Christ was my saviour, it was wonderful, he was my lord, and I loved to bring eternal life to other people. But the man with whom I worked, the man who first went to the heart of Africa and started this little mission to which I then belonged, had his own way of saying things.

We were just over half a dozen of us together out in the villages amongst people. We prayed together, and he had a prayer he used. He said, Lord, we're out here to see Jesus Christ running about inside black bodies.

Now that struck me. That struck me more than just having a lord and a saviour out here, running about inside black bodies. I said, there's something different in this. That means that Jesus Christ lives in me.

My body contains him. That's something different. I began to see something different than I'd known before. Then I found, as I read through the Bible, that Paul began to say that. And I found in one of his letters to the Colossians, he said he had two what he called ministries.

He was the boss of the Gentiles, of course. He came out to get rid of all of them, in that sense, great clansmen of the poor. And he said much the same thing. He said, I first come to bring you into a saviourly relationship so Jesus Christ is your saviour and you'll be born again, what he called in those old Bible terms, you're a saint, a born-again person, knowing you are a born-again.

Then he said, when you've got that, he called that, he said, I want you to fulfil the worthy God. He said that wasn't quite full. Then he goes on, if you read that passage, he says it's a hidden fact.

He said the Bible says it's been God's purpose, hidden for ages and generations, always there. And he couldn't give it until he first had people who were in a living relationship to him, as a family, and his family, with Christ as a saviour.

And then he said that the secret which he could reveal, hidden for ages and generations, Christ in you, now the same thing, Christ in you, not Christ for you. Christ in you. Like my leader said, Jesus Christ is on your mind, it's within black bodies, it's the same idea, Christ in you.

That came as something new to me. And I also found that, quoting that passage in the Colossians, when Paul said that, he went on to say, and not only is it Christ in you, warning every man that could be, you may be complete in him, but you would be a complete one in which he can dwell.

Not only a complete Christ in you, to complete you in whom Christ can dwell. Now that hit me again. It's one thing to say I may have Christ in me, but another thing is that I should be, the right person that I should be, in which he can dwell.

So again I thought, I haven't got a focus here. And that set me seeking, because as I said before, the whole purpose of God is to have a vast family of sons in whom he has done his complete job. When he's done a complete job, then he can trust, as they say one day, he can trust the whole universe to us.

We've got the adequate people to whom we can hand such a trust. So the way in which he serves us, that's the way God made, until I find all I ought to have, not part of what I ought to have, but not part of what I have.

And you know, when we slept, I lived in an African house in those days, in the early morning, I'd have my time of prayer, and my time of prayer really was a seeking, I'd say, God, make me a better person.

How can I help Africans be better persons? I may say their sins are forgiven, and they know Jesus died for them, and he's their saviour, and they may even say they go to heaven. But to be a right kind of person today, how can I make an African a right kind of person today, if I didn't know I was myself a right kind of person?

How can I be better? I need to be more loving. I need to have more power in my life, more victory. Less caught up by tensions and dislikes and hates and fears and lusts, which make me dissatisfied with myself.

I said, somehow you'd better make me a person dissatisfied with myself, before I can make an African a right person. So that was the kind of prayer I was praying. Particularly online, I used to have a kind of love which would give me a real brotherly love, and of course African's very simple, very primitive people, they're different, they're living differently.

Christ in Us as the Source of Love and Life

That's where I got from the Word of God, and it came real to me, I'd better say a sudden shock, which began to change my whole point of view in life. And the shock I got was this, I thought I must have made loving.

I have a love capacity, I must have made loving. And I found the scripture, it's just about the scripture, the simplest you can find in the Bible, but one we all know, it says, God is love. This book, of course, is a book of the Spirit, and God comes in lightness, and makes things real to you.

Something stands up to confront you. And what struck me about that statement was the word is. So God, I thought God has love, would give it to me, yes, I want it, give me love. No, it isn't God has love, God is love.

Now I knew, of course, he was the beginner. I know now the whole universe in expression of him. I didn't know the fullness. All these are really outer expressions. In the beginning, he, of course, all come up in different forms.

I hadn't understood then, of course, that in the fact that they had chosen Genesis, creation of light and different things, the last world of creation, it says that the Father and the Son said, let us make man in our image.

We are made in God's likeness. And then I saw the point, God can be person in me. He can't be person in everything. It shows his glory. Everything he is. I live to see God's marvel. Colors, material, matter, everything is marvelous.

There are forms by which you see his power and wonder and glory. You can't mistake him as person. But I saw he made person, that he can be a person in a person. That's different. That's why I read Christ, Jesus Christ running about inside you.

I saw that there. Now I saw this. Bible says, God. God is love. Then I said, the love I want is a person. God is love. First, in the beginning, God. God loves a person. I thought love was something he'd give to me.

I remember I had the Bible spoken about him in all the other verses. He said, my name is I am, not I have. I have means distributed, doesn't it? I am means he is a lot. Not I have and gives. He himself is.

He is all. He is all. So then I said, what about me? I said, I certainly love. I love the effort, and he's given me more different kinds of victory in my personal life. What about me? If you're love? Then I began to get a new understanding of what the relationship is between us humans and him.

Another scripture just came to me at that time, also Colossians, which is, Christ is all, and in all receiving. Christ is all, in all receiving. Not that they become something. He is the all in them. It wasn't they becoming something.

They contained something. So I began to see what God is saying to me. The purpose of a human person is to contain the God person. And the God person then explicits himself and what he is. And I'm an agent in which he expresses himself.

Not that I become something. I become the reason by which I express him. That began to give me a new idea of what a human person is for. Of course, as I say, in this world, until we've come into that first relationship with Christ, as a saviour and a lord, he isn't the real person to us yet.

If we'd been born again, he is a real person to us. But now he is no longer to be an outside person. An inside person. And I began to find the scriptures which made that plain to me. I found, for instance, the Bible, a number of times, all things, called it a vessel, a cup.

Now a cup, a liquid without a cup, if you want a cup of coffee, you've got to have a cup. But a cup isn't a coffee. It's a means by which a cup is available. So they offer you a cup. I don't say a cup and coffee, I say a cup of coffee.

Because a cup isn't important, a coffee is. But the cups there, they make the coffee available. And yet the Bible says you're a vessel to make God available. It isn't. Your humanity, all these powers, mind and body, can express God, can be a cup by which he can express himself.

So it isn't I becoming something, it's I containing the immeasurable, containing and expressing him. Then I found other kind of Bible illustrations, it's the same thing. One, Jesus said in Proverbs 32, when he said in John 15, I am the vine, ye are the branches.

Now a branch is a part of the vine, it's not the vine, it's in the life. The vine is the life, the branch is just a means by which certain operations take place and the life can be expressed through the branch.

The branch produces life, it isn't the branch life. It's producing the life of the vine. It's the fruit of the vine, not of the branch. Well, you want to come talk to me, do you? So I'm going to see, what am I going to do now?

Am I going to talk to him or you? Tell me. What shall we do, shall we go on? I don't want to take too long. Maybe I talk too long. No, keep going. You're just getting warmed up. Because there are real answers.

You have to find those real answers. So I began to find something about us humans. Our personality is a living personality, think, react, but it's only to contain another person, to express another person.

It doesn't express itself. We think we express ourselves. But a branch doesn't express itself. It expresses a vine. A cup's no good except to present you with what's in it. I found that Babel used other expressions of the same kind.

Babel, John said, Paul said, we're all slaves. Slaves, the old days, the property of the owner. You're never a free person. You're the property of your owner. Who's your owner? If your owner is God, you're his property.

So I began to get some of those illustrations and began to see this tremendous fact myself. It isn't you. It isn't you loving. It's you. You have in you the person of love. And as you do your life, you're expressing his love.

It isn't your love. You're expressing his love. And I found the verse which said, Christ is the power of God. Not has the power. Is the power. So I need power. Power isn't something in meat. Is the power.

And as I, he expresses his power through me. And all those kind of illustrations, even eternal life, Jesus said, I am the life. So real life is, my human being, knowing I've been developed by another being, that other being is expressing himself by me.

Eternal life isn't. I am the life. I am the way. So the real way isn't me finding the way. It's me, the person in me knows the way. As I walk with him, I shall cause him to know what the way is I walk.

And the truth, the truth isn't even the book. It's I am the truth. The truth is the person. If I have that person, this person expressing himself through me, this is expressing the truth. So I began to see all these things, which put a different relationship between, between myself and God.

The expression of him. But I then still found another problem. Although maybe not all of us know that. But if you do, if you do know, you contain Christ. You're a vessel to contain him. You're a branch of his, of him as a vine.

Becoming a Suitable Vessel for Christ

And you know that, and you know what it is to, to reckon on him, reckon, reconcile, reckon, recognize him. Another problem still is, what about that part of me which, which doesn't fit too well? What about still the, the pressures and the tempers and the weaknesses in me?

I may say even, that I contain Christ, but there's another part of me which doesn't, isn't a very good container. What about that? So I hadn't got all my problems solved then, and I say, well, I'm containing Christ.

What about my worries? My hates? My fears? My lusts? The parts of me which I didn't like. So I still found a, found a division there. I got further on. I had got reward for the place where Christ is my savior and rose again and my Lord, and I belong to the Father.

I got beyond just having a relationship to say, this person actually quite lives in me. That's, that's after faith. This person lives his life in me. Not too good of me. I still have a couple not too good of me.

Even if he lives in me. Not too good of me. And I, I told you, I read that scripture in Colossians where Paul said, not only the history, the secret is Christ in you, but you are a complete person in which he can, he can dwell.

I saw how Jesus, for instance, said, you are the light of the world. You are the light. I have it. What's a light? Light is invisible electricity, isn't it? A certain person invented a certain thing by which the light comes through that, what we call the lamp, and becomes visible light.

Invisible electricity becomes visible light through a lamp. The two together turn invisible electricity into visible light, a lamp. He says, you are the light of the world. You can be the lamp by which invisible Christ can be made visible.

But then I said to myself, you must have an adequate lamp for an adequate light or it won't shine well. You can't have a good light for a bad lamp. It won't work. So, that's what Paul says, is not to just have a good light, but you ought to be a good lamp for the good light.

Again, in my time, I wasn't a good lamp. And what about these things about me which, which selfishness, which doesn't make me too good a lamp? So, I still had my problem to solve. But I'd gone one step further from relating to Christ as wonderful enough, my Saviour, my Lord, and whom I could relate to.

To dare to say, we're in a divine brotherhood, a union. This person is here. He's here. I can reckon, I can count on him. I can count on his wisdom and the power and the love. I can begin to count on him.

Or just a weak, feeble person, yet there's a person, I can begin to see that. But what about the areas of me in which I was an unattractive person? And that I hadn't yet got solved. I got that solved by another sudden starting fact I got about God.

God as Love, Light, and Consuming Fire

We'd get things different way. That first thought, in fact, I got that God is, is the person. He's the person. He is the all. He doesn't give. He becomes himself in us. He is the love. He is the love.

He is. It doesn't tell me he gives us. The whole world really is he in different expressions. I mean, a tree is a life in the seed, isn't it? The life's in the seed. It develops the seed and becomes a tree but the life is always there.

And we know these modern days when they examine the atomic particles and so on, they come into this very surprising fact and as they go through the microscopes and examine these things, they find that the mind influences particles.

The mind makes a difference. It isn't exactly God. There's a, even behind particles there's an operating mind. We know that. Always has been. So it always has been. All, everything therefore is really a form of his life.

See, from an animal, all the forms of his life, they're forms of his life. He is the one person. But as I say, you can't see him as a person in things. We're made like persons and he can be a person in us.

As a person. Not, me himself as us. I began to catch that Christ, and to believe this is a person in me operating as a person stopped by me. I began to see that. That's tremendous. And that began, I thought it began to, it isn't me.

It isn't me. It is he. That's a tremendous reality when I first saw that. And dare to believe and say, yes, it isn't you. This person, if you receive him through his cross and resurrection as a saviour who died and rose again and went to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit with his precious blood, you see, he's formed in you, Paul said.

It becomes, that's tremendous. Whereas this person is living in you. All right. But what about my, I've satisfied me. I've got the satisfactory Christ in me. I haven't got a satisfactory me for him to be in me.

And Paul said, I was glad. And he said, you ought to be as complete as he is. I thought of that. I thought of that. How can I find the answer to that? I found the answer, I say then, by another scripture which came to me, things come to me, let's say, in different ways.

Sudden scripture which starts with me. God is, God starts with me, is starts with me. Now, he's a person, I've said it. Is, not has. Everything is he, he, a person, a person, a person. That starts with me.

I'm glad to see that now and I operate by seeing a person everywhere. And that's a tremendous fact. And even the devil is only only a convenient agent which he turns to good purposes like a coward would.

I'm glad to see that. But there still was a problem of not a satisfactory me for him to be himself in me. Not a satisfactory lamp for life. And I suddenly saw this scripture that seemed off the point at the moment.

Of course, we say God's almighty. Well, we'll say that. Everyone's going to say almighty. He's come to us, he's almighty. I'm satisfied he's not almighty. I found this little scripture which says God cannot lie.

Cannot's a strong word. Didn't, didn't, shouldn't, haven't. Cannot lie. That's in Titus 1. It's in Hebrews 6. God, it's impossible for God to lie. Something God can't do? That doesn't quite fit, does it?

Can't God do everything? He says he can't do everything. Then, you see, I had to find out what's that mean? I said, lie, can't lie. I began to think, what's wrong? I said, what's a lie? A lie is a person getting his own way, got his own way.

I tell my lie to get my own way. I don't care what happens to you. I lie to you no matter if it hurts you or doesn't hurt you to gain my aim. A lie is a person a need for me. A lie is a, I'm needing me for me.

And so I tell lies to get my, my way. God can't do that. Then I met a, I, I, I read, I found out, I, I, books were difficult to get. Years ago, I got, I was graduating, get to see them. An old man, lived to be 1500.

A German. A German conglomerate. But he had a great, he was, he was troubled by the, by the opposite things. This, this, God, that's, they, God can't lie. He's got, doesn't even fit. His name was Jacob Boehmer.

His books were tossed away from the Germans and they were difficult to get. And, he had, he had, multiple insights into, into God. And, he picked up some scriptures which most of us have passed by in Proverbs.

Where, the word wisdom is used as if wisdom is a kind of person with God. I, wisdom, was with God when he created. All five chapters, the first, I, wisdom, was with God. I, wisdom. He pointed out that, that means that, that, that, that part of you, about which you know and think, that wisdom, and wisdom is, you come to right conclusions.