Association with Christ-how blessed a subject! And who but God Himself has the ability to connect anything, or anybody, -with the Christ who is His Son. Hear however, what He says: "He that spared not His own Son, kit gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with, Him freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32).
1. Have you Christ? Then all things are yours (see also 1 Cor. 3:21-23). But if you cannot say, Christ is mine, as I am, His," then can you not correctly say that anything is yours.
2. But " How came I to be His?" says the Christian. "He that stablishes us with you in the Anointed One, and hath anointed us is God" (2 Cor. 1:18-22).
3. See now some of the results of this:-
1. By baptism we have confessed that we are dead together with Christ from all guilt, through His death (Rom. 6:8).
Therefore, also,-
2. We have been quickened together with Him (Col. 3:13); that is, we have been made partakers of the life in which He rose from the grave [not had our old man set to rights and made orderly and soft, but a new nature communicated to us].
3. This death with Christ sets us entirely free from legality (Col. 2:20), and is-
4. Connected with a Life which is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). This leads-
5. To a life according to the Spirit (2 Cor. 13:4), and-
6. To a death, practically, as to the flesh with its affections and lusts (Col. 3:9; Gal. 5:24). Its natural instinct, as well as a fruit of its possessing us is that we know that-
7. To leave the body is to depart and be with, Christ (Phil. 1:23), for, to us, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord: and
8. God gives us thus the hope, as a certainty of association with Christ in the glory (Col. 3:4; comp. 1 Thess. 4:17, and 5:10, and 2 Cor. 4:14).