Major Ian Thomas - The Indwelling Life of Christ: All of Him in All of Me

THE INDWELLING LIFE OF CHRIST
published by Multnomah Books

2006 by Major Ian Thomas

Italics in Scripture quotations are the authors emphasis.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from:
The Holy Bible, New King James Version
1984 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Other Scripture quotations are from:
The Amplified Bible ( AMP )
1965, 1987 by Zondervan Publishing House.
The Amplified New Testament 1958, 1987 by the Lockman Foundation.
The Holy Bible, King James Version ( KJV )
Holy Bible, New Living Translation ( NLT )
1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, W. Ian.
The indwelling life of Christ / W. Ian Thomas.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56297-5
1. Christian life. I. Title.
BV4501.3.T472 2006
248.4dc22

2005026805

v3.1_r1

o be entirely honest, I know of nothing quite so boring as Christianity without Christ.

Countless people have stopped going to a place of worship simply because they are sick of going through the motions of a dead religion. They are tired of trying to start a car on an empty tank. What a pity that there are not more people around to show them that Jesus Christ is alive.

I know of nothing so utterly exciting as being a Christian, sharing the very Life of Jesus Christ on earth right here and now, being caught up with Him into the relentless, invincible purposes of the almighty God, and having available to us all the limitless resources of Deity for accomplishing those purposes.

Can you imagine anything more exciting than that?

Every week I receive letters from people who know that excitement, and who, in one way or another, have been exposed in the past to the ministry I have been a part of now for more than seventy years. These are people who have participated in one of our conferences or read one of our books or listened to a tape. They contact me to explain what happened to them when finally, in the gracious revelation that the Holy Spirit delights to give, they rediscover Jesus.

It does not happen all at once. At first they are often a bit bewildered by what they hear, and it seems to go right over their head. Then slowly, bit by bit, there is that revelation and then a moment of truth. It becomes so clear, so divinely obvious. So completely logical. Profoundly simple and simply profound.

This profound simplicity is something Paul spoke of in his second epistle to the Corinthians. His readers were those who knew Christ as their Redeemer. They were born again, their names were written in the Lambs Book of Life, and they were heavenbound, yet Paul had a grave concern for them: I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Paul was anxiously concerned that nothing in their lives would detract from the sheer simplicity which is in Christ, the centrality of a Person, the Lord Jesus Himself, in residence within their redeemed humanity.

Experiencing this simplicity is the greatest need today throughout the Church worldwide. The utmost need in every ministry group, every missionary outreach, every denomination, is to rediscover the Lord Jesus Christ and the indispensability of His indwelling presence within the believer. This means encountering the risen living Lord who shares His Life with us on earth on our way to heaven so that He may accomplish through us what He began to do in His own physical body two thousand years ago.

What a fantastic privilege!

To help move us toward that rediscovery and that privilege, in this book we will focus continually on the Lord Jesus, because only Christ is capable of living the Christian life, for the very obvious and simple reason that He is the Christian life. We will look to Him to learn how He lived as Man in His relationship to the Father when He came to live upon this earth. He will show us how He intends us to live in our relationship to Him, helping us discover in fuller depth what it means not just to become a Christian but actually to be one, and giving us a new vision for all that being a Christian really means.

Do you know what it is to live purposefully? Is there an urgent sense of mission or some compelling thrust within you which makes life add up to the sheer adventure that God always intended life to be?

Or are you simply engaged in the struggle for existence and survival?

Worse still, have you been caught up into the rat race of competitive existence? Haunted by the fear of being overtaken by others at the next bend in the road? Breathlessly trying to keep up with events that travel faster than your capacity to cope with them?

If so, there is good news awaiting you, good news about a treasury of purpose and truth and wisdom to be found in the person of Christ, for living purposefully means trading our poverty for Christs wealth our weakness for Christs strength. We exchange the bankruptcy of the fallen Adam for all the fullness of the Life of Christ, and we discover the sheer adventure of allowing Jesus Christ to