This happens when we are prepared to identify ourselves with Christ in His death and to share His resurrection Life: You acknowledge as a redeemed sinner that Jesus, risen from the dead, has come to re invade your humanity so that you can place all that you are at His disposal. Others who look at you will see Him behaving, just as people looked at Jesus and saw the Father behaving.
This is the gospel.
What then is the ultimate end product of our obeying this gospel and entering into the good of that which has been provided for us in Christ to restore us to our true function as human beings?
God has predestined us “to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). Therefore, when you are finally evangelized and people look at you, they should see the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what God has always had in mind for us, from the eternal ages of the past.
That is why Jesus is the end product of evangelism—His Life indwelling you is exactly what God had in mind when He sent His Son to redeem you and to reconcile you to a holy God. He sent us His Son not just to get you and me out of hell and into heaven, but to get the God of heaven into you and me, so that Christ living in our hearts might be our hope of bringing God again out into the open where He can be seen, to His glory!
We identify ourselves with Him, saying as Paul did in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ,” and we share His resurrection, just as Paul went on to explain in the same verse, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”—not I, but Christ. Paul is saying, “I am a redeemed sinner, and the risen Jesus has come to reinvade my humanity so that He can serve with my hands, walk with my feet, speak with my lips, see with my eyes, hear with my ears, think with my mind, and love with my heart, so that to me, to live now is Christ. It is my privilege as a forgiven sinner to place my humanity at His disposal so that others looking at me will see Him behaving, just as those who looked at Jesus saw His Father behaving.”
This is the gospel as we need to understand it, because the Lord Jesus said, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21)—sending us on the same terms and for the same purpose.
He is the Sender, and we are the sent ones, and for this reason the only authority you and I can legitimately exercise in any area of life is the authority that derives from our submission to His authority.
“As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” JOHN 20:21
- Major Ian Thomas
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