Not We Living But He
It is one thing to know truth by being taught it, by seeing it in the Bible, or by grasping it mentally. That is a right start and we do not despise it; but the reason we stress the second crisis (call it by whatever name we like) is that being inner people, life is lived spontaneously and naturally only by a fixed inner consciousness. We are in outer life what we inwardly know we are. In our former life, before we were Christ’s, we had a consciousness, though maybe a vague one, just of being ourselves, and so we lived on our self-level. Then after we had knowingly become children of God by the witness of the Spirit, we had a new fixed inner consciousness: we were now forgiven, loved, accepted, inheritors of eternal life; we were in living relationship with Jesus and the Father. And without any special effort this had its radical effects on our daily attitudes and actions.
But this was still a gap-consciousness. Here we were, and here was Christ with us or even known as in us.
But that is something different from a full and final union-conciousness that we are He in our human forms: not we living, but He living our lives, as Paul said. And Jesus even said that we are the light of the world, not having the light, but being the light. How could this be on any other basis than an inner unity?—for He is the light, we the negative non-light. Yet here He is saying we are the light!
