My Fifth and Last Commission

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I have this last intercession to share; and probably I can say it is the last, now being 95 years of age. Yet this is the mightiest, because it is the first streams of what is to become a world flood. It was as simple in its beginnings as all the others. Once again, it all stemmed from the originality of the Spirit, totally unplanned and unpremeditated by me or any.

Having handed on the general secretaryship of the WEC to a younger man just suited for it, I was now free to pour myself into my main absorption—the sharing with my fellow believers of Paul’s (and my!) revelation of that mystery once hidden “but now made manifest to his saints” (Col. 1:26). That revelation is of a total present “Christ in you, the hope of [the total coming] glory” (1:27). He is the perfection in us, and we in Him are His human manifesters.

The radicalness of what a number of us call our Total Truth Message to the Whole Church in the Whole World is not in what Paul called his once hidden, now manifest “mystery.” That tremendous reality is becoming more commonly known by faith by us the redeemed. We do say with Paul in his Galatians 2:20, “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” But where we have been held up, and I for long, is with the previous statement of “I am crucified with Christ.”

What is that “I” (or “me”)? That is the point. Is it just an inconsistent, Satan-and-sin-influenced “me”? And what does it mean when I say “I am crucified”? For evidently the “I” continues in living existence when Paul goes on to say, “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” There is the “me” back again! So what was crucified? And in what sense am I a “crucified me, who now comes back as a “resurrected me”? I was not clear about that for a long time.