Are you God-inside minded?

Do you think about the fact that God (Father, Son and/or Holy Spirit) is inside you?

1 John 4:4 (NIV) You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.

The “them” in this verse is, from context, spirits that deny the Lordship of Jesus. These are the spirits that sit on your shoulder telling you God doesn’t care about your problem, God can’t fix your problem, or that God doesn’t want to fix your problem. Those are lies! We know that because Jesus went about doing God’s will, and that was sharing Good News of the Kingdom of God, healing people and destroying the devil’s works (Acts 10:38, 1 John 3:8). Jesus healed everyone that came to Him.

Knowing that Jesus is Lord over all can change your circumstances. Knowing that the Holy Spirit, who raised Christ from the dead, is inside you (Romans 8:11) can give you new confidence. The One that is inside you is greater than the disease working in your body, the lack in your bank account, the sin affecting your kid’s lives, or the hopelessness you sometimes feel. The Holy Spirit inside of you is touching people through your body when you pray for someone, for we are “the body of Christ” (more on this below).

Here’s a similar verse:

Colossians 1:27 (NIV) To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

The “them” in this verse is believers – God is making known to us that Christ inside of us is our hope of Glory. Let’s break this verse down, the three really relevant words are “Christ”, “hope”, and “glory”.

What does Christ mean? It’s not Jesus’ last name, it’s His title. In Greek the word Christ means “the anointed one”, and corresponds to the Hebrew term “messiah”, so Jesus Christ is “Jesus, the anointed one”. A Christian is not just one who adheres to Christ’s teachings – but this is what we’ve often reduced Christianity to. A Christian is “a person with Christ inside them” – and so therefore “a person that carries the anointing”. Think about that. This corresponds to what we read in 1 John 4:4 above. We don’t realize what is inside of us, and the capacity we have to reach out to others. So “the body of Christ” is “the body that carries the anointing”. The church – and the individual believers that make it up – are Jesus’ hands, feet and voice in this earth, carrying His anointing to others.

What is hope? In the New Testament, “hope” is not a wish – it’s not “maybe it will happen, but it probably won’t”. Instead, New Testament hope means “confident expectation”. You expect that God will reward you for diligently seeking (Hebrews 11:6, Matthew 7:7-11). You’re convinced that what you seek will happen.

What is glory? My best simple description is “the presence or manifestation of God”. When God showed His glory in the Old Testament, it was a light to the Children of Israel at night, but it was also what separated them from the Egyptians until they’d finished crossing the Red Sea (see Exodus 14:19-20 and following). When God showed up in His glory at the temple dedication, it was so overwhelming they couldn’t stand (2 Chronicles 5:13-14). When Jesus showed God’s glory, people were healed, delivered and set free. When the glory showed at the transfiguration (Matthew 17), they saw what was really inside Him – and what is now really inside of us. We not only carry the anointing, we carry the glory of God inside us.

So we can translate this verse: “Christ, the anointed one, is inside us, so we have confident expectation of the manifestation and presence of God.”

How does this change your life? How does this change your thinking?

Doug