For Me to Live is Christ

 A Christian is one who has become spiritually alive from the dead. The presence of spiritual life within him

 is the one foundational thing that distinguishes him from the unregenerate world about him.

       

This spiritual life is not native to us, nor can it be developed out of anything we have or are by nature. 

It must be given to us. So God has given us eternal life, “and this life is in His Son,” 

through whose possession of us when we believed on him we were born from above; “not of blood, 

nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God;" by which we have become a “new creation” in Christ, 

being thereby made “partakers of the divine nature.”

The life of a Christian, therefore, is the life of Christ within us through the Holy Spirit. 

It is not a life similar to his, it is his life. This is shown by the fact that what we receive in the new birth 

is not only “everlasting life,” but also “eternal life,” which is far more than “everlasting life.” 

For while everlasting life has no end, yet it may have a beginning; but eternal life has neither beginning nor end.

Now the Triune God is the only one in the universe who has eternal life. The only way He can give us eternal life, 

therefore, is to possess us with his own life, through Christ, by the Holy Spirit. 

This is one thing Paul meant when he said, “For me to live is Christ.” This is a mystery that is too high for us. 

We can none of us understand it; but we can believe it.

J.E. Conant