The Christian Life

                  The God of the Bible, in contrast to the gods of all manmade religions, is the living God (Jer. 10:10) who in Christ has become for us “the Author of life” (Acts 3:15). But what is this “life” he so freely shares with us? Certainly it is more than a mere existence beyond death. If that were it, we would assume it was a life with a catch, a life of eternally trying to pay back the debt we owe to Christ. Jesus explained, “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

                  Knowing God is life. And given what this most infinitely beautiful God is like, you cannot know him truly without loving him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matt. 22:37–38). Such is the life the Spirit breathes into us: he opens our eyes to appreciate God in all his grace and glory, and that sweet knowledge inclines and wins our hearts to him. Moreover, since God is the “blessed” or “happy” God (1 Tim. 1:11), to know him is to enter a life of joy. “What is the coming-to-life of the new man?” asks the Heidelberg Catechism. “It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to” (Q. 90).

                    The Life We Were Made For

                  This, in fact, is the very life for which we were created. In the beginning, the Lord God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). Yet Adam exchanged that life for death when he sinned. Then Christ came as the “last Adam,” and, having overcome death for us, breathed out the Holy Spirit on his people, giving them new life (John 20:22; 1 Cor. 15:45).

                  The Christian life, then, is not some abstract existence unrelated to the real world of creation. It is the life Adam was meant to live as he ate, tended the garden, and looked after the animals. To be reconciled with our Creator and know peace with God through Christ is what we were made for. Being truly human means knowing, loving, glorifying, and enjoying God in all we do.

                  The Christian life, then, is the true life for which mankind was created. Yet it is also much, much more: the life we are given in Christ is the very life of God shared with us.

                  The Life of God

                  For eternity, God the Father has known, loved, and enjoyed his perfect Son, pouring out the Spirit upon him. Now, in salvation, that same Spirit has been poured out upon believers, that we might be known and loved like the Son. In other words, the life we are given in Christ is the life of being children of God. “All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom. 8:14–15). The eternal Son, of course, always has an absolutely unique status as the only begotten Son, sharing the very being of his Father; but in him believers enjoy his life and righteous standing before the Father. He is the preeminent firstborn, but with him and in him we are children of God and fellow heirs (Rom. 8:17; Heb. 2:11–12).

                  This means that, united to Christ by the Spirit, believers are loved by the Father with the love he has always had for his Son. And it means that, sharing the life of the Son before the Father, we begin to share the heart cry of the Son: “Abba! Father!” As the Son, full of the Spirit, has always been filled with love for the Father, so the Spirit of adoption awakens in believers the Son’s own delight in his Father. The same Spirit also excites Christians with the Father’s love for his Son. That is why Jesus could say, “If God were your Father, you would love me” (John 8:42). The Father and the Son thus share their own life and fellowship in the Spirit: loved by the Father as adopted children, believers delight in the Father as the Son does and delight in the Son as the Father does.

                    It is not, then, that God gives believers only some wonderful thing called “life”; he actually gives us himself to enjoy forever. Christ himself is our life (Col. 3:4), and in him we share his Spirit-filled life before the Father. Thus the Christian life is not a life of trying to earn God’s favor, and it is not a life of trying to pay God back; it is a life of enjoying communion with a God in whose presence is fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11).

                  The Life of Love

                  It would be quite impossible to share God’s life, or to become like God, without sharing his love and concern for the world and the people he has created. The Spirit of adoption longs to remold us so that those who share the status of the Son also come to share the character of the Son. In those he has definitively sanctified and made his holy people, he works progressively to make them more and more like Christ, full of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–25).

                  Primarily the Spirit does this by enlightening us through Scripture to the beauty of the Son and his ways (John 15:26; 2 Cor. 3:18). Only then, when our desires are changed so that we begin to want him and want to be like him, will we choose the lifelong and disciplined fight against the world, the flesh, and the Devil. That is, through bringing us to love God, the Spirit brings us to share God’s passions—and so to love our neighbor as well.

                  Vitally, the Spirit also brings us into the community of life (his redeemed people, the church) so that we can help others and be helped to exchange our old “life” of dehumanizing sin for the true life of doing the Father’s good will. There among the people of God, taught by Scripture, we are trained by the Spirit to love praising God together and to hate sin, love holiness, and overflow with God’s own self-giving love for others. To use an OT image, planted by the river of living water that is the Spirit, we become, like Christ, a fruitful tree of life (Ps. 1:1–3).

                    Blossoming Life

                  Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Where sin leaves us all naturally wasted and withered, Jesus gives such life through the Spirit that shriveled souls blossom. Once slaves to sin and spiritually dead, we become children of God, alive and free. And filled with the living Spirit of God, men and women once curved in on themselves begin to radiate with love for God and neighbor. As God is holy and glorious, so they become ever more pure and radiant.

                  For now, we experience this life only in the bud: it is a taste of glory, but terribly hampered by the sin we will struggle with until death. Yet when Christ returns and raises us from the dead, it will be life in full bloom that we will know: without sin, doubt, pain, or death. Like Christ, the glorious Light of the World, the children of God begin now (often only dimly) to “shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15). But on that day when Christ returns to perfect and glorify them, they will “shine like the brightness of the sky above; . . . like the stars forever and ever” (Dan. 12:3).