October 15 Daily Devotional

Christ in you, the hope of glory

Thank God [His forgiveness and acceptance is something that] happens immediately. But it is also a continuing process ... the Holy Spirit ... begins within us His great work of delivering us from the power of sin and from the pollution of sin. We have to hunger and thirst for this deliverance, from the power and from the pollution. And if you hunger and thirst for that you will get it. The Holy Spirit will come into you and He will work in you ‘both to will and to do of his good pleasure’. Christ will come into you, He will live in you; and as He lives in you, you will be delivered increasingly from the power of sin and from its pollution. You will be able to be more than conqueror over all these things that assail you, so that not only do you get this answer and blessing immediately, it goes on continuously as you walk with God and with Christ, with the Holy Spirit living in you. You will be enabled to resist Satan, and he will flee from you; you will be able to stand against him and all his fiery darts, and the whole time the work of getting rid of the pollution will be going on within you.

But of course, this promise is fulfilled perfectly and absolutely in eternity. There is a day coming when all who are in Christ and belong to Him shall stand in the presence of God, faultless, blameless, without spot and without wrinkle. All blemishes will have gone. A new and perfect man in a perfect body.... We shall stand in the presence of God, absolutely perfect in body, soul and spirit, the whole man filled with a perfect, complete, and entire righteousness which we shall have received from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 82–3