God with us! We have recently visited the idea of God’s desire to dwell with us. It is no small thing to consider, and then to recognize, that He has come by the Holy Spirit to take up residence in the likes of you and me, and to make us His abode. Place of abiding. I am mesmerized by the following discourse between Jesus and his disciples –
16“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; 17[that is] the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, [but] you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. 18“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19“After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you [will] see Me; because I live, you will live also. 20“In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. 21“He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” 22Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?” 23Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.
John 14:16-23
I will not go into deep exposition here. Not sure I could anyway. But consider it. Jesus made it possible for the Holy Spirit, who is very God, not to just abide with us, but to be in us. Consider further that there is an understanding that we can know, understand, rest in, that our Lord and Saviour, Jesus, is in the Father, and that we are in Him, and He is in us. We have been made one with Him. And finally, that as we love Him, keeping His word, the Father and the Son come to abide, dwell, live with the likes of us.
Note verse 21 that love and obedience are inextricably linked. As we comprehend the fullness of the Father’s love in Jesus, it draws us into bending the knee, not out of being forced into obedience, but from being loved into it. In the KIngdom submission is gained by love. As we love Him we desire to submit and do what He asks/commands with the outworking result that we are loved by the Father and the Son, and Jesus is revealed/disclosed to us. It is a blessed circle of loving and knowing Him more and more. He is ever dwelling, abiding, with and in us by the Holy Spirit who indwells us.
9However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.
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Romans 8:9, 11
11But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
16Do you not know that you are a temple of God and [that] the Spirit of God dwells in you?
1 Corinthians 3:16
There is a place in your spirit where Christ dwells. A place where the Holy Spirit abides. Heaven touches earth, the mortal the immortal. You are not saved because you “accepted” Christianity and its tenets. No, you are saved because you have been baptised into one body, Jesus, by the Spirit and Jesus has baptized you/gifted you with or in the Holy Spirit who indwells you. It is in, by, and through Him you are able to, and have, come to God. And dwell with HIm.
Read and consider John 14: 16-23 often. Know you have not been left as orphans in the world. No! Your Lord Jesus, saviour and master, has been, and continues to be, disclosed and revealed to you as you abide in Him and under His Lordship. Your Father is nearby abiding with you. The Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are not alone.