Christ in Us: What John 14 Says About the Christian Life

Is the Christian life about trying harder to imitate Jesus? John 14 offers better news: Christ comes to dwell in us by the Spirit.

For many of us, the Christian life takes the shape of an effort — an effort to be more like Jesus, from the position of being not very like him at all.

We read what he said. We notice what he did. We try, as best we can, to do the same. The work of discipleship becomes the work of imitation: we are over here, trying. He is over there, the model. The gap between his life and ours is the room we are working in.

There is something noble in this. There is also something exhausting. And there is, in the end, something wrong with it.

This Sunday's gospel reading — John 14:15–21 — is good news for anyone who has been trying to live the Christian life that way.

Jesus is talking with his friends on the night before his death. He is leaving them. They are afraid. And the promise he gives them is not the one we usually expect from a teacher who is about to disappear.

He does not say, Here are my teachings — live by them. He does not say, Here is my example — follow it.

He says: I won't leave you as orphans. I'm coming to you. (v. 18, CEB)

Coming. Not sending a stand-in. Not leaving a book. Coming. And the way he comes is named two verses earlier — the Father will send another Companion, in Greek paraklētos, one called alongside. The word that does the most work in that verse is another. Another like the first — like the Companion they have had with them for three years. Same role. New mode. The Spirit who comes is the Spirit of Christ; the Spirit's coming is the means by which Christ himself comes.

This is what Paul is reaching for, in different words, when he writes to the Corinthians: if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation (2 Cor 5:17, CEB). And it is what he says even more directly to the Galatians: I no longer live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20).

This is not metaphor. It is not poetry. It is the actual structure of the Christian life.

C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, presses on this further than many of us are comfortable going. The danger, Lewis warns, is treating Jesus as a moral teacher whose words we read and try our best to apply, the way someone might read a philosopher and try to live by what they read. That misses everything. The Christian life is not, in the end, the application of ancient teachings. It is a living Person, present right now, doing actual work on the actual self that you are.

Every Christian, Lewis writes, is to become a little Christ. That, he says, is the whole point — Christianity exists for no other reason.

Which sounds, at first, like a heavier weight than the imitation we were trying to lift.

It isn't.

The imitation project asks us to close the gap between Christ and ourselves by our own effort. The gospel says the gap is not ours to close. Christ has come. The Spirit indwells. The new creation has begun. What is asked of us is not the manufacturing of a Christ-like life. It is the trust that opens, again and again, to the One who is already at work in us.

Trust is how we participate. Love and obedience are the shape that participation takes. The work is his. The participation is real.

We are not orphans. We are not alone in the work. This is how Christ continues his life in the world.