Christ is the life of the world. It is as the world's life that we have fellowship with Him. It is as the world's life that faith recognises Him and rejoices in Him. Christ our life! This is our watchword and our experience. To say that Christ is our life, is not only to say there is life in Christ for me, but that life is flowing down for me and into me. It is life most full and ample; it is life abiding and unbroken; it is life undeserved and unpurchased; it is life which no power of death nor influence of disease can affect and impair.
I. It is connection with Christ that brings the life into us. He is in heaven and we upon earth; but the greatness of distance matters not, provided there be connection the connection, as it were, of a single wire. That single wire is faith. This is the one connecting medium; unbelief is the great nonconducting medium, which arrests in a moment all communication between heaven and earth. Faith only restores this, establishing the surest and most blessed of all connections between Christ and the soul, between heaven and earth.
II. It is connection with Christ that continues the life. The life is not like a treasure of gold brought to us and deposited with us to serve us for a lifetime. It is not like a lake or cistern of water formed within us, rendering us independent of all without us. It is something laid up in heaven, and transmitted down to earth, hour by hour, as light is deposited in the sun, and at each successive moment emitted from Him to us. The connection between us and Christ must be kept unbroken, else the life is us will fail.
III. Connection with Christ introduces us into the everlasting life hereafter. For the present is but the earnest of the coming life. It is into a glorious flower that the present bud expands; and its future expansion it owes to the same connection which quickened and nourished it here. For faith is the substance of things hoped for; and it is into these things hoped for that faith introduces us at last. The fulness of the life is yet to come. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be," but we know that the future life of vision into which the present life of faith is leading us, will be as unutterably blessed and glorious, as it is abiding and everlasting.
H. Bonar, Christian Treasury,1868, p. 529.