Christ in you, the hope of glory
The mystery revealed
Paul names what he calls a mystery, long hidden and now revealed, and it is the very heart of this whole stage: Christ in you, the hope of glory. The secret of the Christian life, the treasure at its center, is not merely Christ for you, accomplishing your salvation from outside, but Christ in you — the living Christ dwelling within, present at the center of your being.
This is the ground of all our hope of being formed into his likeness. We are not left to imitate a distant Christ by our own effort, copying a model from far away. The Christ we are being conformed to actually lives in us, his own life and character at work within, transforming us from the inside out. The hope of glory — the confident expectation that we will be made like him — rests not on our striving but on his indwelling presence.
And notice it is the hope of glory: Christ in us now is the guarantee and the seed of the glory to come. The presence of Christ within is both the means of our present transformation and the pledge of our future glorification. This is why Paul could labor so strenuously for people's maturity, striving with all the energy Christ powerfully worked in him — because the One doing the forming was already within. The whole formed life rests on this mystery: not you, working toward a distant Christ, but Christ in you, your hope of glory.
“The riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
— Paul, to the Colossians — Colossians 1:27 (WEB)
Live from the mystery at the heart of the formed life — Christ in you, the hope of glory — rather than straining to imitate a Christ kept at a distance.
“For which I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily.”
There is a tiring picture lodged in us — Christ as a distant model and ourselves below, copying him by sheer effort across the gap. The interior work is to receive the mystery Paul unveils, Christ in you, the hope of glory, and to let our confidence rest not on imitation from afar but on a living presence transforming us from the inside out. The One we are being formed into is not standing at a distance to be mimicked; he is already within, and that indwelling is both the means and the pledge.
This week, shift from imitating a distant Christ to drawing on the indwelling one: when you face a moment that calls for his character, do not merely try to copy him, but consciously draw on Christ living in you, letting his presence work from within.
Kept at arm's length in the imagination, Christ becomes a faraway figure to be laboriously copied, and formation collapses into exhausting mimicry. But a soul living from the Christ who actually dwells within is changed from the inside out by a presence that is itself the hope and guarantee of glory — past all reach to imitate or wear down.
We can imagine the Christian life as the strenuous imitation of a distant Christ — studying his example and trying, by our own effort, to copy a model far away. Paul reveals a deeper mystery: Christ in you, the hope of glory. The living Christ does not merely stand outside us as a model; he dwells within us, his own life and character at work at the center of our being.
This changes everything about the hope of being formed. Our confidence of becoming like Christ rests not on our striving to imitate someone distant, but on his indwelling presence transforming us from the inside out. And his presence within is the hope of glory — both the means of our present transformation and the pledge of the glory to come. The whole formed life rests on this: not you, laboring toward a faraway Christ, but Christ himself in you. Are you living from that indwelling presence, or still straining to imitate a Christ you have kept at a distance?
- Do I strain to imitate a distant Christ, or live from Christ within?
- Does my hope of transformation rest on my effort, or on his indwelling presence?
- What would change if I lived from Christ in me, the hope of glory?
Lord, I strain to imitate a distant Christ by my own effort. But the mystery is Christ in me, the hope of glory. Let me live from your indwelling presence, transformed from the inside out, confident that the One forming me already dwells within and is my hope of glory. Amen.