God created man in such a way that the presence of God as Creator within a man as creature is imperative to his humanity. Man in normality is to be distinguished from the animal kingdom by a quality of life and behavior that can have no possible explanation apart from God Himself in the man.

This fact is truth! It is not subject to debate nor dialogue; it is not an option to be offered; it is a fact to be proclaimed! Truth does not evolve over the years any more than God evolves or Christ evolved.

In assuming our humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ as Creator chose to play the role of creature. As the God Who made man, He chose to be the kind of man that He as God had made. In declaring that He as Man without the Father could do nothing, Christ demonstrated the truth that has always been true – that we as men can do nothing without Him; that the Father as God, then, was as indispensable to Christ as Man, as Christ as God now, is indispensable to us as men!

To recognize this and to practice the principle is the nature of true repentance and without true repentance there can be no true faith, for true repentance compels us to be totally dependent on Christ as He was totally dependent upon the Father. Christ then can do the work in us as the Father then did the work in Him, and we let all God loose in the world – not then just the sky, but God Himself is the limit!

This gives an entirely new dimension to our understanding of the Gospel and the remedial measures it proclaims. Not just that in the redemptive act Christ died for us, but that in the regenerative purpose of God, Christ rose again from the dead to live His life in us. “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching in vain, and your faith is also vain . . . ye are yet in your sins!” 1 Corinthians 15:14-17. The resurrection is at the very heart of the Gospel, through which we are born again!

Any departure from this truth is a corruption of the mind and has its origin in the subtlety of Satan. 2 Corinthians 11:2-3. It is a departure from the “simplicity which is in Christ” and constitutes a “neo-evangelical humanism.” Were the time to come when by mutual consent, the members of the Fellowship were to depart from this which is the true substance of our faith, then God would have written over the Fellowship, as over so much else of what purports to be Christendom, the word “ichabod”–”the glory is departed!” 1 Samuel 4:21, Revelation 2:4-5

New birth is a divine conception! A man takes a woman to wife so that his life, imparted to her, may be reproduced in and through her. We too have been espoused to “One Husband,” Christ, “Married to Another, even to Him who is risen from the dead” (Romans 7:4) so that His life imparted to us by the Holy Spirit at new birth may be reproduced in and through us “to raise up the foundations of many generations.” Isaiah 58:12. Abiding fruit to His eternal praise, and not only to abide, but to reproduce!

The Lord Jesus Christ established the fact that our spiritual union with Him, as He was in spiritual union with the Father, is the true and ultimate basis of all evangelism, missions and Church planting. “The world will know and the world will believe,” said the Lord Jesus, “that the Father has sent Me when they are in Us as I am in Thee, Father, and I am in them as Thou art in Me!” John 17:21-23

That is the truth that sets men free!

   – Major W. Ian Thomas