"Not I, but Christ Liveth In Me." - Galatians 2.20

"Jesus is the greatest murderer, thief, liar, adulterer mankind has ever known!"

The relationship between Jesus and a believing soul is unique and cannot be well explained in words. In a transfusion, the blood of one man becomes another man's blood. If the latter man is injured and there is a shedding of blood immediately after the transfusion, not the blood of the donor is shed, but that of the recipient. It has become his. In a heart transplant, the heart is no longer that of a corpse, but that of a livng man. So it is between Jesus and the believing soul. A transfusion, a transplantation, a change of personalities takes place.

Luther puts it like this: "The Father says to Christ, 'You become Peter who denies, Saul who persecutes, Judas who betrays, Magdalene who sins. Then the Law sees Jesus full of all these offenses and tells Him that He must die.' Jesus is the greatest murderer, thief, liar, adulterer mankind has ever known. Not in the sense that He committed these crimes, but that He appropriated them to Himself." He has become my sinning personality. In exchange, He gives me His personality. In his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, Luther daringly says, "The Christian is Christ."

Luther stands on biblical ground here. The greatest teachers of Christianity have taught the same thing. Ignatius wrote, "Christ is our inseparable life." Thomas Acquinas said that Christ and the Christian are 'quasi one mystical person.'

All your sufferings are His.

- Taken from Richard Wurmbrand's REACHING TOWARD THE HEIGHTS, June 10 reading.