The Greater One Lives In You, Not Just With You

 The Greater One Lives In You, Not Just With You 

On the last night of His life, Jesus said something to His disciples that turned on a single small word, and the entire Christian life hangs on whether you have understood it.

 Jesus Christ was speaking about the Spirit He was about to send, and He said this, in John 14:17: "for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." With you, and shall be in you. 

Two prepositions, two entirely different arrangements, and the difference between them is the difference between an ally who stands beside you and the Life that has taken up residence inside you. 

For four thousand years, God had been with His people. He walked with them, went before them, camped among them, and spoke to them from a cloud. 

Since the resurrection and ascension of LORD Jesus Christ, under the the New Testament, the early apostles and disciples were waiting. But on the day of Pentecost something happened that had never happened in the history of the world: God moved in. In where? Into the disciples. 

 And most believers, if they are honest, still pray and think and live as though God was standing outside the house, nearby and willing, waiting to be called in. 

This teaching here is going to show you the difference between God with you and God in you, and what changes in your daily life when that single preposition finally settles in your understanding.

The verse for this is 1 John 4:4: "Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them:because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world." Greater is He that is in you. I called Him the Greater One, and I built much of this teaching on the practical consequences of that fact. 

Note, "The Old Testament saints had God with them; the New Testament believers have God in them, and no two conditions could be further apart. The one is help from without, which must be sought and awaited; the other is a life within, but today's church goers pray like an Old Testament man, calling upon a God who is somewhere else, and he will wonder why the Christian life feels like a long effort to attract the attention of heaven.

 The Greater One is not coming. He has come, and He is in you now." He is not coming; He has come. 

Respected reader or believer, read on. Stay with me through this entire biblical teaching, because that single distinction will change how you pray, how you face opposition, and how you understand who you are.

 Let us begin by listening to the way believers actually talk, because our language reveals what we truly think.

 Listen at almost any prayer meeting and you will hear it: "Lord, be with us tonight." 

"God, come and meet with us."

 "Draw near to us in this place." 

"Send Your presence."

 Now, l am not going to scold anyone over a phrase, and there are tender and reverent uses of that language. But notice the picture underneath it. Every one of those sentences assumes that God is somewhere else and must be persuaded to come here. 

That is Old Testament mindset of praying, and it was entirely appropriate for people under the old covenant, because for them, it was accurate. 

It is no longer accurate for you. And the practical consequences of that misunderstanding are serious. If you believe God is essentially outside of you, then you will draw on your own resources first and call on Him only as reinforcement when your own strength runs out, which is exactly backwards.

 You will feel that His presence comes and goes with your feelings, He is near on the good Sundays and distant in the hard weeks. You will pray defensively, hoping to attract His attention rather than speaking to Someone already present. And you will face the pressures of life as a person who is essentially alone in the room, occasionally assisted, rather than as a person who houses the living God. 

There is a second consequence, and it is the one that does the most quiet damage. A believer who thinks of God as external can be convinced that God has left. When the feelings are gone, when the prayers seem to bounce, when a season of failure or grief has hollowed everything out, the thought arrives: He has withdrawn from me. And that thought has tormented sincere Christians for centuries, because if God is essentially a visitor, for a visitor can leave. But the whole point of the new covenant is that He is not a drop-by visitor. 

I identified this as the great practical failure of the modern church. 

Noted: The believer's difficulty is not that God is far from him but that he does not know how near God İs. He prays as a beggar at the gate when he is the temple in which the King resides. He pleads for the presence of the One who has never left the room. 

And the tragedy is not merely a matter of words, for a man's praying will always follow his conception of God, and a man who conceives of God as distant will live at a distance, though the Almighty be dwelling in his own body. He pleads for the presence of the One who has never left the room. 

So let us trace how God moved from with to in, because the story is one of the most beautiful in the Bible. Follow the progression of God's nearness to His people, because it moves in stages, and each stage is closer than the last.

In the beginning, God walked with Adam in the garden, in the Cool of the day. After the fall, He appeared to the patriarchs and went with them; He told Jacob in Genesis 28:15, "behold, l am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." 

   Then He came down in a cloud and dwelt in a tent in the middle of the camp, and Exodus 40:34 says, "'a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle." God in a tent, among His people, but behind a veil that almost no one could pass.

    Then He filled a temple of stone. 2 Chronicles 7:1 says that when Solomon finished praying, "'the fire came down from heaven... and the glory of the Lord filled the house." Closer still, but still a building, still a veil, still a priesthood standing between the people and the presence. 

Then came the most staggering step yet: God became a Man and lived on the street. John 1:14 says, "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," and the word translated dwelt is the word for pitching a tent; God tabernacled among us in a human body, of Jesus Christ. And Matthew 1:23 called Him "Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us." God with us. That was the high point of every prophecy the world had ever received, and men could touch Him, walk with Him, and eat with Him. 

And then Jesus Christ told those same men that there was one step closer still, and that it was so much better that it justified His leaving. 

In John 16:7 He said,"It is expedient for you that l go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart,  I will send him unto you." 

And in John 14:17, the verse we began with, Jesus  named the difference precisely: "he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." With became in. 

The tent, the temple, and the incarnate body of Christ were all stages on the way to this: God taking up residence inside ordinary human beings, the believers. 

Prophet Ezekiel had prophesied it centuries earlier in Ezekiel 36:27, when God said, "And I will put my spirit within you." Within you. 

And Jeremiah 31:33 said, "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts."

 So let us establish what the New Testament actually claims about your condition, because the language is remarkably direct. 

1 Corinthians 3:16 asks, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? 

1 Corinthians 6:19 says, "your ( believer's) body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you." 

Colossians 1:27 reveals the mystery that had been hidden for ages, and it is seven words long: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." 

Galatians 2:20 says, "I live; yet not 1, but Christ liveth in me." 

Romans 8:11 says the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead "dwell in you."

 2 Corinthians 13:5 tells believers to examine themselves, "know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" 

And 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, "But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." 

That is not poetic exaggeration. That is the consistent, repeated testimony of the New Testament about where God resides in relation to a born-again believer. 

Now, let me show you what actually changes when that preposition settles, because this is not a theological curiosity; it is intensely practical. 

1. The fırst change is that God no longer has to be summoned. 

If God is with you in the sense of being nearby, then prayer is a matter of getting His attention.

If He is in you, then prayer is simply turning your attention to Someone who has been present the entire time. You do not call Him in from the yard. You acknowledge the One in the room. 

That single adjustment takes the strain out of a believer's prayer life, because the effort of attracting   God's notice was never required of you.

2.  The second change is that distance becomes impossible. Your awareness of Him will fluctuate, certainly; some days you will feel Him and many days you will not feel Him. But the fact of His residence does not rise and fall with your feelings, your performance, or your circumstances. Hebrews 13:5 records God's own promise: "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." 

And Jesus said in John 14:16 that the Comforter would "abide with you for ever." Under the old covenant, the Spirit came upon men for particular purposes and could leave ; the Spirit came upon Gideon in Judges 6:34 and upon David in 1 Samuel 16:13, and departed from Saul in 1 Samuel 16:14, which is why David prayed in Psalm 51:11, take not thy holy Spirit from me." 

You will notice that no New Testament believer is ever recorded praying that prayer. 

The arrangement changed. 

Ephesians 1:13 says that after you believed, "ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise. Sealed. 

3. The third change is the one that alters how you face opposition, and it is the heart of my expression. 1 John 4:4 does not say that God is greater in the abstract; it makes a specific comparison: "Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world." 

The comparison is between what is in you and what is opposing you. So the measurement is not your strength against the problem, which is usually a discouraging calculation. It is the Greater One resident in you against whatever is arrayed against you, and that is not a close contest.

Which means the right question when trouble comes is not, can I handle this, but rather, who is in me, and is He greater than this? 

4. And the fourth change is that wherever you go becomes a place where God is. Under the old covenant, you traveled to the Presence; the people went up to Jerusalem, and the priest went into the holy place. Under the new covenant, the Presence travels in you. 

That hospital roombecomes a place where God is, because you walked into it. 

That quiet house at eleven at night is inhabited, because you live there. 

The waiting room, the kitchen, the car, the nursing home hallway, all of them contain the presence of God whenever you , Christians, are in them, and Jesus Christ promised in John 7:38 that "out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water," which apostle   John explains in the next verse was spoken of the Spirit. Out of his belly. From the inside out.  I  described what this consciousness produces in a believer's ordinary life. 

Take note here, "When a man knows that the Greater One is in him, his whole bearing changes. He does not approach difficulty as one who must somehow generate enough faith to attract help from a distance; he approaches it as one who carries the answer within him. He is quiet where others are frantic, because he is not counting on his own sufficiency and he is not waiting for reinforcements to arrive. The reinforcements are resident. 

Such a man may be old, poor, unknown, and physically frail, and still be the strongest person in the room, because the measure of a believer is not what stands beside him but Who lives in him." 

The measure of a believer is not what stands beside him but Who lives in him. 

Let me give you a picture that may help fix this in your mind.

 Imagine two men crossing a dessert. The first man  has an excellent guide walking beside him, a man who knows every well with water and every shortcut. That is a great advantage, and he would be foolish to refuse it. But notice his situation: he must stay near the guide, he must keep pace, he can become separated in a storm, and if the guide is delayed he waits. 

Now imagine the second man, who has no guide beside him at all, but who carries within himself an inexhaustible spring. He does not have to reach a well, because the water is in him. He cannot be separated from his supply, because it is not somewhere he must get to. He cannot lose it in a storm. It travels wherever he travels, at whatever pace he can manage, and it is available at midnight as readily as at noon. 

The first man has help with him. 

The second man has life in him. 

And Jesus Christ described the second