Now we have to find out where the Spirit is today. Some Christians may consider that they know a lot. They know the Scriptures and the doctrines concerning the Trinity, predestination, justification by faith, sanctification by faith, etc. But what they have is mere objective knowledge. They do not have much of the true, living, practical, useful, and subjective knowledge. Many Christians know that Christ is the bread of life, the living bread, but nearly no one can tell you how to take Christ as the bread of life. If you have only the knowledge of Christ as the living bread, yet no way to experience it, what good is it to you? You may know that Christ is the life, but do you have the proper, real, practical, and living way to experience Him as life? Many times, what we know is just something in our mentality according to the letter, but we do not know the real thing in the spirit in a living way. Most of the time we know the Scriptures just according to the traditional teachings of theology, but we do not have the personal, living, individual, and practical experience of the Scriptures.
Now we come back to the question, "Where is Christ the Spirit today?" The answer is that Christ, who is the Spirit, is in our spirit. We say this based on Romans 8:16: "The Spirit Himself witnesses with our spirit." This means that the Holy Spirit surely is within our spirit. He cannot witness with our spirit unless He is in our spirit. Furthermore, 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, "He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit." We are one spirit with the Lord. If we did not have a spirit, we could never be one spirit with the Lord. But praise the Lord, we have a spirit, a human spirit created by God. It is in this spirit that we are one with the Lord because the Lord Himself is also the Spirit. The two spirits are mingled as one. Now I believe that we are clear that, first, Christ today is the Spirit, the life-giving Spirit, and second, this wonderful Spirit is now in our spirit. Thus, He is subjective to us, even to the extent that He becomes one with us.
We should have the true realization that we and Christ are one. This should not be merely a doctrine but a reality, a fact, in our experience. We cannot fight a battle with anything objective. We must have something real, living, and strong. This is the living Christ, the living One, who is the Spirit and who lives in our spirit. We have to realize Him in such a way.
After I was saved as a young man, immediately I began to love the Bible. Whenever I came to study the Bible, I exercised my mind and desperately tried to grasp, apprehend, and comprehend all the teachings from the Scriptures. But the more I read and studied, the farther I was from Christ and the emptier I became. I was full in my mentality, but I was empty in my spirit. At that time my studying of the Word had nothing to do with Christ in a subjective way. But today by His mercy I can fellowship with you that when I consider the Bible even just a little bit, my spirit contacts the living One. Whenever I contact the Word, at the same time my spirit has some real contact with the living One. I cannot separate His Word from Himself. If we are not in the spirit but just in our mind, then the Word in black and white is separated from the living One—Christ. So we have to know that Christ, the living One, as the Spirit is in our spirit. This is a reality and a fact.
When you are contacting the written Word, you must have the sense in your spirit that you are contacting the living Word. The living Word is the very essence, the very substance, of the written Word. You cannot separate the written Word from the living Word. It is possible to contact the living Word only in our spirit, not in our mind. Brothers and sisters, we have to learn to realize, to experience, Christ in our spirit in such a real, substantial way. If we are in the spirit, in our human spirit, in our own spirit, we will realize Christ as the Spirit. He is speaking to us, revealing something to us, quickening us, and imparting Himself to us. He as the living Spirit lives within us, waiting all the time for a chance to impart Himself into us, impress Himself in us, and reveal Himself more and more to us.
We need to know how to exercise our spirit because our spirit is the switch. We have electricity installed in this hall for many purposes. But we have to know where the switch is and how to handle the switch. If we know neither where the switch is nor how to handle it, the electricity will not do us any good even though it has been fully installed in this hall. Praise the Lord that we have the wonderful Spirit, who is Christ Himself, installed in our spirit, and we have found out that our spirit is the switch.
(The Centrality and Universality of Christ, Chapter 3, by Witness Lee)