“To whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).
Part 2
The hope of glory
Now let us turn to the experience resulting, “the hope of glory.” “Glory” here refers to the great consummation in which God’s purposes are to be perfectly fulfilled; in which the church, with one voice, will say, “You, O Christ, are all I want”; and in which the whole creation will find its groaning cease and join the chorus of praise to Him who sits upon the throne [Rom. 8:19-23]. God’s glory consists in the realization of the purpose of His love in all that His hands have made.
Christ in you is the hope of this glory. What is hope? I wish we bore in mind the real significance of the good old Anglo-Saxon word “hope.” It does not mean foundationless expectation, but rather confidence in something yet to be, with an accompanying endeavor to reach it.
Christ in you is the one unanswerable evidence of the ultimate victory. Thank God for the company in whose lives Christ is singing the anthem of His coming victory. We are in the midst of the smoke and din of battle. There are days when we sit and fold our hands and say, “Where is the promise of His coming?” No Christian man has ever wailed that out but that presently there came singing back through his soul the answer of the Christ.
But “Christ in you, the hope of glory” means a great deal more than that he sings an anthem of the future. He who gives us a vision of the ultimate is also present to deal with all the forces which oppose. The hope of glory means that at last the wrongs will be righted, the tyrannies broken, and humanity delivered — but Christ in me means power in me to help bring it to pass. I am renegade if I sit still and listen to His singing and do not cooperate in His effort.
So if the great untold mystery of God in Christ has become the personal mystery of Christ in me, then what? Then I see with His eyes all the evil loose in the world — but that is not the ultimate thing. What is the ultimate thing? It is that He who came to destroy the works of the devil will destroy them in me [Heb. 2:14].
His victory is assured. The song of it is in our hearts. God help us to answer the call of the song and hasten the triumph.
[“For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. 3:20,21).]
Part 2 of 2 Bracketed references added.
Reverend Doctor George Campbell Morgan D.D. (1863-1945) was a British evangelist, preacher and a leading Bible scholar. A contemporary of Rodney “Gipsy” Smith, Morgan was the pastor of Westminster Chapel in London from 1904 to 1919, and from 1933 to 1943. Wikipedia
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/