John 14:1-3 Do not let your heart be troubled; believe into God, believe also into Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many abodes; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.
3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and will receive you to Myself, so that where I am you also may be.
1 Corinthians 12:12 For even as the body is one and has many members, yet all the members of the body, being many, are one body, so also is the Christ.
John 14:16-17 And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter, that He may be with you forever, 17 Even the Spirit of reality, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him; but you know Him, because He abides with you and shall be in you.
John 14:20 In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.
John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.
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Fellowship to help us know Christ and pursue Him
Let us exercise our spirit as we seek the Lord’s life and the Lord’s light contained in these verses.
Jesus Christ went to the cross and died for our sins. We recall from the book of Isaiah that Christ left this world, being, “cut off, out of the land of the living” (Isa. 53:8). He had repeatedly told His disciples that He would go to Jerusalem and be killed and on the third day rise from the dead. In John 14:2, in the Lord’s last great speaking to His disciples before His death, He again tells the disciples that He is going, only this time, He says that He is going to prepare a place for them. He also tells them that in His going He is also coming.
He tells them that He would send them another Comforter, the Spirit of reality. Jesus tells them that they already knew this Spirit of reality and that this One “abides with you and shall be in you”. This other Comforter then, is the very Jesus Christ Himself, who was at that time WITH the disciples. He was going to go to the cross, resurrect and be transfigured into a new form, that of the Spirit of reality, who would from that point forward be IN them. This is a great truth which we can also see in John 7:39 where it says, “But this He said concerning the Spirit, whom those who believed into Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” We can also see this wonderful transfiguration in 1 Corinthians 15:45 b, “the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.”
Many have interpreted John 14:3 to mean that the Lord would go to heaven to prepare a house for us there, that when we die, we might have a place to live. As we read the whole chapter of John 14 and even all the related scriptures, we begin to see clearly that the Lord was actually referring to His actions of going to the cross and coming in resurrection as the Spirit to live INSIDE OF US. In verse 20, right after He speaks of giving Himself to us as the Spirit of reality, He says, “ In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” THAT DAY undoubtedly is the day of the Lord’s resurrection.
The result of Christ’s going to the cross to die for us, of such a marvelous going, was not only that He paid the price for our sins. He also came back right away as the Spirit to live in us! He told us that on THAT DAY He would be in us and we would be in Him. This is our oneness with God! He is in us and we are in Him! Where are we? We are now in Christ, and where is Christ? He is now in us! The place that was prepared for us was He Himself as our abode.
Furthermore, this place is Christ Himself in the Father! Christ went to the Father and prepared a place for us there. That is the place where He has His being, in the Father and one with the Father. Mind-blowing, yes, but according to John 14, this is the place prepared for us!
We can now read verse 23 and see how we also are the abode for God. “Jesus answered and said to him, If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.” Who gets a dwelling place, then? Is it us, or is it God? The wonderful place prepared for us by Christ’s going and coming is in the Father and is in us too!. It is the mutual dwelling place of the redeeming God and the redeemed man! This place is in God and in us, it is the Spirit of God coming to be in us, in our regenerated human spirit. It is a spiritual place that is not in the future, but it is here, and now. Praise the Lord for such a place!
The verses in John 14 are wonderful! You can build upon your understanding of these verses by reading the following ministry excerpt.
https://www.ministrysamples.org/excerpts/BECOMING-ONE-WITH-GOD.HTML