The Hidden Life

Your life is hid with Christ in God.

 Colossians 3:3

There is nothing so deep, nothing so hidden, as the life of God in the soul.  It seems to be enshrined in the lowest depths of a man's heart.  It does not float upon the surface, like a cork upon the water, but sinks deep, very deep, into the very bottom of the soul.  Therefore is it hidden from the eyes of a profane world; hidden from the professing world; and what is more, sometimes hidden from the subject of it himself.  A child of God often cannot see his own faith, nor can he discern the life that is bubbling and streaming up in his own bosom.  It is not a lake, spread abroad in the meridian sunshine to attract every eye; nor is it a brook that flows babbling on over the clear pebbles; but it is a well.  "The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."  Therefore it is hidden from view.

The best part of our religion is that which is least seen.  The secret cries, groans, tears, confessions, supplications, and breathings after God do not for the most part come abroad; the despondency, heart sickness, trials, perplexities, and powerful temptations with which many a dear saint of God is exercised do not come to view.  No; nor his fears, sinkings, guilt, misery, and self-condemnation.  Yes, the best part of his religion is hidden from view, for the weightiest ever sinks the deepest.  And as it is with the dealings of his soul with God, so it is with the dealings of God with his soul, making and keeping his conscience tender, reviving the fear of God, drawing the heart upward into prayer and meditation, watering his spirit and bedewing it with the secret dew and rain of his grace.  Thus, the best part, because the spiritual part of a man's religion, is hidden from the eyes of all, except as the fruits thereof are manifest.


Take your stand upon yon hill, and see that thread of verdure spreading itself through the barren plain.  Whence comes that green strip which you see?  Coming down to examine it, you find a little brooklet threading its way through the barren plain.  It is this brooklet that, watering the roots of the grass, gives it that verdure; yet the brooklet itself is hidden until the eye is brought close to it.  So it is with the life of God in the soul.  We see the effects the verdure produced by the brooklet; but the brooklet itself, the life and grace of God in the innermost soul is hidden, "hid with Christ in God."

And if not merely hidden, but hid with Christ in God, what a sacred, what a holy, what a truly divine life it must be!  If this be spiritual religion, that it dwells with Christ himself in the bosom of God, what a divine thing, what a heavenly possession!  How full of eternal blessedness must the religion of a child of God be!  It is locked up in two distinct places, yet united with each other by virtue of the humanity of Christ, and the faith that embraces it.  If I may use the expression, one end is in the bosom of God, and the other in the believer's breast!  Compare man's paltry, beggarly religion with this supernatural life of God in the soul; Christ himself formed in the heart the hope of glory.  Words would fail to express the eternal distinction between them.

But the word "hid" will carry another idea, out of reach, treasured up, therefore SAFE.  What would have become long ago of the life of God in the soul, if it could have been robbed, trodden out, or lost?  But this it never can be, for it is locked up in the Person of the Son of God.  It is, therefore, out of the reach of Satan, sin, and death; safe in Christ's keeping, locked up in his eternal bosom.  Were it otherwise, where should you and I long ago have been?  Where would our religion have gone to, unless we had reason to believe that it had been kindled by the power of God, and was maintained by the same power which first gave it birth?  This is the grand consolation of a child of God--to believe that he has the life of God in his soul; and to feel, day by day, that he who gave that life maintains it in firm and living exercise.

~J. C. Philpot, Daily Words for Zion's Wayfarers