By Oyewole O. Sarumi
…the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery as mong the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. (Colossians 1:26–28, NKJV)
Introduction: The Best-Kept Secret in Human History
In forty years of preaching, teaching, and sitting with men and women who lead churches, seminaries, and ministries across five continents, I have come to believe that the most underestimated truth in Christendom is not some obscure doctrine buried in the back pages of a systematic theology textbook. It is right here in three verses at the heart of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, stated with stunning simplicity: Christ in you, the hope of glory
Think about that for a moment. Not Christ above you. Not Christ ahead of you, somewhere in a distant future you must struggle to reach. Not Christ behind you, a memory of a Galilean rabbi who walked this earth two thousand years ago. Christ in you. Present tense. Personal. Indwelling. Alive within you right now.
Paul calls it a mystery — not a puzzle without a solution, but a sacred secret that has been unlocked by divine will. It was hidden for ages. Concealed through generations. And when it was finally revealed, it did not come through philosophical discovery or religious achievement. It came through Christ himself, who died so that he might live in us. As the great Puritan John Owen wrote, reflecting on Christ’s glory: “Slothful and lazy souls never obtain one view of the glory of Christ.” The implication is that the glory is there to behold — but it demands an awake, attentive, spiritually hungry soul to receive it.
This article is written for leaders. For pastors, ministers, seminary teachers, and Christian workers who are responsible for the spiritual formation of others. And I want to say something to you directly before we go any further: you cannot give what you do not have. You cannot lead people into a depth of Christ that you have not plumbed yourself. The text before us is not merely a sermon outline or a doctrinal position paper. It is an invitation into a life — the life described in Galatians 2:20, where Paul says “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
So let us open this text together. Let us dissect it with care, sit with it with patience, and allow its three dimensions — the mystery revealed, the indwelling hope, and the preaching mandate — to do what Paul intended: form us and the people we lead into the full stature of Christ.
Her letters is profoundly intentional. In the wider Greco-Roman world of the first century, “mystery religions” were everywhere. They promised secret knowledge accessible only to a select, initiated elite — knowledge that gave its holders power, prestige, and special standing before the gods. Initiates paid fees, performed rituals, and climbed ranks.
The mystery was guarded jealously, doled out in measured portions to the worthy.
Paul’s mystery is the exact opposite. It is not an escalating series of secret teachings reserved for the spiritually advanced. It is not a gnostic ladder requiring human effort to ascend. The mystery Paul speaks of in Colossians 1:26 was hidden by the sovereign purpose of God — concealed not because it was too good for most people, but because its time had not yet come. God’s withholding was not exclusion; it was timing.
And when the fullness of time arrived, when the Son of God took on flesh and walked among us and died and rose again and poured out His Spirit, the secret was blown wide open. Not to a secret society. Not to a religious elite. But to His saints — to every born-again, blood-washed believer.
“It is absurd to imagine that God should justify a people and not sanctify them, He should justify a people whom He could not glorify.” — Thomas Watson, Puritan Divine (1620–1686)
What a different spirit this is from the mystery religions!
The gospel mystery was hidden for ages — prophets longed to look into it (1 Peter 1:10–12), kings and righteous men desired to see it and could not (Matthew 13:17) — but now, in Christ, it is available to every person who believes. As Ephesians 3:5 tells us, this mystery “has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.” The veil is torn. The curtain is pulled back. The secret is out.
The Long Silence Before the Trumpet
To appreciate the magnitude of the revelation, we must feel the weight of what preceded it. In the Old Testament, the idea of the Messiah coming near was often expressed in terms of God being with His people — but always at a distance mediated by priests, sacrifices, and the ark of the covenant. God’s presence dwelt in a tabernacle, then a temple. The high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year. The people waited outside. God was among them but not within them in the New Covenant sense.
The prophet Ezekiel glimpsed something extraordinary when God promised: “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). Joel prophesied a day when God’s Spirit would be poured out on all flesh (Joel 2:28). But these were forward-looking promises, gleaming in the prophetic distance. The people of God lived in hope of something they could not yet fully grasp.
Now Paul stands before the Colossian believers — many of them Gentiles, people who had been outside the covenant, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise” (Ephesians 2:12) — and he tells them: the secret is you. The riches of the glory of this mystery are among the Gentiles. Not one day. Not when you have climbed high enough. Now.
To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27)
Notice three layers of lavish language here. Paul does not merely say “the mystery.” He says “the riches of the glory of this mystery.” Riches. Glory. Mystery. Three superlatives stacked together. This is Paul at his most doxological, straining the capacity of human language to hold the weight of divine generosity. He is saying: whatever you think this is, it is bigger.
Whatever you think the gospel offers, it is richer. The treasury is not empty. It is not almost full. It overflows.
The Leader’s Temptation: To Live Short of the Mystery
I want to pause here and speak directly to those of you in leadership, because there is a particular danger that faces those of us who have been in ministry for many years. The danger is familiarity.
Not the warm familiarity of intimacy with Christ, but the cold familiarity of information about Christ. We know the text. We have preached it. We can parse the Greek and trace the theological development. And in the very act of handling the mystery as a professional, we can lose the wonder of it as a participant.
Research from Lifeway Research, published in January 2026, found that a survey of 2,130 Protestant churchgoers gave an average discipleship score of just 68.1 out of 100 across eight measures of spiritual maturity.
The lowest score of all, at just 54.8, was sharing Christ. This is not merely a programmatic failure. It is, at its root, a wonder problem. People who are genuinely astonished by the mystery of Christ in them cannot be stopped from talking about it.
The Samaritan woman at the well ran back to her village immediately (John 4:28–29). The disciples on the road to Emmaus, when their hearts burned within them, turned right around and walked seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the others (Luke 24:33).
“A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us.” — John Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church
The mystery that was hidden for ages is now revealed to you. To you personally. Not to your congregation through you, as an intermediary, but to you first. As a leader, your first obligation is to be among those to whom God has revealed this mystery — not merely to know about it, but to know it, to live inside it, to be stunned by it every morning when you wake up. As Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest church fathers, wrote to the Ephesians: “Let us, in fact, practise Christianity; for whoever is called by any other name than this, is not of God.” The practice begins within.
Part Two: Christ in You — The Anatomy of the Indwelling
The Most Personal Verse in All of Paul’s Letters
Biblical scholars have noted something remarkable about Colossians 1:27: this is the one place in all of Paul’s letters where he uses the explicit phrase “Christ in you.” In Ephesians 3, Paul prays that Christ would dwell in the believers’ hearts. In Galatians 2:20,
Paul speaks in the first person: “Christ lives in me.” But here in Colossians, the phrasing is addressed to the community: Christ in you. The you is plural in the Greek — it encompasses the entire congregation. Yet it is also breathtakingly personal.
It is the King of the universe taking up residence in the body of an ex-pagan, a former idol-worshipper, an ordinary Gentile merchant in a provincial city.
Paul deliberately makes this truth personal for the Colossian believers, whom he has never personally met (Colossians 2:1). He is not building a relationship with them on the basis of personal acquaintance or shared history. He is building it on the basis of a shared indwelling.
The same Christ who lives in Paul lives in them. The same Christ who sustained the apostle through beatings, shipwrecks, imprisonments, and stonings (2 Corinthians 11:23–28) is available in the same fullness to a house-church member in Colossae.
This is the great equalizer of the New Covenant. There is no second-tier Christianity. There are no “Christ in you” benefits that are reserved for the apostolic inner circle and unavailable to ordinary believers. As Paul writes in Ephesians 4:7: “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” Each one. Every believer. Christ in you is not a metaphor for moral influence. It is not merely the memory of Jesus’ teaching embedded in your conscience. It is the living, personal, actual presence of the risen Lord in the innermost being of every born-again child of God.
What It Means That Christ Is In You
Let us unpack this with some precision, because vagueness here is costly. When we say Christ is in us, we are speaking of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9 — “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His”). At the moment of regeneration, the Spirit of God takes up permanent residence in the believer. The body becomes a temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). The transaction is not temporary or conditional — it is the seal of the new covenant.
But Paul’s language here reaches further than the initial transaction of salvation. He is describing a dynamic, ongoing, transformative reality. The Christ who is in you is not a static deposit. He is the same Christ of whom Colossians 1:16-17 speaks: “For by Him all things were created… and in Him all things consist.” The one who holds the entire cosmos together is the one who has taken up residence in your heart. He brings with him, as one commentator beautifully put it, his whole court. His power. His peace. His wisdom. His righteousness. His intercession. His love. His life.
‘Christ is the most bountiful physician. Other patients enrich their physicians, but here the physician enriches the patient. Christ elevates all his patients: he not only cures them but crowns them (Rev. 2:10). Christ not only raises them from the bed, but to the throne; he gives the sick man not only health but also heaven.” — Thomas Watson
This is the reality that changes everything for the Christian leader. You do not lead out of your own resources. You lead out of the inexhaustible resources of the one who lives within you. When you feel depleted — and every honest minister of the gospel knows what depletion feels like — you are not depleted. The Spring has not run dry. You may have stopped drawing from it. But Christ in you means you have access, at any moment, to the same resurrection power that raised Jesus from the dead (Ephesians 1:19–20).
Jacob’s Well and the Woman Who Had Never Been Told
Let me bring this alive with a story. In John 4, Jesus sits at Jacob’s well in Samaria. A woman comes to draw water in the heat of the day — not at the morning hour when the respectable women of the village came together, but alone, at noon, which tells us everything we need to know about how she was regarded by her community. She has had five husbands.
The man she is currently with is not her husband. She carries layers of shame and religious confusion. Jesus tells her about living water. She doesn’t understand at first — she thinks he is talking about hydrology, about not having to haul water up from a deep well. But Jesus says: “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). In him. Not beside him. Not over him. In him.
This is a preview of the Colossians mystery. The living water that Jesus promises is not an external resource you have to keep returning to the well to obtain. It becomes, in the one who receives it, a fountain — a self-generating, overflowing interior spring. And the woman at the well is precisely the kind of person the Colossian mystery was designed for. Not the theologically trained rabbi. Not the morally impeccable Pharisee. The five-times-married, socially excluded, religiously confused Samaritan woman.
Christ in you is not a reward for spiritual achievement. It is a gift to spiritual bankrupts. As Richard Sibbes, the Puritan known as “the sweet dropper,” wrote: “There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.” The indwelling is not given to the worthy. It is given to the surrendered.
The Hope of Glory: The Anchor That Holds the Future
Paul does not stop at “Christ in you.” He adds the critical phrase: “the hope of glory.” This is not an afterthought. It is the second half of a profoundly integrated truth. The indwelling of Christ is not merely a present comfort; it is the guarantee of a future transformation.
The word “hope” in the New Testament — the Greek elpis — is not the tentative, uncertain hoping of ordinary human experience. “I hope it won’t rain on Saturday.” “I hope the diagnosis is good.”
That kind of hope is fragile, dependent on circumstances, easily crushed by bad news. Biblical hope is different. It is a confident expectation grounded in the character and promises of God. It has the quality of certainty about it, even when the thing hoped for is not yet visible. As Romans 8:24-25 tells us: “Hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?”
The glory in view here is the full, final, unobstructed enjoyment of God that awaits the believer. It encompasses the resurrection of the body, the transformation into the full image of Christ (1 John 3:2 — “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is”), the eternal communion with the Father in the new creation. It is what Paul describes in Romans 8:18 as a glory that so far outweighs our present sufferings that the comparison is not even fair.
The movement Paul describes in the sanctification process is from glory to glory. As 2 Corinthians 3:18 says: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” This is not a destination you reach and stay. It is a river you enter and are carried by, ever deeper, ever brighter. As one scholar of Colossians notes, the process moves from justification through sanctification toward glorification — from one stage of God’s grace to the next, each stage building upon the last.
“The nearer anyone is to heaven, the more earnestly he desires to be there, because Christ is there.” — John Owen, Meditation on the Glory of Christ, 1684
For the Christian leader, this future orientation is absolutely vital. The Barna Group’s 2026 State of the Church report found that while spiritual openness is rising, particularly among younger generations, long-term indicators of Christian formation — consistent church attendance, prioritizing faith in daily life, evangelistic engagement — have not yet rebounded. The research describes “heightened spiritual curiosity alongside ongoing formation challenges.” I want to suggest that at the root of this formation gap is a loss of eschatological fire. When people have no vivid, compelling sense of where they are headed, they live primarily for now. The hope of glory is the fuel that makes present suffering bearable, present discipline worth maintaining, and present holiness not a burden but a joyful preparation for a home we are drawing nearer to every day.
Part Three: “Him We Preach” — The Mandate and the Method
The Great Preaching Declaration Verse 28 is one of the most electrifying ministerial declarations in all of Scripture. After describing the mystery of the indwelling Christ and the hope of glory it anchors, Paul turns to the practical implication for his own ministry — and by extension, for every leader who stands in his train: “Him we preach.”
Not a system. Not a philosophy. Not a self-improvement programme. Not motivational content dressed in religious language. Him. Christ. The one who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). Paul’s preaching is relentlessly, unapologetically, exclusively Christocentric.
And this is not an accident — it is a deliberate response to the false teaching that had infiltrated Colossae.
The false teachers in Colossae were offering something that sounded appealing: supplemental spiritual experiences, angelic mediators, rigorous asceticism, cosmic wisdom above and beyond the plain gospel.
They were essentially saying: Christ is a good start, but there is more. Paul’s response is thunderous: Christ is not a starting point for a journey toward something greater. Christ is the sum of all things. As Colossians 2:3 says: “in Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” All of them. Hidden in him. There is no supplemental treasury you need to access through a secret initiation. It is all in Christ.
This is a word with direct application to our current moment. Today’s church faces its own version of the Colossian heresy. It comes not in the form of first-century mystery religion, but in the form of therapeutic self-help spirituality, prosperity gospel distortions, and, increasingly, what the Barna Group recently called “spiritual advice from AI” — with nearly one in three U.S. adults now saying AI spiritual advice is as trustworthy as a pastor’s.
The supplements are different but the principle is the same: something other than Christ alone is being presented as what the soul most needs.
Paul’s response to this is not to refine the church’s programmes or increase its social media presence. It is “Him we preach.” The sermon is the living Christ. The subject of every lesson, every counsel session, every small group discussion, every mentoring conversation is the one in whom all fullness dwells.
Warning and Teaching: The Two Wings of Spiritual Formation
Verse 28 gives us Paul’s pastoral method in two words: “warning” (nouthetountes) and “teaching” (didaskontes). These two words describe the full range of the minister’s responsibility in spiritual formation. Neither alone is sufficient. Both together constitute the complete ministry of the Word.
Warning (nouthesia) is the ministry of confrontation. It is the willingness to name what is wrong, to call out error and sin, to say the uncomfortable thing with love but without compromise. The New Testament does not share the modern church’s allergy to confrontation. The word nouthesia appears repeatedly in Paul’s pastoral letters, and always in the context of caring correction. It is not harshness for its own sake. But it is the refusal to let people stay comfortable in spiritual mediocrity or doctrinal confusion, because the stakes — eternal glory — are too high.
“To pretend to preach the truth without offending carnal men is to pretend to be able to do what Jesus Christ could not do.” — Thomas Watson
This is deeply counter-cultural for those of us who lead in a therapeutic age. The Lifeway Research 2026 State of Discipleship study found that only 8% of Protestant pastors strongly agree that they are satisfied with the spiritual formation in their churches. In the same study, just 30% of churches have specific methods for measuring discipleship, even though 71% believe such measurement is possible. We know the formation is not happening. We know the warning is needed. But the flesh — both ours and our congregation’s — resists the very ministry that would most help it.
Teaching (didache) is the ministry of instruction.
It is the patient, systematic, wisdom-saturated explanation of truth. Paul specifies that this teaching is “in all wisdom” — not merely intellectual information transfer, but wisdom applied to the whole person: intellect, will, emotion, behaviour, and hope. As Thomas Watson said with his characteristic precision: “Knowledge is the eye that must direct the foot of obedience.” The teaching ministry aims not just to inform the head but to redirect the feet.
Notice also that both warning and teaching are directed toward “every man.” Paul uses the phrase three times in verse 28: warning every man, teaching every man, that we may present every man perfect. This universality is Paul’s rebuke to any elitist conception of ministry.
The gospel is for everyone. Formation is for everyone. The goal of perfection in Christ is not reserved for the theologically advanced. It is the God-given destiny of every believer, from the newest convert to the most seasoned elder.
Elepe osinaonake
The word translated “perfect” here is teleios — a word that means mature, complete, fully developed, brought to its appointed end. It is not sinless perfection in the absolute sense. It is the full maturity that corresponds to the measure of Christ (Ephesians 4:13 — “to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”). Paul is describing the end-goal of all Christian ministry: people who are fully formed in Christ, who look like Christ, who respond to the world the way Christ would, who carry within them the actual life of Christ expressing itself through their personalities and relationships and decisions.
This is the most audacious ministry goal in the New Testament. Not growing congregations. Not excellent programmes. Not influential platforms. Every man perfect in Christ Jesus. It is the goal that demands the ministry described in verse 28 — the warning, the teaching, the wisdom — and it is the goal that is only possible because of the reality described in verse 27: Christ in you, the hope of glory.
The indwelling is not just the starting point of the Christian life. It is the engine of the entire formation process.
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18, NIV)
The great Puritan teacher John Owen, in his masterwork on the indwelling Holy Spirit, understood this process with extraordinary clarity. He described sanctification as a progressive work — a movement from one stage of God’s grace to the next. “The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin,” Owen wrote, “ought yet to make it their business all their days to mortify the indwelling power of sin.” The formation work is never done this side of glory. But the direction is certain. And the power for it is not ours — it is the power of the one who lives within us.
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Part Four: Spiritual Formation Implications for the Leader
Formation Begins with You, Not Your Congregation
Every leader I have sat with over four decades who has shepherded people effectively into spiritual maturity has shared one characteristic: they were themselves being formed. They were not merely managers of the formation process. They were participants in it. The wonder of the mystery had not grown stale for them. They woke in the morning with the genuine awareness that Christ lived in them, and they went to bed with the genuine expectation that one day they would see him face to face.
Thomas Watson’s discipline is instructive here: “Do with your hearts as you do with your watches; wind them up every morning by prayer, and at night examine whether your hearts have gone true all that day, whether the wheels of your affections have moved swiftly toward heaven.” This is not mere piety advice. It is the maintenance of the interior life from which all effective ministry flows. John Owen was equally direct: “If we do not abide in prayer, we will abide in temptation.”
The Barna Group notes that only 19% of pastors today are receiving regular monthly personal spiritual support from a network of peers or mentors — down from 37% just a decade ago. And 81% of pastors under 45 are not flourishing in their personal wellbeing. If Christ is in you, but you are chronically depleted, spiritually isolated, and running on empty, the formation leak is not in your congregation. It is in you. The first application of Colossians 1:27 for the leader is deeply personal: draw from the indwelling Christ. Draw from him daily. Deliberately. Hungrily.
Preach Christ, Not Just About Christ
There is an important difference between preaching about Christ and preaching Christ. Preaching about Christ treats him as a subject — a figure to be explained, a doctrine to be expounded, a historical person to be described. Preaching Christ presents him as a living Person to be encountered, trusted, obeyed, and loved. The first can be done from a library. The second requires the preacher to have been, as it were, in the fire himself.
The Colossians false teachers preached about spiritual experiences and cosmic hierarchies. Paul preached Christ. The difference was not merely rhetorical — it was ontological. When Paul preached, he was not transmitting information about a Christ he had read about; he was introducing people to a Christ he lived with. As he told the Thessalonians: “Our gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). The assurance was not the product of good rhetoric. It was the overflow of an indwelling Christ moving through a surrendered vessel.
This is precisely why Paul’s declaration in 1 Corinthians 2:2 — “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” — is not an intellectual impoverishment. It is a deliberate, strategic narrowing of the entire preaching enterprise to its only sufficient Subject. And yet, paradoxically, that single Subject contains all the wisdom and knowledge and riches the congregation will ever need. In Him are hidden all the treasures.
Build a Culture of Warning and Teaching
One of the most pressing formation challenges facing the contemporary church is the abdication of the warning ministry. Leaders who are afraid of controversy, afraid of losing congregation members, afraid of social media backlash, tend to flatten their preaching to the most comfortable and affirming elements of the gospel. The result, as the research consistently shows, is a congregation that is spiritually comfortable but not spiritually mature — a congregation that scores 54.8 on sharing Christ (the lowest discipleship metric, according to the Lifeway 2026 study) because the gospel has never been preached to them as something so urgent and so precious that it cannot be kept.
Paul’s model is to hold warning and teaching in permanent, dynamic tension.
LoThe warning keeps the teaching from becoming merely academic. The teaching keeps the warning from becoming merely emotional. Together, they constitute the ministry of wisdom — “in all wisdom,” Paul says — applied to the whole person in pursuit of the whole goal.
The Apostolic Father Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthian church: “Let our whole body, then, be preserved in Christ Jesus; and let every one be subject to his neighbour, according to the special gift bestowed upon him.” This vision of a mutually accountable body, each member formed and forming, warns and teaches — it is the community dimension of Colossians 1:28. The ministry of “every man” is not just the pastor’s. It is the community’s. The church is a formation community, not a formation delivery system.
Measure Formation, Not Just Attendance
The Lifeway Research data reveals a striking inconsistency: 71% of pastors believe there are ways to measure discipleship, yet only 30% say their churches have specific methods for doing so.
We know formation can be tracked. We choose not to. And this is not, I suggest, primarily a technical failure. It is a theological one. We have defaulted to measuring what is easy to count — bodies in seats, offerings received, programmes running — rather than what Paul says matters: every man being presented perfect in Christ Jesus.
The Colossian goal demands a different set of metrics. Are people growing in their awareness of the indwelling Christ? Are they carrying the hope of glory into their work, their marriages, their parenting, their suffering? Are they warning and teaching one another? Are they being formed into the image of Christ across the full spectrum of Ephesians 4:13? These questions are harder to answer with a spreadsheet than Sunday attendance is. But they are the questions that correspond to the actual goal Paul is pursuing.
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Part Five: The Story of the Mystery — From Moses to You
Let me trace this mystery through Scripture one more time, because the biblical narrative of the indwelling is itself one of the most powerful formation tools we have.
In the Garden of Eden, before the fall, Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8). The intimacy was direct, unmediated, joyful. Then came the fall, and the cherubim with the flaming sword, and the exile from the presence. The whole subsequent history of redemption is the story of God’s relentless movement back toward that original intimacy — and beyond it.
Moses longed to see God’s face. “Please, show me Your glory,” he begged (Exodus 33:18). God could only show him his back — the afterglow of his passing. The tabernacle was built so that God could dwell among his people, but even then it was heavily mediated: priests, sacrifices, curtains, smoke. The glory could be approached, but not entered. David worshipped with extraordinary intimacy, but he did so from outside the Most Holy Place. Solomon built the temple and the glory filled it — so much that the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:11). But the people stood outside, in the court.
Then came Jesus. And everything changed. He looked at tax collectors and sinners and said, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). He touched lepers and the unclean and instead of becoming unclean himself, he made them clean (Mark 1:41). He was God come near — not in smoke and thunder on a mountain, but in human flesh, dusty feet, shared meals, laughter at weddings. Emmanuel: God with us.
And then the cross. And the resurrection. And Pentecost. And on Pentecost morning — this is the pivot of all human history — God moved in. Not into a building. Not into a tabernacle. Not into a temple made of stone. Into you. Into the assembled community of faith. “Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you” (1 Corinthians 6:19). The trajectory of the entire biblical narrative arrives at this: God among us becomes God within us.
The mystery that was hidden from ages and from generations has been revealed. Not to a spiritual elite. To His saints. To every person who has opened the door of their heart to the Lord Jesus Christ. The exile from the Garden is reversed. The intimacy lost in Eden is restored — and surpassed. Because what Adam had was God walking beside him. What you have is Christ living within you.
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Conclusion: Live Like the Mystery Is True
I want to close with a pastoral challenge, because teaching without application is just information, and information without transformation has not honoured the intent of the text.
You have read about “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” But the question is whether you are living like it is true. Not whether you affirm it doctrinally. Not whether you can preach it competently. Whether you are waking up each morning with the conscious awareness that the King of the universe, the one by whom and through whom all things consist, is alive within you.
Whether you are drawing on that reservoir. Whether the hope of glory is doing what it is supposed to do — anchoring your soul (Hebrews 6:19) through the storms of ministry, of disappointment, of watching people you have poured into drift away, of confronting your own persistent failures.
If the mystery has become routine, go back to the well. Read John 4 again. Stand with Paul in his Macedonian prison and let his letter to the Philippians — written in chains, soaked in joy — remind you what a man looks like when Christ in him is genuinely his sufficiency. Sit with Augustine in the Confessions as he traces God’s relentless pursuit of a restless soul: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” The restlessness and the rest are both answers to the same indwelling mystery.
And then go back to the ministry. Go back to the warning and the teaching. Go back to the pulpit, the small group, the one-on-one conversation. Go back with this text burning in your chest: every man. Every woman. Every person God has placed in your sphere of influence. Every one of them a candidate for the full, complete, mature indwelling life of Christ. Not someday. Not when they have sorted themselves out. Now.
“Until sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” — Thomas Watson
Paul strains in verse 29 (the verse immediately following our text): “To this end I also labor, striving according to His working which works in me mightily.” He labours. He strains. He strives. But notice the engine: according to His working which works in me. The striving is real, but it is Christ-powered striving. The effort is genuine, but the fuel is the indwelling.
This is the secret of sustainable ministry over a lifetime: not white-knuckled self-discipline, but surrendered participation in the working of the one who lives within.
The mystery that was hidden for ages and generations has been revealed to His saints. To you. To those you lead. To the newest person in your congregation who barely knows the difference between the Old and New Testaments.
Christ in you. The hope of glory.
Live like it is true. Preach like it is true. Form people in it. Be formed by it. And one day, when faith gives way to sight and hope gives way to possession, you will stand before the one who lived in you all along — and you will understand, at last, the full weight of what Paul meant when he called it the riches of the glory of this mystery.
Key Formation Takeaways for Leaders the mystery is not
hidden — it has been revealed. Don’t live in spiritual ignorance of what God has given you.
Christ in you is not a metaphor. It is the actual indwelling of the risen Lord, with all his power, peace, wisdom, and life.
The hope of glory anchors the present. Keep your eschatological fire burning — it is the fuel of holy living and joyful service.
Ministry is Him we preach — not a system, not a method, not a personality. Christ, and him crucified and risen.
Warning and teaching are both necessary. Build cultures where spiritual confrontation is loving, and instruction is formative.
The goal is not satisfied church members. The goal is every man perfect in Christ Jesus. Measure formation accordingly.
You cannot lead people into a depth of Christ you have not entered yourself. Your own formation is your primary ministry responsibility.
About This Teaching
This article by Prof. Sarumi draws on forty years of pastoral teaching and theological formation ministry, supplemented by recent research from Lifeway Research (State of Discipleship, 2026),
Barna Group (State of the Church, 2026), and classical sources including the Puritan writings of John Owen, Thomas Watson, and Richard Sibbes, along with the Apostolic Fathers. All Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted.