I am not I, but Christ in my human form. I am not THE Christ, THE Son of God, yet I am a son of God. He is the Creator, I am forever the creature. I am not the Vine, but the branch. The Vine bears fruit through the branch. This is the fruit of the Vine, the fruit of the Spirit, as enjoyment to the Heavenly Vinedresser. So I am the Vine in the form of a branch, just as I am Christ in the form of my natural life through which I bear fruit. It’s impossible to see the branch apart from the Vine, just as it is impossible ever to see ourselves apart from Christ.
We are organically one with Him in a spiritual two-oneness. This implies that whenever we look into the mirror of the Spirit, we see Christ. We can’t look at our faces except through a mirror or picture. Self cannot be its own mirror. My spirit is mirrored in God’s Spirit (1 Cor. 6:17). When I look in the mirror of God as ‘I AM’, it reflects I as ‘I am’ which is Christ as me, Christ as me as the light of the world.
Christianity is leavened with believers who try to be their own mirror. They have a divided look of themselves and Christ. They speak of who they are in Christ and who they are in themselves. This distinction is a lie. We are always in Christ, yet we can walk in the illusion that we are not in Christ and consider ourselves as independent branches who need to live closer to the Vine. Likewise a married man can live in the illusion that he is single. So we always have to see ourselves in Christ, because that’s the truth about us. The great temptation of the devil was to separate Jesus from His Father, just as he wants to separate us organically from Christ by unbelief. So whatever happens in your circumstances, happens to Christ as you in your circumstances. That’s where “I am not I” becomes most practical.
