Christ In Us

Woe unto us, if we force the Word of God and want to make the way to salvation broader than it is, as so many who abide in sin and deceive themselves about sonship with God, do to their own harm, when there indeed is no sin in Christ. Instead He died for it, that He might take away and abolish our sin and destroy the work of the devil.

But we cannot otherwise be in Christ or put Him on so as to appear in His person before the Father, unless we take off the devil, or the old man, with his works. Both, the old and the new, cannot live jointly in one person.

Neither is it required of man himself that he live as Christ lived—without sin, but it is Christ Himself Who can do it and does do it in us because it is His nature which He cannot deny. Those, therefore, who will excuse themselves with their human weakness for sin, are not in Christ; otherwise He would also be in them and He is not weak, but strong and He cannot sin, but can do only righteousness. Of this we are convinced.

So there is a lack of the right knowledge of the mystery: "Christ in us, the hope of glory," because men do not know what "to be in Christ" is and means and if we should be unable to find a purified church of sanctified children of God anywhere on earth, it would take nothing at all away from the power and the truth of the Word of God.
--Excerpt: S.H. Froehlich's Meditations on the Epistles of John Vol. II