Does Christ live in every believer?

The Apostle Paul once asked the believers in Corinth to test if Christ was indeed living in them:

2 Corinthians 13:5
"Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!"

If Paul was asking the carnal Corinthian believers if Jesus was living in them, shouldn't we also examine ourselves who believe? How do we know if Christ is living in us? I used to think Christ was living in everyone who claimed to be a believer, but Paul seems to make it not so certain.

It turns out Jesus actually gave conditions for his indwelling in believers that went beyond simply believing:

John 14:26
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him."

What other conditions can we glean from the bible? For one, if Jesus and the Father are living in us, we will have the Father's love. If we don't have the Father's love in us, God probably isn't making his home in our hearts. Is there anywhere in the bible where it says believers can be without the love of the Father?

1 John 2:15
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Here the Apostle John seems to imply that God cannot be living in you if you love the world or the things of the world! How many Christians do you know that love the world? Do you love the world?

So at the very least, Christ living in us is conditioned on our loving him, obeying him and not loving the world. Is there anything else?

1 John 3:6
No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.

This is one of the hardest verses to take in 1 John. It clearly states that whoever lives in sin (not just stumbling in sin which we all do, but staying enslaved to sin in a way that it masters and controls us)  has never known God or seen him. There are many Christians today who are living in sin and believe they are going to enter the kingdom of heaven at the end of this age. This would explain why Jesus declares in Matthew 7:23 "Depart from me I never knew you! You workers of lawlessness" to the many believers who said to him "Lord, Lord! Didn't we do all this stuff for you?"

Anyone living in a home becomes intimately familiar with their place of living. If the home were alive, you could also say it should intimately know its inhabitants. John is saying again that Christ can't be and has never lived in believers who continue in sin. Although I'm not a full blown Calvinist, you cannot argue that this one of the strongest verses supporting the Calvinistic doctrine that believers who fall away were never saved to begin with.

Why make such a big issue of God living in us? Why is Christ living in us so important? It's because that's how Jesus fulfills the moral law of the Old Testament. Christ says in Matthew 5:17 that He didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Many take this to mean that we are no longer under the moral commandments of the Old Testament and that keeping these commandments is old school and we only need to confess our sins. Free grace Christians often point to Galatians 3:25 where Paul says we are no longer under the law. However, was Paul really talking about the moral law? Or was he just referring to the sacrificial and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, many which were fulfilled when Jesus died as the lamb of God and rose again. Does the New Testament teach that we are no longer under the moral law?

Galatians 5:19-21
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Read the words in bold again, and you'll realize that they all refer to keeping the moral commandments listed in the Old Testament! However, those of us living in the New Covenant have a distinct advantage, and that is that we know we don't have to keep these commandments out of our own self effort, but by simply keeping the first commandment: "love God with all your heart, soul and mind" which also results in obeying God, both Christ and the Father will make his home in our hearts through the Holy Spirit (John 14:26). This is why Paul says in Romans 8:1(KJV) that those walk according to their spirit and not the flesh are in Christ Jesus and therefore are no longer under condemnation.

Last but not least, before Christ's resurrection life can live in you, first you must die! As Christ was crucified, have you also crucified the desires of your flesh yet? Did you also know that unless you do so, according to Galatians 5:14 you don't really belong to him?

Galatians 5:14
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

And straight from the mouth of Jesus:

Matthew 10:38
And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Praise God though because life doesn't stop at the cross, we can share in Jesus' resurrection life today after we've died to our old carnal man. After we received John's baptism of repentance which signifies the death of our old man, our previous sinful way of living, God is faithful to send the Holy Spirit to baptize us in fire (Matthew 3:11). In the Old Testament, the Israelites would provide the sacrifice and God would send fire to consume it. In the New Covenant, we present our bodies as the living sacrifice and God sends his Holy Spirit of fire to consume us and live in us (Romans 12:1) ! How cool is that?

On an unrelated note, if Christ is indeed living in Christians who past the test, then brothers and sisters need to treat each other as if they are Jesus. Maybe a lot of strife and fighting among Christians could be avoided if everyone treated each other as if they were actually Jesus :) The Matthew 25 sheep & goat judgment also touches on this.

Colossians 1:27
To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.