The Normal Christian Life
God's normal for a Christian can be summarized as follows: I no longer live! Now it is Christ who lives His life in me (Gal. 2:20). There are two aspects of salvation that should be manifest in a Christian's life: the first is the forgiveness of sin; the second is his deliverance from sinning. Anyone who is not experiencing both of these aspects in his life is living beneath the privileges that God has accomplished for us in Christ. Because of our limited comprehension of the state of our fallen nature, we do not have a true appreciation of how helpless the natural man really is. Thus, we still have some expectations in ourselves. And as a result of this faulty line of thought, we think that we can please God. The blood can wash away my sins, but it cannot wash away my "old man" (Rom. 6:6). For this we are in need of the Cross, that the old man may be crucified. Though the blood deals with sins, it is the Cross that deals with the sinner. At the beginning of the Christian life, we are concerned with our doing and not with our being; we are distressed more by what we have done than by what we are. We think that if only we could rectify certain things we would be good Christians; therefore, we set out to change our actions. We try to please the Lord, but we find that something within us does not want to please Him. And the more we try to rectify matters externally, the more we realize how deep-seated the problem really is. Since we came into the world by birth, we must go out by death. To do away with our sinfulness, we must do away with our life. But how do we die? It is not by trying to kill ourselves. Rather, we die by recognizing that God has already dealt with us in Christ. This is summed up in the apostle's statement, "As many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death" (Rom. 6:3). The Cross terminates the first creation, and out of death there is brought in a new creation in Christ: the Second Man. The conditions of living the Christian life are fourfold: (1) knowing-revelation from God of what Christ has done for us, (2) reckoning-experiencing what He has revealed to us in our lives, (3) presenting ourselves to God-consecration to God of that which pertains to the new life He has placed in us, and (4) walking in the Spirit-maturing in our spirits to be sensitive to His every leading. The experience of every believer should encompass these four conditions. God's way of deliverance is altogether different from man's way. Man's way is to try to suppress sin by seeking to overcome it; God's way is to remove the sinner. Many Christians mourn over their weakness, thinking that if only they were stronger all would be well. But God's means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger; rather, it is by making us weaker and weaker. God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our old man, but by crucifying him; not by helping him to do anything, but by entirely removing him from the scene of action. It is not an intellectual knowledge at all, but an opening of the eyes of the heart-to see what we have in Christ. For the written Word of God to become a living Word from God to you, He has to give you "the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him" (Eph. 1: 17 KJV). We are the factory, and our actions are the products. The blood of the Lord Jesus has dealt with the question of the products, namely, our sins, and the Cross has made a clean sweep of the factory that produces the goods. What is "in Christ" cannot sin; what is "in Adam" can sin and will sin whenever Satan is given a chance to exert his power over it. Faith is the substantiation of things hoped for (Heb. 11:1). This means making them real in experience. Substance is an object I possess-something before me. Substantiating means that I have the power or faculty to make that substance be real to me.
The promises of God are revealed to us by His Spirit so that we may lay hold of them. We, as Christians, are never told by God to struggle to get into Christ. We are not told to get there, because we are already there. However, we are told to remain where God has placed us. In dealing with Christ, God has dealt with the Christian; in dealing with the Head, He has dealt with all the members. It is altogether wrong for us to think that we can experience anything pertaining to spiritual life merely in ourselves, apart from Him. Every true spiritual experience means that we have discovered a certain fact in Christ, and have entered into His experience. The greatest negative in the universe is the Cross, for with it God wiped out everything that was not of Himself; the greatest positive in the universe is the Resurrection, for through it God brought into being all He will have in the new order of things. The Cross is God's declaration that everything within us from the old creation must die, because nothing of the first Adam can pass beyond the Cross. There is an old world and a new world, and between the two there is the tomb. And although God has already crucified me with Christ, I must still consent to be consigned to the tomb. That which has not passed through death can never be consecrated to God, because God will only accept that which is of the new order of things-that which pertains to His Spirit. Presenting myself to God implies a recognition that I am already altogether His.
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