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"In Christ" quote for today | ||
| Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come -- II Corinthians 5:17. | |||
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From the booklet "To All Believers... It's As Simple As This" by Norman Grubb (n.d.) You can save this page as a text file from your browser (File / Save As) and read it off-line. It is about 27K. | It's As Simple As Thisby Norman Grubb (continued)Then Daily LivingWhat followed then was the real answer to this first question of "anthropology". What kind of person am I, now that it is settled by the Word and inner witness that my real inner self is Christ in me? How do I now in fact function as a human? Paul nicely slipped into his Galatians 2:20 statement, "Yet not I, but Christ lives in me". He did not just say "lives", as if I amChrist. So back I come to realize that I am still the lamp -- now absorbed in reflecting the light but still the lamp. But now -- all important -- what a different understanding of the lamp! Now it is no longer a soiled lamp under constant questioning, suspicion, and condemnation. I now accept myself as a right self. If I am good enough for Him to accept and dwell in and express Himself by, I am good enough to accept myself just as I am. That was perhaps the most important and revolutionary new recognition when at last I got Romans 7:17 into focus -- that I never was a "bad" self in my God-created humanity, any more than I was a "good" self. Nor was I a soiled-self, as if something had poisoned my humanity -- my being as a human. No, I can accept myself because the bad or good is the expression of the deity nature in me/as me -- change of Deity, change of Owner, not change of my humanity -- except that my physical body is the mortal part of me in which I long for a change (Romans 8:23-25; II Corinthians 5:1-8). So I am Free To Be. Where I used to live in a continuous warning red light on my failures, sins, and weaknesses, now I live in a green light. I think my thoughts, make my choices, do my daily jobs as right, not wrong. I refuse waves of that old sense of self-failure sweeping over me. Impossible indeed is that old false consciousness of a self-relying-self apparently running itself and merely "helped" by the Lord, and so often tricked by Satan. Now I do accept myself and act freely as a full self because I have that fixed inner witness that it is actually He as me. As C. T. Studd in the Congo used to say to the Lord, "We are put here to see Jesus Christ running about in black [and white] bodies!" This makes my present daily living wholly "natural" and practical. I am just myself. I Be! When I am practicing my profession, I am not always reminding myself I am a carpenter, plumber, lawyer, doctor, professor, nurse, or housewife. No! I just do my job as such, but I am really expressing that know-how of my profession which was not part of my human self but which I had desired, accepted, and trained for, and which became settled in me/as me so that I call myself by the name of my profession. So also now, as a Christian, I am not always saying I am Christ in me/as me! No! I'm just myself most of the day, just being and doing. But underneath I now know Philippians 2:13 is fixedly continuously true to me. It is He working in me "to will and do of His good pleasure", and I boldly turn my "fear and trembling" of Philippians 2:12 into the kind of confidence John speaks of in his I John 4:17. I am to take no condemnation of myself (Romans 8:1), or doubt that it is He as me. That covers my whole range of activity of mind and body. I have so old a suspicion of the misuses of myself, whether of bodily appetites formerly misused and easily responsive to temptation, or soul reactions of disturbed negative emotions about conditions or people, or questionings and doubtings of the mind, that it is new for me to accept the fact that He has taken me over. I am not to doubt or question. It is for Him to keep what He has taken possession of. I didn't choose Him. He chose me (John 15:16), so the "heat" is on Him to do the keeping. I might well question His choices, choosing me or you, but we are His choice, so I laugh and go free. A pastor friend of mine, Keith Lamb of Kerrville, Texas, asked his folk, who are well-taught in Who they really are, "Hands up those who, like St. Augustine, say 'I love God and do as I like'". He said very few hands went up because we bemused folk still suspect that if we do as we like, we'll go back down to the old flesh ways! But no, no, we who now know Who we are, "do as we like" because what we like is His will and ways! It is no longer singing of myself "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love". No! No! No more wandering or leaving for we are fixed as He. (We will talk a little later about temptation and soul-spirit responses.) This greatly changes our songs and prayers for why keep asking Him to bless when He has said He is blessing? Why keep asking for the power when we say with Paul, "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me"? Why not change "pray so" prayers into "say so" prayers? Trials Are Adventures; Temptations Are OpportunitiesThere arises that constant question of our formerly sin-conscious selves. What about sin and temptation? This is where the revelation of no human nature but only the two Deity natures (we having been formerly Satan-I but now Christ-I) answers our questions. The key is that temptation becomes asset instead of liability, just as James leads off his most practical of letters by saying, "My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations [trials is the same word]". How can that be? Because we are now loosed from that former suspicion that temptation is sin, and that therefore my responses to it are sin. Both are false.The temptation question is plainly settled by that invaluable letter to the Hebrews where we see Jesus in His full human nature, particularly in chapters two through four with the one outstanding word in Hebrews 4:15, "Jesus ... the Son of God ... tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin". Perfect Jesus, perfectly tempted. Sinless. Thus temptation is a necessary part of human living. The reason is obvious. We live in a world which is shot through with every form of self-sin solicitation, as we have said, so that in our mortal bodies we remain in contact with our fellow humans as light in a dark world, for we meet the same flesh-world assaults as all do, but we know how to turn them into assets and can show the way to others. The vital difference is found in our new-mind consciousness. We used to mistake temptation for sin and were also suspicious of apparent sinful tendencies in our flesh. We rapidly took condemnation with every "drawing" of temptation on us (James 1:14). Actually, the "lusts" are just the normal strong desires (the correct meaning of that "epithumia" word in the Greek) by which the Universe, on all levels, surges forward all the way from Einstein's equation which proves that all mass is really energy (E=mc2 ), right up to the love-drives of personhood in God and man. So temptation is merely by whatever form our human desires of mind and body are excited to respond by the drawings of the deity spirit through our flesh (depending on which spirit). The philosopher Spencer rightly said, "Life is response to environment". We say, "which environment?" Now with our renewed mind knowing that all humanity (flesh), created "very good" by God, has no negative or positive inherent pull in it, but responds without condemnation to what draws it, we by infinite grace have been drawn to God (John 6:44). Equally, we often are drawn in our present life in the world by the lusting Satan-spirit, but the vital point is that we take no condemnation for such negative sin-drawings. We live in the no-condemnation reality of Romans 8:1. If Satan can get us into taking condemnation for temptations or get us to believe again that we are independent selves, then what we believe holds us. But if instead of being tricked into such negative believings we accept temptation as Satan's right by all his emissaries of people and things (for we are within his camp to rescue his captives), we then do not deny or oppose any forms of temptation. We recognize that they do not issue from our flesh, but from the sin-tempter of our flesh, and then we take no condemnation. By this we are able to pull Satan's teeth, and he becomes a roaring but toothless lion (I Peter 5:9), unless we give him teeth by responding by fear or condemnation. We "agree with our adversary quickly" as Jesus said in Matthew 5:25, or he will imprison us. If we agree with his right to attack us, we have well-blunted his sword. By thus freeing Satan to exercise his rights, we are equally now free to exercise our own. We answer his assaults by affirming Who we are, Christ in us/as us, which really is practicing the daily death-resurrection process of II Corinthians 4:10. The light of expressing ourselves as Christ (light through lamp) swallows up the darkness. Where we are tempted to hate, we love with God's love, including enemies. Where tempted to fear (which is really negative believing in evil), we have the faith of God for the situation: anxiety with assurance; depression with affirmations of Him as our joy, though soul feelings may last. We "resist the devil" as James says (James 4:7) by submitting to God, and in that affirmation that coward of a devil flees. We replace all negatives (without condemnation for feeling the pull of them, and thus accepting Satan's right to pull) with the positives of Christ as us and we as expressions of God as love, power, peace, recognizing Who we are, Him as us, and we loving as He loves, walking as He walks, overcoming our world as He did by faith, just as John says in his letter. We even turn an infatuation for someone into a positive faith action so that, instead of being overwhelmed with condemnation that we should not have such an infatuation, we by faith see Christ forming Himself in that one. Depressions, tensions, compulsive jealousies, hurts, and bitterness -- per haps going back a long time ago into our earlier life -- are all transformed when they are not resisted with false condemnation (as if we were independent selves) but rather are received as temptations meant by God and which we therefore "count" (though do not feel) as "all joy" (James 1:2). We deliberately replace all negative reactions by seeing them as His set purpose (we will see later how God "means" all things). We meet them by reversing our negative believing -- by affirming that He works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11) and that there is no power but God. Sins are committed when we deliberately respond, positively or negatively, to temptation as an independent self. These responses James calls an adultery (not a fixed marriage union) from which a return is made by confession and the forgiveness and cleansing of I John 1:9. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." God never sees sin because of the blood of His Son, and we, therefore, are forgiven. Thus, our guilty consciences are cleansed from the sin of the slip into independent self (Hebrews 9:14), and we replace our sin-consciousness with praise. John underlined that committing a sin is a rare, not a regular, fact, when he adds, "My little children, I write this unto you that ye sin not; and, if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father". Thus the committing of sins is rare whereas so often we have been mistakenly taught that it is continuous and common, so often through confusing temptation with sin. This whole area of temptation and sin is most important for us believers for this is where so much of our confusion and conflict resides. If we do commit a sin, we must be careful not to slip back into that false self-effort which tempts us to resolve that we won't commit it again, if it is something we often repeat. When we are in such a situation, we stand in our total faith position: He as me is also my Keeper (Jude 24), so when we feel desperate through the weakness of an apparent habit, we boldly tell Him we can find no deliverance by our own false self-effort or good resolution (that lie of the independent self). We are already delivered. We boldly say, "I shall do it again unless You keep me; but you are my Keeper." If we commit it again, we return by the same way of I John 1:9 and back again to that same position of faith as an already delivered person, and faith is the substance. The same is true if it is something which is not sin in any specific form named in Scripture, but we find ourselves tempted to consider a harmful "habit". In this we walk the same way. We shall not look for "deliverance" by good resolutions or forms of that lie of self-effort. No! We boldly say that we do not even talk of a needed "deliverance". We are in that same position of faith that I as He know no such thing as a habit which is not He as me. I continue as before with no condemnation, and disregarding the condemnation of others; and in that freedom He will make any changes that please Him. Faith will produce changes that no negative false condemnation can produce. The soul-spirit differentiation of Hebrews 4:12 is a key Scripture for living in the abiding rest the writer speaks of as our continued experience in Hebrews 4:9-11. That rest, of course, means not indolence, but rest from the strain of the sense of incapacity in our daily activities to be replaced by the consciousness of capacity ("we've got what it takes"), which results in far fuller, not lesser, activities in God's sufficiency. This is obviously so when we know that we are He as us, in place of the lie of independent self. We may often be disturbed in our new freedom of living unless, as the Scripture tells us, we have seen clearly this difference between soul and spirit. Paul simply likens it to the difference in our bodies between joints and marrow. Marrow is the life of the bones. Marrow is likened to our inner spirit union where our selves are joined to His Self, and from which our new life flows. Joints are the means by which the marrow-life operates in outer form. They give flexibility. So our spirit joined to His Spirit, where our knowing Who we are is the permanent flow, expresses itself by our outer forms of soul. The soul, like the joints, gives outer emotional expression to our spirit-love, and mental reasonings and explanations give expression to our inner spirit-knowing. Thus, soul emotions and reasonings are of vital value to our Christ-manifestation, but can equally be penetrated and assaulted by Satan on either feeling or thought levels. A great many of our unsolved problems find their answers as we continually differentiate between soul reactions and spirit-fixed-condition and replace the soul disturbances by recognition of our true being as He. Spirit is like the sea -- total and beyond disturbance. Soul is like the restless waves, but we are like the sea. So also is the difference in this verse between "thoughts" (variable soul level, good or bad) and "intents" (fixed spirit-life purpose). This then covers the "young man" second level of true being as detailed for us by John in his I John 2:13,14 statement of the three levels. The young man now has "the word of God abiding in Him", Christ in us/as us; and therefore he is "strong" in God as his strength in a permanent union. He must meet, confront, and overcome all the negatives of "the wicked one" in his daily living; the "overcoming" is the "coming" of Satan in all pulls back to independent self, and the "over" of the "overcoming" is in Who we really are, recognizing Christ as us. As we do that, the light of that recognition swallows up the darkness of the assaults -- all that we have been looking into in relation to temptation and liberation. Here is the complete young man, graduated with his total personhood of spirit, soul, and body, now consciously and fixedly the spontaneous expressor of Him Whom he had been predestined to manifest in his human form. "Ye are the light of the world." As "young men" we have found our true selves! The Finality! We Are Royal PriestsThere is then this third level, the father level, found in John 2:12 14. It is the way of the Spirit joined to our spirit (where we have moved from knowing merely God's acts to participating in His ways, Psalm 103:7). It is He carrying out His love activities in the world by us, which, of course, are the outgoings of God in His eternal nature of Self-giving "that the world through Him might be saved". This is the new and final quality of living in which laying down our lives that others may have their predestined completion is not seen as sacrifice but glory, just as John always spoke of Jesus' coming Calvary as "The Son of man being glorified" (John 7:39, 12:23).In the fulfillment of this there is the discipleship process in which we are being trained to be apostles, God's sent, commissioned ones, whatever our walk of life. All of us who are "young men" of necessity are moved into the royal priesthood life as being the nature of Him Who now expresses Himself as us. It is the "taking up your cross" stage, beyond the point of going to His cross for salvation, and then on His cross and thus He in us/as us we now move on to become participators in His cross. Finally, there is a warning Paul gives in I Corinthians 4:14 that there is now the call to us to "take up your cross and follow Me" and thus be Who He is. Some deeper recognition is involved in this and not all believers follow through into the total meaning of our New Being. See in I Corinthians 4:8-14 where Paul so differentiates between the Corinthian Church with its blessed and gifted members, and himself and others who were "apostles", and warns those saints (I Corinthians 4:14) about their danger of coming short of their completion of taking their intercessory share in the Spirit's saving actions by the Saviour's body. As disciples, learners, as in Luke 14:23-33, the Spirit takes us through detaching-attaching processes. By these we are loosed from our over-attachment to even what are the "good" things of life: family bonds, earthly possessions, over-concern for our own security or physical well-being. "If any man hate not father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sister, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." And, Jesus says, there is a sitting down and counting the cost of this by which we become, not just saved, but co-saviours with Him (I Corinthians 9:22). The Spirit will make apostles of just those who take the full position of faith that He is doing it, which will be in various forms the fulfillment of Paul's description of an apostle in I Corinthians 4:9-13 and II Corinthians 6: 8-10). This is the top level completed Spirit-self. For Paul, in Philippians 3:7-11, that meant that after the joy of his salvation ("... what things were gain to me those I counted loss for Christ"), he then gladly counted all things as loss compared to finding his own completion as Christ in human form in the young man state, "... the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord". This, he said, meant that he "suffered the loss of all things", and that plainly hurt him in the young man stage. But now as the apostle in the royal priest stage, it was actually repulsive to him to think of retaining what it had then cost him to give up, "do count them but dung, that I may win Christ." Total reversal, not of attachment to the bad things of life, but the good things to be absorbed in the best, the only true things. These were to "win" the privilege of equality in co-saviourhood with Christ, way beyond the stages of relying on Christ for his personal needs; now it was to be absorbed with Him in paying the necessary price for the fulfillment of a world's need and that meant being one with Him on that co-saviourhood, fatherhood level, sharing in manifestations of His power by faith action ("the power of the resurrection"). It also meant sharing in the suffering and death experiences of a priest-intercessor ("the fellowship of His suffering and conformity to His death"), from which would then come the co-resurrection of many from the dead -- the intercessor's gain. For us also, not by our self efforts but by His own way of conditioning us, the Spirit will fix us who are willing from the heart in this same reversal of Paul's, where our total passion becomes to hold nothing earthly -- whether loved ones, possessions, or life itself -- of any value except as how they may fit in our all-absorbing passion, "the zeal of God's house eating us up". In this way, we "win" (Paul's word) a leveling up with Christ, not now of reliance on Him for my own needs, but being aligned with Him in His Saviourhood. We are taken by the Spirit those same ways He went of utilizing the power of God at our faith disposal (which Paul called "the power of His resurrection", Philippians 3:10). We are joined to Him in that death-resurrection process of the intercessor, where death-pressures involve us in taking the place of others that they may live, which he called "the fellowship of His sufferings". This takes us right up to death itself (Philippians 3:10); and this produces what Christ's out-resurrection produced, not just His rising, but the "bringing many sons to glory" (the full meaning of that special "out-resurrection" word in Philippians 3:11). And so we go, as co-laborers to the limit, and glorying in it, even as He went to the pain and shame of the cross, not with sorrow, but joy (Hebrew 12:2). We are among, not just the Spirit-baptized members of the church at Corinth who rejoiced in their own spiritual riches and fullness, but among those with the marks of apostleship: weak, despised, poor, a "spectacle" to be stared at as crazy, yet apostles (I Corinthians 4:9-13; II Corinthians 6:8 10). We see this as the glorious completion of the "completed man in Christ", the human side of the mystery of Christ in man, which Paul coupled together in his basic standard statement of Colossians 1:26-28: Christ in us (verse 27); we, complete men in Christ (verse 28). This was the ideal to which Paul pressed forward, not a perfection of sainthood which had been his for years, but a perfection of co-saviour hood in the fulfillment at all costs of his high calling. For him that was the glorious taking of the gospel to the Gentiles and the building up of the saints in Christ, his two-fold ministry (Colossians 1:23,24). This had meant for the Saviour Himself an uncompleted task until He laid down His life for us (Luke 12:50), and so it did for Paul (Philippians 3:12-14). And for us that means, as anointed ones (which all we believers are), we move right into our high calling. We are then pressed by the Spirit into this total absorption in Him flowing out of our inmost being (travail) into others, in countless unexpected ways, so that each of us is fulfilling various intercessions in action, in whatever outer position of apparent unlikelihood we are in. These intercessions, which are the Spirit, The Intercessor, interceding by us (Romans 8:26), drive us to a sense of committal which we do not seek, but which takes us over. We have moved from our young man condition of rejoicing in the inner revelation of being He in our forms, fixed eternally, and are now becoming free from overriding self-concerns to involvement outside ourselves in people and situations. The reality of the royal priesthood takes us over.    This page Copyright © 1999 Peter Wade. The Bible text in this publication, except where otherwise indicated, is from the King James Version. This article appears on the site: http://www.peterwade.com/ Would you like your own copy of books by Peter Wade and other authors? Go to our Catalog. |
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