The amount of pressure and trials in and around us is painful to feel and painful to watch. I wanted to try to give some encouragement in this. I’m reading a book called, “The School of Christ” and what I’ve done in this blog is to share some excerpts from it. It’s probably a little disjointed because I’m condensing a whole book into a couple of pages, but hopefully it will help.
Therefore, I repeat, the Holy Spirit’s first object is to acquaint us with what is in view (the goal) in our spiritual education; namely, that He is to reveal Christ in us and then to get to work to conform us to Christ.
Learn of Me and you will find rest for your souls. That is the end. But we shall never find rest until we have first of all learned the utter difference between Christ and ourselves, and then the utter impossibility of our ever being like Him by anything that we can find in ourselves, produce or do. So we had better despair our last despair with regard to ourselves. This is basic.
Then the next thing the Holy Spirit will do will be to begin to show us how it is accomplished.
What do you think those men felt when He was crucified and they had all run away – and left Him alone and one had denied Him? Do you not think dark despair entered into their souls, not only over their lost expectations, but over themselves? Yes, and He had to allow it. It was necessary. And you and I will go the same way if we are in the same school. It is essential. No constructive work can be done until that has gotten settled in us. Well, that sounds terrible, but it ought to be encouraging. After all, it is all constructive. What is the Lord doing with me? He is clearing a way for His Son, to bring the fullness of Christ into me.
Firstly, the Holy Spirit takes pains to make all who are in discipleship know in their experience, in an inward way in their own hearts, the altogether “otherness” of Christ than themselves. Then He works to bring us to the place where we realize how impossible the situation is apart from the miracle of God. The person who really begins to move forward is the person who has had his final despair over himself, and has come to see that it is no longer I, but Christ . Not what I am, but what Thou art. Nothing of me, all things from You. That is the essential foundation of spiritual growth, spiritual knowledge.
We need to be very sure of where we are in this; to have done with all our unreality, to finish forever with anything that is not genuine and utterly true about us. How helpless we are but how willing He is to complete what He’s begun. So great are the consequences that we cannot afford to be in false position about this. We will be brought to the place where we are perfectly adjustable before God, where there is all responsiveness to the Holy Spirit, and nothing in us that resists or refuses Him, but where we are open and ready for the biggest consequence of the Holy Spirit putting His finger upon anything in our lives needing to be dealt with and adjusted. He is here for that.
If you take the position, “Yes, that is how I feel today, that is my infirmity today, but Lord Jesus, You are other than I am, and I just rest on You, hold on to You, make You my life and hope". You will find that there is peace along that line, and rest, and although you may still be feeling bad in the outer part of you, in the inner part there is rest.
The Holy Spirit is going to expose our true selves. He is going to uncover us and show us thoroughly there is nothing sound in us, nothing to be relied upon in us, in order that He may make it equally clear that it is only in Christ that there is security, safety and life.
Faith is an abiding thing for the duration of this life. We will never cease to need to utterly depend on Him for everything. Faith (helplessness, dependence) is the great factor of sanctification, of glorification, of salvation; everything. And faith simply means that we are put into the position where we have not got it in ourselves, we only have it in Another. I no longer live . . . the life I now live, I live by faith.
You and I can never get revelation of this life, of Christ, other than in connection with some necessity. We cannot get it simply as a matter of information. That is information, not revelation. The apostles got their revelation for the Church in practical situations – often in crisis. They never met around a table to draw up a scheme of doctrine and practice for the churches. They went out into the business and suffering of ministry and came up against the desperate situation, and in the situation which pressed them, oft-time to desperation, they had to get before God and get revelation. The Bible is born out of pressing situations. The revelation of Christ in emergencies is the way to keep Christ alive, and the only way in which Christ really does live to His own.
He has said, The difference between you and Christ is so utter and final that it’s the width and depth of a grave; the cross. It is nothing less than the fullness of death. There is no passing by this. Death and the grave are the end on one side; the end of what you are, and if there is to be anything afterward at all, that death must stand between, and anything subsequent can only be by resurrection; a passing out of yourself (expectation, reliance, etc.) and into Him as through a death and resurrection. So that in that death you are regarded as having passed out of the realm of what you are, even at your best, and as having passed into the realm of what He is. He is so utterly different than us, there is no other way. He must take us into, through, and out to the other side. This is a lifetime process. As Pauls said, I die daily . . . we are always being delivered unto death so the life of the Lord Jesus can be manifest through our mortal flesh.
We have not to die; we are dead. What we have to do is accept our death. That is the daily outworking of an already established position. Failing to see that, we shall all the time be struggling to bring ourselves to death. This is God’s work, not ours, and He has accomplished it in Christ and will work the full implications of it into our lives. That is the meaning of reckoning yourselves dead. It is taking the place God has appointed for us, stepping into it, and saying, I accept the position which God has fixed with regard to myself; the Holy Spirit’s business is to deal with the rest, but I accept the end.
May I just ask a simple question? Can we say with truth of heart that we are really concerned to be in God’s purpose; to be found in that purpose? It is a practical matter – deciding whether we want what He wants. Are we prepared to commit to the Lord in relation to that utter transaction of exchanging our life for His? As the Lord’s people, are we ready to just pause and face that? To have a race conformed to the image of Christ – taken away from what we are to become what He is? Submitting to His way of freeing us from the old to bring in the new?
When the grain of wheat falls into the ground what an ugly thing it becomes as the shell is destroyed to make way for the inward life. Do you think it is pleasant? It is losing its own identity. You cannot recognize it. Take it out and have a look. Is this that lovely little grain of wheat I put into the ground? What an ugly thing it has become! It is all falling to pieces. That is what death does. The death of Christ wrought in us breaks up our own natural life. It scatters it, pulls it to pieces, takes all its beauty away. We begin to discover that there is nothing in us but corruption. That is the truth. It is no pleasant thing to fall into the ground and die. That is what happens. But if it die . . then a new life is given, an new form is given; not ours, but His. Expect what I have said, expect that you are going to fall to pieces, expect that the beauty you thought was there will be altogether marred; expect to discover that you are far more corrupt than ever you thought you were; expect that the Lord will bring you to a place where you cry, Woe is me for I am undone! But then the blessing will just be this – O Lord, the best thing that can happen for me is that I shall die. And the Lord will say, That is exactly what I have been working at. This corruptible must put on incorruption and that incorruption is the germ of that Divine life in the seed which yields its own life up, that is transmitted from Him.
He will accomplish this. It is His plan for us. You have not to go to your knees every morning and say, “Oh Lord, get me out of this difficulty!" You are to say, “Lord, if this is the expression of the cross for me, I take it up to follow You". If you face the situation in that way, there will be ultimate victory in co-operation with the Lord, there will be fruit and not barrenness.
If the Lord lifted that which is the expression of the cross for us and took it off our shoulders, it would not be for our good. It would at once clear the way for the uprising and recovery of the natural self. You can see when people begin to get a bit of relief from trials. How they throw their weight about. They are looking down on you; you are wrong, they are right. Pride, self-sufficiency come in. Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus (the taking of that which is Adamic into the grave) so that the life of Jesus (in resurrection) may be manifested in our body.
For His life to be expressed in fullness in us, we must come to the place where the utterness of the setting aside of the self-life has been accomplished: and that takes a whole lifetime. As we move through this process, the glory grows in the measure of our death and resurrection experiences so His life can be(present tense) manifest through us in varying and developing degrees. But blessed be God, there is the glorious climax when He shall come to be glorified in His saints. Having the glory of God in a race of redeemed sinners. It is the consummation of something that has been going on in an inward way.
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