The Normal Christian Life (5 page)
When therefore the Lord Jesus was crucified on the cross, He was crucified as the last Adam. All that was in the first Adam was gathered up and done away in Him. We were included there. As the last Adam He wiped out the old race;
as the second Man He brings in the new race. It is in His resurrection that He stands forth as the second Man, and there too we are included. “For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection” (Rom. 6:5). We died in Him as the last Adam; we live in Him as the second Man. The cross is thus the mighty act of God which translates us from Adam to Christ.
O
UR OLD HISTORY ends with the cross; our new history begins with the resurrection. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). The cross terminates the first creation, and out of death there is brought a new creation in Christ, the second Man. If we are “in Adam,” all that is in Adam necessarily devolves upon us; it becomes ours involuntarily, for we have to do nothing to get it. There is no need to make up our minds to lose our temper or to commit some other sin; sin comes to us freely and despite ourselves. In a similar way, if we are “in Christ,” all that is in Christ comes to us by free grace without effort on our part, but on the ground of simple faith.
But to say that all we need comes to us in Christ by free grace, though true enough, may seem unpractical. How does it work out in life? How does it become real in our experience?
As we study chapters 6, 7 and 8 of Romans, we shall discover that the conditions of living the normal Christian life are fourfold: (a) Knowing, (b) Reckoning, (c) Presenting ourselves to God, and (d) Walking in the Spirit. And they are set forth in that order. If we would live that life, we shall have to take all four of these steps—not one, or two, or three, but all four. As we study each of them, we shall trust the Lord by His Holy Spirit to illumine our understanding; and we shall seek His help now to take the first big step forward.
Romans 6:1–11 is the passage before us now. In these verses it is made clear that the death of the Lord Jesus is representative and inclusive. In His death we all died. None of us can progress spiritually without seeing this. Just as we cannot have justification if we have not seen Him bearing our sins on the cross, so we cannot have sanctification if we have not seen Him bearing us on the cross. Not only have our sins been laid on Him, but we ourselves have been put into Him.
How did you receive forgiveness? You realized that the Lord Jesus died as your Substitute and bore your sins upon Himself, and that His blood was shed to cleanse away your defilement. When you saw your sins all taken away on the cross, what did you do? Did you say, “Lord Jesus, please come and die for my sins?” No, you did not pray at all; you only thanked the Lord. You did not beseech Him to come and die for you, for you realized that He had already done so.
But what is true of your forgiveness is also true of your deliverance. The work is done. There is no need to pray, but only to praise. God has put us all in Christ, so that when
Christ was crucified, we were crucified also. Thus, there is no need to pray, “I am a very wicked person; Lord, please crucify me.” That is all wrong. You did not pray about your sins; why pray now about yourself? Your sins were dealt with by His blood, and you were dealt with by His cross. It is an accomplished fact. All that is left for you to do is praise the Lord that when Christ died you died also; you died with Him. Praise Him for it, and live in the sight of it. “Then believed they his words; they sang his praise” (Ps. 106:12).
Do you believe in the death of Christ? Of course you do. But the same Holy Scripture that says He died for us says also that we died with Him. Look at it again: “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). That is the first statement, and that is clear enough; but is this any less clear? “Our old man was crucified with him” (Rom. 6:6). “We died with Christ” (Rom. 6:8).
When are we crucified with Him? What is the date of our old man’s crucifixion? Is it tomorrow? Yesterday? Today? In order to answer this, it may help us if for a moment I turn Paul’s statement around and say, “Christ was crucified with [
i.e
., at the same time as] our old man.” Some of you came here in twos. You traveled to this place together. You might say, “My friend came here with me,” but you might just as truly say, “I came here with my friend.” Had one of you come three days ago and the other only today, you could not possibly say that; but having come together, you can make either statement with equal truth, because both are statements of fact. So also in historic fact we can say, reverently but with equal accuracy, “I was crucified when Christ was crucified” or “Christ was crucified when I was crucified,” for they are not two historical events,
but one. My crucifixion was “with him.”
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Has Christ been crucified? Then can I be otherwise? And if He was crucified nearly two thousand years ago, and I with Him, can my crucifixion be said to take place tomorrow? Can His be past and mine present or future? Praise the Lord, when He died on the cross, I died with Him. He not only died in my stead, but He bore me with Him to the cross, so that when He died I also died. And if I believe in the death of the Lord Jesus, then I can believe in my own death just as surely as I believe in His.
Why do you believe that the Lord Jesus died? What is your ground for that belief? Is it that you feel He has died? No, you have never felt it. You believe it because the Word of God tells you so. When the Lord was crucified, two thieves were crucified at the same time. You do not doubt that they were crucified with Him, either, because the Scripture says so quite plainly.
You believe in the death of the Lord Jesus and you believe in the death of the thieves with Him. Now what about your own death? Your crucifixion is more intimate than theirs. They were crucified at the same time as the Lord, but on different crosses, whereas you were crucified on the selfsame cross as He, for you were in Him when He died. How can you know? You can know for the one sufficient reason that God has said so. It does not depend on your feelings. If you feel that Christ has died, He has died; and if you do not feel that He has died, He has died. If you feel that you have died, you have died; and if you do not feel that you have died, you have nevertheless just as surely died. These are divine facts. That Christ has died is a fact, that the two thieves have died is a fact, and that you have died is a fact
also. Let me tell you,
You have died !
You are done with! You are ruled out! The self you loathe is on the cross in Christ. And “he that is dead is freed from sin” (Rom. 6:7,
KJV
). This is the gospel for Christians.
Our crucifixion can never be made effective by will or by effort, but only by accepting what the Lord Jesus did on the cross. Our eyes must be opened to see the finished work of Calvary. Some of you, prior to your salvation, may have tried to save yourselves. You read the Bible, prayed, went to church, gave alms. Then one day your eyes were opened, and you saw that a full salvation had already been provided for you on the cross. You just accepted that and thanked God, and peace and joy flowed into your heart. And now the good news is that sanctification is made possible for you on exactly the same basis as that initial salvation. You are offered deliverance from sin as no less a gift of God’s grace than was the forgiveness of your sins.
For 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. The idea that, because failure to lead a holy life is due to our impotence, something more is therefore demanded of us, leads naturally to this false conception of the way of deliverance. If we are preoccupied with the power of sin and with our inability to meet it, then we naturally conclude that to gain the victory over sin we must have more power. “If only I were stronger,” we say, “I could overcome my violent outbursts of temper,” and so we plead with the Lord to strengthen us that we may exercise more self-control.
But this is altogether a fallacy; it is not Christianity. God’s means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker. That is surely rather a peculiar way of victory, you say; but it is the divine way. 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 removing him from the scene of action.
For years, maybe, you have tried fruitlessly to exercise control over yourself, and perhaps this is still your experience; but when once you see the truth, you will recognize that you are indeed powerless to do anything, but that, in setting you aside altogether, God has done it all. Such a discovery brings human striving and self-effort to an end.
The normal Christian life must begin with a very definite “knowing,” which is not just knowing something about the truth, nor understanding some important doctrine. It is not an intellectual knowledge at all, but an opening of the eyes of the heart to see what we have in Christ.
How do you know your sins are forgiven? Is it because your pastor told you so? No, you just know it. If I ask you how you know, you simply answer, “I know it!” Such knowledge comes by divine revelation. It comes from the Lord Himself. Of course the fact of forgiveness of sins is in the Bible, but for the written Word of God to become a living Word from God to you, He had to give you “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (Eph. 1:17). What you needed was to know Christ in that way, and it is always so. So there comes a time, in regard to any new apprehension
of Christ, when you know it in your own heart, you “see” it in your spirit. A light has shined into your inner being, and you are wholly persuaded of the fact.
What is true of the forgiveness of your sins is no less true of your deliverance from sin. When once the light of God dawns upon your heart, you see yourself in Christ. It is not now because someone has told you, and not merely because Romans 6 says so. It is something more even than that. You know it because God has revealed it to you by His Spirit. You may not feel it; you may not understand it; but you know it, for you have seen it. Once you have seen yourself in Christ, nothing can shake your assurance of that blessed fact.
If you ask a number of believers who have entered upon the normal Christian life how they came by their experience, some will say in this way and some will say in that. Each stresses his own particular way of entering in and produces Scripture to support his experience; and unhappily, many Christians are using their special experiences and their special Scriptures to fight other Christians. The fact of the matter is that, while Christians may enter into the deeper life by different ways, we need not regard the experiences or doctrines they stress as mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. One thing is certain: Any true experience of value in the sight of God must have been reached by way of a new discovery of the meaning of the Person and work of the Lord Jesus. That is a crucial test and a safe one.
And here in our passage Paul makes everything depend upon such a discovery. “Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6).
So our first step is to seek from God a knowledge that comes by revelation—a revelation, that is to say, not of ourselves, but of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. When Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, entered into the normal Christian life, it was thus that he did so. You remember he tells of his longstanding problem of how to live “in Christ,” how to draw the sap out of the Vine into himself. He knew that he must have the life of Christ flowing out through him and yet felt he had not got it. And he saw clearly enough that his need was to be found in Christ. “I knew,” he said, writing to his sister from Chinkiang in 1869, “that if only I could abide in Christ all would be well, but I
could not
.”
The more he tried to get in, the more he found himself slipping out, so to speak, until one day light dawned, revelation came and he saw. This is how he describes it:
Here, I feel, is the secret: not asking how I am to get sap out of the Vine into myself, but remembering that Jesus is the Vine—the root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit, all indeed.
Then, quoting a friend’s words that had helped him, he continues:
I have not got to make myself a branch. The Lord Jesus tells me I am a branch. I am
part of him
and I have just to believe it and act upon it. I have seen it long enough in the Bible, but I
believe
it now as a living reality.
It was as though something which had indeed been true all the time had now suddenly become true in a new way to him personally, and he writes to his sister again:
I do not know how far I may be able to make myself intelligible about it, for there is nothing new or strange or wonderful—and yet, all is new! In a word, ‘whereas once I was blind, now I see.’ . . . I am dead and buried with Christ—aye, and risen too and ascended . . . . God reckons me so, and tells me to reckon myself so. He knows best . . . . Oh, the joy of seeing this truth—I do pray that the eyes of your understanding may be enlightened, that you may know and enjoy the riches freely given us in Christ.
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Oh, it is a great thing to see that we are in Christ! Think of the bewilderment of trying to get into a room in which you already are! Think of the absurdity of asking to be put in! If we recognize the fact that we are in, we make no effort to enter. If we had more revelation, we should have fewer prayers and more praises. We spend so much time praying for ourselves just because we are blind to what God has done.