THINGS DID NOT GO WELL in the home.  The young man had an unhappy marriage.  One day when they were out for a boat ride he accidentally (?) upset the boat and drowned his wife.  But the law caught up with him and sentenced him to death for his crime.  The last night before his execution his father was allowed to stay with him in his cell.  The next morning the authorities led the son out to death.  A few moments later they called for the old heart-broken father.  As he stood there over the poor lifeless frame of his boy, he said, "Oh, my son, if only I could impart to you my life--if only I could put my life into you that you might become the man I had intended you to be." Even so.  Christ has for me an abundant fullness of life.  He yearns over me that I may become partaker of His own divine nature--that I may become the Christian He has intended me to be.  To this end He took on Him not the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham, coming in my very frame and form.  In the likeness of my own humanity, my very own, He took me up with Himself into the place of execution.  Yes, He died my death.  In His death I was discharged from sin, or, as Paul says, "justified from sin." In Christ's dead body I behold sin's claim and power exhausted.  "With Christ I have been jointly crucified." And just "death hath no more dominion over him," so God's promise to me is, "sin shall not have dominion over you." "In Christ" crucified, I died.  "In Christ" risen, I am resurrected.  But He carries every mark of His death into His resurrection.  Without His death He would not be the resurrected One.  He now lives as the Crucified to make good the power and efficacy of His almighty death.  And I am a "partaker of Christ," grafted into Him as the branch into the vine.  "He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." Did the first Adam, by virtue of my union with him, transmit to me the death-dealing effects of his disobedience?  As truly does Christ transmit to me, by virtue of my life-union with Him, the vital effects of His obedience unto death.  Christ died, not only for sin, but unto sin.  In death He stripped sin of its last vestige of power.  In the light of the Cross sin's dominion is "no more." In living realization of my union with Him, I should say to temptation a NO that "carries with it the power of the inward presence of the risen Lord." Far more, then, than any broken-hearted father, does the Lord Jesus yearn to impart to us His own crucified-resurrected life--a life obedient unto death under the severest temptations and testings.

For certain kinds of murder Roman law used to inflict an abominable and living death upon the red-handed criminal.  He was fast-bound face to face to his victim until the murderer died.  Only death released him from the carcass.  In a similar manner Christ fastened me to Himself by cords of a love stronger than death and carried me to the Cross where, with Him, I was "jointly crucified." Mrs. Penn-Lewis tells of a missionary who "had a dream that greatly impressed him.  It was of the Cross of Christ.  However, it was not the Savior's bleeding form which held his eye.  It was an exceedingly ugly thing, an indescribably loathsome thing, the nature of which he could not make out.  What was this thing which so horrified him?  Later, as he heard the message of identification,. and realized that with Christ he had been crucified, the Spirit revealed to him that this loathsome thing he had seen in his dream, was none other than himself.' (F. J. Huegel in Bone of His Bone.)

But we cannot experience this truth of our union with Christ in death and resurrection by a mere lip profession or determined assertion.  This life cannot be copied or possessed by resolution to practice Christ's presence.  No imitation will avail.  There must be a living participation by the Spirit through a new death to self.  I cannot draw upon the life of the Crucified without admitting a new vital fellowship with Him in His death.  I have the new life as I refuse the old--at the Cross.  As I yield all to the power of His death I shall be "in the likeness of his resurrection." It is easy to work and fret and struggle and imagine that we are on the cross with Christ.  In the energy of self we try to picture the nails driven hard into our flesh, thereby hoping to make vital the effects of His death.  Such is the folly and futility of the flesh.  A Christless cross is of no avail either to Protestant or Catholic.  Others, brushing aside the death of Christ, try to live as He lived, to follow His example, to walk and talk and "be like Jesus." But a crossless Christ brings no vital union with Him.  In order to have life we must be joined to Christ.  And we can be joined to Him only in and through His death.