However, ours is a grafting "contrary to nature." According to the ordinary laws of grafting, the good branch of a desirable fruit is grafted into an inferior trunk.  Contrary to nature, we have been grafted into a good tree.  The True Vine was crucified, and into the riven side of the Redeemer we have been grafted, a bad into a good.  But there is another "contrary to nature" that is all-important.  When the life-union of the vine and branch is effected in nature, the branch still bears fruit "after its kind," i.e., according to its own original life.  But I died in Adam.  By the life I received from Adam, I brought forth "fruit unto death." "The mind of the flesh is deith." In order, therefore, to bring forth "fruit unto God," this natural life must give way, must "yield up the ghost." Having been condemned to the Cross, I must come to feel by a deep work of the Spirit that by nature I am unfit to live.  The Cross says so; and I must consent.  I must come to a cordial consent that I have been crucified together with Christ, so that it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me.  His crucified life must come coursing through me, the ingrafted branch, so contradicting and setting cc " 'de, that the spiritual fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus--"after His kind"--shall be manifest to the glory and praise of God. 

Amy Carmichael tells about the nurse Kohila, who, at a certain time, "came upon something in herself which we call briefly Nan than.  Nan means I; than underlines the pronoun.  Someone has said that there is nothing God will not do through one who does not care to whom the credit goes.  Nan than greatly cares.  Kohila set herself to renounce her Nan than, so that she might be free to serve others." When Christ comes into the life He must "take over" entirely; and He is on a sit-down strike until He starves the "me" out.  The Cross must bring me to a glad "yet not I." Contrary, then, to all the laws of grafting and fruit-bearing, the "ye-in-Me" of our life-union with Christ is to be followed all our days by the "I-in-you" of fruit-bearing.

Let us listen to the little scion as he repeats Galatians 2:20: "I have been cut off from my family tree; I am crucified to my former connection and family; I have been ruthlessly torn away; I am dead to them; nevertheless I live--I still know that I am the same little wild branch and no other--I am still myself.  I live.  And yet it is no longer I that is living; it is the life of another that liveth in me so that none of the beautiful grapes are of me.  They are the product of the life of another, continually contradicting my old life and pushing on out through me to bear precious fruit to glorify the great husbandman." In speaking of the violation of these principles of our fallen selfish natures, F. J. Huegel says: "We are so addicted to self, so wrapped up in self, so entwined with self, so infatuated with self, that our spiritual natures cannot be centered in God by means of a deep union of love without a violent contradiction of our old natures.  This is the secret of the Cross.  It does violence to corrupt human nature.  It slays the old life."

Those who teach us that the blood of Jesus cleanses or eradicates the old nature often fail to enter into and learn the meaning of the Christ-indwelt life as the only lifelong remedy for self.  It was the saintly Francis de Sales who said, "It is a delusion to seek a sort of ready-made perfection which can be assumed like a garment; it is a delusion, too, to aim at a holiness which costs no trouble, although such holiness would be no doubt exceedingly agreeable to nature.  We think that if we could discover the secret of sanctity we should become saints quickly and easily." We shall the rest of our lives be making new and fresh discoveries of plague spots in our nature upon which the Cross must be laid.  Has the reader not discovered, in spite of many victories over