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Christ's
requirements are indeed unattainables--that you must learn first of all.
In His demands Christ goes far beyond the natural. He asks for no
mere initiations. On the one hand He well knows your incapacities;
on the other hand He demands the utterly impossible. And the necessary
shock that has to come to the believer is that Christ's standards are completely
beyond the reach of the flesh. Who naturally loves his enemies, rejoices
in persecution, hates himself, and goes the second mile? Yet these
things are native to the true Christian life. We are at once indicted
and hopeless. There is an impassable gulf between the humanly possible
and the requirements of Christ. The flesh profiteth nothing.
F. J. Huegel, in Bone of His Bone, rightly summarizes our
failure thus: "We have been proceeding upon a false basis. We have
conceived of the Christian life as an imitation of Christ. It is
not an imitation of Christ. It is a participation of Christ."
Indeed we are to be partakers
of the divine nature; and the doorway into such an experimental participation
of the life of Christ is through identification-identification with Christ
in His death and resurrection.
George Wyatt did not find
deliverance by fighting the law or endeavoring to please the authorities.
He took his death-position according to the Government record. He
acted on the basis of "It is written." He had died in the person of his
representative. Even so, I, too, have a Substitute and Representative.
He entered a deadly combat and died my death. I have been "crucified
with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal.
2:20). That is a great fact. No amount of struggling on my
part can make it more true. I am an actual partaker of Christ, and,
therefore, of His death and resurrection. Christ actually liveth
in me. His is a life of death to sin and aliveness to God; it is
mine to yield my all to Him--to believe and rejoice and rest in Christ.
An old missionary had long
lived a defeated Christian life. In his despair his eyes fell upon
the words, "Christ liveth in me." "What," he said, "is Christ actually
living in me?" He jumped up,--solid Presbyterian though he was,--and danced
round and round his table, saying, "Christ liveth in me! Christ liveth
in me!" When he realized that he was actually indwelt by the Crucified
One, he came into blessed emancipation from the old self-life.
The life that is identified
with Christ will be a life of sufficiency and fullness and victory.
While it must not be confused with a life of emotion or of feelings, it
is a life filled with "all joy and peace in believing." We must learn not
to live in our feelings, for these are often misleading. The Lord
Jesus said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free." However, the experience of a great pioneer of modern missions, J.
Hudson Taylor, greatly illuminates the truth. After months of agony
and struggle to realize more life, holiness, and power in his soul,
he came in final and utter self-despair to "rest upon the Faithful One."
In a letter to his sister he says in part:
The sweetest part, if one
may speak of one part being more sweet than another, is the rest which
full identification with Christ brings. I am no longer anxious about
anything . . . for He, I know, is able to carry out His will and His will
is mine. It makes no matter where He places me or how. That
is rather for Him to consider than for me; for the easiest positions He
must give me grace, and in the most difficult, His grace is sufficient.
So, if God place me in great perplexity, must He not give me much guidance;
in positions of great difficulty, much grace; in circumstances of great
pressure and trial, much strength? . . . As to work, mine was never so
plentiful, so responsible, or so difficult; but the weight and strain are
all gone. His resources are mine, for He is mine . . . All this
springs from the believer's oneness with Christ.
Though I be nothing, I accept
The uttermost Thou givest,
One life alone between us
now,
One life--the life Thou
livest.
--Lucy A. Bennett.
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