ABIDE IN CHRIST AND NOT IN SELF Part 1
The wisdom of the fathers
ABIDE IN CHRIST AND NOT IN SELF Part 1
In me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing.' — Rom. 7. 18.
TO have life in Himself is the prerogative of God alone, and of the Son, to whom the Father has also given it. To seek life, not in itself, but in God, is the highest honour of the creature. To live in and to himself is the folly and guilt of sinful man; to live to God in Christ, the blessedness of the believer. To deny, to hate, to forsake, to lose his own life, such is the secret of the life of faith. 'I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me;' *Not I, but the grace of God which is with me:' this is the testimony of each one who has found out what it is to give up his own life, and to receive instead the blessed life of Christ within us. There is no path to true life, to abiding in Christ, than that which our Lord went before us — through death.
At the first commencement of the Christian life, but few see this. In the joy of pardon, they feel constrained to live for Christ, and trust with the help of God to be enabled to do so. They are as yet ignorant of the terrible enmity of the flesh against God, and its absolute refusal in the believer to be subject to the law of God. They know not yet that nothing but death, the absolute surrender to death of all that is ' of nature, will suffice if the life of God is to be manifested in them with power. But bitter experience of failure soon teaches them the insufficiency of what they have yet known of Christ's power to save, and deep heart-longings are awakened to know Him better. He lovingly points them to His cross. He tells them that as there, in the faith of His death as their substitute, they found their title to life, so there they shall enter into its fuller experience too.
He asks them if they are indeed willing to drink of the cup of which He drank — to be crucified and to die with Him. He teaches them that in Him they are indeed already crucified and dead — all unknowing, at conversion they became partakers of His death. But what they need now is to give a full and intelligent consent to what they received ere they understood it, by an act of their on choice to will to die with Christ.
(from "Abide in Christ" by Andrew Murray)