LIVING TO AND FOR GOD
Romans 5: 12; 6: 2, 10-12; 8: 3, 4; 12: 1, 2
It is our privilege as believers to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God; and it is our responsibility to serve God. I look at Christ to see what it is to live to God. I do not look at myself.
Christ is dead to sin and living to God; and it is our privilege to live to God now, in Him; that is, having God as our object, all our thoughts centred in God. Naturally, we are all self-centred; but if we are God-centred, we live to God. Thus God reigns in our hearts. If so, God is the object of our life.
I delight to be a bond-slave to God! If I am living to God, and my life is devoted to God, well then, I am recovered for God. Nothing short of this is the object of the gospel. Two things characterise this world. The first is that sin reigns, and the second is that death reigns. God did not make man to die, He made man to live. By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin: therefore death is the penalty of sin. Satan not only reigns in this world today, but death reigns, and sin reigns too. In contrast to death reigning, we see in Christ one in whom sin and death did not reign. He was the one man exempt from the reign of sin and death. Sin and death came in by Adam the first man, but righteousness and life by the coming into this world of Christ. Grace not only met the effect of sin, but overabounded, so that the believer will reign in life. There is the free gift of righteousness. The believer can say, Christ is my righteousness; and instead of sin reigning in us, we shall reign in life. When Christ comes we shall reign with Him in life and righteousness.
I inherited sin and death from Adam. The first man brought in sin, but another Man, the last Adam, brought in life. How did you and I become sinners? Because we were born in sin and thus constituted sinners. We sinned because we were sinners by nature; every one of us. Christ was marked as the righteous One because He became obedient unto death. When we are living in the life of the last Adam, we are not living in the life of the first Adam. Where sin abounded, grace overabounded. If sin reigns unto death, grace reigns unto eternal life. What is grace? Why is it so difficult to understand? Because there is nothing of it in us naturally, it is entirely of God. I believe God delights in grace more than in anything else, because it is the activity of His very nature, Eph 2: 7.
In another day there will be universal “praising” instead of universal “groaning”, because Christ will bring in a reign of life. In the world to come, sin and death will no longer reign. It is in Christ I live to God. This is chapter 6. God has taken me up in Christ.
If I live to God, I live in the life of Christ; but before this, I have to learn what sin and death are in me. God lets you feel what the reign of sin is and you look to the One that God has raised up.
How do souls come into deliverance? The only way is by appropriating the Deliverer. God has raised up Christ as our Deliverer, and you look to Him, and that is where relief comes in, and He can maintain you all along the way. Being indwelt by the Holy Spirit gives you two things—
Romans 8 shows us what we have in the Holy Ghost. The Spirit given is the Spirit of life. God’s intention is that the Spirit should be a law to us, a governing power in us, in contrast to the law of sin and death. The Spirit in me becomes the power of life in me. This is the life that is in Christ Jesus. He lives, and we live in Him.
Life is always enjoyment and happiness. The Spirit in us should be the power of practical righteousness.
It is a great thing to walk after the Spirit and yield ourselves to the Spirit. God has given us a power in the Spirit to meet every liability. If we are in the good of this, then we can take up the language of chapter 12.
Being here for the will of God is the one path of happiness for us; so that we live to God: and we are here for the pleasure of God. Firstly, we live to God, and secondly, we live for God, and in this way God looks down upon us with pleasure and delight.
Swindon
2nd May 1922
From Mutual Comfort vol 15 (1922)