OUR LIFE IN CHRIST ABOVE, AND OUR LIFE IN THE FLESH HERE
OUR LIFE IN CHRIST ABOVE, AND OUR LIFE IN THE FLESH HERE
All our circumstances are intended to call forth the grace we require, whether pleasing or painful. In Christ we live outside of them all, while the life that we live in the flesh we “live by the faith of the Son of God”. We often require more grace in pleasant circumstances than in painful ones, because we look for it less. In every circumstance we have to live by the faith of the Son of God. The real exercise is, how would He live in the very circumstance in which I am? This can only be found out as we are in communion with Him. I suppose in a spiritual sense we all pass through a winter as well as a summer. The winter is the dying away of the natural growth, though then there is also the real strengthening of the new, we pass through a testing time — “the trying of your faith”. As the outer man perisheth, the inner man is renewed day by day. The crossing over Jordan is a real thing. It is the realisation that I have died with Christ, and that in [p. 137] His life — the life of Him with whom I have died — I part company with all that is of man, and that it is a real relief to be apart from the first man. Though I am not to be burdened with its sin, I am never free from the burden of its infirmity; and the more we accept our place with Christ in life, the more the sense of infirmity or death will bear down upon us here.
I was speaking last night on John 14, the place in heaven and the power from heaven. Though we are not yet actually in our place, Christ’s death has set us free from the place and state of judgment, and has set us in the place and state of favour — His own place with God.
The defect of some is trying to kill the old man before they have learned what it is to be outside of oneself in His presence, and the more you are there, the more you will hail the cross where you are dead with Christ. Beholding the Lord’s glory you are assimilated to Him. ‘In this thy nature grow’ is true of you. There is no effort, there is simply a continuance, and thus you become a body of light. You are transformed into a state that you did not ask for or think of. The righteousness of the glory makes us at home in it.