THE NEW MAN ENLARGED. FOUR STAGES

THE NEW MAN ENLARGED. FOUR STAGES

I believe that the new man in me is fostered and enlarged as I behold the Lord’s glory, that there is a divine state as well as a divine standing, and that the practice flows from the state. If you are in a natural state you will have a natural walk, or practice. You are either a Martha or a Mary. The former is natural, the latter is divinely acquired. The mind of Christ is mine, but this mind is only at home in His things. It has no scope in man’s things. The new man “is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3: 10). Therefore “Christ in you” is the highest state. Then His tastes and feelings form your ways. God looks upon the heart. The graft — the rose is cultivated by beholding His glory, and concurrently with this there is the death of the briar, always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus.

It is quite true that you must come from the scene of light and perfection, but it is only as you enter into death on your own side, not judicially but circumstantially, and find the Lord’s earthly footsteps beside you in it, that you can, as relieved by Him, pass to His side in death, and step with Him, or, in other words, suffer with Him.

^[p. 264] There are four stages — first, Jesus relieving you from impending fear in the widow’s house, as Elijah to the widow of Sarepta; secondly, power out of death, as the widow’s son raised up, or Jonah in the whale’s belly; thirdly the gourd gone, death not now on yourself (which is the second), but death on everything, leaving you no shelter but Jesus — a wondrous experience! And, lastly, you have fellowship with Him in His sufferings as a consequence.