FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM
FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM
The great importance of deliverance to every one of us will be admitted, since we cannot be for God here except as delivered; and deliverance has come to that end. God has taken in hand to set us free from all that to which we were in bondage, in order that we might be for Himself.
For a christian to attempt to practise righteousness, unless as set free from sin, is out of the question; you must have died to sin if you are to live to God. How is deliverance from sin and the world effected for the christian? The death of Christ is your title to die to sin and to the world. Our old man has been crucified with Him: that is your title to die to sin. And the [p. 314] world is crucified to the believer in the cross of Christ — that is your title to die to the world. If a christian is to travel that path, and to enter into the thought of God about him, he must be attracted by the grace of God and by what God presents.
‘Sin’, we are told, ‘is lawlessness’. The principle of sin is in the indisposition of man to be under restraint to God. If one is to be for God he must be set free from sin and the world, for if I am in bondage to sin and to the world, I am practically under the power of Satan, the enemy of God; and more than that, sin and the world are so totally opposed in nature and principle to God that I could not possibly be for God if I were not free from their power.
Christ “gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father”. It is a great thing to understand where the secret of deliverance lies — how you are practically set free from sin and the world in such a way as to live to God. It is a blessed thing to live to God, as dead to sin!
It is in the apprehension of Christ as the second Man that the soul is drawn away from all that is connected with sin, and from all that in which sin is operative. That is the leverage by which a soul is enabled to die to sin, that is, to reckon itself “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord”.
The question has to be raised in people’s souls whether they prefer Christ to Adam; the second Man to the first. If I prefer the second Man to the first, I am delighted to think that I can be in His life in the presence of God, entitled to account myself alive unto God in Him. Then comes in the other point, that if I am to be in His life I must part company with the first man, and in this everybody has to begin with himself.