LIFE ABOVE AND DEATH HERE
LIFE ABOVE AND DEATH HERE
This is to you, I doubt not, the widow losing her only son. Saints cannot be persuaded that they must learn death here after they have learned life in Christ in heaven. They think it is enough to have known that they were dead by nature, and that through faith in Christ they are alive in Him; but they are slow to see and to accept that now alive in Him, they must practically find death in that out of which He has saved [p. 153] them. Being dead, we are quickened together with Christ; and in order to know the perfection of this new life, it is necessary that we should have no links to the life here - to feel what it is to go, as it were, to our own funeral. Either I die to everything, or everything dies to me. “We which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4: 11). I see that when souls begin to get on, and to apply their hearts to the word of God, as they progress, they are taught death on their own side, in proportion as they taste of life on Christ’s side.
I do hope, and it will be joy to my heart, to see you come out very brightly from this dark valley. Accept death in the valley but insist on it, at the same time, that life is yours on the hill. Say to yourself, ‘It is all death here, but it is all life outside in Christ’. This will make you to expect nothing here; but to expect, and receive too, everything in Christ. If everything is dead outside of Christ, and everything of life is only in Christ, then Christ is everything to the heart; and this is just the thing you have to learn, in this the saddest hour of your life; but the midnight is the hour for Him to shew Himself - the “fourth watch” - the depth of the night; He is beside you, and if you know what He is doing, you will find Him the living One in His own bright glory, where the waves of sorrow and the darkness of death have almost overwhelmed you. I long to see you bright. No one can be bright until he comes out of his own grave, as it were; and it is when we accept death fully, that we know fully the joy of resurrection.