WE come – I need to admit – to what may seem to some as a rather strange reading in the chapter we are in titled “Complete in Him” continuing in our consideration in Principles of Spiritual Growth. We are such doers! From our youth we are told and encouraged “you can do it,” “just try,” “give it your best,” and “you can accomplish anything.” We take great joy in ourselves and in others who overcome great obstacles to achieve just about anything, from sports, to bringing home a good report card, to overcoming a physical disability; the list of prized human achievement is nearly endless. But there is one area where this “just do it” thinking can be a hindrance, and that is the reality of spiritual birth and our walk with God. Here we learn that we can’t do it, that sin has worked death in us to a complete disability that we “must be born again” (John 3), and it is not of ourselves to get out of the spiritual mess. In fact, there is simply no more effort involved or personal merit on our part then to “look unto the cross where Christ did it all on our behalf (Eph. 3:8&9 cp. John 3:14-15).
BUT, if we are blessed with the faith to get past this starting point, this being “born again” to the other side of the Cross, somehow this “just do it” attitude seems to return. Oh yes, we do have a part in our spiritual growth, being born again we are commanded to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 12:2). But the other half of that equation is still “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil 12:3). Here again we learn that we do not “just do it” alone, that the base principle remains the same, the principle that “by faith you have been saved” continues: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving” (Col. 2:6-7). This means that as we continue our walk, and often face an apparent impossible situation or challenge along the way, at the junction at every decision point and intersection we encounter, the “look of faith” always comes first; and sometimes that’s all we can or need to do. We must keep in mind that “the look of faith” is all we did to overcome the worse situation we would ever face, our cursed lost condition, without God, without hope, without eternal life when we stood on the other side of the cross. Considering that situation, our worse case scenario, Paul gives us the perspective that now “….if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life (Rom 5:10). That “saved by His life” is an on-going process, even to the end (Phil 1:6 and 1Thess 5:24).
ALL of this is being said to set up what our author is going to present here below, that “when you fight to get victory, then you have lost the battle at the very outset.” That is, if you fight it from the wrong starting point. Again, the operable phrase we are brought back to again and again is “Not I, but Christ” (Gal 2:20).
MAY God grant us the apprehension of this vital truth as we proceed on in our consideration—-
With highest regards in Christ,
Joe
Neh. 8:10, Isa. 30:15
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Chapter 6—Complete in Him – Part 3
“Christianity concentrates the whole fullness of revelation in the one human personality of Jesus Christ as Mediator—that is, as the mediating central principle of the new Divine organism, in its fullness of Spirit and Life, in and for the human personal life. As a personal principle, man is not only a being made of God, but a being begotten of God. And with the growing transformation of the individual into the life-type of Christ there is perfected the development of the personal life out of God, in God, and to God—the development not only of a moral, but a communion of Christ’s nature!”
A seed embodies in full the reproduction of the life from which it came. That much is complete and can never be added to. “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible” (I Pet. 1:23). “Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed” (Lev. 19:19). It is to be “not I, but Christ” (Gal. 2:20). The Seed has been implanted—now the entire question is one of growth and maturity. This alone will bring forth fruit that abides. “The development of the divine life in the Christian is like the natural growth in the vegetable world. We do not need to make any special effort, only place ourselves under the conditions favorable to such growth.”
Only those who have sought to grow by effort and failed are in the position to appreciate the fact that God is the aggressor in the realm of development. “All the powers of Deity which have already wrought together in the accomplishment of the first part of the eternal purpose, the revealing of the Father’s perfect likeness in the Man Christ Jesus, are equally engaged to accomplish the second part, and work that likeness in each of God’s children.”
William Law agrees: “A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the Source of all good, communicates Himself to the soul that longs to partake of Him.”
Not only is our life complete in Him but likewise the essential victory in all the many exigencies of that life. ….to be continued
