However while His hand of sympathy is extend in His Words and His Love such a approach [based upon our own need and feelings] loses sight of the paramount value of scripture. Which is that of bringing to heart and mind the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a personal life source; we bound up in glory before the father in a new creation supplied by His Grace, in Him, in His realm, by faith. Knowing Him as our identification in biblical knowledge as the heavenly Church, we seen in Him where He is. "Unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" Eph. 4:13. We fail to see this because we often read and hear the Word in relation to our needs and ourselves. It must be ever kept in mind that our personal perceptions color all of our questions; but few question their world view or hermeneutic [science of biblical interpretation] let alone think it might need to change to accommodate a different or new view of their Christian nature.
Our own will energy and personal gratification are the great thing in the world, and many saints believe that what is effective in the world can be effective in the things of God. This approach from our own self centeredness requires great strength and hard work. But God has said we are to remain weak even suffer, as summed up when He said through Paul in 2 Cor. 12:9, " My Grace is sufficient for in your weakness He will be made strong". Paul was our example and he said so in a very direct command from the Father. "We ourselves had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not have trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead 2 Cor.1:9
There can be no true and intelligent rejection of the self-life without prior preparation by the Holy Spirit and this takes years of processing after the initial revelation of Christ Jesus. We simply cannot arrive in His sphere of spiritual life without self abnegation first. Paul in Romans 6 and 7 and many other places showed us this, by his doctrinarian teachings on the Christian life and self. "Most gladly therefore will I boast [count it a good thing] of my infirmities in order that Christ's power may overshadow me" 2 Cor. 12:9.
We ever in support of self linger over our losses even hold them near. By that process we learn to identify our internal being in the feelings they evoke. But we must rise out of that valley and bury our dead out of sight.; it is a great day when that comes, for then can we be of real value to others. Now we may be under the evolving mantel of God's personal identity and not our own; as new heavenly creatures just as His Word declares. "Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead" Rom. 6:13 And via our former sufferings we may now have a godly empathy toward others. Thus honoring God in a realization of a new life just as He did, one out of death. Our old man and his old thoughts as to what we are in nature as having value will finely be declared dead. "Having died to that wherein we were held" Rom. 7:6.
We in our acknowledged loss of self [ by faith in His Word] now will be adopting His very identity in heart and action, even sacrificing all the we have perceived ourselves to be in nature and the world to know Him. We find this new life by faith only; evoking a heart that trusts, it is the only way we may experience His true inner joy and His Life. We were in His new creation designed for this life of grace. No longer serving the world we are now searching within ourselves His very identity through a love affair He has offered in His new Grace. After all by His very Words we are betrothed to be His Bride. What a blessed identity! "Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready" Rev. 19:7.
"Sinners are not saved until they trust the Savior, and saints are not delivered until they trust the Deliverer". Our tendencies is to focus in on our failures and insufficiencies. This is because we have failed to recognize that our Lord has come into the world not only to pay the price of our worldly sin nature but to give us the true apprehension of its death; He paid the price on the Cross. But by His Spirit He is now regenerating us by the instilling of a renewed [by knowledge of His Word] mind that we may ally ourselves with a new creation under Grace, even Him; His very person and life. The old man is held in a place of death by the same faithful means. According to His divine power He has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness 2 Pet. 1:3.
The defect in our souls is generally the incompleteness of our converted new nature to produce life from a resting faith. We simply become satisfied and accept what is before us in the world, never shedding its control, making providence our guide and not faith. We make our Christian institutions to copy the worldly system so that we may be comfortable in what we have allowed ourselves to remain too be in the world. By this attitude we are agreeing with our sinful condition and desires and dishonoring the Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. We do not believe and are not taught that what Paul said of himself is God's truth toward our present new creation being. "I have been crucified with Christ, and I myself no longer live" Gal. 2:20. But just what does that mean to us as direction toward a new revelation of the Christian life?
The Word is of course paramount in the conversion of our souls to His new way of life. But simply knowing it does not make it so. No we must have a new day brought by a great loss. That of our very selves . "Being justified [through the death of the old man] freely by His Grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" Rom. 3:24. The beginning of this new freedom offered us by God is the realization that we are not the possessing entity. As all that we are to the Father is objectified in His Son. When we know this by trusting His Word and not thinking our own thoughts but His, in effect we are giving ouselves to His Mind and a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. This is the "Law of the Spirit of life found in Christ Jesus". With His mind directing our souls conscience we are thinking His thoughts as to our being, made alive in us by the Holy Spirit, and not ourselves. Why would we want to live any other way?
