The Normal Christian Life (18 page)

“That is the one thing I cannot do,” I said.

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“I mean that one thing is certain,” I answered, “and that is that God is not going to answer your prayer.”

At that they said in amazement, “Do you mean to tell us we have gone so far that God is not willing to hear us when we ask Him to make us patient?”

“No, I do not mean quite that, but I would like to ask you if you have ever prayed in this respect. You have. But did God answer? No! Do you know why? Because you have no need of patience.”

Then the wife’s eyes flashed. “What are you saying?” she burst out. “We do not need patience, and yet we get irritated the whole day long! It doesn’t make sense. What do you mean?”

Quietly I replied, “It is not patience you have need of. It is Christ.”

And this is the truth. God will not give me humility, or patience, or holiness, or love as separate gifts of His grace. He is not a retailer dispensing grace to us in packets, measuring out some patience to the impatient, some love to the unloving, some meekness to the proud, in quantities that we take and work on as a kind of capital. He has given only
one gift to meet all our need: His Son Christ Jesus. As I look to Him to live out His life in me, He will be humble and patient and loving and everything else I need—in my stead. Remember the word in the first epistle of John: “God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life” (1 John 5:11–12). The life of God is not given us as a separate item; the life of God is given us in the Son. It is “eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). Our relationship to the Son is our relationship to the life.

It is a blessed thing to discover the difference between Christian graces and Christ—to know the difference between meekness and Christ, between patience and Christ, between love and Christ. Remember again what is said in First Corinthians 1:30: “Christ Jesus . . . was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” The common conception of sanctification is that every item of the life should be holy. But that is not holiness; it is the fruit of holiness.

Holiness is Christ. It is the Lord Jesus being made over to us to be that. So you can put in anything there: love, humility, power, self-control. Today there is a call for patience—He is our patience! Tomorrow the call may be for purity—He is our purity! He is the answer to every need. That is why Paul speaks of “the fruit of the Spirit” as one (Gal. 5:22) and not of “fruits” as separate items. God has given us His Holy Spirit, and when love is needed, the fruit of the Spirit is love; when joy is needed, the fruit of the Spirit is joy. It is always true. It does not matter what your personal deficiency, or whether it be a hundred and one different things, God has always one sufficient answer:
His Son Jesus Christ. He is the answer to every human need.

How can we know more of Christ in this way? Only by way of an increasing awareness of need. Some are afraid to discover deficiency in themselves, and so they never grow. Growth in grace is the only sense in which we can grow, and grace, we have said, is God doing something for us. We all have the same Christ dwelling within, but revelation of some new need will lead us spontaneously to trust Him to live out His life in us in that particular. Greater capacity means greater enjoyment of God’s supply. Another letting go, a fresh trusting in Christ, and another stretch of land is conquered. “Christ my life” is the secret of enlargement.

We have spoken of trying and trusting, and the difference between the two. Believe me, it is the difference between heaven and hell. It is not something just to be talked over as a satisfying thought; it is stark reality. “Lord, I cannot do it, therefore I will no longer try to do it.” This is the point most of us fall short of. “Lord, I cannot; therefore I will take my hands off; from now on I trust Thee for that.” We refuse to act; we depend on Him to do so, and then we enter fully and joyfully into the action He initiates. It is not passivity; it is a most active life, trusting the Lord like that—drawing life from Him, taking Him to be our very life, letting Him live His life in us as we go forth in His name.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:1–2,
KJV
).

It is in chapter 8 that Paul presents to us in detail the positive side of life in the Spirit. “There is therefore now no condemnation,” he begins, and this statement may at first seem out of place here. Surely condemnation was met by the blood, through which we found peace with God and salvation from wrath (Rom. 5:1, 9). But there are two kinds of condemnation, namely, that before God and that before myself (just as earlier we saw there are two kinds of peace), and the second may at times seem to us even more awful than the first. When I see that the blood of Christ has satisfied God, then I know my sins are forgiven, and there is for me no more condemnation before God. Yet I may still be knowing defeat, and the sense of inward condemnation on this account may be very real, as Romans 7 shows. But if I have learned to live by Christ as my life, then I have discovered the secret of victory, and, praise God, in the inward sense also, “there is therefore now no condemnation.” “The mind of the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6), and this becomes my experience as I learn to walk in the Spirit. With peace in my heart, I have no time to feel condemned, but only to praise Him who leads me on from one fresh victory to another.

But what lay behind my sense of condemnation? Was it not the experience of defeat and the sense of helplessness to do anything about it? Before I saw that Christ is my life, I labored under a constant sense of handicap. Limitation dogged my steps; I felt disabled at every turn; I was always crying out, “I cannot do this! I cannot do that!” Try as I would, I had to acknowledge that I “cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). But there is no “I cannot” in Christ. Now it is “I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13).

How can Paul be so daring? On what ground does he declare that he is now free from limitation and “can do all things”? Here is his answer: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2). Why is there no more condemnation? “For . . .” says Paul. There is a reason for it; there is something definite to account for it. And the reason is that a law called “the law of the Spirit of life” has proved stronger than another law called “the law of sin and of death.” What are these laws? How do they operate? And what is the difference between sin and the law of sin, and between death and the law of death?

First let us ask ourselves, What is a law? Strictly speaking, a law is a generalization examined until it is proved that there is no exception. We might define it more simply as something which happens over and over again. Each time the thing happens it happens in the same way.

We can illustrate this both from statutory and from natural law. For example, in Britain, if I drive a car on the right- hand side of the road, the traffic police will stop me. Why? Because it is against the law of the land. If you do it you will be stopped too. Why? For the same reason that I would be stopped: It is against the law, and the law makes no exceptions. It is something which happens repeatedly and unfailingly. Or again, we all know what is meant by gravity. If I drop my handkerchief in London, it falls to the ground. That is the effect of gravity. But the same is true if I drop it in New York or Hong Kong. No matter where I let it go, gravity operates, and it always produces the same results. Whenever the same conditions prevail, the same effects are seen. There is thus a “law” of gravity.

Now what of the law of sin and death? If someone passes an unkind remark about me, at once something goes wrong inside me. That is not law; that is sin. But if, when different people pass unkind remarks, the same “something” goes wrong inside, then I discern a law within—a law of sin. Like the law of gravity, it is something constant. It always works the same way. And so too with the law of death. Death, we have said, is weakness produced to its limit. Weakness is “I cannot.” Now if when I try to please God in this particular matter I find I cannot, and if when I try to please Him in that other thing I again find I cannot, then I discern a law at work. There is not only sin in me, but a law of sin; there is not only death in me, but a law of death.

Then again, not only is gravity a law in the sense that it is constant, admitting of no exception, but, unlike the rule of the road, it is a “natural” law and not the subject of discussion and decision, but of discovery. The law is there, and the handkerchief “naturally” drops of itself without any help from me. And the “law” discovered by the man in Romans 7:23 is just like that. It is a law of sin and of death, opposed to that which is good and crippling the man’s will to do good. He “naturally” sins according to the “law of sin” in his members. He wills to be different, but that law in him is relentless—and no human will can resist it.

So this brings me to the question: How can I be set free from the law of sin and death? I need deliverance from sin, and still more do I need deliverance from death, but most of all I need deliverance from the law of sin and of death. How can I be delivered from the constant repetition of weakness and failure? In order to answer this question, let us follow out our two illustrations further.

One of our great burdens in China used to be the
likin
tax, a law which none could escape, originating in the Ch’in Dynasty and operating right down to our own day. It was an inland tax on the transit of goods, applied throughout the empire and having numerous barriers for collection, and officers enjoying very large powers. The result was that the charge on goods passing through several provinces might become very heavy indeed. But a few years ago a second law came into operation which set aside the
likin
law. Can you imagine the feelings of relief in those who had suffered under the old law? Now there was no need to think or hope or pray; the new law was already there and had delivered us from the old law. No longer was there need to think beforehand what one would say if one met a
likin
officer tomorrow!

And as with the law of the land, so it is with natural law. How can the law of gravity be annulled? With regard to my handkerchief, that law is at work clearly enough, pulling it down, but I have only to place my hand under the handkerchief and it does not drop. Why? The law is still there. I do not deal with the law of gravity; in fact I cannot deal with the law of gravity. Then why does my handkerchief not fall to the ground? Because there is a power keeping it from doing so. The law is there, but another law superior to it is operating to overcome it, namely, the law of life. Gravity can do its utmost, but the handkerchief will not drop, because another law is working against the law of gravity to maintain it there. We have all seen the tree which was once a small seed fallen between the slabs of a paving, and which has grown until heavy stone blocks have been lifted by the power of the life within it. That is what we mean by the triumph of one law over another.

In just such a manner, God delivers us from one law by introducing another law. The law of sin and death is there all the time, but God has put another law into operation—the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus—and that law is strong enough to deliver us from the law of sin and death. It is, you see, a law of
life in Christ
—the resurrection life that in Him has met death in all its forms and triumphed over it (Eph. 1:19–20). The Lord Jesus dwells in our hearts in the person of His Holy Spirit; and if, committing ourselves to Him, we let Him have a clear way, we shall find His new law of life superseding that old law. We shall learn what it is to be kept, not by our own insufficient strength, but “by the power of God” (1 Pet. 1:5).

Let us seek to make this practical. We touched earlier on the matter of our will in relation to the things of God. Even older Christians do not realize how great a part willpower plays in their lives. That was part of Paul’s trouble in Romans 7. His will was good, but all his actions contradicted it. However much he made up his mind and set himself to please God, it led him only into worse darkness. “I would do good,” but “I am carnal, sold under sin.” That is the point. Like a car without gasoline, that has to be pushed and that comes to a standstill as soon as it is left alone, many Christians endeavor to drive themselves by willpower, and then think the Christian life a most exhausting and bitter one. Some even force themselves to do Christian things because others do them, while admitting they have no meaning to them. They force themselves to be what they are not, and it is worse than trying to make water run uphill. For after all,
the very highest point the will can reach is that of willingness (Matt. 26:41).

If we have to exert so much effort in our Christian living, it simply says that we are not really like that at all. We don’t need to force ourselves to speak our native language. In fact, we only have to exert willpower in order to do things we do not do naturally. We may do them for a time, but the law of sin and death wins in the end. We may be able to say, “To will is present with me, and I perform that which is good for two weeks,” but eventually we shall have to confess, “How to perform it I know not.” No, what I already am I do not long to be. If I “would” it is because I am not.

You ask, Why do men use willpower to try to please God? There may be two reasons. They may of course never have experienced the new birth, in which case they have no new life to draw upon; or they may have been born again and the life be there, but they have not learned to trust in that life. It is this lack of understanding that results in habitual failure and sinning, bringing them to the place where they almost cease to believe in the possibility of anything better.