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Battle For Life

You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Christ is your life. When He appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory. (Colossians 3:3,4 GW)

We are very often inclined to think that the Life of the Lord in us needs in some way to be improved, to be added to, when really what is required is that we should discover what we have, and, discovering it by experience, live according to it. This Life is not something apart from the Lord Jesus, and we can never think of His standing in need of some improvement, nor of the possibility of something being added to Him to make Him complete, or more complete. We would never think like that. And this Life is one with Himself. As the Apostle says, it is Christ who is our Life, and our need is to discover what Christ is in us, and to live accordingly. So in a very real sense it is a matter of the Life getting more of us, rather than of our getting more of the Life. That, at any rate, is the way of its working.

This, in the ordering of God, has to be done in a world where death still rules and works; for in this world the destruction of death has not yet been made manifest. Death, like the devil, goes on, although Calvary still remains full victory. We are left in this world, and it is in this world where death reigns and works as a great energy that we, by this sovereign ordering of God, have to come to prove the values of the Life which has been deposited in us, and to discover its potentialities. This is an experimental discovery. It therefore resolves itself into battle between that which is in this world and the Life which is in the believer. It is the battle for Life, not as to the forfeiture of that Life not as to whether death can take eternal Life away from us, for that is not the question at issue but as to the triumphant expression and the full manifestation of the power of that Life. That is the issue.

I know their sorrows.

A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. § Sympathize with our weaknesses.

He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses. § Jesus … being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled. Jesus wept. § For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted.

He looked down from the height of His sanctuary; from heaven the Lord viewed the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner, to release those appointed to death. § He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold. § When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then You knew my path.

He who touches you touches the apple of His eye. § In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the Angel of His Presence saved them.

Ex. 3:7;  Isa. 53:3;  Heb. 4:15;  Matt. 8:17   John 4:6,  John 11:33,  John 11:35;  Heb. 2:18;  Ps. 102:19,20;  Job 23:10;  Ps. 142:3;  Zech. 2:8;  Isa. 63:9

I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day.

The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made rich. § He who waters will also be watered.

My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. Do you not say, “There are still four months and then comes the harvest”? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. § The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. Now when he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. § Do business till I come. § I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

John 9:4;  Prov. 13:4; Prov. 11:25;  John 4:34:  John 4:35;  John 4:36;  Matt. 20:1,2;  2 Tim. 4:2;  Luke 19:13;  1 Cor. 15:10

Adamic Awareness

For ye have died (not changed)" (Col. 3:3).

Realization of what the first Adam is prepares us for the realization of who the Last Adam is.

"Many a justified one might describe his experience in words like this: I fully recognize, and rejoice in the fact, that I am righteous before God according to Christ risen; and this being so, nothing but Christ can be my standard of holiness or rule of life.

If I could only walk up to it I think I should be a perfectly happy man. But it is one failure after another; and when I think I have got on a bit, something turns up, and I find myself as bad as ever, and the thought of this damps all my spiritual joy.'

"In this stage of spiritual development there are continual discoveries of the old man which makes that old self more and more repulsive, and there is also the presentation of the Lord Jesus again and again in which the soul finds increasing delight. Growth! He must increase, but I must decrease.'

"This repulsion and attraction go on together until the soul accepts with God the reality of the incorrigible badness of the old man. This fact prepares one to see that the death of the Lord Jesus severed us from our old man, and that the Lord Jesus is now our Christian life. We are free, by the finished work of the Cross, from the domination of the man who is now so repugnant to us, and we discover with untold delight that the One who so attracted our hearts is our very life." -C.A.C.

"Fruit is not produced by making fruit an object, nor by thinking of fruit; it is the outcome of having the Lord Jesus as one's object, of thinking of Him. He is the one True Vine who precedes and produces fruit." -H.S.

"And your (new) life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3).

Promise of God - Perfect MAN Eternal SON (7)

False Illusions