Interest or Identification?
The imperative need spiritually is to sign the death warrant
of the disposition of sin, to turn all emotional impressions and intellectual
beliefs into a moral verdict against the disposition of sin, viz., my claim to
my right to myself. Paul says - "I have been crucified with Christ";
he does not say - "I have determined to imitate Jesus Christ," or,
"I will endeavour to follow Him" - but - "I have been identified
with Him in His death." When I come to such a moral decision and act upon
it, then all that Christ wrought for me on the Cross is wrought in
me. The free committal of myself to God gives the Holy Spirit the chance to
impart to me the holiness of Jesus Christ.
". . . nevertheless I live. . . ." The
individuality remains, but the mainspring, the ruling disposition, is radically
altered. The same human body remains, but the old satanic right to myself is
destroyed.
"And the life which I now live in the flesh . . .
," not the life which I long to live and pray to live, but the life I now
live in my mortal flesh, the life which men can see, "I live by the faith
of the Son of God." This faith is not Paul's faith in Jesus Christ, but
the faith that the Son of God has imparted to him - "the faith of the
Son of God." It is no longer faith in faith, but faith which has
overleapt all conscious bounds, the identical faith of the Son of God.
"For if we have been planted together in the likeness
of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection."
Romans 6:5
Co-Resurrection. The proof that I have been through
crucifixion with Jesus is that I have a decided likeness to Him. The incoming
of the Spirit of Jesus into me readjusts my personal life to God. The
resurrection of Jesus has given Him authority to impart the life of God to me,
and my experimental life must be constructed on the basis of His life. I can
have the resurrection life of Jesus now, and it will show itself in holiness.
The idea all through the apostle Paul's writings is that
after the moral decision to be identified with Jesus in His death has been
made, the resurrection life of Jesus invades every bit of my human nature. It
takes omnipotence to live the life of the Son of God in mortal flesh. The Holy
Spirit cannot be located as a Guest in a house, He invades everything. When
once I decide that my "old man" (i.e., the heredity of sin) should be
identified with the death of Jesus, then the Holy Spirit invades me. He takes
charge of everything, my part is to walk in the light and to obey all that He
reveals. When I have made the moral decision about sin, it is easy to reckon
actually that I am dead unto sin, because I find the life of Jesus there all
the time. Just as there is only one stamp of humanity, so there is only one
stamp of holiness, the holiness of Jesus, and it is His holiness that is gifted
to me. God puts the holiness of His Son into me, and I belong to a new order
spiritually.