dience for
that casting out of sinful self which makes our submission a
surrender joined with suffering, but He knew temptation. Flesh, and
sense, and the world, and the prince of this world, presented it to
Him; and therefore His obedience too was suffering, even though to do
the will of His Father was His meat and His drink, His sustenance and
His refreshment.

But then, let me remind you still further, that not only does the
life of Christ, as sinless in the midst of sinful men, and the life
of Christ, as sinless whilst yet there was temptation presented to
it--assume the aspect of being a life of suffering, and become, in
that respect, the model for us; but that also the Death of Christ,
besides its aspect as an atonement and sacrifice for sin, the power
by which transgression is put away and God's love flows out upon our
souls, has another power given to it in the teaching of the New
Testament. The Death of Christ is a type of the Christian's life,
which is to be one long, protracted, and daily dying to sin, to self,
to the world. The crucifixion of the old manhood is to be the life's
work of every Christian, through the power of faith in that Cross by
which 'the world is crucified unto Me, and I unto the world.' That
thought comes over and over again in all forms of earnest
presentation in the Apostle's teaching. Do not slur it over as if it
were a mere fanciful metaphor. It carries in its type a most solemn
reality. The truth is, that, if a Christian, you have a double life.
There is Christ, with His power, with His Spirit, giving you a nature
which is pure and sinless, incapable of transgression, like His
own. The new man, that which is born of God, sinneth not, cannot sin.
But side by side with it, working through it, working in it,
leavening it, indistinguishable from it to your consciousness, by
anything but this that the one works righteousness and the other
works transgression, there is the 'old man,' 'the flesh,' 'the old
Adam,' your own godless, independent, selfish, proud being. And the
one is to slay the other! Ah, let me tell you, these
words--crucifying, casting out the old man, plucking out the right
eye, maiming self of the right hand, mortifying the deeds of the
body--they are something very much deeper and more awful than
poetical symbols and metaphors. They teach us this, that there is no
growth without sore sorrow. Conflict, not progress, is the word that
defines man's path from darkness into