t we live is a death,
because it is lived in the 'lusts of the flesh,' doing the desires of
the flesh and of the mind. There is no real union with Jesus Christ, of
which the direct issue is not a living experience of the power of His
Resurrection in bringing us to the likeness of itself in regard to our
freedom from the bondage to sin, and to our presenting ourselves unto
God as alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of
righteousness unto God. It is a solemn thought which we all need to
press upon our consciences, that the only infallible sign that we have
been in any measure quickened together with Christ and raised up with
Him is that we have ceased to live in the lusts of our flesh, doing the
desires of the flesh and of the mind. The risen life of Jesus may
indefinitely increase, and will do so in the measure in which we
honestly make it our life's aim to know Him and the power of His
Resurrection.

III. The experience of the power of Christ's Resurrection is inseparable
from the fellowship of His sufferings.

We must not suppose that Paul's solemn and awful words here trench in
the smallest degree on the solitary unapproachableness of Christ's
death. He would have answered, as in fact he does answer, the appeal of
the prophetic sufferer, 'Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto
my sorrow' with the strongest negative. No other human lips have ever
tasted, or can ever taste, a cup of such bitterness as He drained for us
all, and no other human lips have ever been so exquisitely sensitive to
the bitterness which they have drunk. The identification of Himself with
a sinful world, the depth and closeness of His community of feeling with
all sorrow, the consciousness of the glory which He had left, and the
perpetual sense of the hostility into which He had come, set Christ's
sufferings by themselves as surely as the effects that flow from them
declare that they need no repetition, and cannot be degraded by any
parallel whilst the world lasts.

But yet His Death, like His Resurrection, is set forth in Scripture as
being a type and power of ours. We have to die to the world by the power
of the Cross. If we truly trust in His sacrifice there will operate
upon us motives which separate and detach us from our old selves and the
old world. A fundamental, ethical, and spiritual change is effected on
us through faith. We were dead in sin, we are dead to sin. We have to
blend the two thoughts of the Christi