bandon
yourself to this Christ who lived that life of utter surrender to God that
He might prepare a new nature which He could impart to you and in which He
might make you like Himself. Then you will be in the path by which He can
lead you on to blessed experience and possession of what He can do for you.
Christ Jesus came into the world with a commandment from the Father that He
should lay down His life, and He lived with that one thought in His bosom
His whole life long. And the one thought that ought to be in the heart
of every believer is this: "I am in the death with Christ; absolutely,
unchangeably given up to wait upon God, that God may work out His purpose
and glory in me from moment to moment." Few attain the victory and the
enjoyment and the full experience at once. But this you can do: Take the
right attitude and as you look to Jesus and what He was, say: "Father, Thou
hast made me a partaker of the divine nature, a partaker of Christ. It
is in the life of Christ given up to Thee to the death, in His power and
indwelling, in His likeness, that I desire to live out my life before
Thee." Death is a solemn thing, an awful thing. In the Garden it cost
Christ great agony to die that death; and no wonder it is not easy to us.
But we willingly consent when we have learned the secret; in death alone
the life of God will come; in death there is blessedness unspeakable. It
was this made Paul so willing to bear the sentence of death in himself;
he knew the God who quickeneth the dead. The sentence of death is on
everything that is of nature. But are we willing to accept it, do we
cherish it? and are we not rather trying to escape the sentence or to
forget it? We do not believe fully that the sentence of death is on us.
Whatever is of nature must die. Ask God to make you willing to believe with
your heart that to die with Christ is the only way to live in Him. You ask,
"But must it then be dying every day?" Yes, beloved; Jesus lived every day
in the prospect of the cross, and we, in the power of His victorious life,
being made conformable to His death, must rejoice every day in going down
with Him into death. Take an illustration. Take an oak of some hundred
years' growth. How was that oak born? In a grave. The acorn was planted in
the ground, a grave was made for it that the acorn might die. It died and
disappeared; it cast roots downward, and it cast shoots upward, and now
that tree has been standing a hundred years. Wher