Holy in Christ: Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is HolyMurray, Andrew
Religion
Holy in Christ: Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy
Murray, Andrew
Holiness
The answer will be found in the right apprehension of the life of
faith. Faith lifts above, and gives possession of, what is the very
opposite of what we feel or experience. In the Christian life there is
always a paradox: what appear irreconcilable opposites are found side by
side at the same moment. Paul expresses it in the words, 'As dying, and,
behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making
many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.' And elsewhere
thus, '_When_ I am weak, _then_ am I strong.' The apparent contradiction
has its reconciliation, not only in the union of the two lives, the
human and the Divine, in the person of each believer, but specially in
our being, at one and the same moment, partakers of the death and the
resurrection of Christ. Christ's death was one of pain and suffering, a
real and terrible death, a rending asunder of the bonds that united soul
and body, spirit and flesh. The power of that death works in us: we must
let it work mightily if we are to live holy; for in that death He
sanctified Himself, that we ourselves might be sanctified in truth. Our
holiness is, like His, in the death to our own will, and to all our own
life. But--this we must seek to grasp--we do not approach death from the
side from which Christ met it, as an enemy to be conquered, as a
suffering to be borne, before the new life can be entered on. No, the
believer who knows what Christ is as the Risen One, approaches death,
the crucifixion of self and the flesh and the world, from the
resurrection side, the place of victory, in the power of the Living
Christ. When we were baptized into Christ, we were baptized into His
death and resurrection as ours; and Christ Himself, the Risen Living
Lord, leads us triumphantly into the experience of the power of His
death. And so, to the believer who truly lives by faith, and seeks not
in his own strugglings to crucify and mortify the flesh, but knows the
living Lord, the deep resurrection joy never for a moment forsakes Him,
but is his strength for what may appear to others to be only painful
sacrifice and cross-bearing. He says with Paul, 'I glory in the cross
through which I have been crucified.' He never, as so many do, asks
Paul's question, 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?'
without sounding the joyful and triumphant answer as a present
experience, 'I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.' 'Thanks be to
God, which always leadeth us in triumph in Christ.' It is the joy of a
Present Saviour, of the experience of a perfect salvation, the joy of a
resurrection life, which alone gives the power to enter deeply and fully
into the death that Christ died, and yield our will and our life to be
wholly sanctified to God. In the joy of that life, from which the power
of the death is never absent, it is possible to say with the Apostle
each moment, 'As dying, and, behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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