Let us take Abraham and Isaac as an illustration.
Abraham bound Isaac, his son, and laid him on the altar, and then he raised the knife to plunge it into Isaac. At the moment that Abraham raised the knife Isaac was dead, and the moment that the angel of the Lord got hold of Abraham's hand Isaac was alive. It was as precise as that.
I do not know why it is that the Lord is compelling me to speak so much about the beginning of the Christian
life. It is not what I had thought of originally, but, against my own premeditation , I was compelled to communicate this. It may put a big strain upon the patience of the older Christians, but we must take nothing for granted. We must not take it for granted that everyone really understands the nature of the new birth, so we repeat, the true beginning of a true Christian life is nothing other than a resurrection from the dead. It is the receiving of a life which is called resurrection life.
The next thing is that resurrection is God's unique act. Resuscitation of not resurrection. Wonderful things are being done in our time. We hear of people whose hearts stop beating, and then by some artificial means they are started again. People are calling that "bringing them back to life from the dead". Then there are people who are drowned. After some artificial application there is given what has come to be called "the kiss of life," which means that someone breathes into their mouth and inflates their lungs again, and they come back to consciousness. Men are calling that "raising from the dead." But is it that? Let them stay in their condition for four days. Let the blood run cold, and then, after four days, try artificial respiration. Well, you can work at it forever and they will not come back to life. Lazarus was dead and in the grave for four days, and Jesus refused to go near him during that time, so that no one would be able to say: "It was resuscitation." It had to be resurrection.
That was why God left Abraham so long before He gave him Isaac. If we had read from the fourth chapter of Romans we would have come to these words: "He (Abraham) considered his own body now as good as dead (he being about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah's womb" (Romans 4:19). God made the promise to Abraham that he would have a son, and then He went away and left him for years, until it was absolutely impossible for him to have a son naturally. What was God doing? He was demonstrating that this was not going to be a resuscitation but resurrection, that is, life out of death.
What we are saying is that resurrection is God's act, and not man's act. It is something which only God can do, and if the beginning of the Christian life is a resurrection, then only God can do it. It is absolutely hopeless for anyone to try to be a child of God without His help. If this is true - and it is true! - how foolish for anyone to say: "Well, I will become a Christian tomorrow", or "Later on in my life I will consider this matter." If God comes to us at any time and offers us this life, it is not in our power to say: "Not today, but some other day." We cannot fix times for God.
We must leave that there now and go on.
We pass from this crisis and the act to the process, because spiritual resurrection is not only a crisis at the beginning, but something which is carried on throughout the whole of the Christian life.The apostle Paul put it in this way: "Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body" (2 Corinthians 4:10). That word "always" spreads itself over the whole life of the Christian. After the one fundamental crisis there are many more crises on this matter. You notice that the apostle said "Always ... in the body the dying", so that the life of Jesus is operating over against something that is always in the body.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 19)
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