It is Lot and Abraham, one of the flesh, the other of the spirit: of faith and not of faith. With God, these two things are fully and utterly separated in the death and resurrection - the Cross - of Christ, but with His people it is a long history of many applications of the principle through a crisis and a process, or a series of minor crisis.
Perhaps we have not been sufficiently aware that the New Testament in its teaching books or letters, as well as in its history, stands wholly related to these two aspects, a basic, all-inclusive crises, and a process marked by many particular applications of that content; progressive illumination and successive challenges. This is the explanation of the whole evangelical convention movement in the last fifty years and more. It is based upon the imperfect understanding of the fundamental implications of the Christian life. Therefore the two things implicit in true spiritual conventions are illumination and challenge, resolving into a further crisis.
These crises created by the conflict between the natural man and the spiritual man in us all are represented in the case of Abram by Lot, Egypt (Genesis 12:9-20), Abimelech (Genesis 20), Hagar (Genesis 16), all of which represent outcroppings of the natural man in his own wisdom, strength, effort and weakness. These will come up again in these studies, but they are recorded for our instruction in what has to be brought back to the initial transition. Abraham was called the Hebrew, and that means: the Man from Beyond, that is - beyond the river - Euphrates). A river lay between his old and his new realm.
The Christian has a river, like the Red Sea or the Jordan, which is a dividing line; and spiritually it declares what does and what does not belong to each side. According to Romans 6, that dividing line is the Cross of Christ, and baptism is there said to be the believer's spiritual acceptance of that great divide. The point is that the Cross goes with us throughout our lives and challenges the presence and action of everything belonging to the "beyond" as not to be tolerated here. This history of denying our selfhood is the pathway which brings us ever nearer the heart of God. Every fresh expression of Christ's victory over the world is a further step into the heart of God. As His "being made perfect through suffering" meant a progressive and final repudiation of the world and the self, so that He arrived at last in the heart of His Father, attested and declared "My Beloved Son", so every believer is called upon to make the same spiritual pilgrimage to the same most blessed destiny. It is the way of the continuous "Not I, but Christ", but this way of His Cross leads right on into God's heart, when and where He will say "My friend".
We may have come out for the Lord and may be working for Him, and yet here may be something of that self-life which is holding up our spiritual progress, something of our natural life which has come out with us. We are not willing to let it go. We argue for it and say: "There is no harm in it. Other good people do it", but that is not good enough for the Lord, and many Christian lives are under arrest for they are not just going on fully and freely with the Lord into all His purpose because there is something like Lot in the life.
We are here that the Lord may get a full, free way in every life. Let us say: "Search me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any way of grief in me" (Psalm 139:23, 24).
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 8 - "Oneness With God in the Heavenly Nature of Everything")
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