Oneness With God In His Method and In His Power (continued)
That was why God left Abraham so long before He gave him Isaac. If we had read from the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Romans we would have come to these words: "He (Abraham) considered his own body now as good as dead (he being 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 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 e 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 the 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.
Now, it is the privilege of every child of God to know the power of His resurrection in the body. We can know it at any time when we are experiencing something of death in our mortal bodies, whether it be sickness, weakness or weariness. There can be a fresh manifestation of His divine life, and what is true for our bodies is also true for our spirit. Oh, we may feel so down in spirit today! We may be suffering from very real spiritual depression and discouragement and may feel just spiritually dead. Have any of you ever felt like that? It is a common experience even of the children of God, but let us get to the Lord at that time and do what Paul told Timothy to do: "Lay hold on the life eternal" (1 Timothy 6:12). Now Timothy needed that in two ways. He needed it physically, for he suffered from stomach trouble - what Paul called "thine oft infirmities" (1 Timothy 5:23). Then Timothy needed it spiritually. He was a young man and was put into considerable spiritual responsibility for the church at Ephesus, and the old, wise people said: 'Well, you know, he is so young.' Paul said: "Let no man despise thy youth" (1 Timothy 4:12) ... "Lay hold on the life eternal." Timothy needed eternal life for body and spirit.
And what is true about our bodies and our spirits is very true in the work of the Lord. How often it seems that the work to which we are called just goes dead! Death invades the people and the work, and as we look at them we could say: 'Why, it is dying. It is just going into death.' Some of us who have been in the work of God for many years know much about that, but we have seen the work of God raised as from the dead again and again, and it would seem that God just allows these experiences of death in order to show the power of His resurrection. God would not have us accept death until He accepts it.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 21)
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