Norman Grubb's Testimony of the Exchanged Life

In his autobiography, Once Caught, No Escape, Norman Grubb recounts how the Lord Jesus brought him to the realization that He was his life:

"But God was using these tensions [on the mission field] for our own lasting benefit. A friend of Pauline’s [Norman Grubb's wife and C. T. Studd's youngest daughter], Dr. Isa Lumsden, was sending her a little paper called The Overcomer, published by Mrs. [Jessie] Penn Lewis, well known in England as a Bible teacher. But what she wrote about didn’t make sense to us. She was not speaking about Christ dying for us, but of our being crucified and dead with Him, and risen with Him. That was all new to us. At first it didn’t register much with us, except that we felt there was something there we hadn’t got hold of yet. But our need was great. We had heard others at Cambridge and other places speaking of knowing that you are filled with the Spirit, especially Barclay Buxton [missionary founder of the Japan Evangelistic Band], the father of Alfred [missionary pioneer with C. T. Studd], whom we undergraduates were fond of getting down to talk to us. Pauline and I knew that we had no such inner witness, and we desired it. We had one canoe journey to do for some days on the Aruwimi River, a tributary of the Congo, stopping at villages every now and then on the banks. I spent the intervening hours studying a commentary on Romans by an American, I think Stifler by name. Light began gradually to dawn on the meaning of this identification with Christ in His death and resurrection.

"Finally, we were out for a visit to a dear and zealous African brother, Bangbani. He was the only light in his chiefdom, and what a welcome he gave us to his little plantation, throwing his well-oiled arms around us so that we came out of the embrace looking like zebras. That night he gave us his best, his cook-shed, with a few banana leaves strung around for privacy, and our two camp-beds in it. The equipment we brought to the Congo and which was our house furniture was a canvas camp-bed each, with mosquito net, a canvas camp table and chair, enamel plates and cups, and cooking pots. That, besides our clothing, which for us men was just khaki shirts and shorts, with stockings or puttees week in and week out--very sensible and comfortable--was the main part of our living necessities.

"But when Bangbani left us we could not go to bed. The full moon was out and it was all quiet in the banana plantation except for the usual chorus of insects, with the moon shining between the great banana leaves. So we took the two little camp chairs and sat outside in the moonlight. There is not much trouble with mosquitoes in that area. We had decided together that we would wrestle this thing out with God, and specifically claim then and there that we should be filled with the Spirit. It was only later that we got our theology more in line--to discover that He in His fullness had always been there--His Spirit joined to ours, since we had been born again: and that what we needed was not a filling from outside, but a witness borne to the existing living relationship. We took Galatians 2:20 to be the fact by faith: 'I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me' and we went to our camp beds around 4 a.m., having accepted the matter as settled by faith. We awoke no different; but I took a postcard and drew a tombstone on it, and wrote 'Here lieth Norman Grubb buried with Jesus”. Probably we all have to get settled on the reality of this death experience before the resurrection can be uppermost in our consciousness. At least that was the period I was in.

"Nothing further happened to me in relation to this for a couple of years. For Pauline, it was different, and she tells how a few days afterwards, when sleeping alone in a native hut, the hut was filled with a consciousness of His presence and a voice confirming to her that their union relationship was fixed for ever.

"Two years later I was at home and visiting this same Mrs. Penn Lewis whose little magazine had first awakened our interest. I had gone to her to talk over our perennial problem of tensions on the field, but I think she must have observed that beneath this I had my own need, for instead of talking about the problem she told me what happened when she had been 'baptized with the Holy Ghost', as she called it, and the power of God had come on a group of young people she talked with that night. As she talked, it was like a great light lit within me, bringing the inner awareness which has never left me since, of Christ living in me; and living in such a sense that it was not I really doing the living, but He in me, in His Norman form. The Scripture against which I had written my name and date that next morning in Bangbani’s village had become permanently alive to me--this great Galatians 2:20.

"There was a great deal I had not yet got into focus; those clarifications had to follow later; but one tremendous fact had become fact to me, and the passing years and deepening understandings have only underlined it as the fact of facts--that the secret of the universe, and the key to my own life, is simply the Person Himself in me; as Paul had put it, 'The mystery hid from ages and generations but now made manifest to His saints . . . which is Christ in you.'

"I had been drawn to and sought an answer before in 'holiness teaching', especially through Barclay Buxton at Cambridge, and from him and others I had caught it that there is an inner fixation, a settling in by which we can know that we are not only born of the Spirit but filled with the Spirit, and which I knew I did not have. But I had some mistaken ideas. I had thought that I myself as a human would be made holy, and thus not respond as before to irritability, lust, pride and so forth; that an actual change would take place in me. I had tried this way, taken it by faith that this 'entire sanctification' had become fact in me; but it had not worked. These same things continued to make their appearance in me. But now I was seeing something different. My humanity did not change.

"I had to learn later that it is not meant to change, because every potential of my human nature is there to be an agency by which Christ can reveal Himself. Sin is not my various faculties or appetites, but shows itself in the misuse of them, when they are stimulated by temptation into action in a wrong direction, and I wrongfully struggle, as in Romans 7, to overcome what independent self can never overcome. It is the independent self which is the sin principle, for independent self is and can only be self-loving, therefore I am helpless in myself to resist the stimulation. But, another Self, God Himself--Father, Son and Spirit--has now so become the centre of my being that I am merely the vessel containing Him. Now, knowing this, my attention is no longer centred on myself, the vessel, and fighting against my fears or depressions or what not and expecting change in myself, and disappointed and condemned when it doesn’t happen. No, I accept myself. The vessel doesn’t change, but it contains Him, Christ living in me, joined to me, Spirit with spirit.

"It is the same idea as when a room is dark. We don’t centre our attention on the darkness. The darkness is not wrong, unless it is misused; we accept it but don’t struggle against it; we just replace it! We look for the switch and turn on its opposite--the light. And when the light is on, where is the darkness? It is swallowed up. It is there in the sense that it appears immediately again when the light is off, yet it is not there to my consciousness with the light on. So now this awareness of Christ in me is the permanent switching on of the light, and the permanency is the importance. I now live in a new consciousness. At any time I am temporarily conscious of temptation which can lead to sin, but that does not mean that He who is the light has gone from my inner centre. He is the permanency; and the appearance of Him being not there, and of me being in the dark is an illusion. I have been tricked into moving back from eternal reality to temporary appearance. The change is in my consciousness, not in the fact.

"So I learn to live by the repetition of recognition, which is the practice and habit of faith. He in me is the all, the joy, power, wisdom, victory--all. I transfer my attention, my recognition, my affirmation from the human vessel to Him whom it contains: and that is switching on the light; and the light swallows up the darkness; yet the darkness was needful to give manifestation to the light. And when I do fall into a sin, which I do, the forgiveness for all sins was pronounced from Calvary two thousand years ago, therefore the forgiveness was there before the sin, and I can boldly appropriate that.

"So this had become the central fact of our lives--Pauline’s and mine--which has to become so in every life--call it by what name we like--the Second Blessing, Entire Sanctification, the Baptism of the Spirit, the Fullness of the Spirit, the Second Rest, the Exchanged Life. We can only live by what becomes part of us, not by something imposed from without and clung to by us. In the new birth, Christ has become real and personal to us as a Saviour, the Spirit has borne inner witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. So again in this second realization, Christ has become known to us, not merely as the Saviour from our sins but also as the One who is living our lives. Then it was His righteousness in place of my sins; now it is His Self in place of myself. This actually took place at the new birth, but, for nearly all of us, we cannot yet see deeply enough into the roots of our problems, which is our self-reliant selves, to be conditioned to see Him as the Divine Self living His life through our human selves. We have to go through our 'wilderness' experience, all of us, redeemed but still regarding Him as separate from us; and we seeking to live the new standards of Christian living as best we can, but with constant failures, self-disgust, strains and stresses we cannot handle. We had a first collapse when we recognized our guilt as lost sinners and came to Him for salvation. We have a second collapse when, now redeemed, we discover our helplessness. First we had learned we had not done what we should. Now we learn that we cannot do what we should. And so, as after the first collapse, we were conditioned to see and affirm His blood replacing our sins; now, after the second collapse, we are conditioned to see and affirm Himself replacing ourselves.

"And the way into the full realization is always the same, the only way of faith, just as Pauline and I found, when in faith without feeling we took our stand that night that Christ does live in us; the same as years before as a young fellow I had taken it by faith that my sins were no longer there, because He had borne them for me. Faith, always faith alone. But the process of faith is that if I take a thing, it takes me, and I know it has taken me. If I eat food, it takes me over and I know it afterwards. So when I take Jesus by faith, I become conscious that He has taken me. Faith has never become a completed faith until there has been this reflex effect; for 'faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen'. In this way in my case two years later, and in Pauline’s only two weeks later, our act of faith had its inner confirmation.

"I think that is why these days so many have found confirmation for their act of faith in the experience of speaking with tongues. It was evidently the confirmation given at Pentecost, also with Paul, and if it was the common experience in the Corinthian church it was likely to have been so in the churches of that day. Confirmation that He does live in us in His fullness, as I say, is the inevitable outcome of faith. When the confirmation has come by the experience of tongues, I thank God for those to whom He has confirmed Himself that way.

"I also recognize that for many of these the experience is so satisfying, releasing and indeed overwhelming, that in their enthusiasm it is easy for them to take it for granted that none have the fullness of God who have not spoken in tongues; and some can be embarrassingly insistent on this and proselytizing to the point that it causes division. But there is no Scripture authority for such an insistence. We all would like others to share in the good things we have, and that is natural; but to insist on tongues as the necessary evidence of the fullness of the Spirit goes beyond the teachings of Paul and the others, and is an error.

"I am one who naturally responds to anything which appeals to me as emotionally satisfying or heart-enlarging or personality liberating, and I have often felt that my friends who have the tongues-gift have much I could benefit by. I admire and thank God for them, and I have at times gone to God about it. But to me the answer comes clear that it would be a step back, not forward, to seek a manifestation when I have the Manifestor. Having been made certain that He with all His gifts is the total Vine of which I am a local branch­expression, my calling is to be myself expressing the Vine­life, Him Himself, just in the ways in which He spontaneously expresses Himself by me. The All cannot be limited to one form of expression, even as Paul and Peter make plain when they list some, and I believe only some, in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and 1 Peter 4, of the varied gifts of the Spirit.

"So I congratulate all who have manifest gifts I have not, but I must not for myself be diverted from my simple abiding as branch in the Vine, and the fruit is the business of the Vine. It may well be that a gift of the Spirit, such as tongues, is experienced as an additional release of the Spirit in a Spirit-filled life. This is something to be thankful for, so long as, through immaturity, it is not wrongly confused with being a necessary evidence of being a Spirit-filled person.

"But I do see one thing. I am sure there are many redeemed people who, as I was, have not moved into the fixed and final act of faith that Galatians 2:20 is the fact in their lives, or in whatever way they may verbalize to themselves their inner eternal union with God, and He the One living their lives. Or, if they have, it does not seem real to them, and they doubt whether they really have. But having once taken the step, the fact is the fact without any inner consciousness of it. Even the desire for an inner witness we have to die to, for it is a final form of self which wants to have for itself. I know. I want to know. And that very desire to know is the final form of unbelief, because it means 'I am not really sure and need to know.' So faith needs to take its stand on fact, and not even by inner witness: 'If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there.'

"Yet it is the changeless law of faith that what we take takes us; so when we no longer finally hang the validity of our faith on the need of knowing, by some means we shall become inwardly and fixedly aware of the Union. When we no longer seek the awareness (the witness), we shall have it, because then we are safe from immediately turning it into a final form of self-exaltation: 'Now I know.' After we have ceased to seek the awareness, we shall have the awareness.

"To both Pauline and me this experience stands out in our lives as next in importance to when we found Christ. We have never been able to shrug this off, as I often hear people do when some mention is made of 'the second blessing', by adding that it is only one of ten thousand blessings. No, to us, it was and is 'the second blessing', if we call our new birth 'the first blessing'; and the two stand by themselves as mountain-tops in our life’s experiences."