"The Spirit-filled life is presented to us by many different teachers from many different angles, each of which in our view makes its own contribution to the building of the 'perfect man' in Christ. In our talks at our Headquarter [of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade: WEC] morning meetings we have also gradually come to see from God's Word and practical experience a special aspect of the subject which has brought light to some.
"We have started from the beginning in Genesis 1, and there have been impressed by a simple enough fact, that the original nature of man -- the human nature as we call it -- came from the hands of God and consists of His own attributes, for man is made in His image. Our physical organism is a marvel and a miracle, but the image of God was to be seen peculiarly in the endowments that go to frame self-conscious personality -- spirit and mind -- supremely spirit, for He Himself is spirit and it is in that throne room of the personality that 'spirit with Spirit can meet', and man can become a son of God; but also mind with its imagination and memory, the emotions which are the driving force of all life, the will which makes it master of its fate. Of this masterpiece of creation it is said, 'And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good'.
"When stated thus by itself, this is commonplace. But the crux of the matter comes in the attitude we Christians take to the human personality as a consequence of the fall. We use expressions of our own such as 'total depravity', or we quote Scriptural definitions such as 'dead in trespasses and sins'. But how dead? In what sense totally depraved? For the Scriptures also speak of unregenerate men 'who show the work of the law written in their hearts'; and that there is a light 'that lighteth every man that cometh into the world'; and that all men are 'His offspring' and 'in Him we live and move and have our being'. Does not the synthesis of these two sides of truth, and the general tenor of Scripture show us that there is only one source or upholder of life from eternity to eternity, and that all that has come from Him is perfect? Neither evil nor the devil were 'in the beginning'. Evil is a misuse of good. It appeared in history at an unknown date, when a being called the Lightbearer (Lucifer), 'the anointed cherub', took advantage of the endowment of free will (the highest endowment in the universe, for only such can be God's fellows), and led his host in revolt against the basic law of God's nature, self-giving love, to found a new kingdom grounded in its perversion, self-seeking love. Thus Lucifer, angel of light, became Satan, prince of darkness. Good became evil. The seraph became the devil.
"Adam also followed suit, but with a vastly important difference. The father of lies was the primal anti-God and anti-Christ. He rejected God and the principles of the heavenly kingdom, and substituted a rival kingdom based on the polar opposites, to the nature of God; evil for good, self-love for selflessness, force for meekness, war for peace. Likewise God rejected him, and he became evil personified, with no spark of his pristine purity remaining in him, incapable of repentance, fixed in iniquity.
"Adam on the other hand, in his fall was not a total God-rejector, a devil; but rather a world and flesh lover allured by their deceitful appeals, drawn away of his own lust and enticed. No sooner had he given consent than he was ashamed, feared and hid himself, sure evidence that all light had not died in him. And God came down, not to deliver him 'into chains of darkness', but to give him a promised seed which would one day fructify to his redemption. A vastly different judgment suited to a vastly different condition.
"Plainly there remained a capacity for God, a something -- call it what we may -- a seed, a light, a work of the law written in the heart, which is God-conscious, God-hungry, God-responsive. Do not all fishers of men sense it? The wistful acknowledgment that it must be wonderful to have a sure faith, the multitude of religions, the ready response to vital testimony in the most unlikely quarters, the search for God which neither flame nor sword nor tyrant's decree can quench? Wise soul-winners not only sense it, but give it central place in their method of approach. Jesus, the greatest of all, looked on fallen men as prodigal sons, far away but capable of return, most tender and true of all descriptions of fallen humanity. His objective with the fallen woman at the well was to quicken and rightly direct her existing sense of thirst. He said He came to call sinners to repentance, thus affirming the existence of a spiritual ear by which sinners can hear, a sense of hearing, which must consist of the same spiritual substance as the summons heard, for like can unite only with like, the eye and the thing seen are of the same substance, likewise the ear and the thing heard.
Beam with vision, eye with sun.
"The something of God in a sinner unites, if he consents, to the calling, saving voice of the Savior come to seek him, and from that union is born the Christ within.
"Then what happens? We are now coming to the point which interests us as God's children. Does the Scripture teach that a new divine nature from without is implanted in the redeemed child of God, as some separate endowment engrafted by some means in the believer? We think not. The Scripture speaks of a self, an ego, a nature, which was sin-bound, but now after passing through a death and resurrection in Christ, is sanctified and meet for the Master's use. Romans 7 says 'I am carnal, sold under sin'. Romans 6 says 'Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin and alive unto God in our Lord Jesus Christ'; and 'Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead'. Your members were once 'instruments of unrighteousness unto sin', but now 'your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost'.
"What then is the self and the members, which were the property of Satan but are now the holy habitation of God? The whole man, the self, the I, is the personality, the God-created mental, emotional, volitional life referred to previously. The members or body are, of course, the equally God-created physical organism. This is all now to be 'alive unto God'. In other words, we have not to fall into the error of regarding any created thing, not a single attribute of our nature, as bad in its origin ('I know and am persuaded of the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself'); but merely that it has been put to evil use. Satan originated nothing, but was merely the misdirector, misuser, usurper of a nature whose endowments and capacities were originally created to manifest the glory of God.
"Redemption, therefore, regains for God, through the cleansing blood and sanctifying Spirit, the full use of the human personality. 'Alive unto God' means that at last poor enslaved man becomes really alive, abundantly alive: not suppressed, not maimed, not dead nor numbed, but wholly liberated. Not a life of don't's, but of do's to the uttermost. 'In whose service is perfect freedom.' The fall had defiled and cramped and clamped down man's capacities to the narrow circle of his gross and corrupted self-interest. Salvation restores them to the endless developing stimulus of the creative Spirit of God, for co-operation with whom man had been originally endowed with God-like capacities for God-like and universal productiveness. It will take all eternity to manifest forth the potentialities of human personality in co-operative submission to the Spirit of God. The whole creation waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
"Away, then, with the false bondage and even resentment that cripples some through the mistaken idea that there are capacities of the physical, mental or emotional life of which we should be well rid, or with which it is a puzzle to know why we were ever endowed. Every capacity is God-given, but devil-infected and earth-bound, until rescued, redeemed, restored to express forth the glories and powers of the world to come. Psychologists have seen this in dim fashion, and emphasized it in their talk of sublimation; only that, with few exceptions, they can merely point to the ideal sublimation, but know not the 'master sentiment' of love to Christ by which alone it can be realized in entirety.
"A remaining matter of importance is the way by which this liberated, resurrected life in Christ can be ours in experience. Many different interpretations of Scripture are given on this point. Some emphasize that as the believer is born of the Spirit, so in logical sequence He will grow in the Spirit, so long as he recognizes the responsibility upon him to co-operate by faith and works. Others, using the type of the crossing of Jordan following upon the passage of the Red Sea (as expounded, for instance, in Hebrews 4), or such New Testament examples as Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit upon the believers of Samaria, teach the necessity of a second definite crisis of sanctification, and date the vigorous growth of the believer in the ways of God only as subsequent to this second work of grace. Some go even farther and teach that the filling of the Spirit, to be genuine, must be accompanied by outward signs, as in some instances in the book of the Acts. The great saints of past centuries used to speak of the way into the deeps of God as the via negativa, the highway of purgation, illumination and union through which all purified souls must pass to reach the full fruition of the Eternal Embrace.
"We can only give truth as we see it from the Scriptures, and on a thorny question such as this we must make it clear that it is only the personal viewpoint of the writer, for the W.E.C. [Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, of which Norman Grubb was General Secretary for many years] gives full latitude within its ranks for all variations of conviction on these lesser points. To us it seems clear that all Christian experience is dependent upon the sole condition 'according to your faith be it unto you', and that, beyond this no single method of realizing the Spirit-filled life is revealed. An outline of truth is given, especially in the basic epistle to the Romans, expounding the full implications of the process of Christ in His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension and return. Justification is there set forth (Romans 3), then Sanctification (Romans 6), then the Triumphing Life, the Guided Life, the Fruitful Life, the Empowered Life, the Sacrificial Life, and so on (Romans 8).
"It does not seem to us that the exact way of realization is delineated in the form of special crises, but rather that the table is spread, and then we are told that faith helps itself. But it does insist that the evidence of true life in God is that we do help ourselves and go from grace to grace and from strength to strength. We are justified; well, are we sanctified? Do we have a vital experience of Christ's death and resurrection inwrought in us as outlined in Romans 6, as well as merely appropriated by us in a vicarious and outward sense for sins forgiven? Are we only vaguely 'reckoning' ourselves as dead and risen with Him, with an underlying unbelief that it really is so? Or is it an actual inwrought experience?
"Being human, we can only receive infinite truth in finite doses, eternal indivisible realities in apparently divisible sections suited to our temporal outlook. Thus, for instance, most of us see our need of justification and then only later of sanctification. Actually, all has been given us eternally and completely in Christ; and this is the truth emphasized by those who stress gradual growth. But, because we are human and finite, for very many of us (but not necessarily for all), Christian experience is more like the scaling of a flight of steps than progress along a smooth road. As we see a new step of advance, we take it. After justification, it gradually dawns on us that we have an inward enemy, the flesh, to be dealt with, as well as the outward defilement of our gross sins which were blotted out on our first approach to Calvary. We find ourselves still in bondage to inward corruption, producing outward falls, and with a vastly greater self-consciousness than God-consciousness interfering with outward witness and inward peace. We cry with the apostle, 'I am carnal, sold under sin'.
"Actually we are not so from the Godward aspect, for we are sanctified once and for all in Christ, but faith has so far failed to possess all its possessions: we still live under a delusion through unbelief -- that we are carnal, when we are not carnal in Christ, and unbelief is as potent in its realm as faith, for it is merely a reversed form of faith, belief in the power of evil in place of belief in the power of God. Thus in actual experience we feel and see carnality, until unbelief is reversed and transmuted into bold acceptance and declaration of the established truth in Christ, that we are dead and that our life is hid with Him in God. This is for many of us a second experience; and again we stress that it must be the actual experience of all of us who would go on with God, whether we call it second or no.
"It has been, as said above, a further stage in the appropriation of faith, a fulfillment of the one law of the new life 'according to your faith be it unto you'. And, do not let us forget, faith begins by being a labor (Hebrews 4:11) or fight (1_Timothy 6:12), although it is consummated in a rest (Hebrews 4:3). That is to say, the first stage of faith is always the battle of taking hold by the will, heart and intelligence of some truth or promise which is not real to us in experience, and declaring it to be ours in spite of appearances. We do not appear to be dead unto sin and alive unto God. We are told to believe it, and so we dare to do so and declare so. A thousand times, maybe, faith will be assaulted and fall: unbelief will say 'nonsense', and we shall belie our declaration of faith; but the fight or labor of faith means that we deliberately return to the assault. Once again we believe and declare it. This we persist in doing. As we thus follow in the steps of those who 'by faith and patience' inherit the promises, a new divine thing will happen within us. The Spirit will co-operate with our faith (as He is invisibly doing all the time), and to faith will be added assurance: labor and fight will be replaced by rest. The consummation of faith has been reached. What was once an effort to attain or maintain, now becomes as natural as breathing. Such is the law of faith, whether exercised in sanctification, or in any of the later and higher reaches of Christian experience.
"To sum up, our God-given human nature is a dynamic potential, which can be directed, according to the aims of its chosen overlord, to good or evil. In the fall it has been 'sold under sin', but now in the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 'we' (our original selves) are bought back from the usurper, and bidden to reckon ourselves 'alive unto God' and to 'yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead'.
"The root of this release is found in the substitutionary death of Christ and our realization of our identification with Him in the Cross. This does not mean that some part of us is to die, but that we are to see ourselves in Christ as those who have passed through an experience of death so far as any further acknowledgment of the lordship of Satan and union with sin are concerned. Nothing in us ourselves has died. There is no such thing as the death of self or death to self. Rather God now reunites us to Himself for the purpose of expressing His own glory through our 'selves'. We have passed on beyond the Cross, out of the Tomb into the Resurrection. The emotions now express love for God and man, hatred of evil, jealousy for God's glory, pride (glory) in the Cross. The imagination and intuition are vibrant with a constant sight and sense of Him Whom having not seen we love, and with a vision of His love for the world. The will makes choices and declarations of faith. The body uses its capacities both in sounding forth His praise and sharing in the preaching of the Gospel to every creature. The same self, the same 'I', but now the willing servant and son of the Spirit.
"Thus, in a word, we have seen the way of the Spirit to be transmutation: the losing of nothing with which God has endowed us, but the transmuting of the whole self from a fleshly to a spiritual kingdom. This fact has meant to us a new and exhilarating freedom, a knowledge that in Christ we have come to full manhood and womanhood, with every endowment of the human nature 'holy unto the Lord'."
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