Roy Hession's Testimony of the Exchanged Life

From Roy Hession's autobiograpy My Calvary Road:

"One morning God led me to the words, 'I have been crucified with Christ . . . it is no longer I that live but Christ that liveth in me' (Gal. 2:20). I saw that my trouble was 'I' trouble: I was an 'I' specialist. I also saw that God had done something about this. I was reading the verse in the Revised Version, where it is 'I have been crucified' rather than 'I am crucified' as in the King James Version. That seemed to suggest that Paul was not professing an experience of crucifixion so much as pointing back to an historic fact in which he was involved and on which he was counting.

"Then I understood: Roy Hession, the man whose center was self, had been judged and crucified with Christ nineteen hundred years before. I was therefore to see myself ended, not mended; and instead of struggling with self, I was to accept the sentence of death pronounced so many years ago and trust God progressively to carry out the execution. This meant for me the end of trying to live by my own efforts, which till then had been the basis of my Christian life. More important, I then saw that the Lord Jesus was the source of the new life that had to be lived, for the verse went on to say, 'it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.'

"I had been reading one or two books by Norman Grubb, in which he showed that faith was not asking for what you had not got, but making use of what you had; that if God said you had it, then you had to believe it and thank Him for it; and that if the promise was to be made good in experience, you had to add the word of faith and declare you had received it, quite apart from feelings. That morning I believed the Word of God, that for me 'self' was on the cross and Jesus on the throne, my throne which was now His; and I knew that I would need to add, sometime, somehow, the word of faith in regard to this new relationship into which I had entered.

"The opportunity came when I was taking the chair of the fellowship meeting for senior Crusaders. In opening that meeting I recounted my struggles with self and acknowledged the new relationship with Jesus which I had entered by faith. Immediately after, Ian Thomas rushed up to me with a shining face to tell me that the same thing had happened to him. He had been having the same struggles, and God had met him through a booklet called 'The Life that Wins' by Charles G. Trumbull, which emphasized that the resources of the Christian life are not prayer, Bible study, fellowship, worship, service, and so on, but just Jesus Christ Himself. Ian had seen it--there is only one life that wins, and that is Christ’s. It was not only that our lives were Christ’s, but much more important, Christ was now our life. We saw this as being filled with the Spirit.

"As I began to count on this in faith and praise God for it, so much of the striving that had characterized me fell away, and the Lord Jesus began to do through me things I had never seen Him do before. People began to be saved with an ease that astonished me, not through effort on my part, but simply as the result of faith in Christ.

"Ian and I were especially drawn together in this new vision. Soon the Lord dealt similarly with others of our group, filling us with His Holy Spirit, and there was quite a little revival among us. It was then that Alan Redpath, who worked as a chartered accountant with the Imperial Chemical Industries and lived in the same area, came across our path. The Lord taught him the same simple truth, and life became new for him. In the years since then, God has given him a mighty pastoral, evangelistic, and 'deeper life' ministry all over the world. But then he was but a babe in Christ; he had just returned to the Lord after years of backsliding and was giving his first faltering messages in a tiny mission hall in the district. None of us guessed--least of all himself--what God would make of him in coming days. We were simply a band of young men and women, all moving together and rejoicing over new discoveries of the riches of Christ.

"Ian Thomas, inspired by the example of Tom Rees, now felt guided by God to give up his medical studies and career to go out to do the work of an evangelist, without any financial resources save faith. He went like a flame of fire from place to place as doors opened for him. He seemed so young, yet had the most unusual ability to preach the Word, leaving everywhere a trail of salvation behind him. For him, as for us all, faith was the victory that overcame the world. I remember the times of prayer he and I spent together, when we prayed the most extraordinary prayers of faith, utterly confident that Jesus was on the throne and the devil on the run, and so we found it in experience. We were on tiptoe with expectancy, not knowing what God was going to do next, or what He would ask of us.

"Tom and Ian, then, were having great experiences in 'the high places of the field,' preaching the gospel in place after place, although they were still only in their early days. The reports of their campaigns and meetings in their periodical prayer letters always made my heart leap and my pulse beat faster. Then they began to say to me, 'You ought to leave the bank and be out with us, preaching the gospel.'

"'Don’t tempt me,' I said. 'There’s nothing I would love to do more; but I have prayed prayers for the boys of my Crusader class which have not yet been answered, and I must stay until they are.'

"'Well,' they said, 'we’ll pray you out.' God was soon to answer their prayers, but in a way none of us ever expected. It came about by a God of grace 'bailing me out' of a serious mess I got myself into."