Christianity Oasis Forum

[Netchaplain]

Our Father intends for each of us to have the gladness of knowing that we are in the favor and acceptance of the risen Lord Jesus. He would not give you anything less than this, and you could not desire anything more. The Lord Jesus would have the faith and affection of your heart turned from yourself to Him—from Adam to Christ. If you are disgusted with yourself*, you will be glad to know that you are entitled to give yourself up altogether, and enter upon the new* ground that the Lord Jesus is everything for you, and that you are in all His acceptance with the Father. But in order to do this, the work of the Cross must be known—you have to know that the first man, Adam, has been condemned* in crucifixion.

If the Father has let you down into the dark recesses of your being as a child of Adam, with His candle in your hand, to find that there is nothing there but sin, you cannot rest until you know that it has all been taken into account and dealt with to His perfect satisfaction. The Cross of the Lord Jesus shows you how the Father can provide for His own glory while taking into consideration everything that you are.

Divine justice could only pass upon you the sentence of utter condemnation. If that condemnation had fallen upon you in your own person, you would have been lost forever, but thank God it has fallen upon you in the person of Him who took your place upon the Cross. When He hung there, God saw you in Him, and when He died unto sin and was buried, you disappeared judicially as a child of Adam form God’s sight forever. “Our old man has been crucified with Him” (Rom 6:6). It is on the ground of this great judicial act that the believer is entitled to reckon himself dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus, and when he is brought to this by the Spirit he has deliverance from the reign of sin.

You might be very well up in the doctrine of deliverance, and yet all the time be secretly* attempting to correct and improve yourself*, and suffering a good deal of private vexation and disappointment on account of the failure of your endeavors. How long I struggled on in this way myself, praying and striving to be made more holy and Christ-like, and continually disappointed with the result. I do not think it ever occurred to me on those days that I was trying to improve the man God has crucified*. It was at a moment when I was utterly discouraged and ready to give up the whole thing in complete despair, that my Father showed me how I was attempting to work of the old material which He had condemned, and that my disgust and despair as to myself were only a feeble echo of His.

I shall never forget the joy of finding out that in the depths of my despair with myself I was thoroughly at one with my Father. He had ceased to look to any good in me, and had His Beloved Son before Him, the perfect, infinite and acceptable Object of His heart; and I, in my nothingness, had ceased to look for good in myself, and was tasting the deep joy of being in Christ, and free to have Him as my Object; while as to life here, I entered in some degree into the blessedness of knowing that it was “not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Struggle and effort in themselves will never secure blessing, but by leading to despair and complete self-disgust (Romans Seven) they serve a divine purpose in the experience of the struggling believer. I would rather see a saint in honest exercise, however legal he was, than see the light and careless acceptance of divine truth in the head without one atom of effect on the conscience or the heart. I do not think God gives us anything without preparing us for it by making us feel the need and the value of it. It is a divine principle that “He satisfieth the longing soul.”

- C A Coats


Daily devotional anthology by Miles J Stanford
http://www.abideabove.com/hungry-heart/


Poster’s opinions:
*Yourself: e.g. old nature
*New nature
*Adam has been condemned: referring primarily to his sinful nature, for the sinful nature which is in all is condemned (Rom 8:3), but not the believer himself in whom it dwells
*Secretly: e.g. not necessarily aware but unknowingly
*Improve yourself: old self, or “old man”; original sinful nature, which is the “flesh” in Gal 5:17
*The man God has crucified: “old man”; “flesh,” not the physical body but the sinful nature; Greek “sarx,” definition IV: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/Le ... 4561&t=KJV