By T. Austin-Sparks from: The Battle
For Life
You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Christ is
your life. When He appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory.
(Colossians 3:3,4)
We are very often inclined to think that the Life of the Lord in
us needs in some way to be improved, to be added to, when really what is
required is that we should discover what we have, and, discovering it by
experience, live according to it. This Life is not something apart from the
Lord Jesus, and we can never think of His standing in need of some improvement,
nor of the possibility of something being added to Him to make Him complete, or
more complete. We would never think like that. And this Life is one with
Himself. As the Apostle says, it is Christ who is our Life, and our need is to
discover what Christ is in us, and to live accordingly. So in a very real sense
it is a matter of the Life getting more of us, rather than of our getting more
of the Life. That, at any rate, is the way of its working.
This, in the ordering of God, has to be done in a world where
death still rules and works; for in this world the destruction of death has not
yet been made manifest. Death, like the devil, goes on, although Calvary still
remains full victory. We are left in this world, and it is in this world where
death reigns and works as a great energy that we, by this sovereign ordering of
God, have to come to prove the values of the Life which has been deposited in
us, and to discover its potentialities. This is an experimental discovery. It
therefore resolves itself into battle between that which is in this world and
the Life which is in the believer. It is the battle for Life, not as to the
forfeiture of that Life – not as to whether death can take eternal Life away
from us, for that is not the question at issue – but as to the triumphant
expression and the full manifestation of the power of that Life. That is the
issue.
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