You
diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess
eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to
come to Me to have life. John 5:39-40
The value of everything is its livingness. The value of the
Scriptures is not that we know our Bibles and can handle our Bibles and can
give addresses, wonderful addresses, from our Bibles, and that we can quote
Scripture fully and accurately and all that sort of thing. It is not that we
bear the name of associates of Christ, Christians, not that we have this great
inheritance and tradition. It is the livingness of it all
which is proving itself in all ways, that this risen Life of Christ should
prove itself.... That is a strong thing to say, it is a searching thing to say.
You have the Christian tradition and a great deal of Christian teaching,
perhaps you know your Bibles very well, or think you do, perhaps you have many
advantages in your associations, but the question arises. Not do you know it
all, have you got it all, all the teaching, the truth, the Bible knowledge, the
association, and that you are at all the meetings and you have heard it for
years and years past and your association with it has been very close. That is
not it. You can have all that and yet you yourself not be marked by this vital
something that you become a vital factor in the whole thing. You are still a
passenger, perhaps a parasite; not really in the good of it yourself. Let us be
frank about it. We must face this as a personal matter.
The answer is in the resurrection.... Resurrection is not to be
only something that happened with Jesus, but it is something that has happened
in us and taken place inside of us. There is a counterpart of that by His risen
Life imparted, that we have been raised together with Him. And that is not just
doctrine either. That is real, that is vital truth and something to happen in
us as well as in Jerusalem so many years ago. It is not just history and
tradition, it is experience.... We have not only to believe that Jesus rose
from the dead, but we have got to be alive ourselves with Him in that
resurrection and on that ground.
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