GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 12

OUR PERSONAL PROMISES:

    JESUS, YOU……HAVE BLESSED MY CHILDREN WITHIN ME—–Ps 147:13

    JESUS, YOU……  GIVE ME STRENGTH BECAUSE OF MY UNION WITH YOU –Ephes 6:10

    JESUS, YOU…… ARE MY WAY, TRUTH, AND LIFE —John 14:6

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THE WORD FOR TODAY

Romans 6:5

 “For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection.”

“Abide in Christ” is the book we’re reading, by Andrew Murray.   Chapter is “the Crucified One”

You have also noticed how the graft has to be torn away from the tree where it grew naturally and to be cut into conformity to the place prepared for it in the wounded stem.  Even so, the believer has to be conformed to Christ’s death – to be crucified and to die with Him.  The wounded stem and the wounded graft are cut to fit into each other, into each other’s likeness.  There is a fellowship between Christ’s sufferings and your sufferings.  His experiences must become yours.

The disposition He manifested in choosing and bearing the cross must be yours.  Like Him, you will have to give full assent to the righteous judgment and curse of the holy God against sin.  Like Him, you have to consent to yield your life, as laden with sins and curses, to death, and through it to pass to the new life.

Like Him, you will experience that it is only through the self-sacrifice of Gethsemane and calvary that the path is to be found to the joy and the fruit bearing of the resurrection life.  The more clear the resemblance between the wounded stem and the wounded graft, the more exactly their wounds fit into each other, the surer and the easier and the more complete will be the union and the growth.

It is in Jesus, the Crucified One, I must abide.  I must learn to look upon the Cross as not only an atonement to God, but also a victory over the devil – not only a deliverance from the guilt, but also from the power of sin.  I must gaze on Him, on the cross as wholly mine, offering Himself to receive me into the closest union and fellowship and to make me partaker of the full power of His death to sin and the new life of victory to which is it but the gateway.  I must yield myself to Him in an undivided surrender with much prayer and strong desire, imploring to be admitted into the ever closer fellowship and conformity of His death, of the Spirit in which He died that death.

Let me try to understand why the Cross is thus the place of union.  On the cross the Son of God enters into the fullest union with man – enters into the fullest experience of what it means to have become a son of man, a member of a race under the curse.  It is in death that the Prince of life conquers the power of death;  it is in death alone that He can make me partaker of that victory.

The life He imparts is a life from the dead; each new experience of the power of that life depends upon the fellowship of the death.  The death and the life are inseparable.  All the grace that Jesus the Saving One gives is given only in the path of fellowship with Jesus the Crucified One.  Christ came and took my place; I must put myself in His place and abide there.  There is but one place that is both His and mine – that place is the Cross.  His in virtue of His free choice; mine by reason of the curse of sin.  He came there to seek me; there alone I can find Him.

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