NORMAL LIFE ACCORDING TO GOD
"He that loses his
life... shall find it," Matt.
10:39
When we speak of regeneration, or of the
filling of the Spirit, or of the anointing of the Spirit, or of spiritual life
in the deepest and profoundest sense of the term, we are not asking men to
enter a range or realm of life for which they were not made. We are calling
them back to normality, to naturalness, to the fulfillment of the deepest and
profoundest meaning of their own first creation. A man does not by his new
birth become something other than himself. He becomes himself, as he never has
been until by that new birth he finds himself. Not angels did Jesus Christ come
to make; and if His terms are drastic and hard, if before He can baptize a man
with the Spirit of life the man must consent to death, it is in order that he
may find by the same new life, not some foreign life, but his own life. If you
differ from the exposition, hear the actual words: "He that loses his
life... shall find it," (Matt. 10:39) the very life he is
willing to lose. The very life which I lose by submission to Him, the life which
I deny in order that I may find Him as my Lord and King, is the life I find.
The baptism of God's Holy Spirit, and the filling and the anointing of that
Spirit mean, first, the correction of the thing that is wrong, the putting away
of the sin, the breaking of the power of sin, the subjection of the rebellious
territory to the power of the Lord. But they mean infinitely more. They mean
the cultivation of the rebellious territory, they mean the
restoration of the thing over which the weeds have spread themselves, and where
the briars and the thorns are growing. Not merely that the desert life of man
is handed over in order that it may be possessed by Him, but that the desert
life, being possessed by Him, shall be made to blossom as the rose. Not that the
dry and arid distances of the wilderness are simply to be given to Him, but
that He will make run through them the rivers of God, which bring life wherever
they come.
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