The Risen Life The Cross of Christ, as Paul preached it contains all the elements of moral regeneration and spiritual life. He never gloried in the Cross as a narrow technicality, but as illustrating and , we might even say, incarnating the length and breadth , and depth and height of the love of God. To the apostle, the Cross of Christ stared from the Incarnation on the one side, and led up to the Ascension and Enthronement on the other. I we have become united with Him by the likeness of His death, we shall be also by the likeness of His resurrection {Romans 6;5 }. According to the completeness of or union with Him in the one , will be the completeness of the union with Him in the other. Unbelief repudiates what Christ has done: for ,as Dr.Pleiderer says: he objective reconciliation effected in Christs death can after all benefit actually , in their own personal consciousness, only those who know and acknowledge it, and feel themselves in the solidarity with Christ to be so much one with Him as to be able to appropriate inwardly His death and celestial Life, and to live over again His Life and death: those only, in a word , who truly believe in Christ. Paul s faith fully endorsed all that Christ had done as His representative. He had joined His Savior on the Cross, he had gone down with Him into the grave , and because He had come forth from the tomb Paul had come forth too, for in this appropriation of the death and rising of the Lord Jesus there are three stages, corresponding to the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Eastertide. Christ died for our sins; He was buried ;He rose again the third day; so by consequence , I am crucified with Christ: no longer do I live; Christ liveth in me Burial is the seal and certificate of death. Christs interment in the rock-hewn sepulcher gave evidence of the reality of Hid death. His enemies said, That is the end of another deception, while His friends said, We trusted that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel. he phrase buried with Christ denotes , then the absoluteness of our death with Him, as a man who passes away is said to be dead and buried. The relatives and friends of a Hindu convert to Christianity, in order to show how completely they cats him off, actually celebrated his funeral , and treated him, after this display of his death, as if he really no longer existed. The reckoning of faith which results in identification with Christ in His death may be at first a secret, and only know to God and ourselves, but it must not remain a secret. The average Roman of the period when this letter was written was accustomed to the amphitheater , He became , by the law of association, brutalized and ferocious to the last degree. Coming under the power of Christ, he died to the degradation and cruelty of the amphitheater, and the fashions of the age were such that no follower of Christ could consent to them, he had joined the ranks of the despised Jesus. He was as much dead and buried to these things as if his body had been laid in the grave. Just as we have all know what it is to turn away at last from the grave-side where the body of someone loved one has been laid to rest; just as we lingered to take the last look at the coffin, and have then come away with tear-dimmed eyes, feeling all over,so they who are really dead and buried with Christ ; think of that old natural self as having been wrapped in its winding-sheer, and buried in the dark grave with Christs burial . The old habits, the old besetments, the old sins are completely past and gone as is the dead body lying in yonder grave. Dead and crucified with Thee, passed beyond my doom: Sin and law for ever silenced in Thy tomb. Passed beyond the mighty curse, dead ,from sin set free: Not for Thee earths joy and music , not for me. Dead, the sinner past and gone, not the sin alone, Living , where Thu art in glory on the throne. -Tersteegen- Dead with Christ but alive unto God. The water of baptism , not water at all but a grave. Rise up, rise up my friends!!!! His Servant Mad Monk
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 14:29:46 +0000