Biblical teaching - T116

The Power of the Preaching of the Cross

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God has lifted us out of the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of His beloved Son, where all things are new. He has made new creatures of us, a new creation. In the Spirit, He has taken this new creation into a Kingdom where all things are new. We still have to wait for Jesus’ return and the resurrection of the dead, when the final aspect of His work on the Cross is to be manifested. Our bodies will be resurrected when He returns, and we shall receive new bodies in which sin will no longer dwell. Then we shall clearly see that all things are truly new.

Meanwhile, all things are new in the spirit ; God enables us to walk in His Spirit, although our bodies are not yet resurrected. If we have grasped, through the Holy Spirit, that our present bodies are dead, that our flesh is dead, and that we can walk in the Spirit through Faith in the Son of God, despite those bodies in which sin still dwells, we can walk in the Spirit on an utterly different ground than the one we used to walk on. When our attitude is one of faith, the law of the Spirit that is in Christ enables us to overcome completely the law of sin and death that is in the body, because we are grounded in faith. Everything is given through faith in Jesus, and revealed through the Holy Spirit.

God is seeking men and women who have grasped this through spiritual understanding, heeded the voice of the Holy Spirit, received this truth into their hearts in faith, so as to walk in the revelation of it and be wholly sanctified, till the Lord returns.

Sanctification, therefore, is not something that we have to grow slowly into. Jesus Himself has secured our sanctification through His death and His resurrection. It is His present to us, a gift we receive as soon as our spirit is filled with light and we enter - through faith - the new Kingdom He has created for us. We can walk in complete sanctification as soon as we understand that the cause of our former problems (that body, that sinful flesh of ours that has been rotten ever since Adam and Eve) was dealt with when Jesus put it to death on the Cross. When we grasp that in our spirits, in our understanding, and in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, we can walk in complete sanctification.

Some Christians walk in defeat, living in the flesh. Others say : "Now this has got to stop. I’m sick and tired of it ! The answer is neither to say : "Lord, make a better person of me !" nor to be bent on "doing the right thing". That would be a sure recipe for failure. When we get really desperate, there is only one answer left : God’s answer, that is to say the Cross. We have to come to Jesus and say : "Lord, by faith I want to come to that place of perfection, under Your dominion. So Lord, I come to You and to Your Word, to receive the sanctification that You have secured for me." Jesus has been made sanctification for me. Through His death and resurrection, He has engulfed death as well as sin, He has engulfed my past. I don’t want this to remain a mere concept, Lord : I want it to sink into my heart of hearts, I want to receive the assurance of it through the Holy Spirit, so that from now onwards my thinking will be completely renewed through Your Word. Let your words sink into the depths of my heart and wash away all my former ways of thinking, so that I can now live by faith in the Son of God, in this new Kingdom You have created for me."

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