Post by netchaplain on Dec 28, 2022 7:06:20 GMT -8
The Lord Jesus is not now on earth. He has ascended into heaven. What a very peculiar position then is mine here! Sensible of the worthlessness of the first man (Adam—NC), and of the absence of the Second. My own life—that of the first man—I have; the One I love—the Man who has glorified God upon the earth—I find no longer here. How can I get on? Only as united to that One in the glory. He is my Christian life. Once with Him I can walk here, not to cultivate my old life, but to manifest His, which is mine in Him (Col 3:4—NC).
Thus the Lord Jesus says, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth” (Jn 17:19). His sanctification as expressed in these words is positional (literally placed in Him—NC). He has ascended into glory, and is wholly apart from this scene, that we might by the Holy Spirit be associated with Him there, and this is our moral sanctification.
But how am I led into this association? See Stephen in Acts 7:55, “being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.” Now there was a new and distinct action of the Spirit, enabling Stephen’s soul to penetrate through everything, and to find the Lord Jesus where He is, even in the glory of God. It was a new thing brought out at that moment.
In Chapter One of Acts the disciples were distinctly told not to gaze up into heaven, but now Christ’s rejection was completed, and there was no longer any possibility of His return to earth to take His rights, and the Holy Spirit takes an altogether new line of action. He reveals the Lord Jesus in the glory to the saint, and links the soul of the believer with Him there, all hope for the earth being cut off.
Now every new revelation determines the character of the action of the Holy Spirit during any given period or dispensation. When everything has failed on earth, He directs me to where there is no failure, He turns my eye and heart to heaven. He accomplishes in me the very same action that He did in Stephen.
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Col 3:2, 3). It is the strangest of all anomalies that we should be left here to live, where our Life is not (Col 3:4). Tell me where your eye is, and I’ll tell you what your conduct is. “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2Co 3:18).
There we get the moral consequences of personal fellowship—one spirit with the Lord Jesus, the glory claims me as its own. I can behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, and be transformed thereby into the same image (Rom 8:29; 2Co 3:18). I have no shrinking from the glory, my heart rests in it. I can look upon that glory as one with the blessed One who is there, and who has made for me a free entrance into it by the ministration of righteousness and of the Holy Spirit.
If I am not in conscious union with the One who is there, I cannot “hate” the life that is here (1Jo 2:15). He has ended the first man on the Cross, and now I am free in the Life of the Blessed One in the presence of my Father.
MJS devotional excerpt for Dec 28
“The teachings of the kingdom (as illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount) have not yet been applied to any man. Since they anticipate the binding of Satan, a purified earth, the restoration of Israel, and the personal reign of the King, they cannot be applied until God’s appointed time when these accompanying conditions on the earth have been brought to pass.
“The kingdom laws will be addressed to Israel and beyond them to all nations which will enter the kingdom. It will be the first and only universal reign of righteousness and peace in the history of the world. One nation was in view when the Law of Moses was in force on the earth; the individual is in view during this age of grace; and the whole social structure of mankind will be in view when the kingdom is established on earth.
“Christianity is totally opposed to Judaism, and any mixture of the two must result in the loss of all that is vital in the present plan of salvation. One made its appeal to the limited resources of the natural man and conditioned his life on the earth; the other sets aside the natural man, secures a whole new creation in Christ Jesus, and counsels that new being in his pilgrim journey to his heavenly home.
“The Jewish nation is the center of all things related to the earth. The Church is foreign to the earth and related to it only as a witnessing people. They are strangers and pilgrims, ambassadors whose citizenship is in heaven.” –Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952)
