Spiritual Convictions & Heavenly Affections

Next Part Spiritual Convictions & Heavenly Affections 2

Death and Resurrection, or Spiritual Convictions and Heavenly Affections

"If you then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God. Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Col. 3:1-3

Until the eyes of our understanding are spiritually enlightened, and our heart touched by regenerating grace, we see, we know, we feel nothing savingly or experimentally of the power of God in the salvation of the soul. We may be religious, very religious; serious, extremely serious; pious, decidedly pious; we may attend church or go to chapel, receive the sacrament or sit down to the ordinance, say our prayers or pray extempore, read the Scriptures and good books; and comparing our religious life with the profane conduct of many by whom we are surrounded, may please ourselves with the deceptive illusion that we are recommending ourselves to the favor of God, and when death shall close the scene, shall be rewarded with eternal life. And yet all this time we may be as destitute of the power of God in saving the soul, as ignorant of law and gospel, of condemnation or salvation, of what we are as sinners or what the Lord Jesus is to those who believe in his name, as the very beasts that perish. True religion must be wrought in the soul by the power of God. We are not saved because we are religious; but we are religious because we are saved.

"Who has saved us, and called us" (2 Tim. 1:9)– saved before called, and called because saved. The grace that wrote our names in the Lamb's book of life, that gave our persons to the Son of God, that he might redeem us through the cross by his sufferings, blood shedding, and death; the grace that is now in the heart of Jesus as sitting at the right hand of the Father in glory and majesty– this same grace quickens our soul into spiritual life, convinces us of sin, gives us repentance, brings us to the foot of the cross, reveals in us a precious Savior, and raises up a faith and hope and love in his name which both save and sanctify us unto eternal life. Thus we are not saved by anything of a religious nature which we can communicate to ourselves, or others communicate to us; but we are saved by the grace of God, and by the grace of God alone. "By grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God." (Eph. 2:8.) If, then, that grace never visits our heart with its regenerating power and its sanctifying influences, we may have all the religion that the flesh can be possessed of, in all its high doctrine or all its low doctrine; in all its strictness or all its laxness; in all its Churchism or all its Dissent; in all its Pharisaism or all its Antinomianism; and yet die under the wrath of God and have our portion with the damned.

Compare this fleshly religion in which thousands are nursed and wrapped up, and in which thousands contentedly live and die– compare, I say, this external service, this mere bodily exercise, without life or power; without faith or repentance, without love or hope, without divine teaching or heavenly testimony, with such language as I have just read from the inspired word, and which is now all but sounding in your ears. Ask people, aye, very strict and religious people, what they know about being dead and their life being hidden with Christ in God; about being risen with Christ, and seeking those things which are above; about setting their affection on things above and not on things on the earth; and what answer can they give? What do they know for themselves of a heartfelt, experimental, and divine religion like this? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Which, then, are we to accept as true religion– that which bears the stamp of man, or that which bears the stamp of God? that which unenlightened, unregenerated men, and even ministers, would impress on our minds and impose on our consciences, or that which the Holy Spirit has written down in the inspired word as a guide to the saints of God? I need not tell you which we should believe– whether we are to follow the true light which shines in the inspired page and guides the soul to heaven and God; or that false light which issues out of the corrupt heart of man, which leads us into, and drowns us in the bog of superstition, error, and self-righteousness.

I seem to see four things in the words before us, which I shall endeavor to bring before you as they are commended to my understanding, my heart, and my conscience.

First, Death– "You are dead."

Secondly, Resurrection– "If you are risen with Christ."

Thirdly, Ascension and Session– "Your life is hid with Christ in God."

Fourthly, Affection– "Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth."

I. DEATH. The spring and fountain of all true religion, of all vital godliness is union with Christ. He is the head of the body, the Church; therefore, from him, and from him alone, all spiritual life comes into his mystical members. "I have come that they might have life." (John 10:10.) "I am the resurrection and the life." (John 11:25.) If, therefore, we have union with Christ– and without union with Christ we have no saving, sanctifying, or experimental religion– we shall have union with him, not only in what he is now at the right hand of the Father, but in all that he was while he was here below. As, then, the path of the Lord Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father in glory was a path of suffering, sorrow, and death, and as in his case the cross went before the crown, so it must be with us. If we have any hope in our soul of being with Christ in the realms of eternal day; if we have any expectation of reigning with him in the life to come, and enjoying those pleasures which are at God's right hand for evermore; if we have any sweet persuasion that we shall be glorified with him and see him as he is face to face, which we never shall enjoy without vital union with him– we must first be conformed to his image as manifested here below.

I need hardly tell you that all those whom God foreknew are predestinated to the image, that is, the likeness of Christ, as the apostle so clearly testifies– "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren." (Rom. 8:29.) This conformity begins below, but is completed above– "But 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." (2 Cor. 3:18.) This image or likeness of Christ is twofold–

1. His suffering image, as seen here below when he was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

2. His glorified image, in which he now appears at the right hand of the Father. "Ought not Christ," he himself said, "to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?" (Luke 24:26.) As, then, with Christ the Head, suffering and glory were firmly bound together by the will and decree of the Father, so it is with the members. "If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." (2 Tim. 2:12.) "If so be we suffer with him that we may be also glorified together." (Rom. 8:17.)

A. But as this is an important subject let me endeavor to open it a little more fully and clearly. Look, then, at these two points–
1. First the ground on which our conformity to the image of Christ rests.
2. Secondly the nature of that conformity.

1. The predestinating purposesof God are the GROUND on which our conformity to the image of Christ rests. It was the eternal purpose of God to glorify his dear Son by making him the Head of a people whose nature he should assume into union with his divine Person. This is the foundation of their conformity to him, as it is also of that union with him whereby we become "members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones." (Eph. 5:30.)

2. But this shows us also the NATURE of that conformity– that he was made to resemble us by partaking of our nature, and we made to resemble him by partaking of his Spirit. As this conformity, then, to his image is a spiritual conformity– a likeness in soul, though there will be hereafter a bodily conformity, for "as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly," both in soul and body (1 Cor. 15:49), it begins at regeneration, in the implantation of the life of God in the heart. Until then, we are conformed to this world, we bear the image of Adam the first, Adam the fallen, the Adam who "begat a son in his own likeness after his image" (Gen. 5:3), the carnal image which God despises when he awakes to execute judgment upon those who bear it. (Psalm. 73:20.)

I have shown you that the image of Christ to which we are to be conformed is twofold– 1, First, the suffering image in which he appeared upon earth, and 2, the glorified image which he now wears in heaven. As, then, we are to be conformed hereafter to his glorified image above, for "when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2), so we must be now conformed to his suffering image below.

I may seem to you perhaps wandering from my text. But not so; for this conformity to the suffering image of Christ is intimated by the words of the apostle in it– "You are dead;" for every step of the Lord Jesus Christ from the manger to the cross was, if I may use the expression, a step of death, a step in death, and a step to death. He came to die– that was his errand. There was no mortality naturally in his flesh; but he took a nature which could die, and a life that he could lay down. Had his pure humanity been naturally mortal, it would have been a fallen, corrupt, and sinful nature, subject to corruption; but God's Holy One saw no corruption. (Psalm. 16:10.) And did not he himself say? "Therefore does my Father love me because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.

No man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father." (John 10:17, 18.) But he came to die. "I lay down my life for the sheep." (John 10:15.) As, then, he took that life that he might lay it down, his path, from the first assumption of that life in the womb of the virgin to the laying of it down upon the cross, with every breath, word, and act of his pure humanity, was, so to speak, an act of death, because an act of suffering; for his sufferings ended in death.

Therefore every act of his blessed Majesty when here below, being an act of suffering, was so far an act of death, as leading to it, terminating in it, and to us an example of it. He died to the world, for he was not of it, and by his death judged and condemned it; he died under the law, for he bore its curse and endured its penalty; he died under the wrath of God due to us that it might be appeased and put away. He died daily under poverty, shame, persecution, and temptation, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps. And his daily death ended in his actual death, closing a scene of meritorious suffering with the oblation of his body and soul on the cross, in the sacrifice which he offered up as the only propitiation for sin.

B. The beginning of this conformity to the suffering image of Christ is as I have already intimated at regeneration, when the first line of the image of Christ is traced on the soul; and this line is the line of death. For we never live until we die, and we never die until we live. So Paul found it– "For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." (Rom. 7:9.) "You are dead." But when did you begin to die? When your soul was made alive unto God by his regenerating grace.

1. Our first death is, I believe, generally to the world. Conviction of sin, trouble of mind, distress of soul, guilt of conscience bring us out of it. The wounded deer cannot run with the herd. It lies down in the shade among the ferns to bleed and die, when the antlered group bound merrily on. So a wounded conscience drops and falls, or slinks away into the shade out of the company and out of the sight of the cheerful youths and mirthful maidens, among whom once perhaps the now stricken man ran first and foremost. The new life of God in the soul, the rising fear of his great name, the budding tenderness of conscience, opening like a green leaf in spring, all shrink from the chill breath, the defiling contact of the world, wherever our lot be cast, whatever be our station in life, even where neither immorality nor profanity makes itself openly manifest.

These first strokes of conviction, this strange sense of uneasiness and unhappiness, may not only come on unexpectedly, but their cause be at the time unknown to the sufferer; and yet, like the beginning of consumption, be the beginning of death. The commencement of a work of grace is often very gradual; but it always goes on until the patient dies.

2. This is being brought under the law, for "by the law is the knowledge of sin." (Rom. 3:20.) To Christ's suffering image we are to be conformed; this death then we must die; for we must have vital union with the Lord Jesus in his dying life, if we have union with him in his risen life at the right hand of the Father. As Jesus died under the law, and by dying under the law died to the law, so we must die the same death that we may be dead with him. The law must kill us as it killed him; must curse us as it cursed him; bring condemnation and guilt into our conscience as it brought condemnation visibly and manifestly upon him as he bore our sins in his own body on the tree. Not that we can suffer to the same extent, or for the same purpose as he suffered. He could say, "Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, with which the Lord has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." (Lam. 1:12.) He could say, in the language of the Psalmist, "Your arrows stick fast in me, and your hand presses me sore." The law did not spare him; it exacted the uttermost farthing; nor did he give up his parting breath until he could say, "It is finished."

So if we are to know anything vitally of dying with Christ, we must know something of dying as he died. And observe it was by crucifixion, a painful and lingering death, though in the Lord's case prematurely shortened; for when the work was done, why need he suffer more? Thus under the law you die a lingering death; gradually your strength and spirit decline and fade; weaker and weaker does the flesh become until at last you die away as to all hope and help. This is dying under the law.

3. But again, Christ died under the manifested, visible anger of God. Not but what his blessed Majesty had a gleam of light in seeing his Father's countenance beaming in upon him with ineffable complacency when the cloud of wrath had passed away, for how else could he have said with such sweet filial confidence, "Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit?" (Luke 23:46.) But in appearance, in the eyes of man, of his enemies and murderers, he died under the wrath of God, for he died an accursed death according to the very language of the Law, for he was literally and truly "hanged upon a tree." His cruel foes knew nothing of those divine purposes of which they were the unconscious executors; nor did they see that when "they derided him, saying, he saved others, let him save himself," he was then offering his body and soul to his Father as a sin-atoning sacrifice.

So we in a sense must die in our experience under the wrath of God. We must feel what a holy and majestic God we have to deal with, and that we are justly doomed to die; that by our sins we have deserved eternal condemnation; and that unless he extends mercy to us, except he saves us by his grace, we never can be delivered from the wrath to come. As we thus feel or fear the terrors of the Almighty, we die to all legal hope; we are killed to our righteousness, and expire before God, sometimes in an agony of distress. When your soul was brought down within you by a sense of God's anger due to your sins; when guilt lay hard and heavy upon your conscience, you have fallen down, sometimes bodily, flat before God, feeling there was nothing in you to save you from the lowest hell, and that if God were to hurl a mighty thunderbolt from the innermost recess of heaven and launch you into the bottomless pit, you only had your desert, and must say justice had its due. This was to die under the wrath of God; this was to expire under a sense of guilt and condemnation in your conscience. Have you never felt this?

C. But death, naturally and literally, is not in all cases a rapid or instantaneous process. There is the lingering consumption and slowly advancing dropsy, as well as the rapid fever and quick-destroying inflammation. How varied in name and nature, in beginning and progress, are the diseases which thin the ranks of the living and fill the cemetery with the dead. But the end in all is the same. Long or short may be the road, but they all terminate in the same place– our last home. As in death natural, so is it in death spiritual. The apostle says, "I am crucified with Christ;" and again, "But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." (Gal. 6:14.) Crucifixion, we know, was a lingering death; it did not take life away instantaneously, for, with a refinement of cruelty, it avoided injuring the vital organs, that the criminal might, as a Roman emperor said of one of his enemies, "feel himself die." Instances are therefore recorded of men living as long as three days upon the cross; but they slowly got weaker and weaker, and their bodily powers suffered gradual diminishing, until pain and hunger and thirst closed the scene. So it is in grace. It is not all the people of God who, like Heman, suffer his terrors until they are in desperation; nor do all tremble over the open mouth of hell with unspeakable fear lest they be plunged headlong into it. But they die a slow and lingering death, becoming weaker and weaker until all their strength is wasted away and gone, and they die in their feelings, helpless and hopeless to save themselves. Thus they die as completely, if not so rapidly or violently, as those who fall down slain under the terrors of the law, and feel the outstretched sword of justice more pointedly and more powerfully in their very vitals.

D. Now it is by this death that we die unto the things of time and sense; to all that charms the natural mind of man; to the pleasures and pursuits of life; to that busy, restless world which once held us so fast and firm in its embrace, and whirled us round and round within its giddy dance. Let us look back. We were not always a set of poor mopes, as the world calls us. We were once as merry and as gay as the merriest and gayest of them. But what were we really and truly with all our mirth? Dead to God, alive to sin; dead to everything holy and divine, alive to everything vain and foolish, light and trifling, carnal and sensual, if not exactly vile and abominable. Our natural life was with all of us a life of gratifying our senses; with some of us, perhaps, chiefly of pleasure and worldly happiness; with others a life of covetousness, or ambition, or self-righteousness.

Men's pursuits and pleasures differ as widely as their station or disposition; but a life of selfish gratification reigns and rules in all. Now by dying with Christ, we die unto those things in which our natural life consists, for they live in us as long as we live in them; and that they may die in us we must die to them. Thus the apostle speaks of his own double crucifixion– "Whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." The world, then, can only be crucified unto us as we are crucified unto it. Paul therefore says– "And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts." (Gal. 5:24.) Many have tried to crucify the flesh, but never could do it because they were not first crucified themselves. Now thus to crucify us is to bring a death as to earthly things into the soul. Thus under the conviction of sin we die to the world; for when suffering under the pangs of a guilty conscience, what is the world to us? What relief can it afford to a bleeding wound? What balm to a troubled mind? What salvation from death and hell? Therefore we die to the world from its inability to do us any good, as the world, the things of time and sense, the charms of nature and art, the spectators of his misery would all pass before the eyes of a man dying on a cross– he dead to them, they dead to him. So it is or should be in the crucifixion of the soul. "O, world," it says, as it hangs on the cross, "you have deceived me long enough. Where now are your promised pleasures, your mirth, your amusements, your schemes of profit and advancement? What can they all do for me a poor dying sinner? I have spent days and years greedily looking for the offered enjoyment, and what have I found but guilt and condemnation? Let me die to you and live unto God."

Similarly we die unto sin. Sin once put forth its intense power and overcame all our resolutions; sin allured us, and we followed like the fool to the stocks. Sin charmed, and we listened to its seductive wiles. Sin held out its bait, and we too greedily, too heedlessly swallowed the hook. But now we see and feel what guilt and condemnation it has brought into our conscience to have been so drawn aside, entangled, and overcome. We find and feel that the pleasures of sin are but for a season, and that it is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lord. When, too, we are favored to view by faith what suffering and sorrow sin cost the Lord to put it away that we might not sink forever under its load, there is a dyingto it– at least to its reigning power and dominion.

So with our own righteousness, wisdom, strength, and all the goodness of the creature. There was a time when we highly prized them all, and, like Job, "would not let them go." But by degrees, as the law, the justice, and holiness of God, the nature and evil of sin, and our own helplessness to do the things that we would, were opened up in our consciences, we died as to the power which we once thought we had in ourselves to believe, repent, and obey. Our boasted knowledge we saw to be ignorance and the worst of ignorance, as puffing us up with pride when really destitute of all true knowledge of God and his dear Son. Our once vaunted strength we found to be weakness, for it never enabled us to truly repent of sin nor savingly believe in the Lord Jesus, or kept us from the power of evil. And thus we died to them and they to us. We might call upon them to help us in the hour of need; but it was like calling to the dead to help the living.

But when a better righteousness, wisdom and strength were revealed to us in a crucified Christ, then we gladly, as well as feelingly and experimentally, died to all our own, that we might find them all in him. Thus there is a blessedness in dying with Christ, for by this death we only lose what we may well part with, and get in its stead what makes us rich forever and ever. To part with the world is to part with its condemnation; and to die to self is the very germ and beginning of not only the death of our worst enemy, but of living to Christ. Thus death becomes the basis of all vital godliness, the grand preliminary to everything holy and happy, blessed and peaceable for time and for eternity.

"You are dead." Do you not find it so by vital experience? When does religion most flourish in your heart? When have the things of time and sense least influence on your soul? When pressed down with sin and sorrow, do you not seem to be more dead to the world than when levity and frivolity possess your mind? And if ever you are favored with a glimpse of a suffering Jesus in the gloomy garden, or expiring on the ignominious cross, does it not seem, at least while the impression lasts, to put a death on everything which at other times occupies or charms your mind, while it raises up a good hope through grace in your soul?

As, then, we look to Jesus by faith, dying that we might live, the virtue of his death flowing into the soul kills us to the things of time and sense. We thus find that the more we close our arms round the Person of Jesus as crucified for us, and the more we embrace the mystery of his atoning blood and dying love, the more the power of sin, worldliness, self-righteousness, creature strength and wisdom, die in the soul. But O, the difficulty of parting with these idols! It is killing work. And yet when we are in some measure killed to them, what a deliverance it is from the miserable bondage of sin, and the hardly less miserable bondage of the world and self.

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