There is nothing more musical in the ears of the Lord. This cry is the most spiritual and the most scriptural cry a man can utter. He only utters it when he knows he can do nothing, and gives up making any further resolutions. Up to this point, every time he failed, he made a new resolution and doubled, and redoubled, his willpower. At last he discovers there is no use in his making up his mind any more, and he cries out in desperation, “O wretched man that I am!” Like someone who awakes suddenly to find himself in
a burning building, his cry is now for help, for he has come to the point where he despairs of himself.
Have you despaired of yourself, or do you hope that if you read and pray more you will be a better Christian? Bible-reading and prayer are not wrong, and God forbid that we should suggest that they are. But it is wrong to trust even in them for victory. Our help is in Him who is the object of that reading and prayer. Our trust must be in Christ alone.
Happily, the “wretched man” does not merely deplore his wretchedness; he asks a fine question, namely, “Who shall deliver me?”
Who?
Hitherto he has looked for some thing; now his hope is in a Person. Hitherto he has looked within for a solution to his problem; now he looks beyond himself for a Savior. He no longer puts forth self-effort; all his expectation is now in Another.
How did we obtain forgiveness of sins? Was it by reading, praying, almsgiving and so on? No, we looked to the cross, believing in what the Lord Jesus had done. And deliverance from sin becomes ours on exactly the same principle, nor is it otherwise with the question of pleasing God. In the matter of forgiveness, we look to Christ on the cross; in the matter of deliverance from sin and of doing the will of God, we look to Christ in our hearts. For the one we depend on what He has done, and for the other we depend on what He will do in us; but in regard to both, our dependence is on Him alone. From start to finish, He is the One who does it all.
At the time when the epistle to the Romans was written, a murderer was punished in a peculiar and terrible manner. The dead body of the one murdered was tied to the living body of the murderer, head to head, hand to hand, foot to foot, and the living one was bound to the dead one till death.
The murderer could go where he pleased, but wherever he went, he had to drag the corpse of that murdered man with him.
Could punishment be more appalling? Yet this is the illustration Paul now uses. It is as though he were bound to a dead body—his own “body of death”—and unable to get free. Wherever he goes, he is hampered by this terrible burden. At last he can bear it no longer and cries, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?” And then, in a flash of illumination, his cry of despair changes to a song of praise. He has found the answer to his question. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:25).
We know that justification is ours through the Lord Jesus and requires no work on our part, but we think sanctification is dependent on our own efforts. We know we can receive forgiveness only by entire reliance on the Lord; yet we believe we can obtain deliverance by doing something ourselves. We fear that if we do nothing, nothing will happen. After salvation the old habit of “doing” reasserts itself, and we begin our old self-efforts again. Then God’s word comes afresh to us: “It is finished” (John 19:30). He has done everything on the cross for our forgiveness, and He will do everything in us for our deliverance. In both cases He is the doer. “It is God that worketh in you.”
The first words of the delivered man are very precious: “I thank God.” If someone gives you a cup of water, you thank the person who gave it, not someone else. Why did Paul say “Thank God”? Because God was the One who did everything. Had it been Paul who did it, he would have said, “Thank Paul.” But he saw that Paul was a “wretched man” and that God alone could meet his need; so he said, “Thank
God.” God wants to do all the work, for He must have all the glory. If we did some of it, then we could claim some of the glory ourselves. But God must have it all. He does all the work from beginning to end.
What we have said in this chapter might seem negative and unpractical if we were to stop at this point, as though the Christian life were a matter of sitting still and waiting for something to happen. Of course it is very far from being so. All who truly live it know it to be a matter of very positive and active faith in Christ and in an altogether new principle of life—the law of the Spirit of life. We are now going to look at the efforts in us of this new life principle.
The Path of Progress: Walking In the Spirit
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OMING NOW to Romans 8 we may first summarize the argument of our second section of the letter from chapter 5:12 to chapter 8:39 in two phrases, each containing a contrast and each marking an aspect of Christian experience. They are:
Romans 5:12 to 6:23: “In Adam” and “in Christ.”
Romans 7:1 to 8:39: “In the flesh” and “in the Spirit.”
We need to understand the relationship of these four things. The former two are “objective” and set forth our position: first, as we were by nature and second, as we now are by faith in the redemptive work of Christ. The latter two are “subjective” and relate to our walk as a matter of practical experience. Scripture makes it clear that the first two give us only a part of the picture and that the second two are required to complete it. We think it enough to be
“in Christ,” but we learn now that we must also walk “in the Spirit” (Rom. 8:9). The frequent occurrence of “the Spirit” in the early part, of Romans 8 serves to emphasize this further important lesson of the Christian life.
The flesh is linked with Adam, the Spirit with Christ. Leaving aside now as settled the question of whether we are in Adam or in Christ, the time has come to ask ourselves: Am I living in the flesh or in the Spirit?
To live in the flesh is to do something “out from”
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myself as in Adam. It is to derive strength from the old natural source of life that I inherited from him, so that I enjoy in experience all Adam’s very complete provision for sinning which all of us have found so effective. Now the same is true of what is in Christ. To enjoy in experience what is true of me as in Him, I must learn what it is to walk in the Spirit.
It is a historic fact that in Christ my old man was crucified, and it is a present fact that I am blessed “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3). But if I do not live in the Spirit, then my life may be quite a contradiction of the fact that I am in Christ, for what is true of me in Him is not expressed in me. I may recognize that I am in Christ, but I may also have to face the fact that, for example, my old temper is very much in evidence.
What is the trouble? It is that I am holding the truth merely objectively, whereas what is true objectively must be made true subjectively; and that is brought about as I live in the Spirit.
Not only am I in Christ, but Christ is in me. And just as, physically, a man cannot live and work in water but only in air, so, spiritually, Christ dwells and manifests Himself not in terms of “flesh,” but of “spirit.” Therefore, if I live “after the flesh,” I find that what is mine in Christ is, so to say, held in suspense in me. Though in fact I am in Christ, yet if I live in the flesh—that is, in my own strength and under my own direction—then in experience I find to my dismay that it is what is in Adam that manifests itself in me. If I would know in experience all that is in Christ, then I must learn to live in the Spirit.
Living in the Spirit means that I trust the Holy Spirit to do in me what I cannot do myself. This life is completely different from the life I would naturally live of myself. Each time I am faced with a new demand from the Lord, I look to Him to do in me what He requires of me. It is not a case of trying, but of trusting; not of struggling, but of resting in Him. If I have a hasty temper, impure thoughts, a quick tongue or a critical spirit, I shall not set out with a determined effort to change myself; but instead, reckoning myself dead in Christ to these things, I shall look to the Spirit of God to produce in me the needed purity of humility or meekness, confident that He will do so. This is what it means to “stand still, and see the salvation of Jehovah, which he will work for you” (Exod. 14:13).
Some of you have no doubt had an experience something like the following. You have been asked to go and see a friend, and you knew the friend was not very friendly, but you trusted the Lord to see you through. You told Him before you set out that in yourself you could not but fail, and you asked Him for all that was needed. Then, to your
surprise, you did not feel at all irritated, though your friend was far from gracious. On your return you thought over the experience and marveled that you had kept so calm, and you wondered if you would be just as calm next time. You were amazed at yourself and sought an explanation. This is the explanation: The Holy Spirit carried you through.
Unfortunately, we only have this kind of experience once in a while, but it should be ours constantly. When the Holy Spirit takes things in hand, there is no need for strain on our part. It is not a case of clenching our teeth and taking a grip on ourselves, and thinking that thus we have controlled ourselves beautifully and have had a glorious victory. No, where there is real victory, it is not fleshly effort that carries us through, but the Lord.
The object of temptation is always to get us to do something. During the first three months of the Japanese war in China, we lost a great many tanks, and so were unable to deal with the Japanese armor until the following scheme was devised. A single shot would be fired at a Japanese tank by one of our snipers in ambush. After a considerable lapse of time, the first shot would be followed by a second; then, after a further silence, by another shot, until the tank driver, eager to locate the source of the disturbance, would pop his head out to look around. The next shot, carefully aimed, would put an end to him.
As long as he remained under cover, he was perfectly safe. The whole scheme was devised to bring him out into the open. In just the same way, Satan’s temptations are not designed primarily to make us do something particularly sinful, but merely to cause us to act in our energy. As soon as we step out of our hiding place to do something on that basis,
he has gained the victory over us. But if we do not move, if we do not come out of the cover of Christ into the realm of the flesh, then he cannot get us.
The divine way of victory does not therefore permit of our doing anything at all—anything, that is to say, outside of Christ. This is because as soon as we move we run into danger, for our natural inclinations carry us in the wrong direction. Where, then, are we to look for help? Turn now to Galatians 5:17: “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” This tells us where the real tussle takes place. The fight with the flesh is not ours, but the Holy Spirit’s, “for these are contrary the one to the other”; it is He, not we, who meets and deals with it. What is the result? “That ye may not do the things that ye would.”
I think we have often failed to grasp the full import of that last clause. Let us consider it for a moment. What “would we do” naturally? We would move off on some course of action dictated by our own instincts and apart from the will of God. The effect, therefore, of our refusal to come out of cover and act out from ourselves is that the Holy Spirit is free to do His work—free, that is, to meet and deal with the flesh in us, so that in fact we do not do what we naturally would do.
Instead of going off on a plan and course of our own, we find our satisfaction in His perfect plan. Hence the command is a positive one: “Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). If we live in the Spirit, if we walk by faith in the risen Christ, we can truly “stand aside” while the Spirit gains new victories over the flesh every day. He has been given to us to take charge of this business. Our victory lies in hiding in Christ, and in counting in
simple trust upon His Holy Spirit within us to overcome our fleshly lusts with His own new desires. The cross has been given to procure salvation for us; the Spirit has been given to produce salvation in us. Christ risen and ascended is the basis of our salvation; Christ in our hearts by the Spirit is its power.
“I thank God through Jesus Christ!” That exclamation of Paul’s is fundamentally the same in its import as his other words in Galatians 2:20 which we have taken as the key to our study: “I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ.” We saw how prominent is the word “I” throughout Romans 7, culminating in the agonized cry, “O wretched man that l am!” Then follows the shout of deliverance: “Thank God . . . Jesus Christ!” and it is clear that the discovery Paul has made is that the life we live is the life of Christ alone. We think of the Christian life as a “changed life,” but it is not that. What God offers us is an “exchanged life,” a “substituted life,” and Christ is our Substitute within. “I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” This life is not something which we ourselves have to produce. It is Christ’s own life reproduced in us.
How many Christians believe in “reproduction” in this sense, as something more than regeneration? Regeneration means that the life of Christ is planted in us by the Holy Spirit at our new birth. “Reproduction” goes further; it means that that new life grows and becomes manifest progressively in us until the very likeness of Christ begins to be reproduced in our lives. That is what Paul means when he speaks of his travail for the Galatians “until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19).
Let me illustrate with another story. I once stayed in America in the home of a saved couple who, soon after my arrival, requested me to pray for them. I inquired the cause of their trouble. “Oh, Mr. Nee, we have been in a bad way lately,” they confessed. “We are so easily irritated by the children, and during the past few weeks, we have both lost our tempers several times a day. We are really dishonoring the Lord. Will you ask Him to give us patience?”