Secret of the Master’s Indwelling (2) ... the Self Life

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
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Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

The Secret of the Master's Indwelling is about digging our roots deep into God’s soil that bears fruit abundantly and gives us strength Supernaturally. Andrew Murray shows what we must do and be to become stalwarts of Faith.

Secret of the Master’s Indwelling, Chapter 2, the Self Life.

“Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

What lies at the root of it? What is the reason that so many Christians are wasting their lives in the terrible bondage of the world instead of living in the manifestation and the privilege and the glory of the child of God?

To those two questions there is one answer: it is self that is the root of the whole trouble. And therefore, if any one asks me, “How can I get rid of this compromise life?” The answer would be, “A new life from above, the life of Christ, must take the place of the self-life; then alone can we be conquerors.”

“If any man will come after me let him deny himself, his own self, and take up the cross and follow me.” That is a mark of the disciple; that is the secret of the Christian life—deny self and all will come right.

Let us dwell upon this one word, “self.” It is only as we learn to know what self is that we really know what is at the root of all our failure, and are prepared to go to Christ for deliverance. Let us consider, first of all, the nature of this self life.  

“How may we be delivered from it?”

Self is the power with which God has created and endowed every intelligent creature. Self is the very center of a created being. And why did God give the angels or man a self? The object of this self was that we might bring it as an empty vessel unto God; that He might put into it His life. God gave me the power of self-determination, that I might bring this self every day and say: “Oh, God, work in it; I offer it to thee.” God wanted a vessel into which He might pour out His divine fullness of beauty, wisdom and power.

Self turned to God is the glory of allowing the Creator to reveal Himself in us. Self turned away from God is the very darkness and fire of hell.

Now what are the works of self? —self-will, self-confidence, self-exaltation.

Self-will, pleasing self, is the great sin of man, and it is at the root of all that compromising with the world which is the ruin of so many. Men cannot understand why they should not please themselves and do their own will. Numbers of Christians have never gotten hold of the idea that a Christian is a man who is never to seek his own will, but is always to seek the will of God, as a man in whom the very spirit of Christ lives.

“Lo, I come to do Thy will, oh, my God!”
We find Christians pleasing themselves in a thousand ways, and yet trying to be happy, and good, and useful; and they do not know that at the root of it all is self-will robbing them of the blessing.

Just think of it! No wonder Peter wept those bitter tears. It was a choice between self, that ugly, cursed self, and that beautiful, blessed Son of God; and Peter chose self. No wonder that he thought: “Instead of denying myself, I have denied Jesus; what a choice I have made!” No wonder that he wept bitterly.

Remember this: every time you please yourself, you deny Jesus. It is one of the two. You must please Him only, and deny self, or you must please yourself and deny Him. Then follows self-confidence, self-trust, self-effort, self-dependence.

Self-confidence. It was simply self-confidence. People have often asked me, “What is the reason I fail? If you trusted God and Jesus, you could not fall, but you trust yourself.” The cause of every failure in the Christian life is nothing but this. I trust this cursed self, instead of trusting Jesus. I trust my own strength, instead of the almighty strength of God. And that is why Christ says, “This self must be denied.”

Then there is self-exaltation. Ah, how much pride and jealousy is there in the Christian world; how much sensitiveness to what men say of us or think of us; how much desire of human praise and pleasing men, instead of always living in the presence of God, with the one thought: “Am I pleasing to Him?”

What are we to do to get rid of it?
Jesus answers us in the words of our text: “If any man will come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” Note it well.—I must deny myself and take Jesus himself as my life,—I must choose. There are two lives, the self life and the Christ life; I must choose one of the two. “Follow me,” says our Lord, “make me the law of your existence, the rule of your conduct; give me your whole heart; follow me, and I will care for all.” Oh, friends, see the danger of this self, with its pride and its wickedness.
He in the depths of sorrow. Jesus led him on, past the led Peter on until he was broken down in utter self-abasement, and humbled grave, through the Resurrection, up to Pentecost, and the Holy Spirit came, and in the Holy Spirit Christ with His divine life came, and then it was, “Christ lives in me.”

There is but one way of being delivered from this life of self.
We must follow Christ, set our hearts upon Him, listen to His teachings, give ourselves up every day, that He may be all to us, and by the power of Christ the denial of self will be a blessed, unceasing reality.

The first lesson will be that we should take time, and that we should humble ourselves before God, at the thought of what this self is in us; put down to the account of the self every sin, every shortcoming, all failure, and all that has been dishonoring to God, and then say, “Lord, this is what I am;” and then let us allow the blessed Jesus Christ to take entire control of our life, in the faith that His life can be ours.

Do not think it is an easy thing to get rid of self.

We are called upon to live the life of Christ, and Christ comes to live His life in us; but one thing must first take place; we must learn to hate this self, and to deny it. As Peter said, when he denied Christ, “I have nothing to do with him,” so we must say, “I have nothing to do with self,” that Christ Jesus may be all in all. Let us humble ourselves at the thought of what this self has done to us and how it has dishonored Jesus.

Let us pray that fervently, and then let us wait upon God until we get away from all our religious exercises, and from all our religious experience, and from all our blessings, until we get close to God, with this one prayer: “Lord God, self has been the ruin of my life and the cause of every failure; oh, discover it to me.” And then comes the blessed exchange, that a man is made willing and able to say: “Another will live the life for me, another will live with me, another will do all for me,” Nothing else will do. Deny self; take up the cross, to die with Jesus; follow Him only.

The complete chapter on the Self Life
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/indwelling.v.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old who’s works have been passed down through the ages.