Secret of the Master’s Indwelling (6) ... Christ Our Life

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
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 6, Christ Our Life:

“How can I live that life of perfect trust in God?” Many do not know the right answer, or the full answer. It is this: “Christ must live it in me.” When first we have seen what the life is, then we shall understand how it is that He can actually take possession, and make us like Himself.

Christ Jesus lived a life upon earth that He expects us literally to imitate. We must go to that which constituted the very root of His life before God. It was a life of absolute dependence, absolute trust, absolute surrender, and until we are one with Him in what is the principle of His life.

“The process of Jesus Christ;” the process by which He became what He is today—our glorified King, and our life. In all this life process we must be made like unto Him.
He received His life from God. What about His life upon earth? He lived that life in dependence upon God. About His death? He gave up His life to God. About His resurrection? He was raised from the dead by God. And about His ascension? He lives His life in glory with God.

First, He received His life from God.
The first lesson we need. We need often to meditate on it, and to pray, and to think, and to wait before God, until our hearts open to the wonderful consciousness that the everlasting God has a divine life within us which cannot exist but through Him. I believe God has given His life, it roots in Him. I shall feel it must be maintained by Him.

We must learn to live as Jesus did. I have a God-given treasure in this earthen vessel. I have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. I have the life of God’s Son within me given me by God Himself, and it can only be maintained by God Himself as I live in fellowship with Him.

The moment that you reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God, go with that life to God Himself, and present yourself as alive from the dead, and say to God: “Lord, Thou hast given me this life. Thou alone canst keep it.”  To live like Christ, I must be conscious every moment that my life has come from God, and He alone can maintain it.

Then, secondly, how did Christ live out His life during the thirty-three years in which He walked here upon earth? He lived it in dependence on God . You know how continually He says: “The Son can do nothing of Himself.” What ever He did, He did in the name of the Father. He, the Son of God, felt the need of much prayer, of persevering prayer, of bringing down from heaven and maintaining the life of fellowship with God in prayer.

I must have Christ within as the power to trust; He must live His own life of trust in me. We must be broken down from all self-confidence and learn like Christ to depend absolutely and unceasingly upon God.

Then comes, thirdly, the death of Christ.
Christ was my substitute, who died for me, just so much He is my head, in whom, and with whom, I die;  and if I want to know what that life is which He will live in me, I must look at His death. By His death He proved that He possessed life only to hold it, and to spend it, for God. And so, if one wants to live a life of perfect trust, there must be the perfect surrender of his life, and his will, even unto the very death. He must be willing to go all lengths with Jesus, even to Calvary.

Ask God to make you willing to believe with your heart that to die with Christ is the only way to live in Him. You ask, “But must it then be dying every day?”

Take an illustration. Take an oak of some hundred years’ growth. How was that oak born? In a grave. The acorn was planted in the ground, a grave was made for it that the acorn might die.  In its grave; all the time in the very grave where the acorn died; it has stood there stretching its roots deeper and deeper into that earth.  It has been growing higher, and stronger, and broader, and more beautiful. And all the fruit it ever bore, and all the foliage that adorned it year by year, it owed to that grave in which its roots are cast and kept. Even so Christ owes everything to His death and His grave. And we, too, owe everything to that grave of Jesus. Oh! let us live every day rooted in the death of Jesus.

This brings us to our fourth thought.
Jesus was raised from the dead, and that resurrection power, by the grace of God, can and will work in us. Let no one expect to live a right life until he lives a full resurrection life in the power of Jesus.

The Father said: “Will you give up that life to me? Will you part with it at my command?” And He parted with it, but God gave it back to Him in a second life ten thousand times more glorious than that earthly life. So God will do to every one of us who willingly consents to part with his life.

The fifth step in His wondrous path was: He was lifted up to be forever with the Father. Because He humbled Himself, therefore God highly exalted Him.

Scripture promises not only that God will, in the resurrection life, give us joy, and peace that passes all understanding, victory over sin, and rest in God, but He will baptize us with the Holy Ghost; or, in other words, will fill us with the Holy Ghost.

And as we come to the resurrection life, the life in the faith of Him who is one with us, and sits upon the throne—as we come to that, we too may be partakers of the fellowship with Christ Jesus as He ever dwells in God’s presence, and the Holy Spirit will fill us, to work in us, and out of us in a way that we have never yet known.

Jesus got this divine life by depending absolutely upon the Father all His life long, depending upon Him even down into death. Jesus got that life in the full glory of the Spirit to be poured out, by giving Himself up in obedience and surrender to God alone, and leaving God even in the grave to work out His mighty power; and that very Christ will live out His life in you and me. Oh, the mystery! Oh, the glory! And oh, the Divine certainty. Jesus Christ means to live out that life in you and me.

Within the Church what lukewarmness, what worldliness, what disobedience, what sin! How can we ever fight this battle, or meet these difficulties? The answer is: Christ, the risen One, the almighty One, must come, and live in the individual members. But we cannot expect this except as we die with Him. I referred to the tree grown so high and beautiful, with its roots every day for a hundred years in the grave in which the acorn died. Children of God, we must go down deeper into the grave of Jesus. We must cultivate the sense of impotence, and dependence, and nothingness, until our souls walk before God every day in a deep and holy trembling. God keep us from being anything. God teach us to wait on Him, that He may work in us all He wrought in His Son, till Christ Jesus may live out His life in us!

The complete chapter on Christ our Life:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/indwelling.ix.html
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