"Imitate VS Partake" II

Preached by Rev. Ed Brouwer at The Gathering Place
Pulpit Series Volume 17 Issue 12 04/01/2007

Christ and all true believers, are one. They constitute His body. They are, in the language of Adam, bone of His bone, and flesh of His flesh. Most Christians have never had so much as an inkling of what that really means. May the Holy Spirit enable us not only to understand, but to realize our oneness with Christ.

One responsibility of the Holy Spirit is to graft the believer into Christ, as a gardener would graft the branch of a tree into the main body of another. By one Spirit are you all baptized into one body I Corinthians 12:13

Paul dwells on this grafting process in Romans 11, where he speaks of the breaking off of Israel from the Root, Christ, and the grafting in of the Gentiles, to become partakers of the Root. True conversion in its deepest aspect is just that.

A grafting into Christ. We must be rooted into the very Trunk of the Eternal Godhead. We do not simply strive to imitate a Divine Leader; exceeding great and precious promises have been left to us whereby we are made partakers of the Divine Nature II Peter 1:4

The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, that we are children of God, heirs and joint-heirs with Christ Romans 8:17

In the Greek, the much-loved John 3:16, conveys a very different meaning from our English versions. It is not simply he that believes in Christ, but rather he that believes into Him, who shall have eternal life. Now this grafting necessitates some cutting, of course. Don’t pull away from God when this takes place. If we won’t die to the natural, how can we expect to live in the supernatural?

Paul puts it like this: If we be dead with Christ we believe that we shall also live with Him. The branch which is grafted into a tree of another species, must die to the old life. It must now depend on the roots of the new trunk. It receives a new life. Its relation with the old is severed so utterly, and so completely, that for it, the old no longer exists.

A seems that the all those who have truly lived in and for Christ have with few exceptions experienced what has been called "a second work of grace." There came a time when they longed for a fuller participation in the life of God. The facts indicate that they usually wander for some years in the wilderness of a divided affection before entering into the land of milk and honey. It is the Holy Spirit who works in the believer this conviction of the sin of a divided heart. The believer comes to realize that he is crucifying Christ afresh by his lust for pleasure, his greed for excitement, and his passion for self. He sees that though he has been rooted into Christ, yet, he has been drawing more from the old roots.

He begins to understand Romans 7. He, too, would be free. The secret cry of his heart also becomes: O wretched man that I am! who will deliver me from the body of this death?

This marks a crisis. The hour has come for a fresh revelation of Christ's redemptive work. The believer's eyes are opened to the deeper aspects of the Cross of Christ. The Cross is unveiled. He begins to see that unless Self is crucified, Christ is. It is all the work of the Holy Spirit. It is not natural for a man to turn against himself and to begin to hate that which by nature he loves.
But He can’t bring us to the place called Calvary-without our consent. We must be willing to die. Romans 6 How shall we who are dead to sin live any longer in sin? Don’t you know that as many of us who are baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death?... We are buried with Him into death... We have been planted together in the likeness of His death... our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed.... In that He (Christ ) died, He died to sin once... Likewise reckon also yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God through Jesus Christ

Oh! that the Church might catch a fresh vision of Calvary and come to appreciate the deeper aspects of the Cross! The Church, said the great French preacher, Lacordaire, was born crucified and until, like her Divine Head, she falls into the ground and dies, she abides alone, the life-giving streams cannot break forth from her bosom.

Oh that Christians might be brought down into the grave, and then brought up in resurrection power! Be clear about one thing: Christ does not come into our lives to patch up the "old man."
This is where too many Christians get "hung up." They think it was Christ's mission "to make them better." There is absolutely no Biblical ground for any such idea.

Jesus has no intention of pouring His new wine into old wine-skins. He said that unless we renounce ourselves utterly, we cannot be His disciple. Christ does not come to simply straighten out the "old life." He never promised to just make us better. We must die and be born again. Christ takes us down into the grave, the "old life" is utterly terminated, then he partakes of His resurrection.

Christ our Lord imparts to us an entirely "new life." Christ the Vine, we the branches. He is the Head, we form the body. Paul again and again points to co-crucifixion. We shall live with Christ, if we die wiith Him. We shall be with Him in the likeness of His resurrection, if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death. We shall reign with Him, if we suffer with Him."

The Cross kills. The one who goes to Calvary soon discovers that a hidden fire burns within his bones. The old "self-life," so resentful, so fussy, so greedy, and so touchy, so haughty and so vain, can no more resist the impact of Calvary, than some frail break the onrush of a great tidal wave.

The Lord’s crucifixion was not mere dying. Rocks exploded, the earth quaked when in that hour of triumph the Son of Man cried out with "a loud voice", "It is finished." His final cry shook the world When the centurion saw that so He cried out, Truly this Man was the Son of God. Mark 15:39

The "old life" brought under the dynamic of the Cross, is doomed to die. Resurrection life takes its place. Little wonder the Apostle cried out God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom I am crucified to the world, and the world to me. We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God.