“There is a deliverance, a liberty wherewith Christ makes us free, which is other than forgiveness, and the joy that may accompany it, and which is often felt to be experimentally a mightier change than the first discovery of mercy and conversion to God. The Epistle to the Romans treats distinctly of these two things.” First, propitiation and forgiveness of sins, justification from all that the first Adam produces, through Christ being delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification, and the blessed grace which has thus given us a portion with God, and given us to joy in Him. This closes with chapter 5:11.
“Then comes the state of the sinner, ‘By one man’s disobedience;’ what we are, and where we are—not guilt from what we have done. We are in the flesh. The quickening power of God does not deliver; it works the desire of holiness, and shows us the necessity of it, but the flesh works still. To this the law, which requires righteousness from us, directly applies. The remedy for this is not the same as for guilt and sins, though it be still Christ’s death. There it was Christ bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, making propitiation, purging us from them before God. But the remedy for the power of sin in us, our state as in the flesh before God, is, taking us out of it, our having been crucified with Christ. We have part in righteousness by having part in death. If we have pert in death, we shall not live on. We are, by the Holy Ghost given to us, in Christ, not in the flesh. It is a new state and place, not the forgiveness of the sins of the old. As Israel not only escaped judgment by the blood on their door-posts when God was a judge, but were wholly out of Egypt at the Red Sea, where God was a deliverer; so we are not only secured from judgment, but out of the flesh, sin, and the world, when, through the work of Christ, we have received the Spirit through faith. We are not only born again, but have put of the old man, have been crucified with Christ, are dead, our life hid with Christ in God. The Christ who has become our life, the new I, which lives to God and to Him only, has died, and I reckon myself dead.
“It is a mistake to say, when we are emptied of self’ we can thus live. It is alive from the dead that we yield ourselves to God as truly free. The doctrine of this is in Rom. 6 The practical process by which we arrive at it is in chapter 7, an humbling process as it always is, though it may be modified by the knowledge of forgiveness under law, the first husband, where a state is discovered which (we are not in the flesh) is not subject to the law of God, nor can be. We discover then our state, what the flesh is, not guilt. I know that in me—that is, in my flesh—dwelleth no good thing; then, through Divine teaching, that it is not me, but sin that dwells in me, but then that it is too strong for me, that I am captive to the law of sin in my members,
“This is clearly not the Christian state at all, but a renewed soul under law. It does not say that the flesh is in me, but that I am captive to it, sold under sin. I am there (though it be not me), and cannot get out. But this is my state under the first husband—law. Death dissolves the bond. I have died in Christ, have been crucified with Him, and power in the life of the risen Christ is now my portion, the flesh reckoned dead, and I alive to God in Christ.
“Consequently, it. is not when brought to be empty of self I am filled with the Spirit, but when brought to find self or flesh wholly evil, and that I cannot get rid of it, or get the victory over it, when I have learned that I have no strength, as well as that I am ungodly (a point much harder to learn and more humbling), then I find I am delivered, having died in Christ to sin, and the flesh, and the law withal. The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus—Christ risen—has made me free from the law of sin and death. I am not a slave or captive, but free. What the law could not do, being weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin (a sacrifice for sin), has condemned sin in the flesh—not forgiven it. But when it was condemned, death was; so that, while the condemnation has been carried out in Christ, it is for faith dead, since He is and now the power of life in Him risen is that in which I live, dead to sin and alive to God, not in Adam or flesh at all, but in Christ.
“Now, being wholly free, I can yield myself to God as one alive from the dead. I reckon myself dead as regards the flesh, and alive in Christ only. I am not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God, given on cleansing by the blood, dwell in me, and if Christ be in me, the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
“Thus there is never any reason forever even having an evil thought. Sin has no dominion over me. I am not debtor to the flesh, and being set free, and the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, am able, for Christ’s power is there, to hold the flesh for dead. There is no reason why one single thought in my mind should come from the flesh, or from anything but the life of Christ which is in me, in the power of the Spirit. There is no excuse if such do arise. There are two elements in this state—having put off the old man and put on the new, which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness, and having the Holy Ghost dwelling in me. Hence God’s way of acting, is my measure of good; Christ, God manifest in a man, being the expression and model of this. I have perfect liberty in Divine favor; loved as Christ was loved and knowing it, and may and ought to be occupied with what is revealed in Him, my affections being engaged there, and I filled with the Spirit. But as this is a state of dependence, diligent seeking of grace alone can keep us thus, and in fact in many things we all offend. But my normal state is not grieving the Spirit, and so in God’s presence, being able to think of Him and not of self.
“No state here is the object of the saint; he is not alive in the world, and he looks having the life to be conformed to Christ in glory, and if he thinks of himself at all, it is only to judge himself. But I believe in complete deliverance from the law of sin which is in our members, that I am called to be filled with the Spirit, which would not allow thoughts from the flesh to arise in the mind, nor anything that would soil the conscience, but would make us live in the atmosphere of the Divine presence.
“The practical realizing this is by (2 Cor. 4) always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, and thus God helps us by delivering us to death by trial, that this may be fully made good, I allow, therefore, no captivity to sin, no dominion of it. Thus when hopeless as to getting the victory we find it to be ours in Christ, and then all has to conic from the Spirit, and all in fullness of joy with God. But this is carried out first, by knowing when hopeless as to victory over the flesh, that we have died in Christ, and then by always bearing about His dying, death still working in us, that the life only of Jesus may be manifested. So that ye cannot do the things that ye would,’ is utterly false. It should be, ‘in order that ye may not do.’ But there is complete deliverance from the whole power of sin, we reckoning ourselves dead, and undistracted enjoyment of Divine favor in the relationship in which Christ is.
“ The only normal state of the Christian then is, unclouded fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ, and the uninterrupted manifestation of the life of Jesus in his body; and when in God’s presence not having to think of sin in himself, but freedom to think of God and what He is. He is divinely free through, and in Christ;
but he has no thought of a present state of perfection, or of purity (only the Spirit is ungrieved and has not to make him think of himself); for his only owned state is conformity to Christ in glory, God having wrought him for that selfsame thing, in virtue of which he purifies himself even as He is pure; and if he does think of himself, has the consciousness of his not being as like Christ as he would desire, but is glad to have to think of Christ only. But purifying himself, is not consciousness that he is pure, his conversation is in heaven, his motives there, and hence necessarily if he thinks of himself, the consciousness of shortcoming, though he be not troubled by any present thought of sin, but is able to think of Christ, and a return to think of himself is already failure.”