I would, for a few moments, draw the attention of brethren in Christ to a point, as to which I think there has been a good deal of misapprehension in practice, and which, while the joy of known forgiveness seemed to make all plain for a time, has left souls subsequently in distress and difficulty, even when not doubting of their acceptance, though it has sometimes come to that. Forgiveness is not deliverance; yet they have been a good deal confounded. It is a very common experience, when a person has found peace through the blood of Christ, that the pardoned and justified soul, (filled with joy and gladness to find its sins gone, the conscience purged, the sense of divine goodness filling it,) thinks that it has done with sin because it is at the time full of joy, and the Lord's goodness and favor; but this is not deliverance.
It is deliverance from the burden of sin upon the conscience, but ere long the soul is surprised to find sin still there; yet this deliverance from the sense of guilt, received forgiveness, has very often been taken for the setting free the soul, as in a new position before God. This it is not. It is freedom, compared with the bondage of uncertainty of acceptance in which souls are attempted to be kept; but the question of sin in the flesh is yet unsolved. I do not speak of perfection, so-called, which has missed all sound discernment as to the state and hope of the Christian, and invariably lowers the Christian standard of holiness and the judgment of sin, tending to harden the conscience, and to lower the state of soul before God. There is no perfection, no goal, for the Christian, but being like Christ glorified Himself! But pardon, in its fullest sense, is rarely known by the soul that is happy in the way that I have just spoken of, which only knows the deliverance of the conscience from the burden of sin actually lying on it, and thinks of none else; but even in its fullest conception the not imputing sin, forgiveness, applies to the sins of which the flesh, the old man, is the source, clearing the conscience, but the fruit of Adam life is all that is contemplated by it. It deals with what man has done as a fallen child of Adam. It leads to the knowledge of divine favor, and, I may add, the hope of glory as revealed in Christ. But, while thus knowing God in His ways of grace, and so far completing my sense of grace, self-knowledge, and the consciousness of a new position in Christ before God, are not yet acquired. That we have sinned and are guilty and deserve condemnation, is in such a case—fully acknowledged. What we are in the flesh, and what we are in Christ, is not yet experimentally known. Hence the soul does not stand in its new position before God, is not delivered, is not freed from confounding the old man and my place before God, nor from the power of sin.
Deliverance has a double character: perfect freedom with God in love in my place before Him; and freedom from the power of sin in myself. We are in Christ for the former; Christ is us for the latter. We are no longer in the position of the first Adam, though outwardly in the world, and the flesh unchanged, we say, “When we were in the flesh.” Then the motions of sins which were by the law wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. This new position, and the consciousness of it, flows from the Holy Ghost dwelling in us, while He refers us to Christ's work as the ground of it. I do not now say simply, He bore my sins, and cleared me forever from them, but I am in Christ before God, accepted in the Beloved, not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. I am not in the condition of a child of Adam, responsible before God, and thinking of my condition in His sight in connection with my conscious state; I have died to that as wholly and hopelessly evil, and know by the Holy Ghost that I am in a new standing altogether, in Christ, accepted in the Beloved. I am not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. Christ has died to sin, and I have died in Him, and He is my life; I am alive to God in this new life in Christ before Him, and reckon myself so by the Holy Ghost. My place is in the Second Adam, not in the first. Not only my sins are forgiven me, but I have died out of the place and nature in which I was guilty by its deeds before God, and the Second Adam is become my life! I am alive in Him to God. Of this the Holy Ghost gives me the consciousness. There is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus. You must condemn Christ glorified, before you can condemn me.
Let us see how this is. I may have learned forgiveness clearly, or I may not. But if I trust in the work of Christ—for it is a present, effectual, and finished work—I am sealed with the Holy Ghost. After having believed the gospel of my salvation, I am sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. Here is a new position altogether: “He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” I have the place of son by faith in Christ Jesus, who is risen; and because I am one, God has given me the Spirit of His Son in my heart, crying, Abba, Father. I know my relationship, and live in it, not in Adam's. But, further (John 14) “I know that I am in Christ, and Christ in me;” I have changed my place with God altogether, and am in a new one—Christ's who has died and is risen again. I reckon myself dead to sin, the old man has been crucified with Christ, that I should not serve it. And I am free: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” not elsewhere. I am not in the flesh but in the Spirit—not, if I am converted, but—if the Spirit of God dwells in me. I know I am in Christ, and Christ is past sin, the judgment of it, death, Satan's power. That is my standing and place before God. Death is gain, if it comes; for the body is not, as to power, redeemed—we wait for it. But I reckon myself dead to sin, my old man crucified with Christ. I am before God in Him who is glorified—in Christ. This is the doctrine presented by the apostle.
We have owned in our very profession of Christ that we were away from God in the flesh, but have taken our part in Christ's death as a Savior, in order to be with God; and as He died to sin once, so we thus reckon ourselves dead to sin, and alive to God, in Him who is our life, in the power of the Spirit. The result is in Rom. 8, where we enjoy the life in liberty according to the power in which He lives, and as dead to the sin which was condemned in His death on the cross. We are in Him now. The manner of it is that the sin which held me captive and distressed me, as a renewed person, was condemned in Him on the cross (ver. 3), so that there is no condemnation by reason of it for me. But this was in His death, and it is as though I had been there, as He was there made sin for me; and thus the condemnation is past and finished But then, as to the flesh—sin in the flesh, I died; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Thus for faith I am delivered from sin in the flesh, as having died in Christ, in that Christ has, who is my life. It is not resurrection with Him—that carries us farther—but death in Him on the cross as to the old man and state, and He now at the right hand of God, my life. Such is the doctrine and effect: Christ, who died, my life, and I in Him, in the power of the Holy Ghost, and through that dead to sin altogether, He having thus died, and the sin in my flesh condemned there, but for faith I dead to it for I died in Him! The condemnation He took, but it was in death, so that I reckon myself dead to sin in His death, and He is now my life, Christ in me, the only thing I own, and that by the Holy Ghost, as consciousness and power.
I am no longer in the flesh. My Adam place is no longer my place and standing before God. The flesh is there, but I am not in it but in Christ; or not in the flesh but in the Spirit, because the Spirit of God dwells in me. My place is thus summed up in Rom. 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus: for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and of death: for, what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The sin in my flesh has been condemned, fully dealt with, in the cross. And afterward, “But ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be the Spirit of God dwell in you;” and “if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his;” and “if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, and the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”