Bible Bedrock
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.” –2 Corinthians 5:7
We must “labour to enter into that rest.” Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. By every means in his power Satan will seek to cut the lifeline of our still flimsy faith. He will trip us into sudden sin and then mock our newly-made confessions of identification with Christ. He will lie to us that we are not different. He will tempt us through all our appetites and faculties, and then tell us to stop talking such foolishness as that we died with Christ. He will play upon our feelings to try and persuade us that the idea of an indwelling Christ is a phantasy. But we must learn to “walk by faith.” Not just to take the first step of faith, but to take a million steps, and then another million! For faith, as we have already pointed out, is a God-given natural faculty. Just as every natural action is taken by faith, so every human attainment is gained by faith, but only gained painfully and slowly. The first steps in learning a trade or a language are very hesitating. Often it seems to us we shall never get hold of it. The thread of our faith often wears very thin, but it must not snap. If it does, we give up. If it doesn’t, we crawl on, until, almost unrealized by ourselves, a natural miracle has taken place. What we were seeking to get hold of has got hold of us! We just know it. We are at home in it. Effort and strain have disappeared. A long series of separate efforts have changed into a natural habit. That is the process of faith. So if we gain human attainments by faith, constrained by human incentives, how much more our heavenly goal by the constraint of the Spirit and the authority of the Word. Persevere, and we shall find, who can tell when or how, that what we seek to know of unbroken union with Christ, what we perhaps strain and strive to maintain by repeated acts of faith, what we may almost despair of finding in fullness, finds us! He will reveal Himself to us by the Spirit: we identified with Him, He in us, as clearly and certainly and unchangeably as He has already come to us with forgiveness of sin and adoption into the family of God.
This is the crisis of union. There are many points to examine about the daily walk which follows, but the road is not firm beneath our feet, “the highway…called the way of holiness,” unless there is the realized union. Romans 6 brings it to a head for us. No longer coming to an outward Saviour, but joined Spirit with spirit to Him in spiritual death and resurrection, we in Him dead and risen, He is us as our life. We are back now in the central meaning of our creation, in the mystery Paul said had been hid from ages and generations, but is now revealed to His saints, which is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” We are freed in Calvary from Satan and sin, flesh and world, the same feeble little creatures to the outward eye, but within princes with God, with One for ever dwelling in us, of whom it is said, “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”
–The Liberating Secret
by Norman Grubb
