To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This
Sins are put out of sight forever, but what about the self that appears to keep sinning? Sins, the product, are no longer our problem. The sin-producer is–which appears to be our sinful self. We who are desperate for the fullness of God in our lives start a second and deeper misery. The misery of the convicted sinner is his sins. The deeper misery of the born-again saint is his apparently inconsistent self! A radical discrepancy increasingly distresses him. He thankfully recognizes goodness (righteousness) proceeding from him in new love, joy, peace and self-control etc., and he is quick to say they are not from him but are the fruit of the Spirit now being manifested in his newborn life (Gal. 5:22, 23). Good things proceed from him which are the fruit of the good Spirit, but then bad things are also evident which must mean he has some bad nature expressing them. So then he says that he is twofold. That is where the fallacy, which has so taken over the evangelical church, is believed and accepted by the believer. If the good is from the Spirit, where does the bad come from? The answer supposedly is a bad nature still in me. But there is the fallacy and deceit.
We humans never had a nature of our own but were created to contain and manifest God in His divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Temporarily, unless we choose to remain so, we manifest, through the Fall, our badness which we falsely attribute to our human selves. But our question should be, if we don’t attribute our goodness to ourselves but to the Spirit of Righteousness, why then don’t we attribute our badness to the spirit of badness? Why put our human selves in? We have been bemused and muddle-headed. So here is our agony, and we see the perfect purpose of God. Unless we see and experience the sin of sins, the lie of the independent self, and have come to a disillusionment and hatred of it (as Paul in Rom. 7:14-24: ‘O wretched man that I am…’) as deep and thorough as our disgust and hatred of our old life of sins, we might revert to it again.
“Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. “(1 John 3:9)
Once we know the total truth of ourselves, we shall not revert to the falsity of independent self any more than a saved sinner reverts to his sinful condition (1 John 3:9). (We can be caught up again in a particular sin, but never again into occupation by that sin nature of Satan–the difference between sins and sin. We must get this clear). Therefore, it has been of necessity that we humans, if we are for eternity to be spontaneous expressers of the God of self-giving love in His nature, must first have tasted to its roots the deceiving nature of the god of self-getting love, that god of deceived independent self (Is. 53:6 ‘…every man turned to his own way…’) and, at all cost, have sought deliverance from it–that ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’ of Matthew 5:6.
–Taken from “To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This.”
