Bible Bedrock
“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not
from us.”
– 2 Corinthians 4:7 (King James Version)
The daily cross, therefore, is not, as so often presented, a grim and unwilling endurance of adversities. It is the sole principle of fruitfulness, the law of the harvest. It is not the cross for sanctification, nor the efficacy of the blood for daily cleansing. It is the continual transmuting of weak human flesh and shrinking human reactions into cooperating channels of the Spirit. We must die all the time, “always bearing about the dying of the Lord Jesus.”
By no other means can weak, separated selves, confronted by all kinds of overwhelming situations, be the soil for the spiritual harvest. The supernatural life only manifests itself through the yielded natural life, and the yielding is identification with Christ in His daily dying in us. Then, Paul says, we are “perplexed, but not in despair,” knocked down but not knocked out: for in our inner man rises the spirit of faith (2 Corinthians 4:13), the recognition of our identification also with an ascended Christ, seated with Him on His royal throne, victors with Him far above all opposition, and dispensers of His gifts to men.
It means actions, for no life is so dynamic, so vitalized as a Spirit-filled life. He who created, upholds and consummates all the activities of the universe, the unmoved Mover, has made us His body–and a body is to use, and to use at full stretch. Is it not obvious that He who is love and who gave His only Son for the world, will likewise give us, His sons by grace? He that spared not His own Son, will He spare us?
