Some years ago we described in a pamphlet the struggles of the soul that goes through with God, and we will repeat here: God says, "Reckon yourselves dead indeed unto sin and alive unto God." But facts are simply against it! We are not dead to the one nor alive to the other. We must stand to the Scriptures, and yet we must also be realists, true to facts! We will find a compromise, a backdoor out! It says "reckon." That means that we are not actually dead, we only reckon ourselves dead, but are not really so. We are crucified with Christ according to our standing in Him, but not according to our actual state on earth! And so, at the critical moment, we nicely elude the real bite of faith, and begin a crazy, wobbly walk with a foot on both levels of reality, the carnal and spiritual: we endeavour to do exactly what Jesus said it was an impossibility to do; to serve two masters, acknowledge the dominion of two lords, the flesh and the Spirit. 

No, that will not do. Faith is the utmost simplicity, but because we are distorted and subtle, it is a long road back to the transparency of childhood. Here is what the Scripture calls the fight of faith. The issue is clean-cut. We are summoned to step right off the level of the visible, the natural, carnal, and take the giant leap into the invisible. Witnesses are piled on us to press us into it. The inward light. The outward Scriptures. The historic fact of Christ. The miracle of changed lives. 

Very well, at last we do it. We state to ourselves that we have begun life on a new level of reality–in Christ. We pronounce the new realities to be the new facts of our everyday life. We are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. We are crucified with Him and He living in us. We have His love, His wisdom, His power. We are in a mystical union with the Godhead. We are in a new, timeless, spaceless realm; a fourth dimension, where, in the Spirit, we reach everywhere, possess all things, and touch all lives or supply all needs by the law of this invisible kingdom, the law of faith. And in the magnificence, wonder and glory of this new and full livingness, like Paul, we loose our hold on all the paltrinesses and trivialities which were once the sum of all life to us, our little bit of earthly dignity, position and reputation, our miserable scraps of earthly possessions, our little world of friends and relatives, even our tenacious hold on our minute particle of physical life. All these rivulets of the good things of existence are now merged and submerged in the endless sea of the ALL in Christ…not lost…merely absorbed, as the light of the night lamp in the morning glory of the sun. How can we grasp tight and cling to our petty dignities, our few bits of things, our tiny circle of loved ones, when hands and hearts are brim full with the wealth of the universe, the honour of divine sonship, the whole family in heaven and earth, and we are busied in praising, blessing and dispensing, in place of coveting, grabbing and keeping? 

And then, with a roar and a rush, back flood the plain facts of the old reality. What’s the use of all this idealism? Stark realism presents us with unmistakable upsurges of the self-life, patent lapses into the flesh, visible situations of need and lack. Back we swing again into the old beliefs, with their satellites of fear, depression, and fruitless struggling against the enemy.

Yet again in the stillness, the outline of things eternal rises before our misty vision, and we climb back, wearily, shamefacedly, but with grim determination, to the highlands of faith. The things that are seen are only temporal, only the roughened, distorted shell of reality, shattered by the hammer blows of Christ’s death and resurrection: such bastard claims to reality we now ignore. The things that are not seen are eternal; here is the heart of reality, the unsearchable riches of the I AM, who now says to us, "In Me, YOU ARE." Yes, here we stand, in Him. 

And so the fight of faith sways to and fro. But note carefully that there should be no fight at all! We only fight and struggle because we are still in the infancy of faith; still seeing men as trees walking, so far as the full way of God is concerned. A great veil, indeed, is over the eyes of thousands of Christians just at this point, because they are given to understand that Christianity is ever a struggle and strife against inward and outward foes. No. That is the half-way method of the law, provided only as a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ, to teach us the power of sin and weakness of self, and thus stimulate us to the discovery of true deliverance. That is meeting the negative with the negative; opposing the devil’s "Thou shalt not do good," with God’s "Thou shalt not do evil," with the consequent exhausting tug-of-war and endless alternation between victories and defeats. 

But the negative is swallowed up by the positive, the evil overcome by the good. By this method, the evil, the visible, the fallen condition, the oppositions of Satan, are disregarded; while all the energies are concentrated on believing, affirming and standing in the victory of Christ. When this is done, the other merely disappears from view. It becomes an unreality to us, a chimera, a dream. We have passed out of the principle of darkness into the principle of light, and these two cannot know each other. The wrestlings against the rulers of the darkness of this world to which Paul refers, are, he distinctly says, not just a negative recognition of and struggle against such forces, but a positive standing in full mental and spiritual occupation with the great positive facts of salvation, the realization of the heavenly armour, the helmet of salvation, sword of the Spirit, shield of faith. 

We struggle and labour and fight in faith, because we have not yet discerned between soul and spirit, the hallmark of the mature. We are constantly moved in the human realm by the impact of the visible. We "see" this or that failing or lack. We "feel" depression. We "hear" an unceasing stream of unbelieving talk. All this affects our minds and conditions, and we seem to have pressing down upon us a mountain of oppression, darkness, inability to maintain our grip on the invisible. We struggle, we strive, and the best we can do is dumbly, without feeling or sight, "to cling heaven by the hems": and the worst, which we more often do, is to let faith go for a season. The battle is fierce. The enemy this time is no dead and gone catalogue of past sins: it is a living, pulsing, corrupt nature. Blows are given and taken in an endless hurricane. One moment, flesh puts its foot on the neck of faith and summons it to surrender, the battle seems hopeless, flesh seems to pop up its evil head whenever it pleases. Another moment, faith rears up again from the dust, flings off the flesh, tramples it under foot and shouts, "They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts." "Cast out the bondwoman and her son." Then what happens? Who can tell? The contest was unequal from the beginning, despite all appearances. Faith had the trump card all the time, the victory already won by Him who "having spoiled principalities and powers, made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in the Cross." Only one requirement was essential: that faith should endure to the end and not be bluffed into a surrender. 

–The Law of Faith