Death in Us, Life in Others

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For us also, not by our self efforts but by His own way of conditioning us, the Spirit will fix us who are willing from the heart in this same reversal of outlook as Paul’s. Our total passion becomes to hold nothing earthly of any value–whether loved ones, possessions or life itself–except as how they may fit in our all-absorbing passion, “the zeal of God’s house eating us up.” In this way, we “win” (Paul’s word) a leveling up with Christ, not now of reliance on Him for our own needs, but being aligned with Him in His Saviorhood. We are taken by the Spirit those same ways He went of utilizing the power of God at our faith disposal (which Paul called “the power of His resurrection”–Phil. 3:10). We are joined to Him in that death-resurrection process of the intercessor, where death-pressures involve us in taking the place of others that they may live, which he called “the fellowship of His sufferings.’’

This takes us right up to death itself (Phil. 3:10); and this produces what Christ’s out-resurrection produced–not just His rising, but. the “bringing many sons to glory” (the full meaning of that “out-resurrection” word in Philippians 3:11). And so we go, as co-laborers to the limit, and glorying in it, even as He went to the pain and shame of the cross, not with sorrow but joy (Heb. 12:2). We are among, not just the Spirit-baptized members of the church at Corinth who rejoiced in their own spiritual riches and fullness, but those with the marks of apostleship: weak, despised, poor, a “spectacle” to be stared at as crazy, yet apostles (1 Cor. 4:9-13; 2 Cor. 6:8-10).

We see this as the glorious completion of the “completed man in Christ,” the human side of the mystery of Christ in man, which Paul coupled together in his basic, standard statement of Colossians 1:26-28: Christ in us (v. 27); we, complete men in Christ (v. 28). This was the ideal to which Paul pressed forward, not a perfection of sainthood (which had been his for years) but a perfection of co-saviorhood in the fulfillment at all costs of his high calling. For him this was the glorious taking of the gospel to the Gentiles and the building up of the saints in Christ, his two-fold ministry (Col. 1:23-24). This had meant for the Savior himself an uncompleted task until He laid down His life for us (Luke 12:50), and so it did for Paul (Phil. 3:12-14).

And for us that means, as anointed ones (which all we believers are), we move right into our high calling. We are then pressed by the Spirit into this total absorption in Him flowing out of our inmost being (travail) into others, in countless unexpected ways, so that each of us is fulfilling various intercessions in action in whatever outer position of apparent unlikelihood we are in. These intercessions, which are really the Spirit, The Intercessor, interceding by us (Rom. 8:26), drive us to a sense of committal which we do not seek, but which takes us over. We have moved from our young man condition of rejoicing in the inner revelation of being He in our forms, fixed eternally, and are now becoming free from overriding self-concerns to involvement outside ourselves in people and situations. The reality of the royal priesthood takes us over.