Words to Live by is a weekly devotional email of Scriptures and quotes that highlight and expound upon our Union with Christ. If you’d like to receive devotionals like the one below, please subscribe using this link.
Wednesday Oct 23, 2024
He is for others, so am I
“So here is our summit, the third and final grade in the ascent, through cross to resurrection to ascension, as Paul reveals to us in his ascension letter to the Ephesians. Just as he puts those stages of our ascent into practical terms in his Roman letter, in our justification in Christ’s death (Chapters 3-5), union with Him in His resurrection (Chapters 6-8), and co-saviorhood with him in His ascension (Chapters 9-15); or as John so succinctly put it, by comparison with the stages in nature by which an infant reaches manhood: ‘I write unto you, little children…young men…fathers.’ Infants who start life in total dependence on their parents (‘Your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake, and you know the Father’): adolescents who have to discover their own inner resources to be adequate for life (‘you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one’): and then–what we are now talking about–this third grade of adults, about whom he makes this curious statement, ‘because ye have known Him that is from the beginning’: not here called the Father in the personal relationship sense, but the One, beyond any names, who is ‘from everlasting to everlasting’ in His love-activities, and we now identified with Him.
That means this third revolutionary fact about us, and its vast implications. As sons in His universe, we are as He is; and if His total being is for others, so is ours. But that is not the usual way we look at our lives. We think rather of the effect of things on ourselves. ‘Why has this happened to me? Why do I seem on the shelf? Why do others have it easier? Am I reaping the harvest of my own mistakes? I wish He would let up on me a little. And so on. But now we begin to practice the third recognition: the first, that I am His and He mine: the second, that it is He living my life: the third that as He is for others, so am I–and nothing else.”
–Taken from Who Am I?
By Norman Grubb
Pages 149-150