There is life in my hand-undoubted life-but let that hand be laid down upon the block, and the headsman’s axe separate it from the arm, and there remains no life whatever in the hand that is separated from the vital center, the heart. We are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. Your life, the true life of your soul, is a derived one, and is in Christ Jesus! Another illustration from the same blessed Word of God gives us the like sense. You are dead-then where is your life? Your life is hid with Christ in God, and if you live at all, this is the reason! “Because I live, you shall live also.” Your life is not in yourselves as a separate life. It does not bear the root, nor a root, but the root bears it, so that once you cut away the branch from the vine, you have taken away the life from the branch, for though the life is in the branch as long as it is joined to the vine, yet it is not so in the branch, itself, that it is there at all apart from the vine. It is the life of a plant which derives all its sap through the stem-through a root that is not in itself. The life of the Christian is not the life of the separate plant put into the soil to suck for itself through its own throat, the nourishment out of the earth. We know how plainly our Savior puts this in the parable of the vine.
He cannot maintain it by his own strength because of its very nature. The believer’s life must be dependent upon God. It is like one of the loaves brought to Christ-it needs breaking and we will break it up thus. That is the point to be thought over tonight-may its rich and humbling instructions be sanctified to us all.
Our souls have been quickened by the life of Christ- we live with the life that Christ has given to us, but we cannot keep ourselves alive any more than we could first make ourselves alive. We have, if we are believers, been made alive from the dead. Now, it is upon our entire dependence upon God as believers that I am to speak tonight. To believe that I am dependent every day upon the grace of God is easy, but to carry that dependence and the sense of that dependence into all my dealings with God and with man-this is not nature, but is in itself a work of grace!
Last soul alive full#
No, though man is dead in trespasses and sins and it is but a rank absurdity to imagine that death can produce life, yet the sinner still thinks that by something of his own he can create a soul within the ribs of death, that a sinner may grow into a saint of himself, that the man who is as full of sin as the leopard is full of spots, may yet, by his own innate energy, cast off his spots and become pure! I say that when man is cured of that rank absurdity, he then will need as much trouble to be cured of another, for even those who are alive unto God fall, more or less, into the false confidence that they can keep their own souls alive, and he out of us all who best knows that he can do no such thing has, nevertheless, sometimes caught himself acting as if he did believe that he could keep his own soul alive! To be sound in doctrine is one thing, but to have that orthodoxy in the heart is another thing. He begins by believing that he can make himself alive-and when he is convinced that this is not possible, he then tries to entrench himself behind the idea that he can keep himself alive. SELF-SUFFICIENCY is the sin of nature-all-sufficiency is the supply of divine grace! Ishmael, sent away into the wilderness with his bottle, is man trusting in himself-Isaac, dwelling by the never- failing wells of Gerar, is man led by grace to trust in the unfailing supplies of the God of all consolation! It is as hard to get man away from self-trust as it would be to reverse the course of Niagara.
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