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The Lord Jesus Christ is at the Father’s right hand, and He is there as our righteousness*. By Him too, we have access into our Father’s favor. It is not only that grace meets us in our need and distance, but us brings us nigh to the Father as those who have access into His favor. To understand this grace, we need to have very distinctly before our souls the One Man by whom it has come. We can never truly learn the grace of God by thinking of those to whom it comes; we must think of the One by whom it comes.
Adam brought in sin and death, but the Lord Jesus has brought in righteousness and life. According to grace, we have been transferred, reborn from Adam to Christ. We have become identified with the Lord Jesus in His death unto sin. This is the only way of blessing. Our Adamic flesh could not be improved or Christianized; its history must be closed in death. One can be thankful for such qualities on human nature as natural affection, amiability, and so on, but they do not alter the terrible fact that “the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God; for neither indeed can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom 8:7). The flesh must be condemned, and it has been condemned in the death of Christ. “Our old (Adamic) man has been crucified with Christ.”
It is on this ground that we have been “made free from sin.” Sin has no longer any right to claim us. Christ has died to sin, and lives to God, and it is our privilege to take account of ourselves as having died to sin, and become alive unto God in Christ Jesus. In Romans 7 we see the exercises of one who is finding out that he is sold under sin; he is under a tyrant from which we cannot escape. Then he learns that the sin which holds him captive is in him. Finally, he discovers that in him, that is, in the flesh good does not dwell. I remember a young man saying to me, “I always knew there was plenty of bad in me, but I never knew until now that there is no good.”
The Lord Jesus is the Man of God’s pleasure, and we have every grace and blessing in Him. All is perfection there, and glorious suitability to divine love. If you have gone down into the depths of what you are, and have found that there is nothing there for God’s approval or pleasure, what a joy it is to look upon the Man Christ Jesus and to find in Him everything that is pleasurable to God! Through His blessed grace on the ground of redemption you are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit given you is “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
The Spirit of God dwelling in us is the evidence that we are no linger “in the flesh” (e.g. in the sinful nature; though this nature is in us: Rom 7—NC). He could not identify Himself with the flesh*; He could not come in as an addition to the flesh. The fact that He dwells in us proves that, according to God, we are in a wholly new standing. We are “not in the flesh, but in the Spirit” (Rom 8:9). The practical outcome if this is that “we are debtors, not to the flesh, to love after the flesh. For if you live after the flesh you shall die: but if you through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live.”
The Spirit brings us consciously into the circle of divine love as those who are in Christ Jesus the objects of that love. We have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. That is liberty. We are brought out of all that attached us to our standing as in the flesh, and we are brought into that which divine love has prepared for us Christ Jesus. If we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, it forbids that we should live any longer after the flesh. In the practical renunciation of the flesh lies the secret of liberty and growth; in short, spiritual maturity.
- C A Coates
Poster’s Opinion:
* “He is there as our righteousness”: The only righteousness in existence is the righteousness of the Lord Jesus, which is in all believers, and it is this righteousness only that makes believers righteous—by being their righteousness—which must be “made unto us” (1 Co 1:30).
The righteousness we perform is by the Spirit of God using Christ’s righteousness. There is no self-made righteousness which God regards, thus we are not required to perform in a manner which seemingly manifest our righteousness but rather Christ’s.
We are “made the righteousness of God in Christ” (Rom 5:19), by “imputation” only (Rom 4:11). This is how the righteousness of believers pleases the Father. After all, which strain of righteousness would you want to be in—what the Spirit uses or a so called self-made righteousness? Everything a believer does apart from the new nature is sin-tainted with the old nature and thus is imperfect, requiring trust in the necessities of the Lord Jesus’ provisions.
* “He could not identify Himself with the flesh”: The Father “made him to be sin for us” 2 Cor 5:21; e.g. made Him out to be like sin, i.e. “the likeness of sinful nature” Rom 8:3; but not become sin, since He is the only One being formed or “conceived by the Spirit” Mat 1:20; Christ’s human nature is sinless but not our human nature—yet! We are only “partakers” of what His human “divine nature” provides (2 Pet 1:4), which is that which keeps us from being dominated by the old nature—through the new nature. He is the only One who has this new human nature apart from sin, and a new human body).
MJS excerpt from May 31 devotional:
“Two things mark spiritual growth; one is a deeper sense of the sinful old nature, the other is a greater longing after the Lord Jesus Christ. The sinfulness is discovered and felt as the power of the Holy Spirit increases; for many a thought and act passes without pain to the conscience where the Lord Jesus is less before the soul, which will be refused and condemned as the knowledge of the Lord increases in spiritual power within.” -J.B.S.
http://www.abideabove.com/hungry-heart/
Adam brought in sin and death, but the Lord Jesus has brought in righteousness and life. According to grace, we have been transferred, reborn from Adam to Christ. We have become identified with the Lord Jesus in His death unto sin. This is the only way of blessing. Our Adamic flesh could not be improved or Christianized; its history must be closed in death. One can be thankful for such qualities on human nature as natural affection, amiability, and so on, but they do not alter the terrible fact that “the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God; for neither indeed can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom 8:7). The flesh must be condemned, and it has been condemned in the death of Christ. “Our old (Adamic) man has been crucified with Christ.”
It is on this ground that we have been “made free from sin.” Sin has no longer any right to claim us. Christ has died to sin, and lives to God, and it is our privilege to take account of ourselves as having died to sin, and become alive unto God in Christ Jesus. In Romans 7 we see the exercises of one who is finding out that he is sold under sin; he is under a tyrant from which we cannot escape. Then he learns that the sin which holds him captive is in him. Finally, he discovers that in him, that is, in the flesh good does not dwell. I remember a young man saying to me, “I always knew there was plenty of bad in me, but I never knew until now that there is no good.”
The Lord Jesus is the Man of God’s pleasure, and we have every grace and blessing in Him. All is perfection there, and glorious suitability to divine love. If you have gone down into the depths of what you are, and have found that there is nothing there for God’s approval or pleasure, what a joy it is to look upon the Man Christ Jesus and to find in Him everything that is pleasurable to God! Through His blessed grace on the ground of redemption you are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit given you is “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
The Spirit of God dwelling in us is the evidence that we are no linger “in the flesh” (e.g. in the sinful nature; though this nature is in us: Rom 7—NC). He could not identify Himself with the flesh*; He could not come in as an addition to the flesh. The fact that He dwells in us proves that, according to God, we are in a wholly new standing. We are “not in the flesh, but in the Spirit” (Rom 8:9). The practical outcome if this is that “we are debtors, not to the flesh, to love after the flesh. For if you live after the flesh you shall die: but if you through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live.”
The Spirit brings us consciously into the circle of divine love as those who are in Christ Jesus the objects of that love. We have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. That is liberty. We are brought out of all that attached us to our standing as in the flesh, and we are brought into that which divine love has prepared for us Christ Jesus. If we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, it forbids that we should live any longer after the flesh. In the practical renunciation of the flesh lies the secret of liberty and growth; in short, spiritual maturity.
- C A Coates
Poster’s Opinion:
* “He is there as our righteousness”: The only righteousness in existence is the righteousness of the Lord Jesus, which is in all believers, and it is this righteousness only that makes believers righteous—by being their righteousness—which must be “made unto us” (1 Co 1:30).
The righteousness we perform is by the Spirit of God using Christ’s righteousness. There is no self-made righteousness which God regards, thus we are not required to perform in a manner which seemingly manifest our righteousness but rather Christ’s.
We are “made the righteousness of God in Christ” (Rom 5:19), by “imputation” only (Rom 4:11). This is how the righteousness of believers pleases the Father. After all, which strain of righteousness would you want to be in—what the Spirit uses or a so called self-made righteousness? Everything a believer does apart from the new nature is sin-tainted with the old nature and thus is imperfect, requiring trust in the necessities of the Lord Jesus’ provisions.
* “He could not identify Himself with the flesh”: The Father “made him to be sin for us” 2 Cor 5:21; e.g. made Him out to be like sin, i.e. “the likeness of sinful nature” Rom 8:3; but not become sin, since He is the only One being formed or “conceived by the Spirit” Mat 1:20; Christ’s human nature is sinless but not our human nature—yet! We are only “partakers” of what His human “divine nature” provides (2 Pet 1:4), which is that which keeps us from being dominated by the old nature—through the new nature. He is the only One who has this new human nature apart from sin, and a new human body).
MJS excerpt from May 31 devotional:
“Two things mark spiritual growth; one is a deeper sense of the sinful old nature, the other is a greater longing after the Lord Jesus Christ. The sinfulness is discovered and felt as the power of the Holy Spirit increases; for many a thought and act passes without pain to the conscience where the Lord Jesus is less before the soul, which will be refused and condemned as the knowledge of the Lord increases in spiritual power within.” -J.B.S.
http://www.abideabove.com/hungry-heart/
