Part 2

It follows from this that every Christian really has received the gift of Victory from God, for it is just the indwelling Christ through the power of the Spirit. But how few, how very few Christians are enjoying the remarkable results of that gift, the freedom from the law of sin, the fruit of the Spirit. Why is this? A generation ago there were very many earnest Christians who thought it presumptuous to be sure of their salvation. They may have been saved and been blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ, but they were not, and some Christians to-day are not, _enjoying assurance of salvation_. Even so defeated Christians, who walk now and then after the flesh and fall into sin, are not enjoying the freedom that Christ purchased for them. They are not living up to their privileges in the Lord. The word of freedom has not been benefiting them, because it has not been united by faith with them that heard. “For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they: but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not united by faith with them that heard” (Heb. 4:2).

The Two Simple Conditions

The simplicity of entering into this New Life has been a stumbling block to many. For there are but two conditions for victory, and every Christian has been given grace to meet these two conditions. The first is surrender. For that resurrection life of Jesus can only operate when our self effort ceases. “Yield yourselves unto God” (Rom. 6:13). Or as Weymouth translates it: “Surrender your very selves unto God.” And this was spoken to Christians. This surrender of the Christian to God is positive, not negative. It is not as a surrender of things, nor of an evil self life, but a yielding of self with all its powers to God, as alive from the dead. With this positive surrender everything contrary to God’s will goes out of the life.

Surrender a Definite Matter

Failure frequently comes in the life of Victory because there has not been a complete surrender. Something has been held back. Or we have been too superficial in our understanding of what crucifixion of the old self life means. Now our Lord is lovingly ready to meet us when we come eager for full salvation and willing to make full surrender to him. He will show us if we ask him, _and wait for his answer_, whether there is anything that is not wholly surrendered to him. Some Christians say this matter of surrender is very vague, and they cannot tell whether they have really surrendered completely. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit is always very definite when we deal with him earnestly. One woman who said the surrender matter was entirely too vague for her to know whether she had surrendered, after some questioning remarked: “Well, of course, I would not be willing to have my two sons go to Africa as missionaries.” The matter of surrender was very definite for her and until this Christian mother lays her two boys on the altar for Christ she will not know complete victory.

Young people sometimes stumble over surrendering such things as worldly amusements, the theatre, dramatic moving pictures, dancing, card-playing, smoking. They argue that they do not regard these things as sins, though others may believe them to be. But surely if we are facing the question of getting such a great Gift as Christ as our Victory and very Life, these things are small matters to yield. But if they are not sins, are they “weights” in the Christian race? “Let us ... lay aside _every weight_, and the sin which doth so easily beset us” (Heb. 12:1).

When A Christian Robs Christ

But, it may be objected, how can a Christian surrender? Does he not already belong to Christ? Ah, that is the sad tragedy of it. Will a man rob God? Yes, the Church of Christ is largely robbing him to-day of the only offering he cares for――ourselves as living sacrifices. We are indeed bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ, we are not our own, we belong to him. Have _you_ acknowledged this ownership in every detail, not with your lips alone, but with your life, in its every action? That is the first requirement for Victory. And Victory will never be enjoyed until the surrender question is settled. An earnest young Christian woman was in defeat and distress because there was something she would not yield. She acknowledged it was pride, but she could not give it up.

“Whom do you belong to?” she was asked.

“Christ.”

“What price did he pay for you?”

“His own life.”

“But you are saying to him there is something you are holding back. What are you doing?”

“I suppose I am crucifying him afresh,” she answered, the tears coming.

“Yes, you are robbing him.”

But the struggle went on and she would not yield.

“Will you kneel down and just tell the Lord that you are robbing him, and that you intend to keep on robbing him?”

She shrank from such a thought, and she kneeled down and told her Lord that she _would_ yield that one thing she was holding back, and that there was nothing that she was not willing to do that he wanted.

She arose with a radiant face, and as the days went on it developed that God did not want her to do the thing she was shrinking back from doing. A Christian may be kept out of victory because he says he would not be willing to go to the mission field, or send his sons to the mission field. God _may not want him to go_, but he can never have Victory as long as there is an unwillingness to do what God _may_ want him to do. For this is doubting God and his love.

More Needed Than Surrender

But there are multitudes of Christians who are truly surrendered, holding nothing back, who do not have Victory. For the surrendered life is not necessarily the Victorious Life. Surrender is _our_ part. The supernatural work of Victory is _God’s_ part. _God is doing his part as soon as we yield ourselves_, and we get the benefit of it when we believe that fact. This is Victory by faith. “Faith does nothing. Faith believes that God is doing it all.” Faith is just believing the word of God. Those marvelous promises, or rather “facts” of God’s Grace which have been quoted above can only be received by the Christian who is holding nothing back from God. Then all the rest is God’s work.

Is he faithful? We have surrendered. Is our part then to believe that God will give us Victory? _No, that is not faith._ “Victory’s final secret,” as Mr. Trumbull has put it, is to believe that Christ _is_ doing his part, that his Grace _is_ sufficient, that we _are_ free from the law of sin, that we _are_ under Grace and not under law and that therefore sin _is not having dominion_ over us, that he _is_ meeting all our needs, but we _are_ walking in the Spirit. This is “letting God.”

Will you not “let go, and let God?” Now?

If you do, you can say with Paul, not only as a truth of your position in Christ, but as the blessed truth of your experience: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).

What It Is Not

The Victorious Life is not a life free from temptation, but a life of victory over temptation. First Corinthians 10:13, with its “there is no temptation” is an absolute guarantee from God that victory over all temptations is possible; for he himself provides the way of escape. Jesus,――in his resurrection Life,――is the Way.

The Victorious Life is not a life free from the possibility of falling into sin. It is always possible at any moment to sin, and as soon as our eyes get off Jesus faith slips, self is in control, and the result is sin.

The Victorious Life is not dependent on circumstances. Nothing is too hard for God, not even your hard circumstances. And let us always remember that the Victorious Life is “_the Life that is Christ_.” He is as able under one circumstance as under another.

The Victorious Life is not an attainment by growth. True growth in Grace really begins when we take the Grace of the Lord for complete victory over sin. Growth in Grace does not mean gradually getting rid of our sins, but it does mean growing from one degree of glory to another degree of glory as we behold the Lord and are changed into his image (2 Cor. 3:18).

The Victorious Life gives no cause for boasting of spiritual attainment. Grace excludes boasting. It gives us no holiness of our own. The holiness and the victory are His, and the most mature saint in the walk of faith needs the same secret of Victory as the young Christian just entering into the Life. His strength is ever made perfect in weakness. My weakness is never made stronger, though as I learn more of the Bible teaching of what faith is I may get more and more established in acting by faith.

Continuing in Victory

We continue in the Life of Victory as we entered it, by continuing the attitude of surrender and faith, moment by moment. It is the principle of “contact”; as long as the trolley keeps on the wire the electric power is supplied to run the car; as we keep looking unto Jesus there is Victory. If a slip of faith comes, if the trolley gets off the wire, and sin enters (which is always possible but never necessary), do not stop to argue with Satan about the sin or listen to his suggestion that you never had Victory: confess, receive instant forgiveness (1 John 1:9), look again in faith just as when you entered into the blessed “rest of faith.”

Does this message leave you with joy and gladness in your heart, because you know that this life is yours? Have you taken the Gift? Or are you like the young Christian who told an older woman that she had surrendered and believed _a thousand times_, and she was in hopeless darkness about it all.

“Well,” this older Christian said, “just stop doing that, or trying to do anything, and trust him to do it all.”

“I have done that a hundred times,” was the discouraged answer.

She had no will power to do anything, and she was hungry for Victory.

“If you can do nothing else, just lift up your heart to Christ.”

“I can’t. My heart is too heavy to lift up.”

It Is as Simple as This

“Well, one thing you can do, for it is just a physical act. You can lift up your eyes. Will you do that?”

The young woman promised that she would do that, and on the way home she kept her eyes directed upward as unto him. The next day she gave her testimony with a radiant face, rejoicing in the Lord: “I lifted up my eyes, and my heart went up with them.”

The Victorious Life is just as gloriously simple as that――just looking up――unto Jesus――and KEEP ON LOOKING.

OUT OF BONDAGE INTO LIBERTY

“They do not care a snap of their fingers whether Abraham was justified by faith or works,” writes a leading American preacher in a recent article that seeks to interpret the heart-cry of men to-day for a prophet who can give them “a spiritual interpretation of the world-rending and home-smashing events that are taking place.”

Yet that very same question which was the all-important thing for Abraham, to-day, nearly four thousand years later, is still the question that goes to the root of the world’s spiritual problem.

There is nothing more important for the Christian to understand than the distinction between law and grace. For to understand that is to have in one’s heart the Gospel message. It is not too much to say that the chief cause of powerlessness in the Christian church to-day, a powerlessness that is made the more acutely evident by the world’s sore travail, is that so many thousands of Christians are still living under law.

They have not found the emancipation of grace.

They do not walk at liberty, which was purchased for us by Christ.

They do not stand fast in the freedom wherewith Christ has set us free.

They are not “free indeed” with the freedom which the Son of God won for us.

This is not an academic question. It is not a discussion of points of law, nor the making of fine distinctions in the deeper spiritual mysteries. _It is a question of sin._

When our Lord was telling the Jews that if they believed him and followed him they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free, they threw back their shoulders in their pride of ancestry and boasted that they were Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man. The Son of God did not stop to discuss questions of race, or of political liberty, but went to the heart of the matter with one of his tremendous verilies: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin” (John 8:34).

Christians Who Are Bondslaves

That Word of the King of kings is the word that needs to be thundered to-day, or, what is more effective, whispered to-day into the souls of men. There is no bondslavery comparable to this. A man may be on the side of righteousness so far as the conflict of nations is concerned to-day, but what avails that for the solving of his individual problem if he is the bondservant of sin?

If, then, the question of law and grace is a question of sin, it is the most vital matter that can concern men to-day. Always alongside of sin is another word beginning with S――“Salvation,”――that is, this word is always alongside of sin in _this age of Grace_. When our Lord told the Jews of this bondslavery, he did not leave them there, but added that wondrous word: “If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

There is needed to-day a great challenge to be thrown at an unbelieving world, a testimony that cannot be answered,――_Christians walking at liberty_, men and women living in the midst of these awful days of stress with the “freedom indeed” which belongs only to sons of God. But instead of that an unbelieving world is constantly face to face with the puzzling spectacle of professing Christians who are bondservants of sin, who do not know the meaning of liberty.

For let us remember the word of the Master, and not nullify it with theological explanations to make it fit into the experiences of Christians: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin.” And Christians are bondservants of sin because they are living under law and not under grace. They are not using, not enjoying, the freedom that Jesus Christ purchased for us.

Have We Nothing to Do with Law?

So fundamental is the correct understanding of the Christian’s relation to the law, that if Satan is not able to beguile Christians into staying in bondage under the law he will seek to drive them into an opposite error that is just as deadly to true liberty. This is the notion that a Christian has nothing to do with the law, and is under no obligation to have his life conform to it. Young Christians who have seen something of the wonder of their deliverance from the law have jumped to the conclusion that the Old Testament books that deal with the dispensation of law have such an indirect bearing upon their lives that they can neglect them. Portions of the New Testament are also divided in this fashion from the rest of the Word, and even Christians with a deep spiritual vision have argued that the Sermon on the Mount had little in it for them because it was on legal ground, and we are under grace. Their teachers may not have intended this application of their instruction about freedom from the law, but it illustrates the danger, and shows the need of clear light from the Word to avoid the pitfalls on each side.

So the Word of God urges on the one hand, “For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1), and cautions on the other, “For so is the will of God, that by well-doing ye should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your freedom for a cloak of wickedness, but as bondservants of God” (1 Peter 2:16).

And Paul puts the two messages together in Galatians 5:13 and 14: “For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Law in the New Testament

But in what sense are we freed from the law, if we are still to keep the law? The New Testament takes hold of the law of God as revealed in the Old, and makes it infinitely higher in its requirements.

Some men say that their Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount.

It is the most hopeless Gospel a sinner ever struggled with.

For in this sermon our Lord pours the spiritual meanings into the law of God. It may have been possible for a man to abstain from the outward act of murder, but our Lord takes that command and shows that the inward fact of murder is in a man’s heart if he is angry with his brother. So does the Master lift the command against impurity into a place where the strong moral man, who does not have the secret of victory, is convicted of impurity.

Not only is there this spiritual interpretation of the law, which makes it the more impossible to keep it, but there is the new commandment the Lord gave his disciples, to love one another _as he loved them_. And as though this were not enough, the New Testament epistles, after the death and resurrection, when the dispensation of law was fully over, show us that to break the law of God at one point makes us guilty of all: “Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well: but if ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all. For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou dost not commit adultery, but killest, thou art become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:8-11).

This startling passage says that if Christians have respect of persons――and has not the Spirit here put his finger upon one of the most pathetic and abominable sins of Christian churches of our day?――these Christians are convicted as transgressors of the law, and are guilty of all. Then the Apostle goes on to speak of the sins of murder and adultery as samples of the kind of thing that a Christian is guilty of when he shows respect of persons,――the awful sin of unlove.

Law Never Abrogated

This leads us into the truth that the law of God is pure and holy and spiritual, and has never been abrogated. The New Covenant does not take away the law: it provides a way of fulfilling the law. There are many senses in which the word “law” is used in the Scriptures, but we are looking now at the righteous law of God which must be fulfilled, and the breaking of which is sin, for sin is lawlessness, or the breaking of the law. James tells us that to stumble in one point is to break the whole law, for the law is a unity.

The law is a unity because it is an expression of the character of God, and God is one.

To break it in one point is to sin against God. It is a true revelation of the Scriptures that “God is law,” though these words do not occur. The words “God is love” do occur, and love is the fulfilling of the law.

When God gave the perfect law to men God knew that men could not keep it apart from the secret of Grace. _But men did not know it._ And God cannot do anything for a man by grace until man learns that he is a transgressor of the law of God, and that it is _impossible for him to keep it_. Israel said, “All that Jehovah hath spoken we will do.” They indeed needed a tutor unto Christ.

The law, then, was added to show man what sin is, to make sin exceeding sinful, to prove to man that he is a sinner. This work the law did all through the old dispensation. But this work the law must continue to do for every individual before he can enter into the meaning of grace.

That Seventh of Romans Struggle

That is what the struggle of the seventh chapter of Romans means. That is a struggle under law, the picture of a man who has been brought under condemnation by the law. The law is a great mirror let down from heaven in which a man may see himself as he is. That is why the law brings condemnation and death. It is a curse,――not because the law is not holy, but because it convicts the man of his unholiness. Law does this in the New Testament as well as the Old, and with infinitely more searching terribleness because of the high spiritual interpretation of the inner meaning of the outward commands. The law of God has done its work in a Christian when he has seen that it is impossible for him to be good according to God’s standard.

Not all have seen this. Dr. Scofield tells of a gentleman who came to him at the close of a talk on how a Christian might get out of the struggle of the seventh chapter of Romans into the victory of the eighth chapter, and asked him this: “Doctor, what was the trouble with Paul anyway? Why did he find it so hard to be good? I don’t find it very hard to be good.”

“What do you mean by being good?” the preacher asked.

“What every one means――living a clean life, being honest, paying your debts, treating people right, and if your neighbor gets in trouble put your hand in your pocket and help him out.”

“Oh,” Dr. Scofield responded, “Paul did those things all his life. Any _gentleman_ would do those things. Paul was not talking of that when he said it was a struggle to be good.”

“Well, what did he mean?” the business man asked, somewhat taken aback.

“Not Built That Way!”

“Did you ever try to be meek?” was the preacher’s next question.

“What’s that?”

“Did you ever try to be meek?”

“No, sir! I don’t admire a meek man.”

“Don’t you? Well, God does. His Son was meek and lowly. But now suppose you started off some morning and determined to be meek all that day, to love everybody, no matter what mean things another man might say. Would you find it easy?”

“I couldn’t do it. That’s not in my line. I’m not built that way.”

Just so, we are not built that way. We need to be built over. A new life needs to come in. And when the law has brought us to that point, and we cry out with Paul, “Wretched man that I am!” then the law has done its proper work. The tragic thing is that most Christians stop right there in their reading of the seventh chapter of Romans. They do not go on to the glorious word of deliverance. There is a way out. Paul has been in bondage under the law of sin. But a new law enters, and he exclaims, “The law of the Spirit ... made me free from the law of sin and of death.” What is the new power of that law of the Spirit? “_Life in Christ Jesus._” What happens when the law of the Spirit is working, when we are enjoying the freedom indeed wherewith Christ hath set us free? _The requirement of the law is fulfilled in us._ This law of the Spirit, of the new Life in Christ Jesus, hath set us free from the law of sin and death, in order that we might keep the law of God. And it is kept in us just as long as we walk in the Spirit. God’s plan is that we should walk in the Spirit all the time; that is “abiding in Christ.” The struggle of the seventh of Romans is a struggle _under the law_, it is human effort apart from grace. It is not given as the normal Christian experience, but a parenthesis between two passages of glorious liberty, placed there to show what bearing the keeping of the law has upon the Christian’s experience. The normal Christian experience is freedom from the dominion of sin.

What Grace Says

“Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law but under grace.” The secret of victory, therefore, is to keep under grace, which is walking in the Spirit. How is this to be done? All Christians who have real assurance of salvation see clearly that we are saved by grace. Law has condemned them. Law says “Do,” and we cannot do.

Grace says, “Jesus Christ has done it for me.”

“How much in the matter of my salvation has he done?”

“All of it.”

“How much is there left for me to do?”