Two Powers

Two Powers

We need two powers: a power to remove the hindrances, and a power to produce the fruit; a power to separate us from the evil, and a power to transform us into the good.

This two-fold power is found in Christ. There is the power of His Death, and the power of His Life. We do not bid goodbye to the first because we have been brought to live in the second. Nay, the condition of knowing the power of His Resurrection lies in “being made conformable unto His Death” (Phil. 3:10).

The true life, that which triumphs over sin and “does not cease from yielding fruit,” is a life that springs up out of death.

There is a deep spiritual meaning in those words of the apostle, which we fail to grasp at first sight, “Always bearing about in the body the dying”—or “putting to death”—“that the Life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10).

Death is here put before us as the condition of Life. The continual manifestation of the Life depends upon the constant conformity to the Death.

Death means separation, and Life means union. By being brought more and more into sympathy with Christ’s death unto sin, we become more and more thoroughly separated from its service and defilement. It is not merely separation from sinning; it is a separation from the old self-life. The great hindrance to the manifestation of the Christ-life is the presence and activity of the self-life. This needs to be terminated and set aside. Nothing but “the putting to death of the Lord Jesus Christ” can accomplish this. Conformity to His Death means a separation in heart and mind from the old source of activity and the motives and aims of the old life.

This “conformity” is the condition of the manifestation of the Divine Life. As we have already observed. the Life of Jesus” does not need our energy or our efforts to make it more living. All that God requires is that we should fall in with those conditions which are essential for the removal of the hindrances. Let those conditions be complied with, and at once the life springs forth spontaneously and without strain or effort. Though we can neither originate nor strengthen it by direct efforts of our own, we may indirectly increase its manifestation by complying with the Divinely-appointed conditions.

(From “The Overcomer”).