Crucified

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me."  Galatians 2:20

I can't say it better, so I am going to turn today's blog over to Mr. AW Tozer.

Quotes from AW Tozer’s book:  The Pursuit of God

“With the veil (the temple veil) removed by the rending of Jesus’ flesh, with nothing on God’s side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without?”

“The answer usually given, simply that we are ‘cold,’ will not explain all the facts.  There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness and the cause of its existence.  What is it?  What but the presence of a veil in our hearts?  A veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us.  It is the veil of our fleshly, fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated.  It is the close-woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross…an effective block to our spiritual progress.”

 “It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit.  They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.  To be specific, the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them.”

“It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.  We may as well try to instruct leprosy out of our system.  There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free.  We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us.  We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment.  We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when He suffered un Pontius Pilate.”

“To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed.  To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all.  It is never fun to die.  To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful.  Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.”

One final thought from Mr. Tozer:

"God must do everything for us.  Our part is to yield and trust!...We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion.  That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.  Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done.  The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective.  It does not keep its victim hanging there forever.  There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies.  After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the presence of the living God.”

 

And his prayer:

 

"Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways of man.  Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life.  Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the veil of the Temple.  We would draw near in full assurance of faith.  We would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with Thee there.  In Jesus' name, Amen."

 

Hint of the day:  Do not inpire to make your kids happy, but rather inspire to make them see the truth of their own depravity and then lead them to the cross and let God do the work there.  A time of sorrow can bring deeper happiness later.