A Clean Severance - Part 2

From earliest memory I understood that everybody ought to love Jesus.  Then I began to hear that everybody ought to "receive the Lord Jesus Christ as his own personal Savior."  To the best of my understanding that is what i wanted to do, so I did it -- I asked Him to come into my heart, as I was instructed to do.  It was a once-for-all decision, and I believe He accepted the invitation and came in.  So far so good.  I was told that I was now "saved," saved by grace.  That was a gift, a free gift, from God.  Amazing.  Simply amazing that the Lord of the Universe, the One who is "the ruler over all authorities and the supreme head over all powers" (Col. 2:10), "the blessed controller of all things, the king over all kings and the master of all masters, the only source of immortality, the One who lives in unapproachable light, the One whom no mortal eye has ever seen or ever can see" (1 Tim 6:15-16) --amazing that the same One bends His ear to the prayer of a child or of a sinner of any age and, if asked, comes in and makes His home with us.  For His name is Immanuel, God with us.

How shall He be at home with us unless our lives are in harmony with His holy life?  Unless He lives His very life in us and we live our lives "in company with Him"?  Salvation means rescue fromt he pit of destruction, from the miry clay of ourselves.

So my decision to receive Him, although made only once, I must affirm in thousands of ways, through thousands of choices, for the rest of my life -- my will or His, my life (the old one) or His (the new one).  It is no to myself and yes to Him.  This continual affirmation is usually made in small things, inconveniences, unselfish giving up of preferences, yielding gracefully to the wishes of others without playing the martyr, learning to close doors quietly.  We may think of them as little "deaths."

Sin no longer holds authority, "exacting obedience to the body's desires.  You must no longer put its several parts at sin's disposal, as implements for doing wrong.  No:  put yourselves at the disposal of God as dead men raised to life; yield your bodes to him as implements for doing right; for sin shall no longer be your master, because you are no longer under law, but under the grace of God" ( Romans 6:12-14).


The further we travel on this pathway to the glory the more glorious it becomes, because we are given to understand that every glad surrender of self is merely a little death.

A Path of Suffering by Elisabeth Elliot

A Clean Severance - Part 1

In Old Testament Times suffering was seen as evil.  In the New Testament, suffering and evil are no longer identical.  Think of the shock the crowds must have felt when Jesus said that those who mourn, those who are poor and persecuted and have nothing are happy!  How could he say such things?  Only in light of another kingdom, another world, another way of seeing this world.  He came to bring life-- another kind of life altogether.  And it is in terms of that life that we must learn to look at our sufferings.  I have found it possible, when I see suffering from that perspective, wholeheartedly to accept it.  But it takes a steady fixing of my gaze on the cross.

If the cross is the place where the worst thing that could happen happened, it is also the place where the best thing that could happen happened.  Ultimate hatred and ultimate love met on those two crosspieces of wood.  Suffering and love were brought into harmony.

It was while we were still powerless to help ourselves that Jesus died for us.  It is a rare thing, as Paul points out, for anybody to die even for a good man, "but Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God's own proof of his love towards us.  And so, since we have now been justified by Christ's sacrificial death, we shall all the more certainly be saved through him from final retribution" (Romans 5:89).

To be "saved" requires a severance from the former life as clean and sharp as though made by a knife.  There must be a wall of separation between the old life and the new, a radical break.  That means death -- death to the old life, in order for the new to begin.  "We know that the man we once were has been crucified with Christ, for the destruction of the sinful self, so that we may no longer be the slaves of sin, since a dead man is no longer answerable for his sin" (Romans 6:6-7).

This wall of separation, this barrier, is the cross.

A Path Through Suffering by Elisabeth Elliot