Matthew 16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me
Vs 25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
Luke 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
Vs 27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.
Romans 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
Vs 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Many want to be saved; to have Jesus as Savior, but have yet to receive Him as LORD or King.
They are saved, born again, but have not yet come under His Lordship. Another way to say this would be that they have not yet “denied themselves, taken up the cross and followed HIM.”
They are still king over their kingdom; they have not yet abandoned the throne of their lives to Him.
They have yet to “present their bodies a living sacrifice” to the LORD so that their minds can be renewed and they become transformed by this change of mindset or renewing of the mind.
Let’s listen to a great Brother in the LORD and see what he has to say about this!
December 9 – Oswald Chambers
(My Utmost for His Highest)
“And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh
with the affections and lusts.” Galatians 5:24
The natural life is not sinful; we must be apostatized from sin, have nothing to do with sin in any shape or form. Sin belongs to hell and the devil; I, as a child of God, belong to heaven and God. It is not a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my right to myself, my natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the battle has to be fought.
It is the things that are right and noble and good from the natural stand point that keep us back from God’s best. To discern that natural virtues antagonize surrender to God, is to bring our soul into the centre of its greatest battle. Very few of us debate with the sordid and evil and wrong, but we do debate with the good. It is the good that hates the best, and the higher up you get in the scale of the natural virtues, the more intense is the opposition to Jesus Christ. “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh” – it is going to cost the natural in you everything, not something.
Jesus said – “If any man will be My disciple, let him deny himself,” i.e., his right to himself, and a man has to realize Who Jesus Christ is before he will do it. Beware of refusing to go to the funeral of your own independence.
The natural life is not spiritual, and it can only be made spiritual by sacrifice. If we do not resolutely sacrifice the natural, the supernatural can never become natural in us. There is no royal road there; each of us has it entirely in his own hands. It is not a question of praying, but of performing.”
December 10 – Oswald Chambers
(My Utmost for His Highest)
For it is written that Abraham had two sons,one by the slave woman and one by the free woman; Galatians 4:22
Paul is not dealing with sin in this chapter of Galatians, but with the relation of the natural to the spiritual. The natural must be turned into the spiritual by sacrifice, otherwise a tremendous divorce will be produced in the actual life.
Why should God ordain the natural to be sacrificed?
God did not. It is not God’s order, but His permissive will. God’s order was that the natural should be transformed into the spiritual by obedience; it is sin that made it necessary for the natural to be sacrificed.
Abraham had to offer up Ishmael before he offered up Isaac. Some of us are trying to offer up spiritual sacrifices to God before we have sacrificed the natural. The only way in which we can offer a spiritual sacrifice to God is by presenting our bodies a living sacrifice.
Sanctification means more than deliverance from sin. It means the deliberate commitment of myself whom God has saved to God, and that I do not care what it costs. If we do not sacrifice the natural to the spiritual, the natural life will mock at the life of the Son of God in us and produce a continual swither.
This is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature. We go wrong because we stubbornly refuse to discipline ourselves, physically, morally or mentally. “I wasn’t disciplined when I was a child.”
You must discipline yourself now. If you do not, you will ruin the whole of your personal life for God. God is not with our natural life while we pamper it; but when we put it out in the desert and resolutely keep it under, then God will be with it; and He will open up wells and oases, and fulfill all His promises for the natural. “
This thing of
-
- taking up your cross
- denying yourself
- presenting your body to the Lord as a living sacrifice
is not to be saved but to manifest the Kingdom of God in our lives in this earth today as it is in heaven.
2 Corinthians 4:10 Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.
