Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
If we "let this mind be in [us], which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5), we will learn self-denial. But that's the lesson our fallen humanity doesn't like; we always want our way, not surrender it and crucify self.
To crucify self can happen only as we are "crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2:20). When that "grace of God teaches us to deny ungodliness" (see Titus 2:11-13), it's Christ that is doing it; there is no "university" on earth that can teach us to do that.
It was at Gethsemane that Jesus as the divine/human Son of God came to the most wrenching temptation to love self. No one in the vast universe of God ever faced such a trial. In His human nature, Jesus did not want to go to that cross, not because He dreaded the pain and shame involved, but He recoiled against the second death that He knew was in the cross. "O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt" (Matt. 26:39).
He had fallen, weeping and broken, and now He sweat blood as He chose to "resist unto blood, striving against sin" (Heb. 12:4). It would have been enormous sin if He had rejected the cross that the Father would lay upon Him. Christ must win His primeval battle with self, or the universe is lost in the great controversy.
Now, says Paul, I have learned from Him--"I [too] am crucified with Christ." I kneel with Him in Gethsemane. Paul says, self in human nature is so strong that it was like sweating blood for Christ to say "No!" to self; but I, Paul, say "let this mind be in me, which was also in [Him]."
Paul goes on to say, "nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." To respond any less than that, says Paul, would be to "frustrate the grace of God," and that I now refuse to do, he adds (Gal. 2:20, 21).
Let "Elijah" "turn ... heart[s]" on this Day of Atonement (cf. Mal. 4:5, 6).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: March 15, 2008.
Copyright © 2013 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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