Scripture: "And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption."--Ephesians 4:30 "Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God."--Colossians 3:2-3
" A Spiritual look is a call to as real and total a death to the life of corrupt nature as that which Adam died in Paradise was to the life of heaven. To the end of four lives every inch of our road is to be made up of denial and dying to ourselves. To think of anything but the continual total denial of our earthly nature is to overlook the very thing on which all depends.
"You rejoice in thinking that now in knowing these truths you have found the Pearl of great price. But notice, it is not yours till you sell all that you have and buy it. Now self is all that you have; you have no good of your own, nothing is yours but this self; and all this self is to be parted with before the pearl is yours. That is, die to all thy possession of self; all of it is to be given up; it is an apostate nature, a continual departure from God; it corrupts everything that it touches. All evil tempers are born and nourished in self. Die to this self, to this inward nature, then all outward enemies are overcome.
"The true ground of all true religion is: it means nothing but to overcome that earthly life which overcame Adam in the Fall. Therefore you must know that the one thing needed is to die to all the life that we have from this world. The Son of God calls us to die to this life and take up His cross. When the human soul turns from itself, and turns to God, dies to itself and lives to God in the Spirit and tempers of the holy Jesus, then only it is delivered from covetousness and sensuality, from a worldly spirit, from all self-interest and self-exaltation, from all hatred and envy.
"To think of anything in religion, or to pretend to real holi¬ness, without totally dying to this old man, is building castles in the air. To think of being alive in God, before we are dead to our own nature, is as impossible as for a grain of wheat to be alive before it dies.
"The total dying to self is the only foundation of a solid piety. Thus alone does the spiritual life begin at the true root, grows out of death, and is born in a broken heart, a heart broken off from all its own natural life."
Our blessed Lord Jesus could not be raised from the dead into the glory of the Father's right hand until He had died on the Cross. This is the new and living way which He opened up through the rent veil of the flesh into the Holiest of All. And it is in this new and living way with our flesh also cruci¬fied and given over to the death, that we can enter into the life and the joy of God's presence here upon earth. The continual denial of self is one of the secrets of the continual enjoyment of God's presence and power working in our hearts.
