Christ Magnified In My Body # 2

Christ Magnified In My Body # 2

Or if you want it in the words of Isaac Watts, after you've seen Him, "my richest gain I count but loss." As I've said so often, we use that phrase, one day after you've seen Jesus, "The things of earth will grow strangely dim." I like to turn that around and say, when we get to heaven and look back, "The things of earth will look strangely grim."

We live and we spend our time gathering sawdust. Everything we spend our lives to get is perishable, outside of the spiritual. Paul says we are to present our bodies a living sacrifice. So the body can be a living sacrifice. In the same verse he said it can be "holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." Now in it's normal condition it cannot be that. The human body is corruptible. The flesh in us is corruptible. But once He takes us in His infinite mercy, and Romans 5 is fulfilled,

We receive the grace of God.
We receive the peace of God.

Then we can present that body, which He will sanctify, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is only our reasonable service.

Romans 8 is a fantastic chapter. Verses 1 and 2 say, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death." Come down to verse 6. "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."

Now, how can you harmonize death and life?

A man called me yesterday. He talked, I'm sure, forty or fifty minutes from California. Oh he was in despair about the carnality mastering his life. He said, "Well, I'm a Christian. I'm sanctified." "You are?" I asked. He said, "Yeah, but something carnal dominates me."

Well, that's ridiculous. How can you be carnally dominated if you're spiritual? This scripture is very clear. To be carnally minded is death. I think preachers are very often the devil's advocates. They defend sin better than an atheist. They tell you, "You can't get rid of sin on this side of eternity. It has to have dominion over you." The scripture says it doesn't!! Oh, this man had just one sin of the flesh that mastered him. He could not, in any shape or form, get the victory over it. I said, "Well, get it nailed to the Cross. That's the answer."

Again, Romans 6, "we are buried with Him by baptism..." As I use the illustration so often, if a man is standing here in the water, and I bury him under the water, he's cut off from the world above. He can't see the world above. He can't breathe the air above. He can't talk with the world above. He's cut off!

We saw some people baptized last week. I thought of them, as they went through the water. Symbolically, they are saying, "Look. This is my grave. I'm being buried to the world above," to its "idle pomp and fading joys," as one hymn writer says.

Somehow preachers love to fall back on Romans 7, don't they?

I heard an amazing Bible teacher. He gave a great message on holiness to about 400 preachers. But when he had taken us into the heavenlies, he said, "Now, don't think I'm preaching a second work of grace, or that you can be really holy in this life, because even the apostle finished up in Romans 7..." HE DID NOT FINISH UP in Romans 7! There happens to be a Romans 8! In the Greek there is no difference, there is no chapter division; we have an artificial division. Paul says there is no answer to the law. "Oh, wretched man that I am." Sure  he said that. "Who shall deliver me from this ... death?" Well, if he stopped there, we would be in trouble. He says, "I thank God through Jesus Christ, my Lord." That's why he starts Romans 8: "There is no therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free..."

I hate planes. As I say facetiously, "Flying is for the birds." Yet, every time that monster takes off, I try to estimate, ....there are three hundred passengers in that plane, all the baggage, the many tons of gasoline...off it goes with a roar! Soon you see the land dropping away as you go up. That thrust that's there is greater than the law of gravity. Well, then, what about the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus?

Oh, I love resurrection hymns. "Up from the grave He arose!" I like that! As I said the other day when we sang it: Sing it with a sneer! "Death cannot keep its prey." "Sin shall not have dominion over us." "The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free..."

Look at verse 8. "So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." "Well, there you are," some will say. "There's the answer." No, the answer is in the next verse: "But you are not in the flesh." He's talking about this flesh in one place, and he's talking about the "fleshy nature" in the other. Verse 9: "But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the spirit of God dwell in you." Look at verse 10: "...if Christ be in you." And verse 11: "...if the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you," What else do you want? You have the Spirit of God in you. You have the Spirit of life in you. You have the Spirit of the Son in you. You have the Spirit of the Spirit in you. How can there be room for carnality?

~Leonard Ravenhill~

(continued with # 3)

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