This gives us the answer to the question so often asked, and
of which the meaning is so seldom clearly apprehended: How can I die to self?
The death to self is not your work, it is God's work. In
Christ you are dead to sin, the life there is in you has gone through the
process of death and resurrection; you may be sure you are indeed dead to sin.
But the full manifestation of the power of this death in your disposition and
conduct depends upon the measure in which the Holy Spirit imparts the power of
the death of Christ. And here it is that the teaching is needed: if you would
enter into full fellowship with Christ in His death, and know the full
deliverance from self, humble yourself. This is your one duty. Place yourself
before God in your utter helplessness; consent heartily to the fact of your
impotence to slay or make alive yourself; sink down into your own nothingness,
in the spirit of meek and patient and trustful surrender to God.
Accept every humiliation, look upon every fellow-man who
tries or vexes you, as a means of grace to humble you. Use every opportunity of
humbling yourself before your fellow-men as a help to abide humble before God.
God will accept such humbling of yourself as the proof that your whole heart
desires it, as the very best prayer for it, as your preparation for His mighty
work of grace, when, by the mighty strengthening of His Holy Spirit, He reveals
Christ fully in you, so that He, in His form of a servant, is truly formed in
you, and dwells in your heart. It is the path of humility which leads to
perfect death, the full and perfect experience that we are dead in Christ.
What a hopeless task if we had to do the work! Nature never
can overcome nature, not even with the help of grace. Self can never cast out
self, even in the regenerate man. Praise God! the work has been done, and
finished and perfected forever. The death of Jesus, once and forever, is our
death to self. And the ascension of Jesus, His entering once and for ever into
the Holiest, has given us the Holy Spirit to communicate to us in power, and
make our very own, the power of the death-life. As the soul, in the pursuit and
practice of humility, follows in the steps of Jesus, its consciousness of the
need of something more is awakened, its desire and hope is quickened, its faith
is strengthened, and it learns to look up and claim and receive that true
fullness of the Spirit of Jesus, which can daily maintain His death to self and
sin in its full power, and make humility the all pervading spirit of our
life.
Humility- By Andrew Murray
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