By Major W. Ian Thomas
All your strivings to manifest this life through human effort will only leave you hopelessly exhausted. “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” (Gal. 3:3)
In the same sense that Jesus did not do anything in His own strength, He tells us, “Without Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) This Life from Heaven, and the God-Like or Christ-likeness of character we are to display, is dependent on God’s Divine power.
When God stopped using His power to display the “Light of Life” through Adam, God’s lamp in the world went out. The body was no longer able to display God’s spiritual image. There is nothing man can do through his own efforts to reproduce God’s nature of Divine Love. This is why carnal darkness will naturally prevail until fallen man has begun to live by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our Heavenly Father therefore sent His Son into the world to first reconcile man to God, and to then become a source of Light to the world. He has promised to provide His “Light of Life” to everyone who will follow Him through the cross. (John 8:12; Matt. 16:24-25; 1 John 4:9) Whoever loses their flesh-life will find the Son’s abundantly full Spiritual Life. (John 10:10) “In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men.” (John 1:4)[In Genesis 1:26a, 27-28; man made as a spiritual being; 2:7 this spiritual being made a house or body from the dust of the ground, which housed the Spirit of God, Yehovah-Messiah. Emphasis added]
The Bible declares emphatically that “without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Heb. 11:6) No matter what we try to do for Him, we cannot please Him until we are willing to walk in a moment by moment reliance on Him to supply us with His Life and Godliness from above. And, glory be to God, whoever earnestly seeks Him through a responsive walk of faith will be rewarded – they will find His Kingdom-Life.
Christians are therefore expected to depend on God for everything. They are not to do anything that does not include a total Reliance on God, “for whatever is not from faith is sin.” (Rom. 14:23)
Faith involves something more than an academic nod! The children of God are expected to rely on the power of the Spirit to display the Life of the Son through them. Since we were created for this very purpose, we cannot neglect this great life of faith without being morally irresponsible. The Light and Life of God is not optional! We must not remain like a light bulb without electricity!
Man has only two alternatives: He can either continue living by faith in his own strength {live by the flesh}, or he can turn to God and begin living by faith in His enabling power {live by the Spirit}. Living by human self-sufficiency is the essence of sin. (Rom. 14:23) Therefore, as the Scripture so clearly teaches, “if you live according to the flesh you will die.” (Rom. 8:13)
Once you recognize this spiritual principle you can better understand why Satan will keep opening up reasonable alternatives to faith. He knows that if he can keep you living by the strength of your flesh {the self-sufficient ways of the fallen world}, which is diametrically opposed to the Way of faith, he will cause you to defy your Creator. And everyone who lives this way will find they are continually dying in a spiritual sense. They do not experience the Living Water that continually satisfies the soul and wells up to a manifestation of God’s Eternal Life of Love. (John 4:14)
No matter how lofty your motives or otherwise commendable your actions, if they come from your own sufficiency {the pride of life} they are sin. God expects His children to depend on Him in everything they do.
When Jesus walked in a mortal body as a man, He too was required to Live by faith. He remained without sin simply because He always relied on His Father. He did nothing in His own strength. He did not produce a sinless life through any other means than by continually relying on the working of His Father. To have acted in His own independent strength would have resulted in sin. In essence, all sin comes from acting by self-will and self-sufficiency.
This is why Satan’s attacks on the Son were designed to lead Him into acting on His own initiative. He was tempted again and again, and in all points as we are. But He never departed from a life of living under the control and power of the Holy Spirit. He did not sin because He never once stopped relying on His Father. This is the Mystery of Godliness.
If Christians are to ever walk as Jesus did, which they are Required to do (1 John 2:5-6), they will need to go through a
complete renewing of their mind. Everyone who is still thinking in terms of what they must do in their own strength, still needs to press forward in their walk of faith. They must die to all forms of self-sufficiency before they will be in a position to be raised by the power of God into the Life of Promise.
When people tend to think of the Christian walk in terms of what must be worked out by human effort, they will naturally believe that it is impossible for anyone to walk as Jesus did. Their lack of faith will prevent them from receiving the life of promise. These Christians will therefore need to be built up in their faith so they can rest from their own works and begin depending on the Lord to establish His Kingdom-Life within their hearts by the Resurrection power of His Spirit.
There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the {regenerate} people of God; for anyone who enters God’s Rest also rests from his own work… Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest… (Heb. 4:9-11)
Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it… (Ps. 127:1)
Again, the Christian life is intended to have a supernatural quality about it. “Whoever lives by the Truth comes into the Light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” (John 3:21) Only the Spirit of Christ has the needed power to manifest the “Light of Life” through a human body.
Next we'll look at, "The First Adam"
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