- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
THE CROSS OF CHRIST AND FRUIT BEARING.
By Gordon B. Watt.
The aim of our Lord for each of His disciples is a fruitful life, “Herein is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, so shall you be My disciples”. And the secret of such an experience Paul gives us in the words to the Galatians, ‘‘I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless . . . Christ lives in me”.
What produces fruit? In nature it is the life of the tree flowing into every branch and twig. What is its source in the Christian life? “Without Me you can do nothing.” One of the greatest needs in Christian life is to understand that this is literally true.
Fruit in the sphere of Christian discipleship does not come through the development of the physical or the natural. Nor is it the outcome of bodily energy, mental powers, or personal attractiveness. Andrew Murray wrote, ‘No one knows what fruit is until he has learned to die to all that is merely human’. How difficult it is to die to dependence on our own intellects, to pride in our abilities, to our reputation, to our natural desire for success or to our self-made plans. But true fruit only comes when we are willing that all these should go to the Cross and Christ becomes everything, and we depend entirely on the Holy Spirit for every word we speak, every work we do and every path of life we take.
The source of fruit in the believer’s life is not in himself but in Christ, and leading up to that point where it is possible to have fruit for God Paul states certain great facts. The first is, “I am crucified with Christ”. The “I” is the representative of the self-life and has to be dealt with if fruit for God is to be gathered. We cannot tie the Christian life on to the old Adam nature, and the fact is very clearly stated by Paul, “Knowing this, that your old self was crucified with Christ” (Rom. 6 v6). Paul gives us confirmation of this in his own experience, “I am crucified with Christ”. What requires to be done? Christ’s Cross must become our cross. We share with Christ death through the Cross to everything in us that is opposed to God, to His will, His purpose, His power and everything in us that shows the effect of sin and has on it the mark of the Fall.
Whenever we consent to share Christ’s Cross and allow the meaning of it to be worked out in our lives in relation to the good as well as the evil in our nature, then the way is open for the life of Christ to flow out. As we take up and maintain the attitude of death to each assertion of the self-life and attack of Satan, it gives the Holy Spirit the opportunity to bring into us the life of Christ, setting us free from the law of sin and death. Christ and I are co-crucified.
What then? “I live”. That is the interesting paradox stated by Paul, “I am crucified . . . never the less I live”. Co-crucifixion with Christ does not create a religious machine. I live. A new ‘I’ quickened by the Holy Spirit, raised with Christ and seated with Him in heaven, appears, and as Ellicott states in his Commentary, ‘The fact is that I live in a truer sense than ever’. I live all the more because I have died with Christ and the roots of my new life are in the Cross, in contrast to the old life, the roots of which are in the Adam nature .
“I live, yet not I” - “Christ lives in me”. Here is the secret of entering into the wonder of Christ’s salvation. The secret of this new life and the source of it is the Cross. Christ and the Cross are inseparable. In the measure in which we yield ourselves to the Holy Spirit to accomplish in us the work of the Cross, so does Christ find it possible to make “Christ lives in me” real, and apart from the Cross it never can be true. The moment we come to the Cross, being willing for the Holy Spirit to work in us the purpose for which Christ died, we touch the point of contact and make it possible for Him to enter into an alliance with us, for the believer’s true life is the life of Christ in him.