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THE SUPPLY OF THE SPIRIT.

By Mrs Jessie Penn-Lewis


According to the Bible, as a believer you have died with Christ and the old life is now crucified.  You now hold this identity from which the Holy Spirit communicates to you the life of Christ moment by moment.  He gives you the power of His Spirit (Philippians 1 v19) so that you can be what you could not be without Christ.  He gives you Divine strength in your weakness.  He gives you power to triumph over things that once defeated you, and He imparts to you life from the Lord Jesus in glory.  “He who has the Son has life” (1 John 5 v12).  “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3 v4). “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1 v27).

The Holy Spirit testifies to every aspect of Christ’s finished redemptive work on Calvary.  When He has revealed the Lord Jesus as Saviour then His work is to bring to death the “old creation” by making room for the life of Christ in the believer, so that they will grow more and more like Christ (Ephesians 4 v15).

Once the Holy Spirit has brought the old life to the place of death He replaces it by a new life of eternal power.  If you are a child of God there is now in your spirit a Divine life-giving power.  It may not be able to get out because it is blocked by your distracted soul, in such a way that those around you cannot tell that you really love the Lord at all.

Your deep need is to understand the meaning of the Cross, which shows that the Lord Jesus not only carried on it your sins, but that He took you there with Him.  When the Roman Christians were debating whether they ought to continue in sin or not, Paul said, “we are those who have died to sin, how can we live in it any longer?”  Suppose you had actually died to this world, how could you live in it?  And if you have died to sin, how can you go on living under its power?

In Galatians chapter 2, verse 20, Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me”.  Have you ever taken to heart that meaning of the Cross?  Have you ever been to the foot of Calvary and seen not only the Lord Jesus Christ but yourself also hanging on that Cross?  When you do, you will see yourself in Him on the Cross.  We see this in the Greek language of Galatians 2 v20 where there is another word which has not been brought out in the English translations of the Bible, “I have been crucified together with Christ”.  “May I never boast except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world had been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6 v14).

How does this work?  It means that when you take the position of the old life crucified, the new life has room to grow in you.  God then becomes a reality to you, and although you are in the world, instead of submitting to it, you become crucified to the world by the Cross of Christ.  This is the only true way to have victory over sin.  It is not saying, “I will not get into an angry outburst" but it is quietly and deliberately taking your position with Christ at Calvary, and saying, “Lord Jesus I have died to that anger, on the Cross with you, and I trust the Holy Spirit to separate me from it, for I have died to it.  I cannot manage it, it is beyond me and I have died to it”.  In the centre of your will you take an attitude of death and say, “I refuse to have anything to do with it because I have died with Christ”.

This is considering yourself dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.


From ‘The Work of the Holy Spirt’.