- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
VICTORY IS ALREADY OURS.
By F.J.Huegel.
"This is the victory that has overcome the world,
even our faith” (1 John 5 v4).
The victorious life is not something exotic added to the Christian life. It is not an attainment of a few advanced souls who, after much effort and struggle, have scaled the heights and finally arrived. It is not something which a privileged upper-strata of Christians achieve because, after much searching and no little self-sacrifice, they experienced what others may not have.
When conscious of our need and we are seeking and would enter the way of victory, it will be a great help to realise that we are seeking something which is already ours. That is to say, if we have named the name of Jesus in true faith and have surrendered to Him, crowning Him Lord of our lives, as Christians we have been made kings and priests to God (Rev. 1 v6), and as such we have a right to reign. If we fail to reign, we are simply not exercising our rights.
It cannot be stressed too much that all Christians come into the same glorious inheritance. We have received Christ and all things are ours for we are Christ’s. In Him we are complete. With Him we have been raised up and with Him we have been made to sit together in heavenly places (Eph. 2 v5-6). In Him we died to sin and were made alive to God (Rom. 6 v11). Christ has been made to us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption (1 Cor. 1 v30). These things cannot be made more truly ours than they already are. When God gives us Christ, His holy Son, to be our life, He does not do so with reservations. The whole gift is ours, not simply a part. We receive all of Christ. We do not receive justification without sanctification. We are not brought into Christ piecemeal. This unspeakable gift is for all who will receive it by faith.
This inheritance, God says, is ours by virtue of the fact that we have received His wondrous gift, which is Christ, and are found in Him. He was crucified, therefore we were crucified (meaning our old nature was crucified with Christ, Rom. 6 v6). He died, therefore we died (“you are dead” Col. 3 v3). He was buried, therefore we were buried (“. . . we are buried with him . . . into death” Rom. 6 v4). He was raised up, we are raised up (“God . . . has quickened us together with Christ and raised us up together”, Eph. 2 v5-6). He ascended, we are ascended (“and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” Eph. 2 v6). This is the believer’s position before God, ours by right, because Christ and believers are one. “For he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1Cor. 6 v17).
Too few of us have learned to say with Paul, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”. We live too much in the realm of the natural. We have not grasped the meaning of the Saviour’s word where He says that the flesh profits nothing. We have not yet stood where Paul stood when he cried, “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh), dwells no good thing”. We have not realised that it is our good “self” not yet denied which causes us to stumble. We are willing for our bad “self” to be crucified, not aware of the fact that the good “self” is just as mischievous, for it is still “self” and victory cannot be ours until all of “self” has been assigned to the Cross, according to Romans 6.
If as Christian we hunger and thirst after righteousness, the righteousness of victory, we are seeking something that is already ours. In a sense God cannot make it more ours than it is already. On the divine side it is a completed thing. We get nowhere by looking at ourselves. God expects nothing of self but that it be crucified. We are not called upon as Christians to die to sin, but to recognise the fact that we have died to sin in the death of Him who, on Calvary’s cross, put an end to the old creation, that in the power of His resurrection He might bring forth the new. Our old man was crucified with Christ, and in view of this fact we know ourselves dead to sin and alive to God (Rom. 6 v11). The reckoning does not produce the fact, it simply springs from the fact.
The victory we speak of is God’s standard (“thanks be to God who always causes us to triumph”), but it appears to be altogether unattainable for many. It seems to be a goal never to be reached here upon earth however great the longings for such a thing might be. However earnestly we might strive to reach such a position, the reason it is not reached is possibly because we are not willing to believe what God says about the matter, nor to do what He says must be done. How can we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God according to Romans 6 v11 (the Christian basis of victory), when it does not seem to be a fact? We feel that we must be honest. To state such a thing would be a lie. How can we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God when it seems as though every atom of our being still responds to sin, when the world still seems to master us, and the devil, in many respects, is still king?
God does not ask us to affirm something which we can believe to be true because we feel it and see it. It is not a fact in ourselves. It is a fact in the eternal council of God. It is a fact in the divine economy of redemption. It is a fact because it was wrought by the Son of God on Calvary’s Cross. It is as true as its twin fact, that Christ the Lord bore our sins in His body on the Cross. Feeling this does not make it a fact nor does believing it. It is a fact because, when the blessed Redeemer died the shameful death of a slave and a criminal on Golgotha’s cursed tree, God tells us in His holy Word that it was to put away the sin of the world. When we believe and are saved we do not create the fact, we simply rest on the fact established since the foundation of the world when, as we read in Revelation, the Lamb of God was slain. Calvary was the visible expression of a fact already established by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.
So it is with this twin-fact of the Cross, so insistently proclaimed in all of Paul’s Epistles. “Our old man was crucified with Christ.” “You are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” We are told that it was a fact when on the Cross the Saviour cried with a loud voice, “It is finished”. Not only was guilt dealt with, sin was condemned (see Rom. 8 v3). The sin in us crucified. We get nowhere with this question of victory until we believe it. We do not try to deceive ourselves into believing we are dead to sin and alive to God, when experience says something quite different. We are asked to reckon ourselves dead to sin through Christ, because God says He dealt with sin that is in us (our old man was crucified) when the Redeemer died on Calvary’s Cross. Victory is already ours if we are Christians, but we must accept it in God’s way and according to His terms.
From ‘Forever Triumphant’.