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and we recommend that you purchase these materials to read them in their entirety.
The following excerpts from the writings of Major W. Ian Thomas are available on this page: Christ Himself The Content
of Christian Faith By: Major W. Ian Thomas There is something, which makes Christianity more than a religion, more than an ethic, and more than the idle dream of the sentimental idealist. It is this something, which makes it relevant to each one of us right now as a contemporary experience. It is the fact that Christ Himself is the very life content of the Christian faith. It is He who makes it "tick." "Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it" (I Thessalonians 5:24). The One who calls you is the One who does that to which He calls you. "For it is God which worketh in you, both to will and to do of His good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). He is Himself the very dynamic of all His demands. Christ did not die simply that you might be saved from a bad conscience, or even to remove the stain of past failure, but to "clear the decks" for divine action. You have been told that Christ died to save you. This is gloriously true in a very limited, though vital sense. In Romans 5:10 we read, "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." The Lord Jesus Christ therefore ministers to you in two distinct ways - He reconciles you to God by His death, and He saves you by His life. This, however, is but the beginning of the story, "for if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, (now an accomplished fact,) we shall be saved (as a continuing process) by His life" (Romans 5:10). The glorious fact of the matter is this no sooner has God reconciled to Himself the man who has responded to His call, than He re-imparts to him, as a forgiven sinner, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and this restoration to him of the Holy Spirit constitutes what the Bible calls regeneration, or new birth. Titus 3:5 and 6, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour." From: The Saving Life of Christ, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas There are few things quite so boring as being religious, but there is nothing quite so exciting as being a Christian! Most folks have never discovered the difference between the
one and the other, so that there are those who sincerely try
to live a life they do not have, substituting religion for They are lamps without oil, cars without gas, and pens without ink, baffled at their own impotence in the absence of all that alone can make man functional; for man was so engineered by God that the presence of the Creator within the creature is indispensable to His humanity. Christ gave Himself for us to give Himself to us! His presence puts God back into the man! He came that we might have life - God's life! There are those who have a life they never live. They have come to Christ and thanked Him only for what He did, but do not live in the power of who He is. Between the Jesus who "was" and the Jesus who "will be" they live in a spiritual vacuum, trying with no little zeal to live for Christ a life that only He can live in and through them, perpetually begging for what in Him they already have! From the foreword of Classic Christianity by Bob George, Eugene: Harvest House Publishers. ©1989.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas Christian living is not a method or technique; it is an entirely different, revolutionary principle of life. It is the principle of an exchanged life" not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Galatians 2:20). This is all part of our Gospel - it is not the Gospel plus! We must not get our terminology wrong. To divorce the behavior of the Christian from the Gospel is entirely false and is not true to the Word of God, yet all too often such is the characteristic of gospel preaching. I would like to explore with you what is the true spiritual content of our Gospel not just heaven one day, but Christ right now! Christ in you, on the grounds of redemption this is the Gospel! To preach anything less than this must inevitably produce "Evan-jellyfish" folk with no spiritual vertebrae, whose faith docs not "behave!" Do you remember what James says in his epistle? "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead" (chapter 2:26). The "spirit" there means breath, and a body without breath is dead. Stop breathing and folk will bury you! In other words, a living body breathes, and a living faith breathes, and a living faith breaths with divine action. A living faith breathes with the activity of Jesus Christ. That is why the Lord Jesus, in John 6:29, said, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent." That is the work of God. It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you. It is the kind of activity that the Bible calls "good works," as opposed to "dead works." "Good works" are those works that have their origin in Jesus Christ - - whose activity is released through your body, presented to Him as a living sacrifice by a faith that expresses total dependence, as opposed to the Adamic independence (Romans 12: 1,2). It is only the life of the Lord Jesus -- His activity, clothed with you and displayed through you, that ultimately will find the approval of God. From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas What is eternal life? Is it a place that you are going to when you are dead? Is it a peculiar feeling inside? If you were to ask a normal congregation, or any sort of Bible class or Sunday school in an evangelical church to define eternal life, you would be amazed at the strange answers you would get! What is eternal life? When does it begin? I noticed just the other day, in a hospital chapel where I was speaking, a tablet on the wall in memory of one of the previous chaplains, and in giving the date of his death it said, "He entered into eternal life." Is that true if he was a Christian? Is it right to imply, as did that tablet on the wall, that eternal life begins when a man is physically dead? No, indeed! "And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (I John 5:11,12) Jesus Christ and eternal life are synonymous terms, and eternal life is none other than Jesus Christ Himself, of whom it is written in John 1:4 "In Him was life; and this life was the light of men." "If you have eternal life at all, it simply means that you have the Son, Jesus Christ now! Jesus said, "I am the Way, I am the Truth, I am the Life" (John 14:6) Eternal life is not a peculiar feeling inside! It is not your ultimate destination, to which you will go when you are dead. If you are born again, eternal life is that quality of life that you possess right now, at this very moment, in your own physical body, with your own two feet on the ground, and in the world TODAYI And where does this life come from? Of Him! He is that Life! So if you have eternal life, it means that you have Somebody, Jesus Christ, and the life that you possess is of Him. From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas It may be that your need is still that of a sinner seeking forgiveness; you need to be redeemed, and you are still trying to find your way back to God and godliness. Christ is saying to you now, as He said to His disciples of old in the Upper Room, after he was risen from the dead, "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself" (Luke 24:39); in other words, "I AM - all that a guilty sinner needs! The wounds in My hands and My feet are the hall-marks of My Saviourhood; put your trust in Me, and I will save you!" All you need to say to Him is this, "Lord Jesus - Thou art! For me - Just what I need! My Saviour and my Redeemer - for ever!" You will be redeemed, and He will give you life; by the gift of His indwelling Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ. He will give you His Life, and this is what it means to "live in the Spirit"; but "If we live in the Spirit let us also walk in the Spirit: (Galatians 5:25), and this is what it means to "walk in the Spirit" to take one step at a time, and for every new situation into which every new step takes you, no matter what it may be, to hear Christ saying your heart, "I AM!" - and then to look up into His face by faith and say, "Thou art! That is all I need to know Lord, and I thank Thee; for Thou art never less than adequate!" True godliness leaves the world convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only explanation for you, is Jesus Christ to whose eternally unchanging and altogether adequate "I AM!" your heart has learned to say with unshatterable faith, "Thou art!" From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publising House. ©1964.
TO BE WHAT HE WAS (PERFECT) By: Major W. Ian Thomas For godliness is not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of His capacity to reproduce Himself in you; not self-righteousness, but Christ-righteousness; the righteousness which is by faith a faith which by renewed dependence upon God releases His divine action, to restore the marred image of the Invisible God. It is not inactivity, but Christ-activity; God in action accomplishing the divine end through human personality - never reducing man to the status of a cabbage, but exalting man to the stature of king! "For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:17). At first sight this might seem to offer to you the possibility of sinless perfection as the result of spiritual regeneration, but this is far from being the case; for it is only your faith and your obedience which allow Him to be in you now what He was then (perfect) - and you will be what He was then only to the degree in which you allow Him to be in you what He is now (perfect)! All of the Father was available to all of the Son, because by His faith-love relationship, all of the Son was available to all of the Father, and this constituted His perfect manhood; and the availability of the Son to you will be in the degree of your availability to the Son, because of your faith-love relationship to Him! From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1964.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas The moment you are redeemed through the atoning death of Christ upon the cross, you receive the Holy Spirit within your human spirit. You have "passed from death to life" - raised from the dead - and the Life which has been imparted to you by the Holy Spirit is the very Life of Christ Himself; " He made us alive together in fellowship and in union with Christ. He gave us the very life of Christ Himself, the same new life with which He quickened Him" (Ephesians 2:5, Amplified New Testament). The life that the Lord Jesus Christ lived for you nineteen hundred years ago condemns you; but the life that He now lives in you saves you! The Christian life is the Life which He lived then, lived now, by Him in you. As He behaved in the sinless Humanity which the Father had prepared for Him then, so He wants to behave in your humanity presented to Him now. Your mind placed at His disposal through the indwelling Holy Spirit; your emotions, your will, all that you are and have, made available to the Lord Jesus Christ as a living member of His new corporate body on earth, which is called the church. This is the new law in action, the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus, re-establishing the "faith-love" relationship between your soul and God, making it possible for you to "declare" the Son, as once the Son "declared" the Father. Your "behavior mechanism" once more wholly "Deo-centric" instead of "Ego-centric." " so that the commandment of the law may find fulfillment" in you, whose conduct, no longer under the control of your lower nature, "is directed by the Spirit." A radical change of government! From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1964.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas Jesus Christ Himself is the final exegesis of all truth. He is all that we need to know about God, and He is all that we need to know about man. The Lord Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into His hands that as a Man, all the illimitable resources of deity had been vested in His person. That is the first thing I would like you to notice, for although He was in the beginning with God, and was God, and is God and although as the Creative Word, all things were made by Him when He came to this earth, in the very fullest sense of the term, He became Man; but He became Man as God intended man to be, and behaved as God intended man to behave, walking day by day in that relationship to the Father which God had always intended should exist between man and Himself. Who, although being essentially one with God and in the form of God (possessing the fulness of the attributes which make God God), did not think this equality with God was a thing to be eagerly grasped or retained; but stripped Himself (of all privileges and rightful dignity) so as to assume the guise of a servant (slave), in that He became like men and was born a human being. And after He had appeared in human form He abased and humbled Himself (still further) and carried His obedience to the extreme of death, even the death of (the) cross! (Philippians 2:6-8 Amplified New Testament). In all His activities, in all His reactions, in every step He took and in every word He said, in every decision He made, He did so as man, even though He was God. He knew that in His perfection as man, the Father had vested in Him all that God intended to vest in man all things! In other words, man in perfection has an unlimited call upon the inexhaustible supplies of deity. To put it another way, all the inexhaustible supplies of God are available to the man who is available to all the inexhaustible supplies of God; and Jesus Christ was that Man! He was Man in perfection - - totally, unrelentingly, unquestioningly available and that is why there was available to Him all that to which he was available all things! From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh" (1 Timothy 3:16). Godliness is a mystery! Fail to grasp this fact and you will never understand the nature of godliness. God did not create you to have just an ape-like capacity to imitate God. There would be no mystery in that, nor would this lift you morally much above the status of a monkey or a parrot! The capacity to imitate is vested in the one who imitates, and does not derive from, nor necessarily share the motives of the person being imitated, who remains passive and impersonal to the act of imitation. In direct contrast to this, godliness or Godlikeness is the direct and exclusive consequence of God's activity in man. Not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of God's capacity to reproduce Himself in you! This is the nature of the mystery! Remove the mystery or try to explain it away, and the result must inevitably be disastrous, for you will no longer be anchored to anything absolute; you will be at liberty to choose your own God the object of your own imitation; and your "godliness" will be the measure of your conformity to the object of your choice. The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in and through you, whoever He may be and this will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing for there is only one God, and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself! From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1964.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas "Faithful is he that calls you, who also will do it." (I Thessalonians 5:24). The One who calls you to a life of righteousness is the One who by our consent lives that life of righteousness through you! The One who calls you to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, is the One who by your consent, goes into all the world and preaches the Gospel to every creature through you! This is the divine genius that saves a man from the futility of self-effort. It relieves the Christian of the burden of tying to pull himself up by his own bootstraps! If it were not for this divine provision, the call to Christ would be a source of utter frustration, presenting the sorry spectacle of a sincere idealist, constantly thwarted by his own inadequacy. If you will but trust Christ, not only for the death He died in order to redeem you, but also for the life that He lives and waits to live through you, the very next step you take will be a step taken in the very energy and power of God Himself. You will have begun to live a life which is essentially supernatural, yet still clothed with the common humanity of your physical body, and still worked out both in the big and the little things that inevitable make up the lot of a man who, though his heart may be with Christ in heaven, still has his two feet firmly planted on the earth. You will have become totally dependent upon the life of Christ within you, and never before will you have been so independent, so emancipated from the pressure of your circumstances, so released at last from that self-distrust which has made you at one moment an arrogant, loud-mouth braggart, and the next moment the victim of your own self-pity and, either way, always in bondage to the fear of other men's opinions. You will be free from the tyranny of a defeated enemy within. You will be more than conqueror, for even death itself is conquered by His life. Christ through death destroyed "him that had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). This indeed is victory! You will be restored to your true humanity to be the human vehicle of the divine life. From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without Me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5). In other words, you can do no more without Him than He could do without the Father. But how much could the Father do through the Son? Everything! for He was available to all that the Father made available to Him. "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands . . ." (John 13:3.) "It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell" (Colossians 1:19). How much then can Jesus Christ do through you and through me? Everything! He is limited only by the measure of our availability to all that He makes available to us, for "in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are complete in Him" (Colossians 2:9,10). What then is the faith that releases divine action? How may you be saved by His life, as you have already claimed to be redeemed by His death? This is the critical question of Christian experience, and the answer is simple "The just shall live by faith" (Romans 1:17). Faith in all its sheer simplicity! Faith that takes God precisely at His Word! Faith that simply says, "Thank You." If you are to know the fulness of life in Christ, you are to appropriate the efficacy of what He is as you have already appropriated the efficacy of what He has done. Relate everything, moment by moment as it arises to the adequacy of what He is in you, and assume that His adequacy will be operative; and on this basis in I Thessalonians 5:16 you are exhorted to "rejoice evermore!" You are to be incorrigibly cheerful, for you have solid grounds upon which to rejoice! Can any situation possible arise, in any circumstances, for which He is not adequate: Any pressure, promise, problem, responsibility or temptation for which the Lord Jesus Himself is not adequate? If He be truly God, there cannot be a single one! This being so, applying His adequacy by faith to every situation as it arises, will leave you with no alternative but to obey the injunction of I Thessalonians 5:18 "In everything give thanks!" In how many things? In everything without exception, "this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you." From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas This is divine vocation into which you have been redeemed, as "His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained that you should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10) can only be fulfilled in the energy and power of the One who indwells you now by His Spirit, as He walked once only in the energy and power of the Father who indwelt Him through the Spirit. Of Himself He said, "I can of mine own self do nothing" (John 5:19), and of you He says, in John 15:5, "Without me you can do nothing." How much can you do without Him? Nothing! It is amazing how busy you can be doing nothing! Did you ever find that out? "The flesh everything that you do apart from Him "profiteth nothing" (John 6:63), and there is always the awful possibility, if you do not discover this principle, that you may spend a lifetime in the service of Jesus Christ doing nothing! You would not be the first, and you would not be the last but that, above everything else, we must seek to avoid! So you discover that the life which you possess as a born-again Christian is of Him, and it is to Him, and every moment that you are here on earth it must be through Him of Him, through Him, to Him all things! "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice" (Romans 12:1). The Lord Jesus Christ claims the use of your body, your whole being, your complete personality so that as you give yourself to Him through the eternal Spirit, He may give Himself to you through the eternal Spirit, that all your activity as a human being on earth may be His activity in and through you; that every step you take, every word you speak, everything you do, everything you are, may be an expression of the Son of God, in you as man. If it is of Him and through Him and to Him, where do you come in? You do not! That is just where you go out! That is what Paul meant when he said, "For me to live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21). The only Person whom God credits with the right to live in you is Jesus Christ; so reckon yourself to be dead to all that you are apart from what He is, and alive unto God only in all that you are because of what He is (Romans 6:1 1). It is for you to BE it is for Him to DO! Rest fully available to the Saving Life of Christ. From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas To live "to and for yourself" is to "walk after the flesh"! To live "to and for Christ" is to "walk after the Spirit"! These are the two principles of human behavior. It is not just a matter of degree, it is a matter of kind; to be dominated by the "flesh" is to be dominated by the devil; and to be dominated by the Spirit is to be dominated by God. Two men doing identically the same thing may at the same time, by their identical act, be demonstrating two different principles of behavior, which are diametrically opposed to each other. What is the principle that governs your behavior? I am not asking you the nature of your behavior; I am asking you the principle from which it springs! You will remember that we have seen sin defined in the Bible as independence: "whatsoever is not of faith is sin" (Romans 14:23), an attitude of "lawlessness" (I John 3:4); what then does repentance involve? It involves stepping out of independence back into dependence - and the measure of your repentance will be the measure of your dependence! Every area of your life, in which you have not learned to be dependent, is an area of your life in which you have not as yet repented. From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1964.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas Never allow anyone to deceive you into believing that God has placed an arbitrary limitation upon the efficacy of the blood of Christ, or that there are those who cannot repent, even if they would, simply because God has deliberately placed them outside the scope of His redemptive purpose! This blasphemes the grace, the love and the integrity of God, and makes Him morally responsible for the unbelief of the unbeliever, for the impenitence of the impenitent, and saddles Him squarely with the guilt of the guilty as an aider and abettor of their sin. Such is not the teaching of the Bible, for the Lord Jesus Christ made it abundantly clear that the reluctance is on man's part, not on God's! Without freedom of choice it is equally impossible to obey or to disobey to be commended for the one or to be condemned for the other! Some would have you believe that only those can obey the Gospel and accept Christ as their Saviour, to whom God has given the ability to obey as a purely arbitrary, mechanical act on His part, leaving no option in the matter to any individual either way! On the basis of this strange hypothesis, the fearful judgment of God is to fall upon those who have remained in their rebellious state of unbelief, only because they have been unable to exercise an ability to obey the Gospel, which only God can give, and which He has refused to give them! Needless to say, such an idea can only serve to bring the righteousness and judgment of God into contempt and disrepute. The revelation that God has given to us by His Holy Spirit through the apostles is delightfully clear: "if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world" (I John 2:2); "Who gave himself a ransom for all" (I Timothy 2:6); "... that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9). It is your inherent right to choose which is at the very heart of the mystery, both of the mystery of godliness and of the mystery of iniquity. From: The Mystery of Godliness. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1964.
By: Major W. Ian Thomas It is not the nature of what you are doing that determines its spirituality, but the origin of what you are doing. Not its nature, but its origin! There was never a moment in the life of the Lord Jesus that was without divine significance, because there was never anything He did, never anything He said, never any step He took which did not spring from a divine origin nothing that was not the activity of the Father in and through the Son. Thirty-three years of availability to the Father, that the Father in and through Him might implement the program that had been established and agreed on between the Father and the Son before ever the world was. Why did the Father give all things into His hands? Because Jesus Christ was completely Man. And He was completely Man because He was completely available! For the first time since Adam fell into sin, there was on earth a Man as God intended man to be! Which of His activities were the more spiritual, the Sermon on the Mount, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, or the washing of His disciples' feet? The answer, of course, is that no one activity was more spiritual than another, for all had their origin in the Father, who acted through the Son. "I do always those things that please Him" (John 8:29). The Lord Jesus summarized this in John 14:10 - "Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works." In other words, "I have presented My body to the Father who indwells Me, that He may do His works in My body; and My Father does His works through His Spirit by whom He indwells Me, and through whom I have offered Myself without spot, faultlessly, to my Father." The whole activity of the Lord Jesus on earth as Man was the Father's activity in the Son, through the eternal Spirit through whom His body was presented to the Father. Spirituality in man is his availability to God for His divine action, and the form of this activity is irrelevant. If it pleases you, always and only, to do what pleases God you can do as you please! From: The Saving Life of Christ
By: Major W. Ian Thomas "It is not difficult for man to live the Christian life," somebody once said, it is a sheer impossibility!" A sheer impossibility, that is, without CHRIST but for all that He says, you have all that He is, and that is all that it takes! The Christian life can only be explained in terms of Jesus Christ, and if your life as a Christian can still be explained in terms of you your personality, your willpower, your gift, your talent, your money, your courage, your scholarship, your dedication, your sacrifice, or your anything then although you may have the Christian life, you are not yet living it! If the way you live your life as a Christian can be explained in terms of you, what have you to offer to the man who lives next door? The way he lives his life can be explained in terms of him, and so far as he is concerned, you happen to be "religious" but he is not! "Christianity" may be your hobby, but it is not his, and there is nothing about the way you practice it which strikes him as at all remarkable! There is nothing about you which leaves him guessing, and nothing commendable of which he docs not feel himself equally capable without the inconvenience of becoming a Christian! It is only when your quality of life baffles the neighbors that you are likely to impress them! It has got to become patently obvious to others that the kind of life you are living is not only commendable, but that it is beyond all human explanation! That it is beyond the consequences of man's capacity to imitate, and however little they may understand this, clearly the consequence only of God's capacity to reproduce Himself in you! In a nutshell, this means that your fellow-men must become convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ of whom you speak, is essentially Himself the ingredient of the Life you live! From: The Mystery of Godliness
By: Major W. Ian Thomas You cannot accomplish your own redemption, and you cannot accomplish your own sanctification! It is "according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue" (11 Peter 1:3): faith takes what God gives, and God gives what man needs! All that he needs! All that God gives, which is all that you need, He gives to you in Christ, "That no flesh should glory in his presence. But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (I Corinthians 1:29 and 30). The degree to which by a deliberate, voluntary attitude of faith you are reckoning yourself to be dead "with Christ" to all that you are "in Adam" and alive to God in all that you are "in Christ" is the degree to which the redemptive purpose of God has been wrought out in your life and this is the only valid estimate of your worth! Everything else is a dead loss! "Consequently, from now on we estimate and regard no one from a (purely) human point of view in terms of natural standards of value" (11 Corinthians 5:16, Amplified New Testament). Pointing to an affluent looking gentleman coming into the church, I might say to you (if I were mischievous enough), "How much is he worth?" and maybe you would reply, "If he's worth a dollar, he's worth a million!" and I would say to you, "I did not ask how much money he had in the bank! I simply asked you how much he was worth!" A man could have all the money in all the banks in all the world, and be worth nothing so far as God is concerned, if he were still living "to and for himself"! The measure of a man's worth is the measure in which he no longer lives "to and for himself," but "to and for Jesus Christ." No more and no less! How much are you worth? From: The Mystery of Godliness
By: Major W. Ian Thomas The Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth, and as in all other things that pertain, unto life and godliness" (11 Peter 1:3), He is the Truth about true commitment. He was committed to the Father for all that to which the Father was committed in the Son, and He was supremely confident that the Father who dwelt in Him, was gloriously adequate for all that to which He was committed. We know also that the Saviour's commitment to His Father was such that the Father was completely committed to His Son! The Lord Jesus Christ refused to be committed to the parochial needs of His own day and generation; He was not committed to the political situation in Palestine, or to the emancipation of the Jewish nation from the Roman yoke! He was not committed to the pressing social problems of His time, nor to one faction as opposed to another, any more than today He is committed to the West against the East, or to the Republicans against the Democrats (as though either were less wicked than the other!). Christ was not even committed to the needs of a perishing world; He was neither unmindful nor unmoved by all these other issues, but as Perfect Man He was committed to His Father, and for that only to which His Father was committed in Him exclusively! The basis of His commitment to the Father is the basis upon which the Lord Jesus Christ claims your commitment to Him; you are committed to Him for all that to which He is committed in you exclusively! You are not committed to a church, or to a denomination, or to an organization; as a missionary you are not committed to a Mission Board nor even to a "field," and least of all are you committed to a "need"! You are committed to Christ, and for all that to which Christ is committed in You, and again I say exclusively! From: The Mystery of Godliness
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