Lesson 90: Christ the Sacrifice, part 3
In Him, as He bows there in Gethsemane, I must abide. As my Head, He not only once suffered for me, but ever lives in me, breathing and working His own disposition in me too. The Eternal Spirit, through which He offered Himself unto God, is the Spirit that dwells in me too, and makes me partaker of the very same obedience, and the sacrifice of the will unto God. That Spirit teaches me to yield my will entirely to the will of the Father, to give it up even unto the death, in Christ to be dead to it. Whatever is my own mind and thought and will, even though it be not directly sinful, He teaches me to fear and flee. He opens my ear to wait in great gentleness and teachableness of soul for what the Father has day by day to speak and to teach. He discovers to me how union with God’s will in the love of it is union with God Himself; how entire surrender to God’s will is the Father’s claim, the Son’s example, and the true blessedness of the soul.
He leads my will into the fellowship of Christ’s death and resurrection; my will dies in Him, and in Him to be made alive again. He breathes into it, as a renewed and quickened will, a holy insight into God’s perfect will; a holy joy in yielding itself to be an instrument of that will, and a holy liberty and power to lay hold of God’s will to answer prayer. With my whole will I learn to live for the interests of God and His kingdom, to exercise the power of that will—crucified but risen again—in nature and in prayer, on earth and in heaven, with men and with God. The more deeply I enter into the “FATHER, NOT WHAT I WILL” of Gethsemane, and into Him who spoke it, to abide in Him, the fuller is my spiritual access into the power of His “FATHER, I WILL. And the soul experiences that it is the will, which has become nothing so God’s will may be all, which now becomes inspired with a Divine strength to really will what God wills, and to claim what has been promised it in the name of Christ.
Oh let us listen to Christ in Gethsemane, as He calls, “If you abide in me, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you.” Being of one mind and spirit with Him in His giving up everything to God’s will, living like Him in obedience and surrender to the Father; this is abiding in Him; this is the secret of power in prayer.
Prayer: Blessed Lord, open my heart and that of all Your people, to take in fully the glory of the truth, that a will given up to God, is a will accepted of God to be used in His service; to desire, and purpose, and determine, and will what is according to God’s will. A will which, in the power of the Holy Spirit - the indwelling God, is to exercise its royal prerogative in prayer, to loose and to bind in heaven and upon earth, to ask whatever it will, and to say it shall be done. Oh Lord Jesus, teach me to pray.