52. The Mold of Resurrection
The Mold of Resurrection The cross is just the gathering point for the children of God. It is the fixed point where the children of God can always find the most perfect assurance of safety and the most continuous spring of power, the cross. Without the cross as a mighty factor in your life and in mine, we should never reach the divinely revealed goal, we would be imperfect.
Therefore the call of the cross is to enter into this passion of Christ. We must have upon us the print of the nails. We hear the people of the world saying to us children of God today, “Except I see the print of the nails in you I will not believe” (John 20:25). We must have on us the print of the nails; we must share in the likeness of His death and have formed in our characters the pattern of Jesus.
What is it going to mean? It is not going to be for you what the world would have you believe it is going to be. It is not going to be for you what many Christians fear it will mean, the gloomy side of life uppermost, an experience of loss, a harvest of pain and suffering, and the repression of all the natural gifts with which God has endowed us. It is not going to mean that. What is it going to mean? Let us listen to the man who poured himself into the mold of the cross, as he tells us what it is to mean for you and for me. In the translation of Conybeare, Romans 6:5 reads: “For if we have been grafted into the likeness of His death, so shall we also share His resurrection.”
Let me say that we do need to be careful not to emphasize a truth out of right proportion; not to preach what I have been calling the death side of the cross so as to forget the life side of the cross, but never to emphasize the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ so as to lose sight of the cross. That is what many, I fear, are doing today, forgetting that the constant reassertion of the self-life can be dealt with only by the cross, and can be kept under only by the Holy Spirit through the cross; and that only in the measure in which we enter into the death union with Christ can we know the resurrection life of Christ.
Look at an oak. It has been standing for hundreds of years. How was it born? In a grave. The acorn died and disappeared, and it sent its roots down and its shoots up, and it has grown big and strong, with its roots constantly in the grave, and all its strength, its beauty, its foliage and everything else it owes to the grave. Everything that you and I can have we owe to the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the resurrection is the flower that springs out of the tomb, and if we share in the death of Christ, the very first thing that comes to us is sharing in the resurrection.
Look at Romans 6:8 : “Now if we have shared the death of Christ, we believe that we shall also share His life,” life over which death can have no dominion, a power that nothing in the world can destroy, a hope of which nothing can rob us.
I want to quote some lines by an old mystic, written in 1277 along the line of this truth, which shows what a wonderful thing it is to share in the death and the resurrection life of the Son of God: The loathing of thy sin thy cross shall be, Thy crucifix the crossing of thy will, The nails thine obedience that shall fasten thee; And love shall wound and steadfastness shall slay, Yet thou shalt love me still. The spear shall pierce thy heart, my life shall be The life that lives and moves henceforth in thee, Then, as a conqueror, loosened from the cross, Laid in a grave of nothingness and loss, Thou shalt awaken and be borne above Upon the breath of mine almighty love.