Abiding is NOT Impossible

"How do we abide? ‘Of God are ye in Christ.’ It was the work of God to put you

there and He has done it. Now stay there! Do not be moved back on to your

own ground. Never look at yourself as though you were not in Christ. Look at

Christ , see yourself in Him. Abide in Him. Rest in the fact that God has put you

in His Son, and live in the expectation that He will complete His work in you. It 

is for Him to make good the glorious promise that ‘sin shall not have dominion

over you. (Rom 6:14).”

Watchman Nee from The NORMAL Christian Life.

Personal: Nee speaks of what every Christian should be living from and in, not

just the spiritual heavy weights. God continues to challenge me. What about you?

Faith Speaks

“The point of the past couple of week is that there is practical

 value in the stand of faith that says:

‘God has put me in Christ and therefore all that is true of Him

is true of me. I will abide in Him.’ 

Satan is always trying to get us out, to keep us out, to convince us 

that we are out of sync with God, and by temptations, failures, suffering, 

trial, to make us feel acutely that we are outside of Christ. Our first 

thought is that, if we were in Christ, we should not be in this state,

 and therefore, judging by the feelings we have now, we must be out of Him. 

God’s injunction is to ‘abide’ in Christ, and that is the way of deliverance. 

Why? Because it opens the way for God to take a hand in our lives and 

to work the thing out in us. It makes room for the operation of His superior 

power--the power of the resurrection (Rom 6:4,9,10)--so that the facts 

of our daily experience, and where before ‘sin reigned’ (Rom 5:21)

 we now make the joyful discovery that we are truly ‘no longer...

in bondage to sin.’ (Rom 6:6).

If we stand steadfastly in Christ, we find that He becomes experientially true

in our lives. If instead we come on the basis of what we are in ourselves we 

find all that is true of our old nature remaining true in us. So often we go to the

wrong place to find the death of self. It is in Christ. We have only to look within

to find we are very much alive to sin; but when we look to Him who dwells 

within us, Christ, then God sees to it that even though death is working, 

newness of life is ours also. We are ‘alive unto God.’ (Rom 6:4,11)”

Watchman Nee from the Normal Christian Life

Well, dear reader, there is only one post left for this series on what 

it means for us to be in Christ and how to walk out of who we 

truly are. So few preach on it today and the concepts may sound

strange to you.  But more on this next week.

Abiding In Him

“The scriptures tell us that we are ‘dead indeed’, but nowhere do they say that

we are dead to ourselves. We shall look in vain to find death within; it can’t be

found. However, scripture does say that we are dead in Christ for we were

crucified with Him.

‘Abide in Me and I in you’ (John 15:4). It was an act of God that put us into

Christ and we have to abide there. This verse lays down for us a divine

principle, which is that God has done the work in Christ and not in us as

individuals. It is the history of Christ which is to become the experience

of the Christian, and we have no spiritual experience apart from Him. We

were ‘crucified with Him, quickened, raised, and set by God into the 

heavenlies in Him and we are complete in Him’ (Rom 6:6, Eph 2:5,6

Col 2:10). 

It is wrong to think that we can experience anything of the Christian life 

in ourselves, and apart from Him. All the spiritual experience of the Christian 

is all ready true in Christ. It has all ready been experienced by Christ. What 

we call ‘our’ experience is only our entering into His history, His experience. 

The character of the branches is determined by the Vine.The history of Christ

 becomes our experience and our spiritual history; we do not have a separate 

history from His. The entire work with respect to us is not done in us here 

but in Christ. He does no separate work in individuals apart from what He has 

done there. Even eternal life is not given to us as individuals; the life is in the Son, 

and ‘he that hath the Son hath life.’ God has done all in His Son, and He has 

included us in Him; we are incorporated into Christ.”

Watchman Nee from The Normal Christian life.

Tomorrow you and I will look at how this truth is lived out in our daily lives.

Sin Versus Sins

Sins vrs Sin

God dealt with our sins directly by means of the Blood so that they no

longer come to remembrance. But when it comes to the matter of sin

and deliverance from its power, we find that God deals indirectly. He 

does not remove the sin but the sinner. The vehicle of sin, the body,

is unemployed. 

(The verb katargeo translated “destroyed in Romans 6:6

does not mean ‘annihilated’ but ‘put out of operation, made 

ineffective’, and is from the Greek root argos, which means 

‘inactive, not working, unprofitable.’  

This word is translated as ‘idle’ in Matt 20:3,6 of the unemployed

laborers in the market place.) 

Sin, the old master is still about, but the slave who served him 

has been put to death and so his members are unemployed. 

Thus we can say that ‘deliverance from sin’ is a more scriptural idea 

than ‘victory over sin.’ The expressions ‘freed from sin’ and ‘dead unto

sin’ in Romans 6:7 and 11 imply deliverance from a power that is still very

present and very real--not from something that no longer exists.

In 1John 1:3-9 John boldly writes: ‘whosoever is begotten of God doeth no

sin...he cannot sin,’ which is a statement that is often wrongly understood 

and thus misleading. John is saying that to sin is not the nature of that which

is born of God. The life of Christ has been planted in us by new birth and its

nature is not to commit sin.

So it is a question of choice of which facts we will count upon and live by:

the tangible facts of daily experience or the mightier fact that we are now

‘in Christ.’ The power of His resurrection is on our side, and the whole

might of God is at work in our salvation (Romans 1:16), but the matter still

rests upon our making real in history what is true in divine fact.

Watchman Nee. The Normal Christian Life

PERSONAL

I don’t know if these blogs are for you or for me. I first read this book of Nee’s

just after college and it is underlined from end to end. BUT, as I go back into

the book, I find a depth of truth I did not comprehended then. My prayer for

me as well as for you, dear reader, is that God will give us revelation of His 

truth so that we can walk in it.

What is the Secret of Reckoning?

What is the secret of reckoning?

“It is revelation.” 

“We need to have our eyes opened to the fact of our union with Christ, 

and that is something more than knowing it as doctrine. Such revelation 

is no vague indefinite thing. Most of us can remember the day when we 

saw clearly that Christ died for us, and we ought to be equally clear as to 

the time when we saw that we died with Christ. It should be nothing hazy, 

but very definite, for it is with this as basis that we shall go on. It is not that 

I reckon myself to be dead, and therefore I will be dead. It is that, because 

I am dead--because I see now what God has done for me in Christ--therefore 

I reckon myself to be dead. That is the right kind of reckoning. It is not 

reckoning toward death but from death. God tells us to reckon ourselves dead, 

not that by the process of reckoning we may become dead, but because 

we are dead. He never told us to reckon what was not fact.” 

Watchman Nee, from The Normal Christian Life

Scripture says, “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, 

but alive unto God.” Romans 6:11

This is huge for me. It is the difference between seeing myself as a sinner 

still needing salvation or a saint who sometimes sins. Romans 6:11 seems to 

contradict everything I see about myself and other Christians. However,

if what God is saying in these verses is truth, then I want to understand

it and walk it out.  You see, I will live out of what I truly believe about myself.

Breakthrough

“I remember one morning--that morning was a real morning and one

I can never forget--I was upstairs sitting at my desk reading the Word

and praying, and I said, ‘Lord, open my eyes!’ And then in a flash I 

saw it. I saw my oneness with Christ. I saw that I was in Him and that

when He died I died. I saw that the question of my death was a matter

of the past and not of the future, and that I was just as truly dead as He

was because I was in Him when He died. The whole thing had dawned

upon me. I was carried away with such joy at this great discovery that I 

jumped from my chair and cried,‘Praise the Lord, I am dead!’ I ran

downstairs and met one of the brothers helping in the kitchen and laid

hold of him. ‘Brother,’ I said, ‘do you know that I have died?’ I must

admit he looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, so I went on:

‘Do you not know that Christ has died? Do you not know that I died with

Him? Do your not know that my death is no less truly a fact than His?’

Oh, it was so real to me! I longed to go through the streets of Shanghai

shouting the news of my discovery. From that day to this I have never

for one moment doubted the finality of that word: ‘I have been crucified 

with Christ.’ I do not mean that we do not need to work it out. Yes, there

is an outworking of the death which we are going to see presently,

but this, first of all, is basic. I have been crucified : in Christ it

has been done.”  Watchman Nee

Nee's Struggle

“For years after my conversion I tried to reckon as I had been taught. 

I reckoned from 1920 to 1927. The more I reckoned that I was dead

to sin, the more alive it clearly was. I simply could not believe myself

dead, and I could not produce death. Whenever I sought help I was

told to look at Romans 6:11, and the more I read Romans 6:11 and 

tried to reckon, the further death was: I could not get it. I fully 

appreciated the teaching that I must reckon, but I could not make 

out why nothing resulted from it. I have to confess that for months I

was troubled. I said to the Lord, ‘If this is not clear, if I cannot be

brought to see this which is so very fundamental, I will cease to do

anything. I will not preach any more; I will not go out to serve Thee

any more; I want first of all to get thoroughly clear here.’ For months

I was seeking and sometimes fasted, but nothing came through.”

Watchman Nee