19. Yes to the New Life
Yes to the New Life
Glance back at the vetch seed-vessels. Why is it that the leaves which used to stand firm and fresh like those of the flowering clover, have begun to shrivel and turn yellow? It is because they have acquiesced wholly now in the death sentence of their new birth, and they are letting the new life live at the expense of the old.
IN THE MAIL THAT CAME TO MY JUNGLE station after Jim’s death were many letters quoting Scripture. I was grateful for every one, but the verse which was more like “water from the well of Bethlehem” than all the others was this:
“These little troubles (which are really so transitory) are winning for us a permanent, glorious and solid reward out of all proportion to our pain. For we are looking all the time not at the visible things but at the invisible. The visible things are transitory: it is the invisible things that are really permanent” (2 Cor 4:17-18, JBP).
Those words clarified for me the alternatives. Little troubles versus big ones. Was widowhood a big one? It was indeed, if this world is the only plane on which it can be judged. I think I read that it’s number one on the list of causes of stress.
Visible versus invisible. If I concentrated on my losses and all the very present evidences of Jim’s absence, that permanent, glorious, and solid reward would be completely out of focus. I must start concentrating on the invisible for a change. That was where my treasure was now, for my heart was there in a way it never had been before.
And what of the transitory versus the intransitory? “All that grieves is but for a moment.” It seemed a long “moment,” but I knew that someday it would be seen as of no account. There was eternity to consider. Here was a new chance to choose happiness and peace. They were not something that merely “happened” to me because I was lucky or because my temperament was sanguine (it’s melancholic). They were given in proportion as I chose to view my sorrow in the light of the intransitory and invisible.
The leaves of the vetch shrivel because they have acquiesced wholly now in the death sentence of their new birth. Everything that went before has to go. Everything is going to be new.
“We, who have died to sin—how could we live in sin a moment longer? Have you forgotten that all of us who were baptized into Jesus Christ were, by that very action, sharing in his death? We were dead and buried with him in baptism, so that just as he was raised from the dead by that splendid revelation of the Father’s power so we too might rise to life on a new plane altogether. If we have, as it were, shared his death, we shall also share in his resurrection” (Rom 6:3-5, JBP).
Rise to live on a new plane? Live our new lives with Him?
“But we have to live in the real world! We need something practical!”
Nothing is more real and practical than the Word of God. This world is not more real than the other world. It won’t last nearly as long. The objection implies that God who made both worlds forgets that we’re stuck in the here and now. He never forgets. He knows our downsitting and our uprising. He understands our thoughts before we think them. He traces all our paths, keeps close guard before and behind us, spreads His hand over us, knows us through and through. There is not a word on our tongues with which He is not thoroughly familiar. He forgets nothing (except our confessed sins). It is because He is so well acquainted with what it means to live in the here and now, understands so thoroughly the hidden places of our hearts and walked this lonesome valley Himself, that He shows us the pathway through our suffering, the only pathway that leads to glory. He is touched with the feeling of our weaknesses and therefore knows how to comfort us. The new plane, the new life is designed to be lived here and now.
How much depends on our choices, how much on the work of the Spirit of God? Don’t ask. Both truths are clear but hard to harmonize intellectually. I only know that the more I take at face value what He says and choose to open myself to His grace, the more I discover the eminent practicality of His Word. He makes available to us the very same power that raised our Lord Jesus from the dead. If we want His peace and obey Him, even in the least measure, He gives it.
“If by the Spirit you put to death all the base pursuits of the body, then you will live” (Rom 8:13). There it is in one verse: by the Spirit you—the work of the Holy Spirit and my will, in combination. Grace working on nature.
Libraries of books have been written about this new resurrection life, but this book happens to be about suffering. How shall we rise to this “new plane altogether” if we are newly widowed, sick, paralyzed, abused, abandoned? What difference does it make here that we were “dead and buried with him in baptism”? That was the dividing line between the old life and the new. That was the beginning of our life in Christ. The difference, a very great one, is figured in the vetch leaves—a complete acquiescence in the death sentence of the new birth.
I had no idea of all that when, at the age of ten, I wanted to be born again. It was very simple. 1 took God at His word, “received” Him, and was given the power to become a child of His. I sang songs like
At the Cross, at the Cross,
Where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
I cannot claim that overnight I became “happy all the day,” but the Spirit of God began to show me that my once-in-a-lifetime choice must be followed by moment-by-moment choices to do things His way or mine. I must accept not just “salvation,” meaning a free ticket to heaven, but His sovereign lordship of my life, His will (which often cut across mine). More than half a century later I am still learning the acquiescence of the vetch leaves, submission to the death-life cycle. I have not found the lesson “a piece of cake.” In some ways it gets harder—
But we never can prove the delights of His love
Until all on the altar we lay,
For the favor He shows and the joy He bestows
Are for them who will trust and obey. (J.H. Sammis)
October 25, 1972, was rather a full day in Hamilton, Massachusetts. I wrote in my journal of having finally found an apartment for my aging mother; of visiting a friend whose only son had been killed; of talking with Jill whose three-year-old son had a serious heart condition, and of taking my husband to the hospital because of a lip sore that did not heal. I wrote on a scrap of paper (perhaps in the hospital waiting room):
How to deal with suffering of any kind:
1. recognize it
2. accept it
3. offer it to God as a sacrifice
4. offer yourself with it
The diagnosis was cancer, and a date was set for surgery. Next night at home rectal bleeding occurred. My journal: “fear, resentment, worry—all very real for both of us, all necessitating coming to Christ.” Here was my chance to “acquiesce wholly now in the death sentence” of the new birth, accepting to the uttermost limits the meaning of the cross.
The reason for the fear, resentment, and worry presented me once more with a dilemma and a choice. It was a crux (the Latin word for cross), crucial (a derivative of the same word) to my living in harmony with God—agreeing that it was not I, but Christ. Not my life, His. I am not my own, I am bought with a price; therefore I belong to Him and what happens to me is His affair. The old life, mine, is gone. Crucified. Dead. The new life—the daily yes, Lord—lives at the expense of the old. Both cannot flourish together. It’s one or the other. It’s no to the self, yes to the Lord.
P.T. Forsyth wrote, “Our will alone is our ownest own, the only dear thing we can and ought really to sacrifice” (The Cruciality of the Cross, Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, no date given, p. 92).
What if I have to go through deep waters? Will He be there? It is YES to the deep waters:
Thou didst cast me into the depths, far out at sea,
and the flood closed round me;
all thy waves, all thy billows, passed over me.
I thought I was banished from thy sight
and should never see thy holy temple again.
The water about me rose up to my neck;
the ocean was closing over me.
Weeds twined about my head
in the troughs of the mountains;
I was sinking into a world
whose bars would hold me fast forever.
But thou didst bring me up alive from the pit,
O Lord my God (Jon 2:3-6).
What of the furnace? “See how I tested you, not as silver is tested, but in the furnace of affliction; there I purified you. For my honour, for my own honour I did it” (Is 48:10-11). It means YES to the fire, the process essential to our purifying. We have said YES to the burning out of the impurities, which the apostle Peter tells us is nothing extraordinary—everybody ought to expect it, in other words. But the fire of suffering is still the fire of suffering. The apostles never for a moment denied the reality. They wrote about it often, pointing repeatedly to that other level on which it was to be seen: “I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the splendour, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for us.… If we hope for something we do not yet see, then, in waiting for it, we show our endurance” (Rom 8:18, 25).