Every Christian leads a double life. One of the two is fading away, while the other increasingly comes to the forefront.
Consider Adam, the first human, the progenitor. This is the man who was placed in a perfect environment, who lacked for nothing, who had access to the Tree of Life but never drew from it, and who chose as the source of his life the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He turned his back on God and God’s plan, exchanging allegiance to God for allegiance to himself.
His legacy was the desire to be a god unto himself, to live independently of the only true God. This kind of humanity, naturally speaking, is our inheritance. The old man, the natural man, the old creation, the Adam in us, is not in right standing with God (here I’m drawing on a series of recorded messages by T. Austin-Sparks entitled “Right Standing with God”). He is the “wrong man”. He is by his own choice estranged from God’s family. In seeking freedom from the authority of God he falls into slavery to invisible forces of evil and has no power to liberate himself from them. In fact, in many cases, he lacks the awareness of his state of bondage. He is incapable of appreciating the things of God, and actually hostile to the life of the Spirit. This humanity is ingrained in each of us. The apostle Paul refers to this person as “the man of dust.” God’s decision regarding this man: he came from the dust and to the dust he would return. And He turns his attention to a new humanity.
The new humanity owes everything to Jesus. In the gospel of John, Jesus “is presented to us as God’s thought concerning man.” He is, by God’s reckoning, the Right Man. The incredibly good news is this: “What is true of the Lord Jesus as man is to be made true of all the children of God.” This is our new inheritance as believers, our right standing with God. God has made Jesus to be, according to Paul, our wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Jesus took our old nature with him when he went to the cross. As Paul writes elsewhere, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (1 Corinthians 5:27). The term “sin” here refers the old humanity. The resurrection of Jesus brought the new creation to the light of day. This is the new humanity that, in Christ, is in right standing with God. As this new creation in Christ, we have the right to stand in the presence of God.
However, the old creation does not disappear from view for a long time. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:49). As T. Austin-Sparks puts it, “We are to be made according to God’s Right Man.” This is one way of describing our transformation: the process of coming into conformity with the image of Christ and relegating the image of the man of dust to the dustbin of our personal history. Transformation takes a long time. God knows me and He knows you. He sees how the process will unfold in each of us. More than knowing us, He loves us. He has a deep interest in our transformation. He knows how to intervene in each segment of the journey, to keep us on track and guide us back to the trail after every wrong turn.
This being so, what would be an appropriate response?
Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love.
Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee.
Take my voice and let me sing always, only, for my King.
Take my lips and let them be filled with messages for Thee.
Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold.
Take my love, my God, I pour at Thy feet its treasure store.
Take myself and I will be ever, only, all for Thee.
(After Frances Ridley Havergal)