Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Deep "Nee" Exercises

"Oh, it is a great thing to see that we are already in Christ! Think of the bewilderment trying to get into a room in which you aleady are!"

"All temptation is primarily to look within: to take our eyes off the Lord and to take account of appearances. Faith is always meeting a mountain, a mountain of evidence that seems to contradict God's Word, a mountain of apparent contradiction in the realm of tangible fact -of failures in deed, as well as the realm of feeling and suggestion -and either faith or the mountain has to go."

"God has put us all into his Son, and crucified us in Him. In the last Adam, He has wiped out all that was of the first Adam. What then is the answer to God's verdict on the old creation? I answer by asking for baptism. Why? In Romans 6:4, Paul explains that baptism means burial: 'We are buried therefore with Him though baptism.' Baptism is of course connected with both death and resurrection, though in itself it is neither death or resurrection: it is burial! But who qualify for burial? Only the dead! So if I ask for baptism, I proclaim myself dead and fit only for the grave...Let me say emphatically, that unless our eyes have been opened by God to see that we have died in Christ and been buried with Him, we have no right to be baptized."

And further on baptism:
"The real meaning behind baptism, is that in the Cross we were 'baptized' into the 'historic death of Christ', so that His death became ours."

"(Satan) accuses us not only before God, but in your own conscience also. 'You have sinned and you keep on sinning. You are weak, and God can have nothing more to do with you.' This is his argument. And our temptation is to look within and in self-defense to try to find in ourselves, in our feelings or our behavior, some ground for believing that Satan is wrong. Alternately, we are tempted to admit our helplessness and, going to the other extreme, to yield to depression and despair. Thus accusation becomes one of the most effective of Satan's weapons. He points to our sins and seeks to charge us with them before God, and if we accept his accusations, we go down immediately. Now the reason why we so readily accept his accusations, is that we are still hoping to have some righteousness of our own....God is able to deal with our sins; but the cannot deal with a man under accusation, because such a man is not trusting in the Blood. The Blood speaks in his favor, but he is listening instead to Satan. Christ is our Advocate, but we, the accused, side with the accuser."

No comments: