Self-Consciousness and Christ Consciousness Part 2

www.ChristAsUs.com

Self-Consciousness and Christ Consiousness-Part 2

Norman P. Grubb

Here, then, we come back to our former consideration ---- the dual consciousness of Paul and all of us that, though made anew, with Christ as our life, we are conscious of two selves, our self and Himself: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me"; because we are still members of a fallen, divided human community, the world of man. But the fact that we have human constitutions, human appetites and passions, human and corruptible bodies, and are immersed in all the human activities of this divided world, does not mean that we still have the fallen nature: it died with Christ; we have the human nature, and are not yet clothed with "the building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens"; with a nature so completely unified that there will be no consciousness of separation, of good and evil, of temptation.

Our present privilege is to be God's redemptive agents, in every faculty and appetite responsive to our environment, for by us men God now offers His grace to men, even as by a Man He redeemed man; therefore, as humans among humans, we are as open as Jesus was through our human natures to all human enticements, as in our spirits to the drawings of the Spirit. As Paul tells us, we "walk in the flesh" (2Cor.10:3), but so far as our real life in the spirit is concerned, we "have crucified the flesh" (Gal. 5:24), and are "not in the flesh, but in the Spirit" (Rom.8:9), and do "not war after the flesh" (2Cor.10:3), and do not "mind the things of the flesh" (Rom.8:5). In other words, once again we are in the flesh, but not of it, in the world but not of it, and in self, but not of it.