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Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 6th

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ALL CHRISTIAN LIVING A SHOWING FORTH OF CHRIST’S DEATH

Bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. - 2 Corinthians 4:10

This showing forth of Christ’s death is the truest explanation and definition that we can give of the process by which a Christian soul grows up into the likeness of its Lord. The death of the Lord Jesus, as a death for us, and the ground of our hope, is to be shown forth in our daily walk, as a death working in us, and the ground of our conduct. There is not only the atoning and sacrificial aspect in Christ’s death on the Cross, but there is this likewise, that it stands as the example of the way by which we are, in our measure and place, to "mortify our members which are upon the earth," because "we are dead with Him, and our life is hid with Christ in God." Here, then, we say, "That death was for me, and I trust it": in our common life we are to say, "That death is working in me, and I am becoming conformable unto the image of His death, that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and so attain to the resurrection of the dead." And as sacred as is the one form of memorial, so sacred is the other; and closer than the outward sign which expresses the outward fact upon which we hope, is the inward reality by which alone the outward fact becomes the basis of our hope and the reason for our confidence. No man manifests the death of Christ by any outward act of communion or worship who is not feeling it daily in his own soul; and no man has any right to say, "I am trusting in that death as a sacrifice and salvation," who does not feel and show that he is builded on Christ, and that that death is in him a power to change him into its own likeness. It is in vain for us to say that we are relying on Christ, unless Christ be in us, slaying the old man and quickening the new. The one test of true faith is the inward possession of the Lord’s Spirit; and between the sacrifice on the Cross and me the sinful man, there is no real union effected, nor any imputation and transference of merits, unless with it, proof of it, and consequence of it, - and proof of it because consequence of it, - there be likewise the flowing over from the Cross to me of the life that was in Him, and of the death that He died. You do "show forth the Lord’s death till He come" not only, nor chiefly, when you take the bread and the wine in remembrance of Him, but when, in daily contact with sin, in daily practice of that bitter and yet most sweet lesson of self-denial and sacrifice, you "crucify the old man with his affections and lusts," and "rise again into newness of life." The fact is better than the symbol - the inward communion more true than the outward participation. Just in proportion as His flesh and His blood are better and more vivifying than the bread and wine which feeds the body, in the same proportion is the manifestation of His death in life a nobler thing than the manifestation of His death at any table.

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