ESchaible posted that Summit Living was a very good book. I looked online but never found it but I did get a copy of the book. Here are some excerpts from it.

God for ever gives, man for ever receives. In the glory of His grace, that is what God never ceased to do: "He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again." Therefore salvation, just as much as creation, is every iota a gift. And man, of whom is said concerning his creation. What hast thou that thou hast not received?, can never experience the ABC of his re-creation in Christ until he is brought back to the act of simple reception. As Jesus said, "Except ye become converted and become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." Every iota of works, of self-effort, has to disappear. Faith, so far from being works, is really only the flash of recognition of what is: in this case, already redeemed, if we only knew it. I hope I have made this clear, because it is the first infant experience of the lost secret of humanity, a secret we shall never outgrow and never replace, for it is humanity's sole basic capacity.

The Creator gives all by giving Himself, the creature receives all; and the faculty of receiving is so simple, obvious, natural, automatic, that it can hardly be called an action at all. It is the first activity of a newborn babe, receiving air, receiving nourishment. It is the continued activity which sustains all life. And that is faith. The repentance side of faith is in essence the breaking down and giving up of a false faith which we have received from Adam, a faith in our own self-righteousness, our own religion, our own philosophy; the receiving of a false self-reliance as a basis of living; Thus it is the negative side of faith, the saying no to an illusory faith.

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The proud human heart never can and never will, for it leaves man with no shred of self-justification. God alone could do for us what we could never do for ourselves, and God took flesh to do it. No one really believes this, although we may say we do, until the Spirit of God reveals it to us; and the Spirit can only reveal it, when He has first given us a glimpse of what we really are in the sight of God; and that also is by revelation.

Means He uses-the Bible, preaching, personal witness, the lives of living Christians, sometimes disappointments, loss or sorrow; but the light has to shine, and we respond to it; and that very response is a conviction of the Spirit which we cannot escape. We at last realize what we are and admit it. That is what the Bible calls the gift of repentance, the change of mind concerning ourselves, such a change affecting conduct and producing what the Bible calls "works meet for repentance."

This gift of repentance is really the reverse side of that one fundamental response God quickens in us-faith. It is the quickening or re-directing of the one automatic faculty with which the creation is endowed, as well as being the most elementary and utterly simple-the faculty of reception. We have sought to make it clear from the beginning that the Creator-creature relationship is in the nature of things of one kind only, that of giving and receiving.

At the time of conversion we have become so convinced of our lost condition, through the impact of the outer law, that we are willing to take a revolutionary faith-action. We become aware through the written word - the one material link in the process - of the offer of forgiveness, a removal of all that guilt which propels us to a destiny in hell. And much more, we hear of acceptance by a loving, uncondemning Father who offers the gift of eternal life, purchased by the historic event of His Son's public death on our behalf. And that death, we discover, resulted in a further event which is "beyond human history," His bodily resurrection - attested to by numerous of His disciples; and His unconditional offer to be our Savior requires only that we believe and receive Him as alive from the dead! But that receiving means transferring our faith to the reality of a Person whom we can neither feel, see, nor touch, and who in His resurrection is an absurdity to material-world thinking. This is why it becomes a crisis moment. It is the absurdity of faith! Now is the first time we affirm that we are believing in One who was not only crucified - a fact verifiable in history - but who is living, risen from the dead - foolishness to the world, and impossible of material verification! That is why it is the greatest moment in our human history... when we, made desperate by our need, are moved by faith into a deliberate relationship with the universal kingdom of Spirit - and with the King of that kingdom.

How does that faith become fact? By an inner spirit-knowing. None on earth can say how we know. . . or if we really do know! But we know that we know. Into us has come an inner awareness, what Paul calls "the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit," that we are a child of God. And nothing can shake us.

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"One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." Spirit-reality is never provable to material sense, including our own soul-senses, so we always appear to walk, as Kierkegaard said, "on sixty-thousand fathoms of water." It is always the "adventure of faith," and we walk by faith, not by sight; but inner consciousness is the real stuff of life, and by that we know - with the outer Scriptures as our bastion of defense and confirmation. But we live because we know we know.

This spirit-knowing of the new creation has two confirming evidences. One is given the Bible name of "peace." "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God." It is precious indeed, but in its essence it still has a selfish element of satisfying me: I am so glad that I now have peace with God and there is nothing between us. Peace is the first baby-step of assurance given us by God, because as babes we are in a condition in which we have never yet desired anything except for ourselves, so can only be reached by an answer that will satisfy us. God's love always reaches out to meet my need at its own level.

But the true new-creation reality is neatly packaged inside this gift of peace; for we might not take it were it publicly revealed at the outset. It is the fact of "other-love": that our new relationship is to the living Trinity - Father, Son and Spirit - which is a Lover- Trinity. And here is where we are taken unawares. We who have been compulsively self-lovers now find we can't help loving the Son who died for us, and the Father who sent Him, and the Spirit who sheds this God-love abroad in our hearts; and this being other-love, we equally can't stop wanting to share with others this ultimate reality which is now ours. We become other- lovers. Of course, we do not at first realize that this is not we loving (for the human self cannot love in this manner) but that He is loving by us.

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Our real problem has never been the sins we have committed, but the sinner who commits them. It is this infected ego, this defined self in me, of which my sins are only an outward expression. If I lose my temper, if I hate or resent, if I lie or respond to a lust, it is my infected "I" which has done it because it likes to-that is my basic trouble. It is this "I" which has been the hateful false god in the usurped temple of my personality. It is this "I" which all men really worship, unless it has been exchanged for the great I AM. It can be a most respectable "I," for a certain amount of respectability is a pleasant clothing for it and only seats it all the more firmly on its false throne. Love for one's own family, class, or nation, morality, religion can all be its clothes. It has its unpleasant side, for it is a slave to its own lusts, passions, ambitions, and shoulders other selves out of its way to obtain them; but on the whole it can progress very well, if it can preserve the eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not be found out!"

Now this is the nerve-center of the trouble which must be eliminated. It must be destroyed; nothing short of that will do. It is not the original self which must be destroyed. That would be absurd; God made that to be His dwelling place, His co-operator, His fellow. It is the spirit of independence in the self, the virus in the self, producing a self that lives unto itself and by itself, the self that has turned in on itself. In other words, it is not the self which must be destroyed, but the Satanic spirit of egoism in the self.

Amen dear brother. I am overjoyed you have been reading it. He writes in a way, and presents the entirety of the Gospel in a way few others outside of the Bible ever have.

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Caleb

The perfect Scriptural presentation of this relationship, given in complete and masterly outline with almost the stroke of a pen, and yet weaving together all the intricate threads that make the pattern of the new life in Christ, is Gal. 2:20: Paul's master analysis of his own condition as a new man in Christ. The first half of that verse will repay unceasing study, until the Spirit illuminates in personal understanding and experience the fundamental and subtle balance of truth in the three operative statements-"I am crucified with Christ": "nevertheless I live": "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

The first is clear, in the light of what we have already been seeing of the death of Christ and of ourselves in Him. The "I" which has been crucified with Christ is, of course, the old ego-centric self with which we came into the world.

The second-"nevertheless I live"-is the new Paul, our new selves, risen from the dead in Christ, the same self as before so far as our organs and faculties are concerned, but "renewed in the spirit of our minds," "created in righteousness and true holiness," the dead and risen self to which Paul refers when he says, "Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God-yield yourselves unto God as alive from the dead." This renewed "I" has a pure heart (Acts 15:8; 1 Pet. 1:22), a purified soul (I Pet. 1:22), pure mind (H Pet. 3:1), dedicated body (Rom. 6:13; 12:1) the temple of the Holy Ghost.

But then Paul definitely qualifies this second statement by a third: "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" Why does he do this? Because the real new I is Christ in me.

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There can, then, be only one possible purpose in God's grace in salvation-to restore man to his sole and original destiny- "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

We stress this again because the only infallible, inexorable consequence of a sinner receiving salvation is not always made plain by Gospel preachers. It is often easy to get the impression that it is certainly necessary to have our sins forgiven, to be delivered from the wrath to come, to receive an assured entrance into heaven; but to submit to the total control of Christ is something which may and should follow, but does not necessarily do so; and even that it is possible to enjoy the former without the latter. Nothing could be more false or absurd. There is no salvation conceivable, possible or actual, other than God's way in infinite grace of destroying the false form of life in which man lives, and replacing it by the true. The false form of life is that which has self in the centre, which is the sin in which my mother conceived me, which is the false god. The true form of life is that which has God at its centre-Christ living in me.

It is for that reason Paul used the striking expression in Gal. 1:17 to describe his conversion-"when it pleased God-to reveal His son in me." The startling fact is that on the road to Damascus it was the exalted Christ who spoke to him from heaven; yet he writes years afterwards that the out-come of God's dealings with him those three eventful days was not an external revelation of an ascended Christ, but an internal revelation of the Indwelling Son.

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The atoning work of Christ, which makes it possible for a lost sinner to stand in the sight of God as one who had never sinned, is only the gate-way to life, not the life itself. The life itself is, and can never be anything but, Jesus Himself, "that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us," coming into the cleansed vessel, occupying His holy temple, being the life of the branch now attached to the Vine, the life of the member of the body now attached to the Head.

Do we see the point? Salvation is only salvation when it is God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit-returning to live in the personality created for Him, but exiled from Him through the fall. This is the inner reality of such parables as the prodigal returning to his Father. Therefore salvation is only salvation to any individual believer when the Spirit has given the inner witness of the presence of the Indwelling Christ.

It is certainly true that a new born babe in Christ might not be able to interpret his new living experience in these exact terms; but it must be true that he has not merely an external faith in a Christ crucified 2000 years ago, but also, as the inevitable result of the heavenly gift of repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, the inner revelation of "Christ in me", my Saviour, my Lord, evidenced by an inner witness that is both incomprehensible to the world, and indescribable.

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"They are not of the world" - John 17:16.

Though we are Christ's, we share in this divided world. We are part of it. We eat its food, partake in its activities, earn its money, taste of its sorrows and tragedies, endure its temptations. Though one'd with Christ in spirit, we are still one with the world in body.

Therefore, though new men in Christ, we still have a duality of consciousness: we have self-consciousness, world-consciousness, flesh-consciousness as well as Christ living in us. Not that it is wrong to be self or world-conscious; we are in the world (but not of it: John 17:13,16), in the flesh (but not of it: Galatians 5:24), in self (but not of it: Galatians 2:20). A great proportion of our waking hours must necessarily be spent in the affairs of this world, with Christ in the background rather than the foreground of our consciousness. Sin only enters when we are consciously drawn into activities and attitudes which we know to be displeasing to Him.

While we are in this divided world we cannot have solely a Christ-consciousness; we must also have a self-consciousness. Certainly it is the renewed self, which knows how to maintain its abiding place; yet it is also a self-conscious self, responsive to all the stimuli of its environment, therefore as open to temptation fleshward as to Christ-control spirit-ward. It is still a case of "nevertheless I live," as well as, "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."


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"We. . . who have the firstfruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait. . .for our adoption" - Romans 8:23.

We shall never in this life be free from a sense of self, as well as a realization of the indwelling Christ. We shall never, therefore, be free from temptation in a world that exists to tempt, nor be free from the daily necessity of vigilance and abiding. The chapter of triumphant living, Romans 8, significantly enough is the very chapter which warns against the subtleties of the surrounding flesh, and expresses our groanings amidst our rejoicing - as we long for the final redemption of the body, and are saved, not only by faith, but by hope.

For this reason, then, it is of utmost importance that we understand the exact relationship between the renewed self and the other Glorious Self, Christ Himself who dwells within. It is the hardest lesson we have to learn, and cannot be learned except in the hard way. Nothing but frequent and strong doses of the false activities of self can teach us this lesson. It is peculiarly subtle because it is now not a case of a troublesome bad self, but an anxious, frustrated, condemned good self; not good in the positive sense of being able to do good things, but good in the negative sense of wanting to do good and no longer wanting to do evil; a purified self, but though pure, still empty: just as a cup may be clean, but what really matters is the fluid it contains.

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Our nature is one thing, influences upon our nature another. In our unredeemed condition, the influences to which we temporarily responded were upward, we were tempted upward; but such responses did not make us good, because we were owned by the evil (self-loving) spirit. We continued basically to walk that same broad road to destruction.

It is equally so in the redeemed life. We need to get one fact clarified. We must not locate either evil or good fundamentally in us humans. Evil is a person, good is a Person. Evil is that spirit of evil, good the Holy Spirit. That is why when Jesus as a man was called "Good Master", He immediately repudiated the name and said, "Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, that is, God." And when Peter on one occasion urged Him to look to His own self-preservation, Jesus said to him, "Get thee behind Me, Satan".

Jesus traced a self-interested statement back through Peter to its source in Satan. He did not mean that Peter was permanently possessed by Satan. He had just told Peter that he had the Spirit of God (Matt. 16:17); but Peter was responding to a temporary influence downward. Just as the good was not in Jesus as the Son of man, nor the evil in Peter, so with us.

Our nature is the nature of the one who indwells us, and we share that nature and live that quality of life.

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We humans, as we have seen, have always been containers of another, the false god or the True. The nature we have manifested has not been our own; it has been the nature of the one indwelling us. These are the two natures the Bible speaks of. In our unredeemed condition we were "by nature the children of wrath", because we contained the "spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience". In our redeemed lives, there have been given to us "exceeding great and precious promises, that by these ye might become partakers of the divine nature". We were "slaves of sin", now we have become "slaves of righteousness".

In the old the trend of our lives was downward on the road of self-love. In the new the trend of our lives is upward on the road of self-giving. This is what the Bible means by the old man and new man. The old man was I with the old spirit within me, the new man is the same I with the new Spirit within me. We can never be old man and new man at the same time, for the one becomes the other. "Seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man": not put one on top of the other, like an overcoat over a coat, but taking off one to wear the other.

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The New Creation January 13

"I know that nothing good lives in me" Romans 7:18.

Most mistakenly we often seem to think that God put Adam there to test him, to see whether he would obey or not. Not so. It was because by no other means could he discover his own innate helplessness.

It was not as we often erroneously think, that Adam could have done the good deed of rejecting the advances of Satan. If that were so, man could be good by his own unaided effort. But he was placed between those two trees to learn that of himself he can do nothing good, and is not expected to! It was to teach him the basic fact of his creation, that his own human spirit is an empty, helpless vessel so far as living the good life is concerned: "in me, that is in my flesh (my humanity) dwelleth no good thing." He was not created to be good. He was created to be indwelt by the Good One, and the negative command not to eat of the tree, followed by the direct temptation to do so, was not to stir into action some potential capacity in Adam for obedience and goodness nor to demonstrate that he could be good if he would, but to reveal to him the one essential point he had to learn about himself that he was created helpless so far as being and doing good is concerned and then that his little human spirit had one marvelous potentiality: it could be the container of the Divine Spirit via the tree of life, and yet not lose its own individuality in being so; but [the fact is] that the two can dwell together, each in the other, in an eternal fruitful bond of union.

"An intercessor is not "working for God"; he is the human means by which God is doing His own work - and that's all. The fundamental difference is between the way we "tried" to be God's servants, when we were still under the delusion that the redeemed man does God's work for Him and with His help, and the revelation now given us that we are not really we at all, but He in us that He may be He by us. We, indeed, need to have this clear deep down to the center of our consciousness, so that our basic outlook on what we commonly call Christian service has been revolutionized; and we cannot, simply cannot, be caught up again in that frustrating, ulcer-causing, nervous-breakdown-producing rat race of "doing our best for Him". - Norman Grubb