8-21. Life Above All
“That the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:11, ASV.).
The love motive is not adequate to carry the believer through to fruitful walk and service. Few seem to be able to face up to this fact, possibly because they see no higher alternative. But there is one: the life motive. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2).
“By the body of Christ on the Cross believers were made dead to the law (Rom. 7:4), in order righteously to be joined to Another, even the risen Lord Jesus Christ. The reason why we had to die to the law was, not at all because the law was bad (it, on the contrary, is ‘holy, just and good’), but because we were bad.
“Our flesh was so powerless to do good and so ready to do evil, that the application to us of God’s holy law only gave sin an occasion to involve our enslaved members in open rebellion against the law.
“So that even if a man loves God’s law, as Paul did, he has no power to keep it; but sin only makes the law a constant means of working death to him, and the more a man tries to keep the law the more he comes under the power of sin. Hence there is only this left for us—to die to the law, and be joined to the risen Lord Jesus in a resurrection life absolutely beyond the sphere of the law.” -W.R.N.
“The law is for the man who departed from God—that man has been removed from God’s sight in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I rejoice that now by the ‘law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ I am ‘free from the law of sin and death’ (Rom. 8:2).”
“Not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16).