7-The Pathway to An Overcoming Life

7-The Pathway to the Overcoming Life
BH Clendennen

We have been dealing with man and where he fell from. That has to be established. You listen to a lot of religion today and you'd think that Adam fell from nothing. That seems to be the what is propagated. Today they say if you are born again, you can never be lost again. Well, I can tell you Adam lost the life of God. We proved that over and over, that is what he fell from. Now to be redeemed, he must come back to that same place where there is a restoring of the image of God's Son in that man. God must once more be able to see His own image in that man or woman born of Himself. Now the Bible says of those early Christians, the world took knowledge that they had been with the Christ. Now that right there is where we've come to.

Paul says in Philippians 1:21 For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. I want you to notice something. Here in this he's not specifically talking about a physical death to be gain but a death to what he was. That's the only way the life of Christ can be manifest in his life. He said for me to life is Christ-for me to die is gain, I gain more of Christ. Something in me must become that burnt offering if there's going to be something of Christ. There must be a decrease of myself if there's going to be an increase of Christ. So we come to this lesson, the Pathway to an overcoming life. Now, the ordinary Christian life is a state of learning, where one is under the influence and teaching of the Scripture. The mind and heart have to be disciplined and the will trained and stirred to seek after the life in which the Spirit of God really fills and rules. The Bible said set your affection on things above and not on this earth. That's the only overcoming pathway. See, if you set your affections on things above, you're truly born again, you will realize you have been delivered from the powers of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. The Bible says in the book of Hebrews, even if you're born again if you are mindful of where you come from, you're going to go back there again. It's that will to set that affection on the things above. Such a life is possible but can proceed only by the operation of the Spirit of God in which our Lord as the Lamb of God reveals Himself in the heart and takes possession. That's what is meant by for me to live is for Christ to live.

The one great hindrance to this life of the Spirit of God within you and I is the power of that evil self that poisons our whole nature. The chief object of our learning is the soul in its struggle to obey God's law and to overcome this evil self must be brought to the confession of its utter impotence to the work of deliverance. The only way to deliverance is by true and entire death to self. The secret to this death to self is to be found in a simple, helpless turning from self to God. Coming to this place where I understand I cannot but I can believe God. Like the leper I must come to Christ understanding I am totally helpless in this matter just as I could not save myself. I could not do that. I tried to be a better man, I turned over new pages, but it was just as dirty on the other side. I found myself right back. It was a hopeless situation until I heard the message of the Gospel and cast myself upon Him. Like the leper, I said, if Thou wilt Thou can make me whole. And now as a Christian, born again, I understand that only by the same power that saved me can I keep this old nature down and walk in the Spirit of God. Now this dying to self is the perfection of faith in Christ as the Lamb of God. He bore my sins so I don't have to. He died my death so death is not future with me, it is past. The humility of the Lamb of God was the secret of the work He did, and the salvation He gives. Understand and take a hold of that.

This is an arrogant, prideful age. Man, even the church has produced a parasite of the pew that all they think of is what is in it for me. I'm not talking about giving ourselves to God, but giving our bodies, giving ourselves to God, that His Son may be manifest in and through us. This is an age of arrogance, even in the church.

A man said once on the TV, one of the big TV preachers, he said my faith got me a jet airplane, what has your faith got you? Well, I know the television can't hear but I talked back to it, I said my faith delivered me from the vanity of wanting one. You see the humility of Christ demonstrates how in sinking down before God in humility, meekness, patience and resignation to God is the very perfection of faith in Christ and the one and only condition of God doing His work in us. It took 40 years in a desert for God to bring Moses who the book of Acts testifies was mighty in word and deed. That's the point when he first tried to deliver Israel. See in his own strength he felt he was capable but then God suffered him 40 years in this wilderness. When God came back, Moses said in effect, you're too late, I can't talk. I am no longer mighty in word and deed. God said then you've come to the place now where only I can do it through you. If you'll give Me your body, Moses, I'll do the work. When Moses went to Egypt, he never had a plan, he simply went there to do what he was told and God did the work.

This great truth is demonstrated by the fact that the low estate of the average believer and the cause of all failure is the result of self confidence. They felt they could do it and when they fail they give up on things. Humility and utter self despair and a complete dependence upon God's mighty working in simple faith is the only way to be delivered from this self. When I was 34 years old only begun to preach, preaching one night, I had a massive heart attack. Just fell out in that pulpit. A registered nurse was there and she come and upon examination, listening and looking at my hands. She said this man's had a heart attack. They carried me over to the Pastor's house which was on the same lot and I had the second one. She pronounced me dead, could find no pulse, no nothing. But my wife never ceased to pray and so I lived. But then I had the third one. I knew though that God was testing me for something. I knew there was something God was trying to teach me, that if I'm going to be able to teach others I must know. I knew I couldn't go to a physician, if I did I would die. So, I had her to put me in a room by myself for 9 days. On that 9th night, God walked in there, touched my heart, and I've been running ever since. Healed it perfectly. A doctor told me I had terrible scars on my heart but I've never saw a more perfect heart in a man your age. But you see, I was brought to know I must give up all self helps and come to the place I cast myself upon God and like the leper 'if Thou wilt, Thou can make me whole.' That's as much in the spiritual as the physical. If we come to that, humble and meek, patient, total resignation to God, that is the essence of faith. God is the origin of all love. It is the nature of God, love is, it's one He delights in to give all goodness, happiness and blessing and can give nothing else to the human but these things.

This says there can be no possible goodness in the creature but what God gives. Jesus said to a man who called Him "Good master" and Jesus said "Why call you Me good, there is none good but God." What's He saying? That man didn't believe He was God, He was God, but He said, "why do you call Me good? There is none good but God." Because this love in God is the origin of all love in the believer, love has to be in the believer exactly what it is in God. A will to all goodness toward others at all times under every single circumstance. I must be able to pray for those who despitefully use me. I must be able to ask God to bless those who hate me. That is Christianity. Christ loved us while we were yet sinners. Now that love in us manifested through us will cause this world to recognize that we have been with Christ. That is the only way. The spirit of love which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit cannot be really yours until it's truly the Spirit of your life. Until you live freely and willingly according to that love which is shed abroad in your heart by the Holy Spirit. In that Sermon on the Mount, He made this so wonderfully real. He preached to us this is to be our life, a life poured out to others. When it's that way it comes back in great volumes to that believer. Jesus said seek first the kingdom of God, where this is your life, then God will add everything to else to that life. If we just come to live this life.

The Spirit of love can do nothing but love. Wherever it is, whatever is done to it, because it is the truth and reality of God in the new creature. Then all it can do is love. Love is the only bond of union between God and the creature. Love is the very nature of God and if I have His nature, that must be my nature. I must so walk, so live and so be, and pour this life out to others. But that stream will come back in the goodness of this great God. I don't know all of this but I've learned something of living the life of another for others, how God's blessing has been on this life. How He has provided without any of effort of mine. This School of Christ was born in Russia, 16 years ago, it was born. I didn't think it would ever go anywhere else. 16 years later it's in over 140 countries. Had no money when I started, but something like 26 million American dollars has come through these hands, didn't stop, to carry the Gospel. Christ has been that Source all of the time because as we give to Him He gives to us.

Since the will to all goodness is the whole nature of God, it must also be the whole nature of every service of religion otherwise God never accepts it. The selfishness of our time, we fill the church with mere consumers who go to church only to get. God has nothing to do with that. You see, all sin is a result of the creature turning from the love of God to some self seeking or its own will in created things. It is this self that crucified Christ the Lord and it is from self that sinful man must be delivered. That's the key. All along the line that is the process of sanctification, this new man growing to a point that he commands the old nature that soul, and body, Godward and keeps that nature dead. There is no way to accomplish this but dying to self and having the Spirit of love born within us. This is why the doctrine of the cross is an absolute necessity as the only way to a life in God. Thus there are two paths open to man. He either must live for that for which he was created which was to receive and manifest the goodness of God, that is one path. I must live for that and that alone, or live in self, unto self and let self manifest itself without God. That's the only choice, there are only two paths. I will either live for myself or I live for God. Now since goodness and happiness are absolutely inseparable from God and can only be found in God, then the life of God in union with the life of man is the one and only possibility of goodness and happiness in any creature.

It was for this that Pentecost was given. It's not a suggestion but a command of God in Eph 5:18 to be filled with the Spirit because it's for this we were born. This is how God's Son lives in and through our lives, by the Holy Spirit. He that has been with you shall be in you was the testimony of God to those apostles. When the Holy Ghost came into them the world saw that Christ was in them because of the love and the goodness of God that flowed through them. For this there must be a perpetual operation of the Holy Ghost within us. Be filled with the Spirit must not be taken lightly. I've watched it become optional in the modern Pentecostal church but the holiness of the Christian is not an occasional thing that begins or ends, but is the holiness of that which is always alive and stirring in us, namely of our thoughts, wills, desires and affections. If our thoughts and affections are to be always holy, then the Holy Ghost must be always operating as the Principal of life within every one of us. The kingdom of heaven must be all within us or it can never belong to us. This is the message God has pressed upon me to bring to the elect in this moment because Christ is coming. It may be today. The holiness can be ours only as our thoughts, wills, and desires become the thoughts, wills and desires of the Holy Ghost. See, the work of Christ as Redeemer is to take from the earthly life of flesh and blood its stolen power. We need no other deliverance but from the power of our earthly self because that is Satan's territory. If we give him no place, he cannot come. All the bad that we do is the result of this earthly self resisting the working and power of God within us. The only good we accomplish is the result of our conforming to the Spirit of this great God within us. Thus it is plain that salvation consists wholly in the life of God quickened and being born again within you. Jesus Christ as the second Adam became the parent of a new humanity.

If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Christ, says Paul, was the firstborn of the creature, He became that firstborn. To do this, He had to enter into our state, enter its weakness, sufferings, pass through that which we needed to pass through in giving up this life of the fallen nature. To demonstrate he was not of this world and He lived in the perfection of the first man, He must show that all good of this earthly life was renounced by Him. We must also walk in His footsteps, following, to renounce that world as we willfully say no to that world and yes to God, then we are on the upward bend to being a part of that Bridal company.

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