Freedom From Sin’s Power - Part III of VIII

The Independent-Self, Or A Self That Is Dependent Upon the Indwelling Lord

The Self of all selves is Great I Am. He is the genuine independent self. He is in the believer, but He cannot be Himself fully within us if we remain as a rival “self”, living independent of Him. If there is an independent human self that counters His will to do exactly what He likes in and by me, He cannot be free. Philip. 2:13 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.

Yet, that is exactly what has happened by the fall of Adam, and to thereby mankind. This first occurred with Lucifer and all those terrible hosts of fallen angels with God, and then that fallen notion of “self as God” was imparted into man in his fallen humanity. A rival self has entered to rival The Self who would dwell within, and that rival self is our problem, what we shall call the independent self. Yet so perfectly does God’s Word rightly divide things for us that He makes things perfectly clear, that it doesn’t mean that we lose ourselves; rather, we become our rightful selves. It’s the wrongful self who was crucified with Christ; that our rightful self then becomes itself as it was meant to be – in Christ. We emerge as a new self expressing the very life of God that is in Christ as the Spirit of life within our spirit as our new inward life and guide.

So it is not losing self. It is losing the wrong form of self that the rightful form of self may coexist with that Supreme Self. But the rightful form of self is that which becomes very small and as near a simple container can become; we must recognize our own weakness, helplessness and utter neediness.

Man’s fall to his supposed, independent, self-godhood was a fall from his original dependent relationship with God who was mans joy, mans provision. He had supposed that he would become as a god by eating of that tree, but actually he gained the fallen nature of the Evil One. Man is helpless and hopelessly poisoned against genuine righteousness by the snare of Sin.

This snare of “Sin” may only be reversed for those who are regenerated, to be “In Christ”. Even then, he snare is broken only for those who 1) know their place of utter dependency upon God’s provision of Christ’s life to be within them as their new guiding and empowering life and nature and, 2) Then take that place of utter dependency by their submitting themselves, to trust the Christ in them as their new guiding life.

Man came into the world by the creative hand of God and was made as an upright being (Eccl 7:29). He was made as a perfect container for God to indwell, for God’s nature to ultimately become expressed through the man that He had created. Now, after the fall, man now is born into the world possessing the very nature of his first “father of sorts”. Satan cannot be a real father; he has no life, only death to give. Yet, Satan has the usurped man, standing in the place of God as Father. At creation Adam had never had a father at all – he had only been created by God, not born of the seed of a father, not until the Evil One placed his corruptible seed within Adam’s flesh body. All of mankind then was born of Sin.

Peter gives us some light on this matter. He contrasts the “corruptible seed” of Satan with the “incorruptible Seed” of God, which is Christ Jesus, who is the Word. He was God and with God from the beginning, the beginning that was before the creation account that we see in Genesis 1:1 (John 1:1).

1Pet 1:23 Being born again, not of corruptible seed (Greek, spora, seeded parentage), but of incorruptible (cf, spora), by the word (Christ) of God, which liveth and abideth for ever (Christ is the eternal Seed of God). 1 John 3:9 Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his (God’s) seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

Galatians 3:16 to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed (sperma), which is Christ.

From this we see that a nature only comes from the seeded life of a father, following all his progeny.

The Genesis account tells us the living species that God created reproduce only “after its kind”. We’ve all heard the sayings, “Like father, like son” and “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”; all indicating the seeded life of the father is passed onto his progeny.

Paul in Gal 2:20a and Rom 6:6a tells what has happened to our old corruptible self – It is crucified with Christ. Rom 6:6 …our old man is crucified with him Galatians 2:20 I am crucified with Christ…

Paul then also goes on to tell us of an entirely new self that has come to replace the old self, in those who receive Christ; it has made the old things to be passed away (parerchomai, put aside). 2 Cor. 5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature (ktisis, creation): old things are passed away (parerchomai, put aside); behold, all things are become new (neos, regenerated).

In Eph 2:1-3 Paul repeats these thoughts, while telling us exactly what kind of spiritually seeded nature it was that had taken over man’s old self. It is the Sin nature that all unregenerate mankind now possesses as their primary nature. Even the Christian still possesses this Sin nature in his flesh body, but Paul tells us it has been dealt a blow that makes it “unemployed” or of “of no effect” upon those Christians who have come to know and trust who they are “in Christ”.