WALK IN HIM

“As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him: rooted and built up in Him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:6, 7).

 

I am forever amazed at just how ready I was to receive Christ as my Savior.  I had been brought to a point in my life where I knew I’d messed up and couldn’t fix things, or go back and change the choices I had already made that had brought me down the road that I was on.  I needed help, but more than that, I needed mercy.  I didn’t need a theologian to tell me I’d offended my Creator.  What little I knew about God was enough to tell me I’d blown it.  That’s when someone found me and told me about Jesus.  I was amazed to hear that my past could be forgiven, and that I could have a clean slate to write the rest of my life on.  It wasn’t difficult – I simply believed it.  As a gift from heaven, I just accepted it and discovered the joy of salvation and the free gift of grace. 

 

It was sometime later, after I’d settled into this thing called Christianity that I began to struggle.  Things that I suddenly felt guilty about doing, I had trouble doing without.  I would want to do the right thing in my heart, but my body and my will would fight against me and often win.  My life was a series of peaks and valleys – one moment on top of the world, and the next moment discouraged and ashamed.  I wasn’t content to go through the “sin and repent” cycle that many Christians practiced – I wanted to overcome!  It was then that I found that to receive Christ was one thing, but to walk in Him was something else altogether.

 

That’s when I found these words in the second chapter of Colossians: “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him.”  God showed me in this verse that it was a simple matter of believing that Christ had already secured not just my redemption, but my victory as well!  I found that faith was the victory that overcomes all things.  I learned that walking in Christ can be as easy as receiving Him was in the first place.  Instead of trying to exert my willpower over temptations (which I found to be very ineffective), I could simply trust that through Christ’s death and resurrection I can do all things.  I found that God gives me power over those things that used to defeat me.  My sins were nailed to His cross and now it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.  It isn’t a power that comes from me, but from His Spirit working in me. 

 

The Chinese teacher, Watchman Nee, once explained the power of sin and death versus the Spirit of life in Christ by holding his Bible at arm’s length from his body to show that his natural strength was sufficient to accomplish this task easily.  After a few minutes however, his strength began to wane and the book became heavier until, as light as the book was, he was unable to support its weight.  The reason, he said, was because the law of gravity was exerting a constant force against him that never weakened and never ceased until it overcame his will and natural strength.  He had some strength to resist this law for a time; but ultimately, he was doomed to give in.  The same is true of the relationship between our natural willpower and the law of sin and death.  The law of sin and death exerts a constant force on us that never stops, and never gets weary.  In order to overcome this law, a greater law must be applied.  That’s why Paul says in Romans that, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” (See Romans 8:2).

 

There is something that we must do on our part.  That is to surrender the thing that is defeating us completely to the Lord.  We must determine to die to that thing altogether, to “mortify the deeds of body.” (See Romans 8:13).  We cannot indulge ourselves with it any longer.  Even thinking about it longingly can lead us back into bondage to it.  Remember the Israelites whom God delivered from the cruel slavery of Egypt?  All it took for them to begin talking about going back there was dwelling on the memories of eating melons, cucumbers, leeks, and garlic.  That’s when the very Bread from Heaven became detestable to them (see Numbers 11:4-6). 

 

Are you struggling with something in your life that you can’t seem to completely overcome?  Trust the Savior today that He has given you the power to walk in Him just as surely as He has granted you redemption.  Don’t let fear and defeat govern your life – believe Christ for the victory!  It is God Who is working in us both to will and to perform His good pleasure (see Philippians 2:13).  We have been made free in Christ Jesus!