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There you have a brief description of our basic makeup and our fatal problem with sin just because we’re part of the human race. Next we’ll consider how God provided a way out of the dilemma.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

*
As you study through Romans 5–8, which is quoted extensively in this book, I suggest you avoid using the New International Version. I believe the translators were incorrect in using the phrase “sinful nature” for the Greek word
flesh
.

One of actor Jimmy Stewart’s most famous films is
It’s a Wonderful Life.
In that picture, Stewart plays a despairing young banker who comes to a point in his life when he thinks he’d be better off dead. And through the rest of the movie, an angel shows him what the world would be like if he did indeed leave the scene.

In a sense, the lives of most people are like that of the Jimmy Stewart character. While they’re living and breathing physically, a vital part of them—the spirit—is dead. It was dead on arrival when they entered this world because of the choice made by Adam.

Even if you’re not a Christian you, too, were a spiritual stillbirth. You were born dead. You also inherited this condition from Adam. In this chapter, I’ll use the Word to show that God solved your problem of being cut off from His acceptance by crucifying your Adamic identity in Christ and causing a brand-new spirit-you to be born in Christ’s resurrection.
Now,
because of the finished work of Christ, God finds it delightfully easy to totally accept the new you (see Appendix B).

Salvation is a two-sided coin. Side A represents Jesus’ coming into the believer; side B represents the believer’s coming into Jesus. He is in me, and I am in Him. This is a package deal; you can’t get one side at a time.

While studying this back in the ’70s, I discovered that for every verse you can find in the New Testament stating that the believer is indwelt by Christ, you will discover
ten
verses stating that the believer indwells Jesus. Ten to one! But until very recent years, I could count on one hand the number of messages I’d heard on what it means to be “in Christ.”

I’ve heard thousands of sermons on the one side of the relationship, how to get Christ to come into you and save you. Praise the Lord for those messages! But on the other hand, if the Word is weighted ten to one with side B verses, do you see that many Christians are being fed on short rations? A straight diet of salvation messages to the church won’t bring us to maturity. God makes that clear to us in Hebrews 6:1: “Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying
again
a foundation of repentance” (emphasis added).

John 3:16 served up in eighty-seven ways to the believer is not God’s plan for victory. A Christian will starve on such a milk diet. That teaching won’t help me much when I experience an assault on my self-esteem and feel rejected. I need power to resist; I don’t need to quote John 3:16. I need to know how to appropriate what side B is all about.

Consider a few of the verses that speak of the believer’s being in Christ, side B. What does the Bible state that God accomplished for you
in
Christ? How did this solve the problem of your alienation from Him? Consider Ephesians 1:4: “[God] chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” In some way, God placed you into the lovely, innocent Jesus before the world was formed. That doesn’t mean you had no choice, but God saw the problem before time ever began (see Appendix C). He saw your need before you even had one!

Thus, imagine yourself being in Christ as He came to planet earth to solve your problem. God placed you in Him. Ultimately, He went to the cross. Where were you? In Him. As the lovely, innocent Jesus died, you, too, were crucified. The difference is that you deserved it and He didn’t. But it wasn’t your earthsuit that died; not the physical you, but the
spiritual
you (see Figure 5.1).

That rebel you, that Lord-of-the-Ring you, that spiritually dead-to-God you, that spirit-son of Satan was crucified with Him. “I
have been
crucified with Christ,” Paul said (Galatians 2:20, emphasis added). “Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him” says Romans 6:6. Romans 6 and 7 and many other verses in the Word of God state categorically that all believers
died
when Christ died. The verbs in the Greek are all past tense. You and I were executed in Christ (side B).
God executed everything about you He could not tolerate in His holy presence
and buried you with Jesus (see Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12). That’s what water baptism is all about. It’s a pantomime of your co-death and rebirth in Christ.

Dear Christian, the Word unequivocally states in each of the verses cited above that when Christ died, you died. As Watchman Nee points out, every Christian believes that two thieves were crucified with Christ on Calvary. However, there is much more biblical ink dedicated to
your
death on the cross than there is to that of the thieves. Why won’t you believe that
you
were crucified with Christ? May I tell you what I suspect? I suspect that you refuse to believe it because your religious man-made tradition makes no allowance for it.

You
must
deal with the abundance of verses which describe your death in Christ. You must deal with the question, “
What
died?” I have dealt with it, arrived at the conclusion that it was the old self, the old identity that died, and have appropriated this in my own life. When I did all that, I immediately began to experience a vastly more consistent victory over lifelong hang-ups.

If you say, “No, Bill, I know you mean well, but the old self did not actually die,” then you must answer the question, “What
did
die?” You cannot be intellectually honest with yourself and God by simply sweeping under the rug this abundance of Scripture referring to your death in Christ. This truth permeates much of Paul’s writings. You have to come to grips with that before the Lord. What died? It was everything about the former “you” that God could not tolerate in His holy presence. The old you, your old spiritual identity, was executed and replaced by a lovely, new, godly you. In Christ, at salvation, you were not only given a new present and a new future, but you were also given a new
past
! Your spiritual roots are no longer in Adam, but in Christ.

All born-again people know that God solved the problem with their sins (performance) through the shed
blood
of Jesus Christ: “without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22b). But what the vast majority of Christians have not seen is that God solved the problem
with the source,
your old man, through the
body
of Christ on the cross. “We
have been sanctified
through the offering of the
body
of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10, emphasis added). That goes even beyond forgiveness. Through the
body
of Christ you experienced a change in your identity. You were changed from a sinner-man to a saint. It means that as new creatures in Christ, we have been made pure and holy before God through the body of Christ, not through His blood.

Finally, through the
Spirit
of Christ, the Holy Spirit, you have exchanged your old Adamic life for Christ’s Life. By His indwelling Spirit, He longs to express Himself through you and fellowship with you. Christ’s blood, Christ’s body, and Christ’s Spirit…it takes all three to give you victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The blood and the body of Christ are both critically important. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why we partake of
two
elements at the Lord’s Supper since it is the blood of Jesus that has cleansed us from our sins? Why did Jesus introduce the wine
and
the bread? Why not just the wine since it is to remind us of our forgiveness bought with His precious blood? Forgiveness is all that is ever mentioned in most churches as we partake of the elements. But that’s only observing half the celebration.

The bread, the second element, represents Christ’s
body
in which God crucified our old son-of-Satan, self-centered, sin nature—the old man. Then you were recreated as a new creature in Him (in His resurrection body). Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are
His
workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus
” (emphasis added). It doesn’t reference the spirit-person created in your mom, but the new you who was created in Christ. This is your true identity!

Do you see how presumptuous it is for an instructed Christian to willfully appropriate only the blood of Jesus Christ while ignoring His Body and His Spirit? It’s as if he were saying that he functions so well that he needs only one facet of Christ’s sacrifice for him. The bread is to remind us to commemorate the execution of our old identity through our co-death in His body, in which that old rebel who refused to submit to God’s rightful authority, who insisted on playing Lord of the Ring, was eliminated and replaced by a brand-new person in Christ who
desires
to do God’s will. “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he
is
a new creature; the old things
passed
away; behold, new things
have
come” (2 Corinthians 5:17, emphasis added). This new person really desires to submit to God’s authority and desires his life to be lived to bring glory to the Lord Jesus. That’s a 10!

Please understand that God had no plan for joining His Holy Spirit to any person’s old sin nature. He had no plan to give birth to spiritual Siamese twins who are half spirit-child of Satan through Adam and half spirit-child of God through Christ. Jesus said, “Any city or house divided against itself shall not stand” (Matthew 12:25). God would never set you up for
guaranteed failure
by making you a “house divided against yourself.” I’ll agree that my experience and my feelings at times “tell” me I am a house divided, but since God would never set me up for certain failure, I must search His Word to find another cause for my strife within. I am not a house divided.

Jesus made this very clear, and the body of Scripture documents it. He said you couldn’t sew a patch of new cloth on an old garment. He meant this as an analogy of the new man and the old man. It would be futile to try to join them together, and God did not make a lie of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus said you can’t put
new
wine (the Holy Spirit) into
old
skins (the old nature), because the old skins can’t contain the glory of His presence. You’ve got to put the new wine into
new
skins (new nature).

The Scriptures likewise say you cannot join light (Holy Spirit) with darkness (old man). The Word further says that a believer (live-spirit child of God) must never join himself in marriage to an unbeliever (dead-spirit child of Satan). It follows that He would never violate His own admonition by joining into union the old man and the new man inside your earthsuit.

Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Now I ask you, would God who taught all the foregoing truths deliberately “set up” the Christian by giving him two conflicting identities, one loyal to God, the other equally loyal to Satan? No! Lost people have
one
master (Satan), not two. Christians also have
one
master (God), not two. But your
former
master constantly tempts and badgers you to submit to him again.