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Start a New Method

Reckoning the finished work of our life, our resurrected life in Jesus Christ, is not about dying but about living. You have to die to live. We present our bodies living sacrifices, holy and acceptable unto God. We have an involvement in it but not an ability. The four steps of sanctification out of Romans 6 are know, reckon, yield, and obey. That's how we live the victorious, sanctified life.

Philippians 3:10 says the way that we come to that knowledge of the experiential power of His resurrection is by "being made conformable unto his death." So many people want to do it by formulas or by study. They think that if they study the Scriptures enough, discipline themselves, and spend enough hours in prayer and fasting that somehow they will tap into the power of God. There is only one way that you can know this power of God, and that is to be able to be conformable to His death. We choose to conform to a life of obedience to the Spirit of God, to a selfless purpose. We eat the meat, which is the will of Father, and finish the work of Him that sent us. That's the cross that Jesus bore. That was the mission He was on. To be crucified with Him is to live with Him. We yield our will to know that resurrection power as He yielded His will up to the will of the Father. We have no agenda and assume no glory. Everything that Jesus did was to glorify the Father. This was Paul's desire and why he counted worthless the things that used to be gain to him.

"Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind..." (Phil. 3:12-13). Let me encourage you to forget about all of your great accomplishments and all of those things that used to be gain. But let me also encourage you to forget about all of your failures. Forget about all of the sins that dominated your life. Forget about all the times that you cried and wept, saying, "Lord, I'll never do it again," and you did it again. Forget about those things, because you are starting a new method now. You are moving into a new arena from the self-life into the dependent life--the life of reckoning the victory already won, the life that doesn't try and work but rests through the knowledge of what Jesus has already accomplished for you.

"Forgetting those things which are behind, [I reach] forth..." There is still effort, but it is no longer works; it's obedience. It's the Spirit working in us to will and to do. It's the ability to discern that voice as we reach forth to those things which are before us, pressing toward the mark, the prize, the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

"Let us therefore, as many as [would] be perfect [complete, mature], be thus minded." That word "perfect" means "having finished," or "having allowed this to finish itself in us." The mature man comes to realize the vanity of self-effort and trusting in past accomplishments or in his ability to endure hardship and disciplining the flesh, getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning to pray and study. We have learned to die to those things. The spiritual man is the one that reckons himself dead in Jesus Christ, alive in resurrection power, and confident that the Spirit of God orders his steps and leads into all truth.

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