"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me." (Galatians 2:20) "We have been planted together in the likeness of his death." (Romans 6:5)

The Crucified One
Day 11

To be able to look upon His death as mine, just as really as it was His
— upon His perfect obedience to God, His victory over sin, and complete
deliverance from its power, as mine; and to realize that the power of
that death does by faith work daily with a divine energy in mortifying
the flesh, and renewing the whole life into the perfect conformity to
the resurrection life of Jesus! Abiding in Jesus, the Crucified One,
is the secret of the growth of that new life which is ever begotten of
the death of nature.

Let us try to understand this. The suggestive expression, “Planted into
the likeness of His death,” will teach us what the abiding in the
Crucified One means. When a graft is united with the stock on which it
is to grow, we know that it must be kept fixed, it must abide in the
place where the stock has been cut, been wounded, to make an opening to
receive the graft.

No graft without wounding — the laying bare and opening up of the inner
life of the tree to receive the stranger branch. It is only through
such wounding that access can be obtained to the fellowship of the sap
and the growth and the life of the stronger stem. Even so with Jesus
and the sinner. Only when we are planted into the likeness of His death
shall we also be in the likeness of His resurrection, partakers of the
life and the power there are in Him.

In the death of the Cross Christ was wounded, and in His opened wounds
a place prepared where we might be grafted in. And just as one might
say to a graft, and does practically say as it is fixed in its place,
“Abide here in the wound of the stem, that is now to bear you”; so to
the believing soul the message comes, “Abide in the wounds of Jesus;
there is the place of union, and life, and growth. There you shall see
how His heart was opened to receive you; how His flesh was rent that
the way might be opened for your being made one with Him, and having
access to all the blessings flowing from His divine nature.”

You have also noticed how the graft has to be torn away from the tree
where it by nature grew, and to be cut into conformity to the place
prepared for it in the wounded stem. Even so the believer has to be
made conformable to Christ’s death — to be crucified and to die with
Him. The wounded stem and the wounded graft are cut to fit into each
other, into each other’s likeness. There is a fellowship between
Christ’s sufferings and your sufferings.

His experiences must become yours. The disposition He manifested in
choosing and bearing the cross must be yours. Like Him, you will have
to give full assent to the righteous judgment and curse of a holy God
against sin. Like Him, you have to consent to yield your life, as
laden with sin and curse, to death, and through it to pass to the new
life.

Like Him, you shall experience that it is only through the self-
sacrifice of Gethsemane and Calvary that the path is to be found to
the joy and the fruit-bearing of the resurrection life. The more clear
the resemblance between the wounded stem and the wounded graft, the
more exactly their wounds fit into each other, the surer and the
easier, and the more complete will be the union and the growth.

It is in Jesus, the Crucified One, I must abide. I must learn to look
upon the Cross as not only an atonement to God, but also a victory
over the devil — not only a deliverance from the guilt, but also from
the power of sin. I must gaze on Him on the Cross as wholly mine,
offering Himself to receive me into the closest union and fellowship,
and to make me partaker of the full power of His death to sin, and the
new life of victory to which it is but the gateway. I must yield myself
to Him in an undivided surrender, with much prayer and strong desire,
imploring to be admitted into the ever closer fellowship and conformity
of His death, of the Spirit in which He died that death.

Let me try and understand why the Cross is thus the place of union. On
the Cross the Son of God enters into the fullest union with man —
enters into the fullest experience of what it says to have become a son
of man, a member of a race under the curse. It is in death that the
Prince of life conquers the power of death; it is in death alone that
He can make me partaker of that victory. The life He imparts is a life
from the dead; each new experience of the power of that life depends
upon the fellowship of the death.

The death and the life are inseparable. All the grace which Jesus the
Saving One gives is given only in the path of fellowship with Jesus
the Crucified One. Christ came and took my place; I must put myself in
His place, and abide there. And there is but one place which is both
His and mine — that place is the Cross. His in virtue of His free
choice; mine by reason of the curse of sin.

He came there to seek me; there alone I can find Him. When He found me
there, it was the place of cursing; this He experienced, for “cursed is
every one that hangeth on a tree.” He made it a place of blessing; this
I experienced, for Christ has delivered us from the curse, being made a
curse for us. When Christ comes in my place, He remains what He was,
the beloved of the Father; but in the fellowship with me He shares my
curse and dies my death.

When I stand in His place, which is still always mine, I am still what
I was by nature, the accursed one, who deserves to die; but as united
to Him, I share His blessing, and receive His life. When He came to be
one with me He could not avoid the Cross, for the curse always points
to the Cross as its end and fruit. And when I seek to be one with Him,
I cannot avoid the Cross either, for nowhere but on the Cross are life
and deliverance to be found.

As inevitably as my curse pointed Him to the Cross as the only place
where He could be fully united to me, His blessing points me to the
Cross too as the only place where I can be united to Him. He took my
cross for His own; I must take His Cross as my own; I must be crucified
with Him. It is as I abide daily, deeply in Jesus the Crucified One,
that I shall taste the sweetness of His love, the power of His life,
the completeness of His salvation.

Beloved believer! it is a deep mystery, this of the Cross of Christ.
I fear there are many Christians who are content to look upon the
Cross, with Christ on it dying for their sins, who have little heart
for fellowship with the Crucified One. They hardly know that He
invites them to it. Or they are content to consider the ordinary
afflictions of life, which the children of the world often have as
much as they, as their share of Christ’s Cross.

They have no conception of what it is to be crucified with Christ,
that bearing the cross means likeness to Christ in the principles
which animated Him in His path of obedience. The entire surrender of
all self-will, the complete denial to the flesh of its every desire
and pleasure, the perfect separation from the world in all its ways
of thinking and acting, the losing and hating of one’s life, the
giving up of self and its interests for the sake of others — this is
the disposition which marks him who has taken up Christ’s Cross, who
seeks to say, “I am crucified with Christ; I abide in Christ, the
Crucified One.”