Free The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee Page A

something. It is not to bring us through something, and as a result to put something into us which we can call “our experience.” It is not that God effects something within us so that we can say, “I died with Christ last March” or “I was raised from the dead on January 1st, 1937,” or even, “Last Wednesday I asked for a definite experience and I have got it.” No, that is not the way. I do not seek experiences in themselves as in this present year of grace. Where spiritual history is concerned, time must not be allowed to dominate my thinking.
    Then, some will say, what about the crises so many of us have passed through? True, some of us have passed through real crises in our lives. For instance, George Müller could say, bowing himself down to the ground, “There was a day when George Müller died.” How about that? Well, I am not questioning the reality of the spiritual experiences we go through, nor the importance of crises to which God brings us in our walk with Him. Indeed, I have already stressed the need forus to be quite as definite ourselves about such crises in our own lives. But the point is that God does not give individuals individual experiences. All that they have is only an entering into what God has already done. It is the “realizing” in time of eternal things. The history of Christ becomes our experience and our spiritual history; we do not have a separate history from His. The entire work with respect to us is not done in us here, but in Christ. He does no separate work in individuals apart from what He has done there. Even eternal life is not given to us as individuals; the life is in the Son, and “he that hath the Son hath the life.” God has done all in His Son, and He has included us in Him; we are incorporated into Christ.
    Now the point of all this is that there is a very real practical value in the stand of faith that says, “God has put me in Christ, and therefore all that is true of Him is true of me. I will abide in Him.” Satan is always trying to get us out, to keep us out, to convince us that we are out, and by temptations, failures, suffering, trial, to make us feel acutely that we are outside of Christ. Our first thought is that, if we were in Christ, we should not be in this state, and therefore, judging by the feelings we now have, we must be out of Him. So we begin to pray, “Lord, put me into Christ.” No! God’s injunction is to “abide” in Christ, and that is the way of deliverance.
    But how is it so? Because it opens the way for God to take a hand in our lives and to work the thing out in us. It makes room for the operation of His superior power—the power of resurrection (Rom. 6:4, 9–10)—so that the facts of Christ do progressively become the facts of our daily experience. Where before “sin reigned” (Rom. 5:21) we makenow the joyful discovery that we are truly “no longer . . . in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6).
    As we stand steadfastly on the ground of what Christ is, we find all that is true of Him becoming experimentally true in us. If instead we come on to the ground of what we are in ourselves, we will find all that is true of the old nature remaining true of us. If we get there in faith, we have everything; if we return back here, we find nothing. So often we go to the wrong place to find the death of self. It is in Christ. We have only to look within to find we are very much alive to sin; but when we look over there to the Lord, God sees to it that death works here, but that “newness of life” is ours also. We are “alive unto God” (Rom. 6:4, 11).
    “Abide in me, and I in you.” This is a double sentence: a command coupled with a promise. That is to say, there is an objective and a subjective side to God’s working, and the subjective side depends upon the objective—the “I in you” is the outcome of our abiding in Him. We need to guard against being over-anxious about the subjective side of things, and so becoming turned in