The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee Read Free Book Online

ask you how you know, you simply answer, “I know it!” Such knowledge comes by divine revelation. It comes from the Lord Himself. Of course the fact of forgiveness of sins is in the Bible, but for the written Word of God to become a living Word from God to you, He had to give you “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (Eph. 1:17). What you needed was to know Christ in that way, and it is always so. So there comes a time, in regard to any new apprehensionof Christ, when you know it in your own heart, you “see” it in your spirit. A light has shined into your inner being, and you are wholly persuaded of the fact.
    What is true of the forgiveness of your sins is no less true of your deliverance from sin. When once the light of God dawns upon your heart, you see yourself in Christ. It is not now because someone has told you, and not merely because Romans 6 says so. It is something more even than that. You know it because God has revealed it to you by His Spirit. You may not feel it; you may not understand it; but you know it, for you have seen it. Once you have seen yourself in Christ, nothing can shake your assurance of that blessed fact.
    If you ask a number of believers who have entered upon the normal Christian life how they came by their experience, some will say in this way and some will say in that. Each stresses his own particular way of entering in and produces Scripture to support his experience; and unhappily, many Christians are using their special experiences and their special Scriptures to fight other Christians. The fact of the matter is that, while Christians may enter into the deeper life by different ways, we need not regard the experiences or doctrines they stress as mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. One thing is certain: Any true experience of value in the sight of God must have been reached by way of a new discovery of the meaning of the Person and work of the Lord Jesus. That is a crucial test and a safe one.
    And here in our passage Paul makes everything depend upon such a discovery. “Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6).
Divine Revelation Essential to Knowledge
    So our first step is to seek from God a knowledge that comes by revelation—a revelation, that is to say, not of ourselves, but of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. When Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, entered into the normal Christian life, it was thus that he did so. You remember he tells of his longstanding problem of how to live “in Christ,” how to draw the sap out of the Vine into himself. He knew that he must have the life of Christ flowing out through him and yet felt he had not got it. And he saw clearly enough that his need was to be found in Christ. “I knew,” he said, writing to his sister from Chinkiang in 1869, “that if only I could abide in Christ all would be well, but I could not .”
    The more he tried to get in, the more he found himself slipping out, so to speak, until one day light dawned, revelation came and he saw. This is how he describes it:
    Here, I feel, is the secret: not asking how I am to get sap out of the Vine into myself, but remembering that Jesus is the Vine—the root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit, all indeed.
    Then, quoting a friend’s words that had helped him, he continues:
    I have not got to make myself a branch. The Lord Jesus tells me I am a branch. I am part of him and I have just to believe it and act upon it. I have seen it long enough in the Bible, but I believe it now as a living reality.
    It was as though something which had indeed been true all the time had now suddenly become true in a new way to him personally, and he writes to his sister again:
    I do not know how far I may be able to make myself intelligible about it, for there is nothing new or strange or