Holiness and Crucifixion

Written by: Maximino Fernandez
Date Posted: January 12th, 2012
Category: Book Review, Fernandez Ramblings
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Andrew Murray’s book entitled Holy in Christ is an excellent book. In the chapter entitled Holiness and Crucifixion, Murray develops John 17:19 which says, “And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” What an encouragement! Murray says:

And where is the place of death? And how can the crucifixion which leads to Holiness and to God be accomplished in us? Thank God! it is no work of our own, no weary process of self- crucifixion. The crucifixion that is to sanctify us is an accomplished fact. The cross bears the banner, ‘It is finished. ’ On it Christ sanctified Himself for us, that we might be sanctified in truth. Our crucifixion, as our sanctification, is something that in Christ has been completely and perfectly finished. ‘ We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. ’ ‘By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. ’ In that fulness, which it is the Father’s good pleasure should dwell in Christ, the crucifixion of our old man, of the flesh, of the world, of ourselves, is all a spiritual reality; he that desires and knows and accepts Christ, fully receives all this in Him. And as the Christ, who had previously been known more in His pardoning, quickening, and saving grace, is again sought after as a real deliverer from the power of sin, as a sanctifier, He comes and takes up the soul into the fellowship of the sacrifice of His will. ‘He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, ’ must become true of us as it is of Him. He reveals how it is a part of His salvation to make us partakers of a will entirely given up to the will of God, of a life that had yielded itself to the death, and had then been given back from the dead by the power of God, a life of which the crucifixion of self- will was the spirit and the power. He reveals this, and the soul that sees it, and consents to it, and yields its will and its life, and believes in Jesus as its death and its life, and in His crucifixion as its possession and its inheritance, enters into the enjoyment and experience of it. The language is now, ‘I died that I might live: I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me. ’ And the life it now lives is by the faith on the Son of God, the daily acceptance in faith of Him who lives within us in the power of a death that has been passed through and for ever finished.