As we fellowship with the Lord in a living, genuine, and loving way, He as light shines on us, and we realize that we are sinful and thus we take Christ as our sin offering. God has made a provision for us to come to Him and contact Him – the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
We can come forward with boldness to contact God every day, and when we do so, He as light shines on us and in us, and we see how sinful we are. As we see that we are sinful, we confess our sins and hate our sinful nature, and we lay our hands on Christ, the sin offering, to be identified with Him.
The more we contact the Lord and the more we love Him, the more we hate ourselves, for we see ourselves in His shining light.
We realize that, even though we have received the divine life in our spirit and we love the Lord with all our heart, we still have the sinful nature in us, and we hate ourselves, we love the Lord, and we take Him as our sin offering.
What can we do when we see the Lord, He shines on us, and we are exposed of how sinful we are? We do not justify ourselves – for it is God who shines on us, and He sees all things; we do not hide from Him – for He can see us wherever we are; and we do not “sweep everything under a rug” and go on – for our sins cannot just be “swept away”.
When we see who we are in our nature and what we are capable of doing because of the indwelling sin, we repent, we confess before the Lord, and we take Him as our sin offering.
When we take Christ as our sin offering – as we realize that we are sinful under God’s light – the sin in our sinful nature is condemned, our old man is dealt with, Satan as sin is destroyed, the world is judged, and the ruler of the world is cast out.
Furthermore, as we are kept in this realization that we are sinful, we constantly take Christ as our sin offering, and we no longer trust in ourselves but in God, and we are kept from sinning.
But if we are exposed under God’s light of our sinful nature and of our sins, and we do not walk in the light, we lose God’s presence, and we cannot know God, who is light.
In our Fellowship with the Lord we Realize that we are Sinful and we Take Christ as our Sin Offering
If we say we have no sin, we lie and are not speaking the truth, but if we walk in the light, as God is in the light, we are exposed of our sinful nature, our sins come under God’s light, and we take Christ as our sin offering.
Through our genuine, intimate, loving, and living fellowship with God – who Himself is light, see 1 John 1:5, Col. 1:29 – we will realize that we are sinful, and we will take Christ as our sin offering (1 John 1:5-9).
As we come forward to God to enjoy Him by taking Christ as our burnt offering (He’s the only One absolute for God) and as our meal offering (His God-man living satisfied God and nourishes us), we realize how sinful we are.
As we fellowship with the Lord, His light shines on us, and we realize that we are sinful, so we take Christ as our sin offering in our experience.
This is our experience daily. The more we love the Lord, pursue after Him, seek to know Him and enjoy Him, the more we will know how evil we are (see Isa. 6:5; Luke 5:8; Rom. 7:18).
How can this be? When we consecrate to the Lord, enjoy Him, and offer everything we are and have to Him, we are flooded by His love and simultaneously the light from God shines on us like the sun, exposing our sinful nature and pointing out the sins in us.
When we see God, we see ourselves and we realize that we are sinful. On one hand, we enjoy the Lord and we are melted by His love, and on the other, we hate ourselves, for we see our true nature and realize how evil we are in our being.
Then, under His light, we take Christ as our sin offering and we continue to have fellowship with God.
Sometimes, when we love the Lord to the uttermost, we may feel that there’s no place to hide ourselves, for we realize how sinful we are. As we are enjoying the Triune God in the divine fellowship, we realize that we still have sin inwardly and that we have committed many sins outwardly.
Therefore, we confess our sins, we take Christ as our sin offering, and we receive the cleaning of His blood. This becomes a cycle in our Christian experience day by day – we fellowship with the Lord by taking Christ as our absoluteness, we enjoy Him as our meal offering, and we are in His light, allowing the divine light to expose and shine in us; the result is that we see how sinful we are, we confess our sins, and we take Christ as our sin offering.
The divine life in us issues in the fellowship of the divine life, the fellowship of life brings in the divine light which exposes us of our sins and sinful nature, under God’s light we see how sinful we are and we take Christ as our sin offering and apply His blood, and the result is there have more life, more fellowship, more light, more realization of our nature, and more experience of Christ as the sin offering and of Christ’s cleansing blood.
Lord Jesus, we love You, we want to enjoy You, and we want to be under Your light. Oh Lord, thank You for exposing us in Your light that we may see how sinful we are and how easy it is to commit sins. Lord, keep us coming to You in the light and walking in the light so that our sinful nature would be exposed and we would take You as our sin offering and apply the blood for the cleansing of all our sins. May we be kept in a genuine, intimate, living, and loving fellowship with God all day long!
Realizing we have a Sinful Nature and Taking Christ as our Sin Offering Subdues and Preserves us
As we go through this healthy spiritual cycle of enjoying the eternal life with its fellowship, being under the divine light and being exposed of our sinful nature and sins, and taking Christ as the sin offering and applying His blood, we realize that we are sinful.
Realizing that we have a sinful nature and taking Christ as our sin offering causes us to be judged and subdued, and this preserve us, for it causes us not to have any confidence in ourselves (see Phil. 3:3; cf. Exo. 4:6).
When we take Christ as the sin offering, we feel that we are judged, subdued, and exposed, for we are reminded of our sinful nature, and this has a preserving effect. But when we forget this, we are able to sin.
The first work of the Holy Spirit in a believer is to bring him to know his sinful self right after he is saved.
We may think that once we receive the Lord, we sin no more, but actually, God in His mercy exposes us that our self is so sinful and we are so prone to sinning that we need to completely depend on God and not on our self.
From our experience we can all testify that it is not easy to allow the Lord to expose the self, and we may not bear to forsake the self but rather, we would not like to know the self or have it exposed.
Because we don’t know our sinful self, because we don’t realize that we are sinful, we rely on the self, and the Holy Spirit cannot work in us to expose us and enlighten us. Therefore, many times God has no other way but to use the painful method of deliberately allowing us to fail so that we may see our self.
We may progress in the Lord for a while, and we may feel we are victorious and sanctified, but while we are satisfied with this situation, God allows us to fail and sin just like the others or even worse.
This really humbles us, for we realize that we are not better or worse than anyone else.
Why does the Lord allow us to fail again and again? Why doesn’t He get rid of the sinful nature within us? The Lord has a wonderful intention behind allowing us to fail – His intention is to show us that we cannot make it.
We couldn’t make it before we were saved, and we cannot make it after we are saved, for our very nature is sinful. Therefore, we need to rely in the Lord.
When we realize that we are sinful under God’s light, this becomes a preserving factor in our Christian life.
But if we are proud like David the king, and we become loose, we may fail miserably just like the ones around us. We should learn from David’s experience not to have the slightest confidence in ourselves (see Psa. 51).
When we are not subdued, realizing what we are made of, we are out of the realm of protection. But when we realize that we are sinful, we have no confidence in ourselves, we trust in the Lord, and we desperately turn to Him to experience Him as our sin offering.
Lord, have mercy on us and cause us to realize that we are sinful, so that we may have no more confidence in the self or the flesh but depend completely on God. May we be preserved in our Christian life by having this realization of what and who we are in our nature, so that we may depend on You and take You as our sin offering. Lord, save us from being proud or loose in our living. May we really see how horrible, ugly, and abominable we are, so that we would forsake all that is from the self and depend completely on God!
References and Hymns on this Topic
- Inspiration: the Word of God, my enjoyment in the ministry, the message by Minoru Chen for this week, and portions from, Life-study of Leviticus, pp. 186-188, as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Crystallization-Study of Leviticus (1), week 6, The Revelation, Appreciation, and Application of Christ as Our Sin Offering.
- Hymns on this topic:
# God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all! / Oh, how we love within His presence to dwell! / In this light we enjoy a constant cleansing within— / From every sin! (Hymns #1197)
# I hardly know myself; / Deceived so much by pride, / I often think I’m right / And am self-satisfied. / Oh, may Thy living light, Lord, / Scatter all my night, Lord, / And everything make bright, Lord, / For this I pray to Thee. (Hymns #426)
# In the flesh I need no effort to express / Marks of Adam’s nature and its sinfulness; / In the spirit I need not to strive or strain, / I can live as He is and in spirit reign. (Hymns #539)
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Amen ..Lord save us from being proud or loose in our living , may we really see how horrible, ugly & abominable we are……………
Amen Lord!!
Amen.. Lord thank you for exposing us in your light that we may see how sinful we are & how easy it is to commit sins……… we would take You as our sin offering & apply the blood for the cleansing of all our sins……..
Amen…just trust in the Lord,and desperately turn to Him…
To think that we sin no.more after accepting Christ is not reading the bible at all :):):) being ignorant. Even David sinned being the man after the heart of God. But this does not excuse sin at all.
To look at sin as something that we cannot avoid although fighting against it is what Luther taught in his commentary on the book of Galatians. It does not mean I disagree 🙂
God allows many things to happen good and bad ones. Doesn’t mean He is indifferent to us. We’ve got freedom, sometimes I think too much of freedom 🙂
Genesis 1:26 God created a man is God’s imagine; there was no sin. Genesis 5:1-5 Adam got a son in his image not of God’s anymore. The sin has entered the human’s nature in Genesis 3. Now, we have that sinful nature in us inherited through Adam and Eve against which I need to fight as a protest against sin. Having sin in me that only with the second advent of Christ when He gives me a new body, sin is going to be eradicated from me. But until then, I fight not as one beats the air. 🙂
Amen,praised the Lord that sometimes we forget self is a hopeless case. The world is againts the the Lord,s recovery.The world says you must build you self confidence but the Lord says you must denied yourself for you to become the expression of God.God expression must be manifested in us.
Amen !!
Hallelujah
Praise the Lord
Dear Lord I Cannot Make It!
Amen! Deep experience of Romans 7 ushers us to deeper experiences of Romans 8 and 12!
Sounds horrible, but without our failures we wouldn’t be closer to God, in fact we probably would not want anything to do with God. Praise the Lord, that He allows us to go through these failures to come in and take charge!
So true. My concept after being saved was that I would no longer sin. However shortly after I was fully exposed that I cannot make it without the Lord. Thank You Lord, the more we love You the more we realise how sinful we are.
Hallelujah brother I cannot make it!
Amen! Take a walk with God in the light today! 1 John 1:7
主に感謝します! アーメン
[Thank you Lord! Amen.]
To take Christ as the sin offering is very deep. The experience of the sin offering is altogether related to our enjoyment of the Lord Jesus as our burnt offering. The more we love the Lord and enjoy Him, the more we will know how evil we are. Sometimes, when we love the Lord to the uttermost, we may feel that there is no place to hide ourselves. Paul had such a realization concerning himself. When he was seeking the Lord, he saw that there was nothing good in himself.
By enjoying the Lord as the burnt offering and the meal offering, we realize that we are sinful. So we take Him as the sin offering and then as the trespass offering. This is what we see in chapter 1 of 1 John. As we are enjoying the Triune God in the divine fellowship, we realize that we still have sin inwardly and that we have committed sins outwardly. We then receive the cleansing of the precious blood. This becomes a cycle. The more we are cleansed, the more we enter into fellowship with the Triune God; the more we enjoy this fellowship, the more we are enlightened; and the more we are enlightened, the more we realize that we are sinful, even sin itself. It is by this cycle that we are delivered and saved from our self. Actually, we are delivered and saved from sin, from the flesh, from Satan, from the world, from the prince of the world, and from the power struggle. The more we enjoy Christ, the less power struggle we will have with God. Eventually we will give every inch to Him. (Life-study of Leviticus, pp. 186-188, by Witness Lee)
The first work of the Holy Spirit in a believer is to bring him to know the self after he is saved. This is so he will, according to God’s will, forsake all that is from the self and completely depend on God. But how difficult it is! How unflattering it is to know the self! How unbearable it is to forsake the self! A believer often does not know the self or want to know the self. Because he does not know the self, he thinks the self is reliable; because he does not want to know the self, the Holy Spirit has no way to reveal to him his true character under God’s light. Under such circumstances, God has no other way than to use a more painful method to cause a believer to know the self. This method is to deliberately allow him to fail.
Sometimes when believers have progressed slightly in their spiritual path, they feel that they are victorious and sanctified. But while they are satisfied, God permits them to fail and sin just like others, or even worse than others, thus making them realize that they are not any better than anyone else. (Collected Works of Watchman Nee, vol. 8, pp. 43-44)