The Way of the Cross - Chapter 7

The Inward Cross

What is it to be inwardly crucified? It is to be dead to every desire, whatever it may be, which has not the Divine sanction; to be dead to every appetite and every affection which is not in accordance with the Divine law; to have no desire, no purpose, no aim but such as comes by Divine inspiration, or is attended with the Divine approbation. To be inwardly crucified is to cease to love Mammon in order that we may love God, to have no eye for the world’s possessions, no ear for the world’s applause, no tongue for the world’s envious or useless conversation, no terror for the world’s opposition. To be inwardly crucified is to be, among the things of this world, “a pilgrim and a stranger”; separate from what is evil, sympathizing with what is good, but never with idolatrous attachment; seeing God in all things and all things in God. To be inwardly crucified is, in the language of Tauler, “to cease entirely from the life of self, to abandon equally what we see and what we possess, our power, our knowledge, and our affections; that so the soul in regard to any action originating in itself is without life, without action, and without power, and receives its life, its action, and its power from God alone.” —Professor Upham

THE French have a most suggestive proverb: “He is not escaped who drags his chain!” Gibbon tells of one of the Roman emperors who was brought from prison to the palace, and who sat for some hours on the throne with his fetters on his limbs. Thousands of those whom God has brought out of prison are in much the same condition. They are in the palace, but they carry about with them vestiges of the prison-life. They have escaped from the tyrant’s custody, but they are not yet completely free; for as the grim jailer hears the rattle of the links sin has forged, and sees some of his fetters upon the soul, he still exercises his power, and indulges the hope that he may one day seize and entirely enslave his former captives. So long as we fail to perceive and claim deliverance from the power of indwelling sin through the wondrous Cross, we may give occasional evidence of our kingship, but we shall give unmistakable proof of our servitude.

Our message is one of complete deliverance. We believe that our regal honors are not a fiction, as they must have seemed to the king Gibbon tells of, but a glorious reality; and so we sing of Him who “breaks the power of cancelled sin,” and of a Cross that effects a “double cure.” The soul that dares, on the warrant of God’s word, to claim identification with Christ in His death, resurrection, and enthrone­ment, proves what it is to be a king in Christ Jesus; to such even the devils are subject, and the principalities and powers of darkness are made to feel the regal power of those who, clad in the armor of God, are more than conquerors through Him who shows His love to them by indwelling them. Charles Wesley sang of those who “hugged their chains.” There are some who do this still; but there are many others, thank God, who hate them, and who long to lose every link that binds them to the conquered enemy.

The Cross of Christ not only enforces holiness, but makes holiness possible. Conybeare gives a striking translation of Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ; it is no more I that live, but Christ is living in me; and my outward life which still remains, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Here we have both the exterior and the interior Cross. There is a great difference between realizing, “On that Cross He was crucified for me,” and “On that Cross I am crucified with Him.” The one aspect brings us deliverance from sin’s condemnation, the other from sin’s power. We first discover the Cross as coming between God and ourselves. That is its substitutionary or judicial aspect. In it Christ must ever be alone; into that circle none can enter; when He trod that winepress there was none with Him.

But there is an aspect of the Cross in the passage quoted which is not vicarious. “I am crucified with Christ; it is no more I that live, but Christ is living in me.” Here we see the Cross coming between us and our sinful nature, and these words bring us face to face with a crucifixion which is experimental, for Christ does not vicariously deliver His followers from indwelling sin. It is a crucifixion which is inwrought by the power of the Holy Ghost, solely on our compliance with clearly defined conditions. The one is an outward, the other is an inward Calvary, the one is “the complement of the other, and their true union is their perfection.”

The death of Christ was not only an atonement for sin, but a triumph over sin. By faith we see our sins not only on His head for our pardon, but under His feet for our deliverance. Multitudes who glory in the outward Cross know nothing of that inward crucifixion which it has also made possible, whereby they are delivered from the power of self and sin, the world, the flesh, and the devil. This they do not know, “that their old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, so that they should no longer be in bondage to sin” (Rom. 6:6).

There must be conformity between Christ and the members of His mystical body. How incongruous it is for a holy Christ to be leading a company of unholy Christians; or a cross-bearing Christ, a band of self-indulgent Christians, whose hearts are often towards Egypt, and who shrink from the least suffering and self-denial! It is only they who have truly followed Him, having known the meaning of this inward Cross, who will “have boldness, and not shrink with shame before Him at His coming.”

Why hesitate, therefore, to bear the Cross by which you may gain the crown? In the Cross is salvation, in the Cross is life, in the Cross is safety from enemies; in the Cross is that peace which the world cannot give, in the Cross is courage, in the Cross is joy; in the Cross is the sum of all virtues, in the Cross the perfection of holiness. There is no salvation for the soul, no hope of eternal life in anything else. The Cross is the beginning and the end; and all who would live, must first die; there is no other way to life and to real inward peace but the way of the Cross.1

In times of persecution, those who had an experi­mental knowledge of this inward crucifixion were able to suffer the most terrible outward inflictions without shrinking or fear, while many of those who knew nothing of this interior Calvary abjured the truth to save their lives. Many instances are on record of such who afterwards—when they had learned to tread this royal road—came forward of their own accord and gave up their bodies to fire and death.

How much light this neglect of inward dying throws also on the doleful, shadowed death-beds of unsanctified Christians! When we have learned the blessedness of dying with Him, both to the flesh with its affections and lusts, and to the deceitful world, we shall know nothing in our last hours of the pains of death which those experience whose carnal hearts cling to carnal things. With an actual knowledge of inward death, we shall face that death which can only touch the outward, without any fear, and as cheerfully put off the body as we put off our clothes. We fear the great death so little, because, for Christ’s sake, we have loved death with Him so well.

In physical crucifixion there were three stages. The criminal was first arraigned, found guilty, sentenced to death, and in many cases visited with marks of hatred and contempt. Then he was nailed to the cross, and finally he died. These three stages illustrate the experience of this inward crucifixion. First the old nature must be arraigned and sentenced, for it is not likely that the old Adam will be executed until, by us, he is condemned to die. Then this enemy, which is both God’s and ours, must be given over into the hands of the only executioner, the Holy Spirit. He will not undertake this work without our consent and co-operation. “If ye through the Spirit do make to die the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Rom. 8:13).

“The law of death in our sinful members is only another form of the law of life in Christ. It is the same Spirit who both killeth and quickeneth. Though it is said most expressly that we crucify the flesh, it is not said that we put it to death, and ‘destroy the body of sin.’ That is the sole work of the Divine Spirit. It is His breath which withers the fruits of evil in our nature; it is His condemning word that blights the tree of evil in us unto its root. He will watch the expiring enemy within us, ready to inflict upon it the last stroke that shall dispatch it finally. We must not doubt that He will finish the work He has begun in us. Crucifixion is not death; but it is unto death, and death is supposed to be its result. If we do our part, and spare not our affections and lusts; if we keep the sinning Adam in us crucified, and watch, and pray, and wait in fervent expectation, we shall ‘see the end.’ And we shall see it in this life, for there is no work of sanctification beyond the grave; and surely there is no necessary connection between the death of the body of sin and the death of the physical body. The Holy Ghost, we may hope, will cry over our crucified flesh, with all its affections and lusts, stilled and extinguished for ever. It is finished.”2

The way of the Cross is certainly the way of death. The stoning among the Hebrews, the guillotine of the French, the gallows of the English, and the cross of the old Roman times, as instruments of capital punishment, all mean death. If at the outset of this Calvary experience we listen to the voices of the tempters, and withdraw the nails, we cannot expect to know this real inward death; but if we have had a vision of the loathsomeness of the old Adam nature, and of its power to prevent the in­coming and consequent outflowing of the risen life of Jesus, we shall refuse for a moment to listen to its pleadings to be allowed to come down from the Cross and so save itself.

The Jews were not content with blows and buffetings and scourgings; these were but the forerunners of death, and we may well beware of attempting to “run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” or, in other language, to make a pretence of inward crucifixion while at the same time we are secretly parleying with the enemy. We shall not parley if we resolutely remember that to do so is to prolong the life of “the old man,” and so defeat the purpose of Jesus Christ, who was manifested not to buffet or maim but to “destroy the works of the devil,” and only by that destruction can we know what real marriage union with Jesus means.

Hence it follows that our shrinking from the way of the Cross, and our fainting on that way, even when we have begun to tread it, arise from ignorance of the blessedness to which this pathway leads. The most joyous moment in the life of the bride ought to be the moment when she loses her own name and self-dependence at the marriage-altar, taking her husband’s name instead of her own, and merges her life in his; and the most blissful moment in our life ought to be that in which we, by taking up our cross, renounce our right to self-ownership, and begin to reckon ourselves dead to self, to sin, and to the world, through the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Oh, sacred union with the Perfect Mind,
Transcendent bliss, which Thou alone canst give;
How blest are they this Pearl of Price who find,
And dead to earth, have learnt in Thee to live.

Thus in Thine arms of love, O God, I lie,
Lost, and for ever lost to all but Thee.
My happy soul, since it hath learnt to die,
Hath found new life in Thine Infinity.

Go then, and learn this lesson of the Cross,
And tread the way that saints and prophets trod:
Who, counting life and self and all things loss,
Have found in inward death the life of God.