There is one trouble with this program of human effort co-operating with divine power. It always leads to defeat, bringing the struggling man under the dominion of sin. It produces the man pictured in the seventh chapter of Romans. It is the program followed by nearly all Christians.
And that is why nearly all Christians are living in defeat practically all of the time.
It is not that defeats come now and again in the face of difficult temptations; the distressing thing in the experience of most earnest Christians is the consciousness that complete victory is never enjoyed; the occasional bad falls are but indications of a chronic condition of defeat.
The Two Covenants
The reason for this life of defeat is that Christians mingle law and grace, and this makes complete victory an impossibility. When we are in defeat it is because we are under the Old Covenant, which can make nothing perfect. It may be that we are clear intellectually on the distinction between law and grace, but it is the mingling of them in daily experience that results in defeat before sin. The secret of victory, then, is to get entirely from under law and get wholly under grace for the needs of the present moment. What does this mean? How can it be done?
Probably no one has put more concisely and clearly the distinction between the Old Covenant and the New than has Andrew Murray in his “Two Covenants.” Under the Old Covenant, he points out, God says: “Obey me, and I will be your God.” In the New Covenant God speaks in some such words as these: “I will put my law in your heart, and ye shall obey me.” In the Old Covenant, Andrew Murray says, there were two parties, man and God. Man failed to keep his part of the agreement and the covenant was broken. In the New Covenant there is only one party. God undertakes the whole responsibility. The first is law. The second is grace. If man has any responsibility in the second, except to receive God’s provision through faith, then it is no longer of free grace.
A clear-thinking Presbyterian elder, a man of culture and trained mind, who recently saw the truth of Christ as his victory for the first time, was asked what he thought was the difference between the Old Covenant of works and the New Covenant of Grace. Several verses of Scripture had just been quoted which brought out the distinction. He was a man of few words, and he answered by holding up two fingers of his left hand, and one finger of his right hand. He had seen at once, five minutes after entering into victory, what Andrew Murray makes the theme of his helpful book on the Spirit-filled life,—that in the New Covenant it is not man co-operating with God, but God assuming the whole work, and doing it for man.
“I Could Not Live Up to It”
Another Presbyterian elder, also a clear thinker, a lawyer of ability, was recently facing the question of the need of victory in his own life. When the Scripture promises were presented to him, and he was asked whether he would take victory, his reply was a decided “No.”
“Why won’t you?”