FROM GLORY TO GLORY
BY MARY H. MOSSMAN
Questionings
arise in the minds of some, why any should be sick who have taken Christ as
their Healer. I think this is wrong, for there is no promise that we shall not
have other diseases or a recurrence of those He has healed, and yet I think
observation teaches us that those who entrust the body to His care, are more
exempt than others in similar conditions.
Christ came to
destroy the power and works of the devil, and all who rest in Him for a full
salvation are to be made without “spot or wrinkle, or any such thing.” This
work affects body as well as soul, and claiming Christ as our Redeemer, we are
to “reckon ourselves dead” to disease, as well as to sin, because it is, like
it, the effects of the fall, from which He came to save us. And yet though
baptized into His death, we find that we have a long and close experience in “dying
daily” ere we find the completion of the work, and the full bestowment of
resurrection power. How fully this may be wrought in this life, is not for me
to say. As we stand in Christ Jesus, the command to us is,-“cleanse yourselves
from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit.” We cannot accomplish this in our
own strength, but we have come into fellowship of the Spirit and He doth the works. All He asks of us is
to surrender all we have, and are, to Him, and walk in the light as He from moment to moment may give it. He
takes us on through the testings most needful to a symmetrical development, and
in all reveals to us of the saving power of our God. As we partake, we are
changed from one degree of glory to another until He shall say, “It is
finished.”
He
does not say that we shall no more suffer from the pressure of the old
besetting sins, but exhorts us to “resist,” and promises the “way of escape,”
or- if it is sickness that sweeps down upon us, He says, “The prayer of Faith
shall save,” and in all to “reckon ourselves dead” to Satan’s work, and alive
to the work of God in us. Thus obeying, we pass on, to inherit the promised
land, and find the enemies “little by little” driven from before us. Do we not
see this typified in Deut vii:15-26? Let us press on and take Christ’s offered
grace.
Jesus will not
heal our body without communicating, at the same time, new life and new power
of soul. Nothing can bring us into so strict a discipline of the Spirit as to
live the Health of Faith, because it can only be sustained by the unwavering
renouncement of the will and self, and unbroken waiting upon the Lord. God’s children
must not seek the healing of the body, without taking, at the same time, by
faith, all the new positions which Christ’s redemption gives us… “Nothing more
for self, but all for Christ.” –Pastor Otto Stockmayer.