A Life That Counts - Final

The promise is that if it die, it shall bring forth much fruit. This new life, the Christ-life that has taken over, will suffer for others, that’s true. It will expend itself; it will bleed for the suffering, but what a harvest of fruitfulness there is! It indeed brings forth much fruit because it has germinated into communion with others; it has germinated into fellowship with God and into a self-forgetfulness that brings rest, joy, and riches eternal.

If you are suffering the loneliness of the egoist, the one whose whole world is “self,” the one who never gets away from himself, then take this verse from God’s wonderful Word and ask the Lord to take you out of yourself and into Him. Seek Him; yield to Christ. Yield all of self. Present your body to Him a living sacrifice, as that Word says: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, which is holy, acceptable unto God.” And, he adds, it’s a reasonable service.5

A living sacrifice that He may come in and abide, living out His life through you until you can say with Paul, “Christ liveth in me.” Then that verse in Colossians will be fulfilled in you, “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”6

Oh, this is the happy life! This is the useful life. Now with the death of self, there are heights of joy that you have never known, as your feet are planted on higher ground! Higher ground is the Christ-life, supplanting the self-life. Out of self and into Him is victory.

Nothing can better depict the Christian life, the life that’s hid with Christ in God. I think this is so well portrayed in the words of Scripture in the third chapter of Colossians: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. And set your affections on the things above, and not on the things on the earth.

“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then ye shall also appear with him in glory.”7 And so the Christian life is a life that’s hid with Christ in God. Isn’t it wonderful to have a life hid away above all the turmoil and strife of the world?

We don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to us when we’re so thoroughly in His hands and our life is hid away with Jesus Christ.

Have you gotten before the Lord recently and taken a good look at yourself and seen how you look in God’s sight? God looks down into your heart and talks to you and lets you see yourself as you really are.

If we’ll get a good look at the “self,” we can see if our life is really hid away with Christ in God. Then there is the wonderful promise that, “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.”8—Virginia Brandt Berg

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Be like Moses, who looked beyond this world because he saw Jesus and had his eyes on eternity and its great rewards. “For he counted the riches of Christ greater than the riches of all Egypt.”9 The greatest and most powerful and richest nation on the face of the earth in that day, of which he could have been pharaoh, couldn't compare to Christ.

“He counted the riches of Christ greater than the riches of this world, because he had respect unto the recompense of the reward”—far greater than all the riches of this whole world combined and all its pleasures and selfish interests. So “he chose rather to suffer affliction with the children of God than to enjoy the pleasures of this life for a season.”10

Did you spend today's precious time for Him and others? For eternity?—David Brandt Berg

5 Romans 12:1.
6 Colossians 3:3.
7 Colossians 3:1–4.
8 Colossians 3:4.
9 Hebrews 11:26.
10 Hebrews 11:25.



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