Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 25
I GET MYSELF BACK
Now we move on to the surprising and glorious effects on us of this total relationship of replacement-union. The chief one is the paradox.
A person might think that this inner consciousness of Christ in me, as me, would give me an enlarged consciousness of Him and an increased glorying in Him. It does... even though He has already been, for years, my precious Christ in the love relationship of the Song of Songs. But what becomes paradoxically new to me is a totally new self-acceptance. And here, at once, we move onto "dangerous ground" - not dangerous to us, but to onlookers like the daughters of Jerusalem in the Song! Because it seems to produce a newly inflated ego - I! It does. But of course, we who have entered in and are now in on the secret know the whole key - that it is a Satan-expressing ego which has first disappeared forever in His cross, before reappearing as our new Christ-expressing ego. But it is a total reappearing of the "I"! Why? Because it has been God’s fixed plan of grace from before the foundation of the world that He was going to have a vast company of fully liberated sons - liberated fully to be themselves - by whom He would fully be Himself embodied in human forms. Yet in that paradoxical relationship, unintelligible to those not initiated into it, the human "I" is its full spontaneous self, and acting as such. That is why I often say there is no egoist in history equal to our Lord Jesus Christ! He was always I, I, I – "I am the door," "I am the living bread," "I am the light," "I am the way." Emphatic self. Yet we who know Him are also aware - look within Him! - that He was always saying "I do nothing by Myself, but only what I see My Father do," and "If you see Me, you see the Father."
That is precisely what happens to us. Before we know our exchanged life, while still in the struggles and self-condemnation of Romans 7, we dislike and downgrade ourselves - "O wretched man that I am!" We are compulsively negative about ourselves and deeply suspicious of what we think are our dangerous tendencies. So now it is an altogether new thing, and may take a little time to sink into us, that so far from downgrading ourselves, because He now accepts us, we now accept ourselves as His precious vessel, branch, body member, bride. Every part of us - our physical appetites, our soulish emotions and reasoning powers - are beautiful and wholly valuable as His outer means of manifestation. It usually takes a little time to realize this, just because we’ve been so used to thinking the opposite about ourselves.
So now we’re free to be ourselves, because we now know we are wholly His human forms. We live with raised, not lowered heads! Sure, we’re not unaware of the subtle misuse today by psychologists and many others of a false "self-acceptance" and "self-liberation to be ourselves." Indeed, this is universal, because the deceived natural man assumes he has no self except himself, and his only remedy for his self problems is the fraudulent build-up of himself as "inherently good." But just because there is a wave of modern, false emphasis on the buildup of self, that must not inhibit us from boldly accepting and affirming ourselves - we who truly know who we truly are!
One notable effect of this is also another kind of paradox - in that in our normal daily living, for most of the time, we forget who we are, and just function as ourselves. It is the same principle as in our professional lives. Once we are competent in our particular profession, as we’ve said before, whether a cook, teacher, carpenter, engineer, or whatever, we do not spend our hours reminding ourselves or others that we are this or that, but we just go ahead being it.
I don’t think my friend, Gloria, sister of former-President Carter, will mind me telling this story about her. About eight or more years ago we were together at a Faith at Work conference in Georgia, and during the weekend the Lord revealed to her the secret that she was really Christ in her form. When she returned home to Plains, she found a card in the mail asking her to speak on herbs at her garden club. But she told me that she knew little about herbs, so she spent the next day or two studying up on them. Then, after having given her lecture and returned home, she talked to the Lord in her room and asked His forgiveness because she had forgotten about Him those days because of her herb preparations. The answer He gave her: "What are you apologizing to Me for? I was co-herbing with you. That was My lecture, not yours!"
So we actually are free persons and learn to recognize ourselves as such - free to express our opinions, to make our judgments, to do our jobs, make our choices. Dangerous? It surely looks like that, and others would tell us it is - who don’t know the spontaneity of the union. But no danger to us who know our unchangeable oneness. We know that all we do is He, and we live the "dangerous life" of believing... which is knowing and thus recognizing that it is all He. We live spontaneously. If we cook, it is He doing the cooking. If we do our job, it is He doing it. If we have conversation, it is He conversing. Union in the Spirit is actual, factual. Where He is, we are. Where we are, He is. No hairbreadth separation between us can ever be possible.
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