Self-Discovery

Some words from ...Norman P. Grubb
Karuizawa Japan Conference of 1954Topic: “The Liberated Self”

"I just point out what is of course obvious to us who are Bible teachers and Bible students -- how you can trace out in almost every great life of the Bible, the period, the long period that it took for God to get a person to discover his insufficiency, to break to pieces his self-reliance, and then to replace it by God-reliance. And God-reliance is union. In every case you’ll find great moments when these men came out into union. But the union couldn’t be realized until the man had become the nothing so that God could become the everything. It couldn’t! You cannot know a free Christ inside you until you’ve been freed from yourself. You can’t know two people inside at the same time. You can’t know the indwelling Christ in His liberated presence conveying His mind to us, conveying His Word to us, conveying His power to us, and conveying His beauty and purity to us unless we’ve first of all been through that basic experience which has put out the self-sufficient self. Put it out! And it’s a real putting out. It’s as real a crucifixion for me as it is for Jesus Christ in the Spirit. When Paul said, “I am crucified,” it wasn’t a theory. It was something he had gone through. Those nails had pierced his personality even as they had pierced those Holy hands and feet. And we all no doubt take delight in digging out those simple facts for ourselves and expounding to others the evidences in the histories of the great biographies of the Bible. The years it’s taken God to give blind, earnest, utterly consecrated men such an eye opener to their helplessness, and then the replacement of their helplessness by Himself. That’s the meaning of the burning bush. We all know the story of Moses. I needn’t dwell much on these things because we know them so well."

Rich