8042	Forums / Main Forum / Complete!	on: January 10, 2007, 12:34:27 PM
I agree to a certain extent that we are able to count or reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. We really died to sin when we were made completely new in regeneration. We were baptized into His death and we were raised in new ness of life in Him. Being in Him makes us definitively sanctified because we not only died to sin , that is our sin was imputed to His account in our being identified with Him in His death but His active and passive righteousness was imputed to our account in our being raised to new life in Him in being justified. We were declared righteous in a legal sense. But we still have the remnants of sin because we do not do what we want to do. Now instead of sin and righteousness having equal power in us, righteousness rules as we reckon ourselves dead to sin , since Christ has already done all the work in concurring sin in us. But still we are subject to the pull of sin as if a man were in us tempting us to give into sin. Sin is a metonomy of a man. There is an active principle in us that has power to pull us down. We put sin to death by the Spirit. By giving the Spirit more and more control of our lives we are growing in our sanctification. When we read and meditate on the word the Spirit uses the word to increase our new spiritual desires by using our spiritual senses to apprehend the glory of Christ in our face to face inward renewal. By the process of renewal through the word we are being transformed from one glory to another as we see the face of Christ in the revealing of truth in the word of God. Once we begin to rejoice in the truth of His word and that revealing we begin to grow in our desires to glorify Him. As we grow in Him , He then becomes our all in all. At the same time we still have all of the sorrow of this life, and of our humanity, and of our consequences of sin, and our pain. We still are confronted with the reality of our being in a finite state, subject to the pangs of death , the sorrows of the heart and the knowledge of our personal sin. These two experiences fountain up in us as we go from one to another in our moment by moment experience. As we increase in our desires for Him, and our understanding increases we begin to experience the heights of joy and praise in an eternal mindset. In that mindset we learn that there are experiences beyond our ability to comprehend. We learn that there is a work of the Spirit that is beyond words. In this frame we are going to be subjected to more sorrow since we are accustomed to experiencing the sealing of the Spirit and the effects of that genuine mystical sense. We are going to feel the pangs of sorrow in a more sensitive way and in that sensitiveness we will become more unfamiliar with sinning since we are becoming what we really are in the full understanding of being in Christ.