When we lived in southern Ontario, we enjoyed an inspiring treat each spring. We lived on the Niagara peninsula, between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The hawks that migrate north for the summer pass right over that area. These majestic birds travel up the peninsula because there is a ridge that causes an upward wave of air [an escarpment]; this serves as an “elevator” for the hawks. They circle round and round, carried skyward on the thermal current. Then they continue on their flight north to points beyond.
This reminds us of the promise given through the prophet Isaiah: “He [God] gives power to the weak, And to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:29-31).
I can still hear the voice of Eric Liddell in a scene from the inspiring documentary film Chariots of Fire. (Liddell was well known in Scotland an a rugby player and became famous internationally as an Olympic champion runner and world record-breaker. He eventually went to China as a missionary until he was promoted to glory in 1945.) In the film, Eric read these words from Isaiah to a congregation in a British cathedral. He knew in a literal sense that God equips His people to “run and not be weary.”
The view of sanctification which emphasizes the believer’s spiritual union with Christ and its many implications goes by various terms including the higher life, the deeper life, the abiding life, the Spirit-filled life, and the exchanged life. Grace Notes often uses the phrase “exchanged Life” with was coined by missionary pioneer, Hudson Taylor.[1] This word “exchanged” comes from Isaiah 40:31: “But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew [exchange] their strength … ” Here “renew” is the Hebrew word chalaph meaning “to change, exchange, pass on.”
Missionary and author Roy Hession recorded in his diary his struggle with the self-life and the way of exchange:
28 August, 1934: “Have had much temptation from ‘self’—envy, jealousy, self-glory, vain imagining. This morning I claimed Galatians 2:20. The Lord has delivered me from self; praise His name! I am standing on the promises of God!”
This “exchange” involves appropriating by faith one’s identification with Christ. Rather than seeing this spiritual growth step as a “second work of grace,” it is a further unwrapping of the multifaceted grace God that was bestowed upon us at salvation (1 Pet. 4:10; Eph. 2:4-7).
Hession went on to describe the way that The Holy Spirit illumined him:
“One morning He [God] led me to the words, ‘ I have been crucified with Christ … it is no longer I that live but Christ that liveth in me’ (Gal 2:20). I saw that my trouble was ‘I’ trouble; I was an ‘I’ specialist. I now saw that God had done something about this … Paul was not professing an experience of crucifixion as much as pointing back to an historical fact in which he was involved and on which he was counting. Then I understood: Roy Hession, the man whose centre was self, had been judged and crucified with Christ nineteen hundred years before.
“I was therefore to see myself ended, not mended, and instead of struggling with self, I was to accept the sentence of death pronounced so many years ago and trust God to progressively carry out the execution. This meant for me the end of trying to live by my own efforts, which till then had been the basis of my Christian life. More important, that the Lord Jesus was the source of the new life that had to be lived, for the verse went on to say, ‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.’ ” [2]
If you have trusted Christ as your Savior, trust Him moment by moment as the One who can lift you up on eagle’s wings—to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint.
[1] See Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor
[2] Roy Hession, My Calvary Road, p.45,46.
This theme is developed further in our Christ is Life conference (available in audio and video at GraceFellowshipInternational.com).
Copyright by John Woodward 1999. Permission is granted to reprint this article for noncommercial use if credit is given to the author and GraceNotebook.com. Biblical quotations are from the New King James Version (copyright by Thomas Nelson).