A Clean Severance

"Botanists say that across the leaf-stalk there forms in autumn a layer of thin-walled cells, termed 'the layer of separation.' These press and tear the older cells apart, and become disintegrated in their turn, till without an effort the leaf detaches with a severance clean and sharp as though made by a knife. The plant sentences the leaf to death, and the winds of God carry out the sentence...."

In old testament times suffering was seen as evil. In the new testament, suffering and evil are no longer identical. Think of the shock the crowds must have felt when Jesus said that those who mourn, those who are poor and persecuted and have nothing are *happy*! How can He say such things? Only in light of another kingdom, another world, another way of seeing this world. He came to bring life--another kind of life altogether. And it is in terms of that life that we must learn to look at our sufferings. I have found it possible, when I see suffering from that perspective, wholeheartedly to *accept* it. But it takes a steady fixing of my gaze on the cross.

If the cross is the place where the worst thing that could happen happened, it is also the place where the best thing that could happen happened.

To be 'saved' requires a severance from the former life as clean and sharp as though made by a knife. There must be a wall of separation between the old life and the new, a radical break. That means death--death to the old life, in order for the new to begin.

Many who come to Christ have a long, sinful, and destructive past. The 'layer of separation,' the cross, stands now between us and our past. We have to make up our minds to part company with it, not by struggle but by an honest act of renouncing it in the name of Christ. Sin no longer holds authority, 'exacting obedience to the body's desires. You must no longer put its several parts at sin's disposal, as implements for doing wrong. No: put yourselves at the disposal of God, as dead men raised to life; yield your bodies to him as implements for doing right; for sin shall no longer be your master, because you are no longer under law, but under the grace of God' rom 6:12-14.

When Satan the accuser scorns that act of renunciation later and taunts 'Hypocrite! You didn't mean it! You never *really* put yourself at his disposal or parted company with us at all!'--run to the foot of the cross, our safe shelter and abiding place.

The further we travel on this pathway to glory the more glorious it becomes, because we are given to understand that every glad surrender of self, which to the young Christian may seem such a morbid and odious thing, is merely a little death, like the tree's 'loss' of the dead leaf, in order that a fresh new one may, in God's time, take its place.

(Chapter 2 of "A Path Through Suffering," by Elisabeth Elliot)