"I am crucified with Christ."  Thus the apostle expresses his assurance of his fellowship with Christ in His sufferings and death, and his full participation in all the power and the blessing of that death.  And so really did he mean what he said, and know that he was now indeed dead, that he adds:  "It is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me."  How blessed must be the experience of such a union with the Lord Jesus!  To be able to look upon His death as mine, just as really as it was His - upon His perfect obedience to God, His victory over sin, and complete deliverance from its power, as mine; and to realize that the power of that death does by faith work daily with a divine energy in mortifying the flesh, and renewing the whole life into the perfect conformity to the resurrection life of Jesus!  Abiding in Jesus, the Crucified One, is the secret of the growth of that new life which is ever begotten of the death of nature.

     Let us try to understand this.  The suggestive expression, "Planted into the likeness of His death," will teach us what the abiding in the Crucified One means.  When a graft is united with the stock on which it is to grow, we know that it must be kept fixed, it must abide in the place where the stock has been cut, been wounded, to make an opening to receive the graft.  No graft without wounding the laying bare and opening up of the inner life of the tree to receive the stranger branch.  It is only through such wounding that access can be obtained to the fellowship of the sap and the growth and the life of the stronger stem.  Even so with Jesus and the sinner.  Only when we are planted into the likeness of His death shall we also be in the likeness of His resurrection, partakers of the life and the power there are in Him.  In the death of the Cross Christ was wounded, and in His opened wounds a place prepared where we might be grafted in.  And just as one might say to a graft, and does practically say as it is fixed in its place, "Abide here in the wound of the stem, that is now to bear you"; so to the believing soul the message comes, "Abide in the wounds of Jesus; there is the place of union, and life, and growth.  There you shall see how His heart was opened to receive you; how His flesh was rent that the way might be opened for your being made one with Him, and having access to all the blessings flowing from His divine nature."

     You have also noticed how the graft has to be torn away from the tree where it by nature grew, and to be cut into conformity to the place prepared for it in the wounded stem.  Even so the believer has to be made conformable to Christ's death - to be crucified and to die with Him.  The wounded stem and the wounded graft are cut to fit into each other, into each other's likeness.  There is a fellowship between Christ's sufferings and your sufferings.  His experiences must become yours.  The disposition He manifested in choosing and bearing the cross must be yours.  Like Him, you will have to give full assent to the righteous judgment and curse of a holy God against sin.  Like Him, you have to consent to yield your life, as laden with sin and curse, to death, and through it to pass to the new life.  Like Him, you shall experience that it is only through the self-sacrifice of Gethsemane and Calvary that the path is to be found to the joy and the fruitbearing of the resurrection life.  The more clear the resemblance between the wounded stem and the wounded graft, the more exactly their wounds fit into each other, the surer and the easier, and the more complete will be the union and the growth.

     It is in Jesus, the Crucified One, I must abide.  I must learn to look upon the Cross as not only an atonement to God, but also a victory over the devil - not only a deliverance from the guilt, but also from the power of sin.  I must gaze on Him on the Cross as wholly mine, offering Himself to receive me into the closest union and fellowship, and to make me partaker of the full power of His death to sin, and the new life of victory to which it is but the gateway.  I must yield myself to Him in an undivided surrender, with much prayer and strong desire, imploring to be admitted into the ever closer fellowship and conformity of His death, of the Spirit in which He died that death.

     Let me try and understand why the Cross is thus the place of union.  On the Cross the Son of God enters into the fullest union with man - enters into the fullest experience of what it says to have become a son of man, a member of a race under the curse.  It is in death that the Prince of life conquers the power of death; it is in death alone that He can make me partaker of that victory.  The life He imparts is a life from the dead; each new experience of the power of that life depends upon the fellowship of the death.  The death and the life are inseparable.  All the grace which Jesus the Saving One gives is given only in the path of fellowship with Jesus the Crucified One.  Christ came and took my place; I must put myself in His place, and abide there.  And there is but one place which is both His and mine - that place is the Cross.  His in virtue of His free choice; mine by reason of the curse of sin.  He came there to seek me; there alone I can find Him.  When He found me there, it was the place of cursing; this He experienced, for "cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree."  He made it a place of blessing; this I experienced, for Christ has delivered us from the curse, being made a curse for us.  When Christ comes in my place, He remains what He was, the beloved of the Father; but in the fellowship with me He shares my curse and dies my death.  When I stand in His place, which is still always mine, I am still what I was by nature, the accursed one, who deserves to die; but as united to Him, I share His blessing, and receive His life.  When He came to be one with me He could not avoid the Cross, for the curse always points to the Cross as its end and fruit.  And when I seek to be one with Him, I cannot avoid the Cross either, for nowhere but on the Cross are life and deliverance to be found.  As inevitably as my curse pointed Him to the Cross as the only place where He could be fully united to me, His blessing points me to the Cross too as the only place where I can be united to Him.  He took my cross for His own; I must take His Cross as my own; I must be crucified with Him.  It is as I abide daily, deeply in Jesus the Crucified One, that I shall taste the sweetness of His love, the power of His life, the completeness of His salvation.

     Beloved believer!  It is a deep mystery, this of the Cross of Christ.  I fear there are many Christians who are content to look upon the Cross, with Christ on it dying for their sins, who have little heart for fellowship with the Crucified One.  They hardly know that He invites them to it.  Or they are content to consider the ordinary afflictions of life, which the children of the world often have as much as they, as their share of Christ's Cross.  They have no conception of what it is to be crucified with Christ, that bearing the cross means likeness to Christ in the principles which animated Him in His path of obedience.  The entire surrender of all self-will, the complete denial to the flesh of its every desire and pleasure, the perfect separation from the world in all its ways of thinking and acting, the losing and hating of one's life, the giving up of self and its interests for the sake of others - this is the disposition which marks him who has taken up Christ's Cross, who seeks to say, "I am crucified with Christ; I abide in Christ, the Crucified One."

     Would you in very deed please your Lord, and live in as close fellowship with Him as His grace could maintain you in?  O pray that His Spirit lead you into this blessed truth:  this secret of the Lord for them that fear Him.  We know how Peter knew and confessed Christ as the Son of the living God while the Cross was still an offense ( Matt.16:16,17,21,23 ).  The faith that believes in the blood that pardons, and the life that renews, can only reach its perfect growth as it abides beneath the Cross, and in living fellowship with Him seeks for perfect conformity with Jesus the Crucified.

     O Jesus, our crucified Redeemer, teach us not only to believe on Thee, but to abide in Thee, to take Thy Cross not only as the ground of our pardon, but also as the law of our life.  O teach us to love it not only because on it Thou didst bear our curse, but because on it we enter into the closest fellowship with Thyself, and are crucified with Thee.  And teach us, that as we yield ourselves wholly to be possessed of the Spirit in which Thou didst bear the Cross, we shall be made partakers of the power and the blessing to which the Cross alone gives access.