The Christian life is both natural and supernatural. By natural we mean that it is a natural outflow of life. Immediately this natural outflow is inhibited by outer laws it ceases being natural. If you dam a river, which otherwise quite naturally would have flowed through the landscape expressing itself in wild torrents down a mountainside or running just slowly and majestic through a valley, it has ceased being natural. Its inherent life is quenched by the erected barriers constructed by unyielding cement. In the same manner outer laws will inhibit the natural outflow of the Spirit’s life in a Christian. Everything that does not stem from inner life, that is, a position of being will quench the Spirit.
We might call this trust in our inner life, that we in fact are in a glorious union with the resurrected and ascended Christ and that He is in fact expressing Himself as us, faith. Faith viewed from this side is a state where we just are. In this almost unconscious state of merely being we have found our life again in Christ, where it is has been hidden as a contingency ever since God decided to see Himself mirrored in a succession of sons.
It is supernatural because we are not of this world. We are sojourners in this temporal realm until this age has reached its consummation. In God we have access to resources which are completely alien to the unregenerate man. Seated in the Heavenly places with Christ we express ourselves both in the natural and the spiritual world.
We refuse to again subject ourselves to any outer law whether its name is “ought to” or “ought not to”. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that we have to yield more. This particular law hinges on a severe misconception, because when we accepted Christ God completely took possession of us. It is not possible to yield more than that. The Spirit is preoccupied with enlightening the eyes of our hearts so that we in increasingly measure can know the hope to which He has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
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