In the Christian Life, There is No Suspension of our Human Faculties

The third of six posts containing the substance of teaching given by Albert N. Martin at the 1984 Banner Youth Conference, presenting a basic biblical theology of the Christian life.

Principle 3: There is no suspension of the use of our human faculties in the Christian life

What are the faculties of a redeemed man? He has his hands, his feet, his eyes, his nose. He also has his intellectual faculties—his mind and his judgment, his emotional faculties of action, his volitional faculties, his will. He has his appetites, his feelings, his desires and some of the psychological and physical overlap and interpenetrate. These are the faculties of our humanity. When God regenerates a sinner he creates no new faculties, nor does he kill or destroy any existing faculties. Grace works wonderfully and powerfully so as to give new functions and new perspectives to those faculties. God does not cancel, kill, negate any of the faculties or create any new faculties. When I live the Christian life I live the Christian life with the full engagement of mind, judgment, the ability to think, the ability to weigh and evaluate my affections, my feelings, my emotions, my appetites, my inclinations, my hands, my eyes.

What teaching am I seeking to expose by articulating that principle?

There are those who teach that the problem with most Christians is that they are trying to live the Christian life and God never intended they should. And then you are told that just as God never expected you to save yourself by going to the Cross for yourself, he does not expect you to live the Christian life. All he expects you to do is to let go and to let Jesus Christ live his life through you. I call it the funnel theory! You just get so adjusted and make sure everything is just right and you get totally passive and Christ will pour his life through you. Christ lives his life again in you and there is the suspension of many of your faculties! The reason you get in such a muddle is that you are using your mind! Don’t use it. Let your mind go into neutral. Let Christ’s mind be your mind. The problem is that you are using your will and that it is getting in the way. Now negate your will and let Christ will through you. It sounds so spiritual but it is a travesty of the Biblical teaching and I want to focus on three specific expressions of this kind of teaching.

First, an imbalanced doctrine of the indwelling Christ.

There is a doctrine of the indwelling Christ in Scripture—Galatians 2:20: ‘I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’; Colossians 3:4: ‘Christ who is our life …’; Romans 5:10: ‘We are saved by his life .. .’ Many well-meaning people take those phrases and, totally ignoring both the immediate context and the analogy of faith (the total witness of the Bible) they spin out a theory of the indwelling Christ. The kindest thing we can say about it is that it is woefully imbalanced because they teach a doctrine of the indwelling Christ in which, according to such authors as Mrs Hannah Whithall Smith, Watchman Nee and A. B. Simpson, Christ literally lives his life through you, and to the extent that there is the negation and suspension of your thought, your judgment, your will, your affections. To that extent, they say, Christ will successfully live his life through you.

Second, an unwarranted deduction from analogies of the Christian life.

Some of this teaching is derived from unwarranted deductions from the likenesses or analogies of the Christian life. Is the Christian life in one degree or another like the relationship between a branch and a vine? Yes, but you know what some people do? They take that analogy and they wrench it loose from all other biblical teachings and they spin out a whole theology. I have heard it put this way: ‘How many of you have ever walked by an orchard at the time when the fruit was coming to full bloom?’ and when people raised their hands, the speaker said, ‘Now let me ask you something: “Did you ever see a tree struggling to bring forth such beautiful apples, did you ever see a tree agitated to bring forth apples? All the lovely little branches do is just hang there, joined to the main trunk and the sap flows and the apples appear and all the lush fruit of the Spirit will be born”‘.

Others take the deductions from the biblical analogy of being united with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection, and they say, ‘Are we dead with Christ? Well, if you go to a dead man and hold the most beautiful smelling perfume under his nose, do you get any response? Of course not—he is dead. Or if there is a particular food that he was obsessed with in his life you can hold it under his nose, but do you get any response? So if you really are dead with Christ sin will have no real and valid appeal to you.’ Unwarranted deductions from analogies of the Christian life!

Third, an inaccurate doctrine of sanctification by faith alone.

The teaching goes something like this:

When you were conscious of your guilt and stood under the condemnation of a holy God, and there was nowhere to flee for refuge, you were told that Jesus Christ the incarnate God lived the life we should have lived, died the death we deserved and on the basis of that perfect life of obedience culminating in his obedience to the death of the Cross there is a God-righteousness, a perfect righteousness, available to all who will believe. And then they say, ‘What did you need to do to obtain that perfect righteousness? Nothing! You simply believed. The empty hand of faith took it.’ ‘Now,’ they say, ‘in the same way in Jesus Christ is held forth sanctification. What do you need to do? Simply believe!’ Faith operates in exactly the same way in our sanctification as it does in our justification.

Now what is wrong with all of those theories that have as their common denominator the suspension or the negation of the conscious engagement of all our faculties as redeemed men and women?

Firstly, they ignore the fact that God, in the Bible, addresses all of our faculties with commands, with imperatives.

‘Set your mind on things that are above’. Who is supposed to do that – you or God? Jesus said, ‘If your hand offend you … trust the indwelling Christ to make it rot away?’ ‘If your hand offends you cut it off and cast it from you’. You are to do it. You are addressed. Paul said ‘I buffet my body and I keep it under lest in preaching to others I myself should be a castaway’. He didn’t say the indwelling Christ did it. ‘I buffet it …’ Yield your members as instruments of righteousness. You do it! And I could quote dozens of texts in which every faculty of body and mind is addressed. ‘Flee fornication.’ How do you flee from it? You flee it with your feet. God says the best way to avoid fornication is with your feet.

Secondly, mortification is said to be our responsibility by the Spirit.

Romans 8:13: ‘If you by the Spirit do mortify…’ I commend John Owen’s dissertation on this in volume 6 of his Works. Furthermore the description of the positive cultivation of Christian graces: all of those descriptions show that it is our responsibility to cultivate them. 2 Peter 1:5 ‘Besides this, showing on your part all diligence, add to your faith virtue and to virtue knowledge and to knowledge self-control … ‘. Colossians 3:1–2: You and I are to set our minds, our affections, on things above. ‘He that sayeth he abides in him ought to walk as he walked.’ We are to walk in the Spirit. We are to follow his steps. The positive cultivation of grace demands the engagement of all of our faculties. The dominant images of the Christian life are the images of the military and the athletic and I could quote many such texts. We turn to what Dabney calls ‘the epitomizing text.’ He told his young preachers always to preach from epitomizing texts which distil the essence of broad biblical teaching in a simple statement.

Philippians 2:12 is perhaps the most helpful text in all the Bible on this subject. ‘So then, my beloved brethren, even as you have always obeyed (notice he didn’t say, even as the indwelling Christ has always lived his life through you) not in my presence only but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is working in you to will and to work for his good pleasure.’ Notice the basic teaching. The imperative is this: ‘Work out your own salvation.’ He doesn’t say ‘work to attain it.’ They were a forgiven people. They are to work out the implications. They are to work towards the completion of this salvation that is theirs in Christ. And they are to do it with fear and trembling—that is, with the sense of God’s eye upon them and with the awful realization of the seriousness of the task—’with fear and trembling’. And they are to do it with what encouragement? ‘For it is God who is working in you (now notice carefully) both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (v. 13). God’s work in grace both enables me to will and to do, and it is because he is working in me to will and to do that I can work out with fear and trembling. Well, does he work or do I work? His working and our working are concurrent realities. His working comes to manifestation in my working and my working is the proof of his working. You see the beauty of that! And I need never fear that I will work out more than he is working in. You never need fear that your working out will ever outstrip God’s working in.

Philippians 4:13: ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’. Paul says ‘I can do.’ How much can you do, Paul? ‘All things.’ And in the context the ‘all things’ refers to all the things necessary in responding to the providence of God. He said, ‘At times I am in want, at times I am in plenty, at times I have got to learn what it is to be joyful when my stomach is playing a tune on my backbone, I am so hungry’. At other times, he said, ‘I am so full I wonder if maybe I even verged on the border line of excessive indulgence I have been so blessed with so much’. But, he said, ‘whether learning how to be abased or how to abound in a godly manner, I can do all things. I do them! But I do them through him who strengthens me from within’. ‘I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live and the life which I now live in the flesh…’ Who lives Paul’s life in the flesh – Christ or Paul? Paul does. But, he said, ‘I live it in faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

Albert N. Martin (1934–2026) was a pastor and preacher whose penetrating exposition of God’s word has been a transformative influence on many. His noted lectures on pastoral theology, originally given at Trinity Ministerial Academy, can be accessed in mp3 or book format. Al Martin is the author of four booklets published by the Trust – A Life of Principled Obedience, Living the Christian Life (a booklet comprising the content of this six-part series), The Practical Implications of Calvinism, and What’s Wrong with Preaching Today? 

Look out for the remaining three posts coming in the next two weeks. 

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