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p35 [To the same.] Mrs Bevan, As regards your estimate of my thoughts on our reckoning ourselves dead - it requires a practical consciousness that we have no force to arrive at it; and there it is so many fail, often mistaking the joy of forgiveness for true deliverance. In Germany there has been much of this, and indeed a good deal everywhere. Practically there must be a single eye upward, or we do not discover our want of force.

As to disowning such relationships it requires the word. It may come to a question between Christ and these ties, and then everything must give way. We belong to the other world as risen with Christ, not to this; but as belonging to it, the acknowledgment of what God has established is part of our christian life. Is a wife to disown her husband, or children their parents? There is at bottom a great deal of self-licence in all this. It is monstrous. Where that is disowned which God has established, self, not Christ, has the first place in people's hearts. If the unbeliever disowns it it is another thing. If he breaks the tie, there is liberty; or if he requires what is contrary to Christ, for he receives his authority from Him, and cannot use it against the direct authority of Christ. We cannot feel too strongly that we belong to another world, not to this; but that is not the question, but the path of those who do belong to it according to the word.

I have written because the idea of not owning the relationships is monstrous. You will find it a difficult task, because I greatly dread any diminution of the feeling that we are dead and risen with Christ, or of having our conversation in heaven. But so false a use of this, which I feel more strongly every day, is just what would tend to alarm upright souls as to the truth.

Yours truly in the Lord.

Was Christ wrong when, after refusing all connection with His mother when engaged in His service, which was of course and in every sense outside such relations - when His hour was come, in a positive and demonstrative way, He gave testimony to the relationship and acted so touchingly in it? It is remarkable it should be introduced.

There is a loosing from the power of our surroundings (as the Americans say), and sometimes from the surroundings themselves, as called away by the Lord, or as driven out by themselves. The absence of natural affections is an evil sign of the last days; but we have to live in natural ties as those who are not in them, to act from Christ in them. What God established of natural relationships He always owns, carefully so; but a power has come in, which, as sin has ruined all, overrules or makes independent of them.

[53026E]

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