The Normal Christian Life

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. GALATIANS 2:20

Watchman Nee opened his most famous book with a question that sounds almost impertinent. What, he asked, is the normal Christian life? The word matters. He did not ask what the ideal Christian life is, or the advanced Christian life, or the life of those unusual saints whose biographies we read with admiration and no expectation of imitation. He asked what is normal. And he answered that the normal Christian life is the life described in Galatians 2:20 — a life no longer lived by the believer at all, but by Christ in him. Set that beside the experience of most of us and the gap is immediately painful. What we call normal is something else: a cycle of resolve and failure, of conferences that lift us and Mondays that flatten us, of sins confessed on Sunday and committed again by Wednesday. We have quietly redefined normal downward until it means defeated, and then we have comforted ourselves that everyone else is defeated too. Nee’s whole ministry was a protest against this redefinition. The New Testament standard, he insisted in The Normal Christian Life, is not an unreachable summit for the few. It is the ordinary birthright of every child of God. And the reason we do not enjoy it is not that we have not tried hard enough. It is that we have been trying at all.

The two halves of the problem

He built his case on Romans, and he made much of the way that letter is constructed. Romans divides at the end of chapter five. The first section, chapters one to five verse eleven, deals with one problem. The second section, chapter five verse twelve through chapter eight, deals with another. Most believers, he observed, have understood the first section and never entered the second. The first problem is our sins — plural. The things we have done. The record against us. The guilt that lies on the conscience. For that problem God has provided the blood of Jesus Christ, and the language of that first section is the language of forgiveness, justification, remission, propitiation:

Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past. ROMANS 3:25

The second problem is our sin — singular. Not the acts but the nature that produces them. Not the fruit but the root. Not what we have done but what we are. And for that problem, Nee argued, blood is not the remedy at all. You cannot forgive a nature. You cannot pardon a disposition. Something must be done not for us but to us. The language changes accordingly:

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. ROMANS 6:6

Notice the verb. Not shall be crucified. Not ought to be crucified. Is crucified — and in the Greek, as an accomplished thing. The believer’s old man was put to death when Christ was put to death. It happened. It is history. Here, Nee said, is where nearly all our striving goes wrong. We treat Romans 6 as a command when it is an announcement. We read reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin and we set about trying to die. But no one is asked to die. We are asked to believe that we have died.

The great discovery is not effort but sight

There is a story Nee told in various forms over the years, of a young believer tormented by his failures, who came at last to Romans 6:6 and read it as though for the first time, and cried out that if it was true he did not need to die but only to see that he was dead already. That is the hinge of the whole matter. Deliverance, in Nee’s teaching, never comes by struggling. It comes by seeing. And seeing is not something a man can manufacture; it is something God gives. This is why he put such weight on the word revelation — not new truth beyond Scripture, but the Holy Spirit turning on the light in a believer’s heart so that what was always written on the page becomes suddenly, personally, undeniably real. Paul prayed exactly for this:

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened. EPHESIANS 1:17–18

You may study Romans 6 for a decade and remain in bondage. You may see it in a moment and walk out free. The difference is not intelligence or effort. It is light.

What God has done, and what we are to do

Nee summarised the Christian’s response to the finished work of Christ in a sequence of four words drawn straight from Romans 6, and the order is everything. Know — verse six. Reckon — verse eleven. Present — verse thirteen. Obey — verse sixteen. The next several chapters of this book will follow that order, because getting it backwards is precisely what wrecks so many earnest believers. We attempt to present before we reckon, and to reckon before we know, and we end exhausted. Everything begins with a fact outside ourselves. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). The Christian life is not the pursuit of a blessing we lack. It is the occupation of a position we already hold.

There is one further thing to say, and Nee said it constantly. This life is not self-improvement. It is substitution. The end of the process is not a better version of you. It is Christ living where you used to live. Not I, but Christ.

Is this not perfectionism?

The objection arises immediately, and Nee met it directly. If the normal Christian life is Christ living in me, does that mean the believer no longer sins? He answered no, and he was careful about why. Nothing in his teaching suggests that the sinful nature is eradicated, or that a believer arrives at a settled condition in which temptation has no purchase. Romans 6 never says that sin is dead. It says that we died, and it then immediately warns us not to let sin reign — a warning that would be meaningless if sin were no longer present to reign.

My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 1 JOHN 2:1

Notice how John holds both. The goal is that we sin not. The provision covers us when we do. Nee’s teaching lives in exactly that space, and any presentation of it that promises a sinless condition has misrepresented him. What he did claim is more modest and more useful. He claimed that sin need not be master. That the ordinary pattern of Christian experience should be deliverance rather than defeat. That a believer who is being overcome by the same thing year after year is not living as God intends, and should not accept it as inevitable. He also insisted — and this is the safeguard against every form of perfectionism — that the deliverance is never a possession we hold independently of Christ. It is not a state achieved and then owned. It is a moment-by-moment dependence. The branch does not store up sap for later; it draws continuously, and the moment it stops drawing it withers, however green it looked yesterday.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. JOHN 15:4

That is the difference between this teaching and any doctrine of attained holiness. The one produces a man who is confident in himself and blind to his condition. The other produces a man who knows he has nothing, and stays close to the One who has everything.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write out, in your own words, the difference between your sins and your sin. Which of the two has your prayer life been mostly concerned with? Ask God to show you the other. 2. Read Romans chapters six to eight slowly, at one sitting, and underline every verb that describes something already done. Do not underline the commands yet. Look only at the facts. 3. Identify one besetting failure you have been fighting by willpower. Stop fighting it this week. Instead, bring Romans 6:6 to God each morning and ask Him to make it real to you rather than merely known. 4. Confess honestly to God any place where you have lowered your definition of the normal Christian life in order to accommodate your defeat. 5. Ask one mature believer to tell you what Galatians 2:20 has meant in their own experience. Listen without arguing.

A PRAYER

Father, I have been labouring to become what You say I already am. I have been trying to reach a place where You have already set me. Forgive me for the pride that would rather achieve than receive.

Open the eyes of my understanding. I do not ask for a new truth; I ask for light upon an old one. Show me the meaning of the cross, not as a doctrine I can explain, but as a fact that has happened to me.

Lord Jesus, I am content to be nothing if You will be everything. Live Your life in me today. Amen.