Reckon

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. ROMANS 6:11

The second word is reckon, and Nee spent a great deal of effort rescuing it from misuse, because it is one of the most misunderstood terms in the New Testament.

Reckoning is not pretending

To reckon, in the ordinary English of the Authorised Version, is to count, to calculate, to enter into the accounts. It is a bookkeeper’s word. It means treating something as true because it is true. What it does not mean is imagining. Nee warned repeatedly against the sort of teaching that tells a believer to repeat I am dead, I am dead until he feels dead, as though repetition could create a fact. That, he said plainly, is not faith; it is self-hypnotism, and it collapses at the first serious temptation. The difference is the ground you are standing on. A man who reckons is standing on something God has said. A man who is pretending is standing on his own determination to believe. When the storm comes, the first man is still standing and the second is not.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. ROMANS 10:17

This is why know must come before reckon. You cannot reckon on what you have not seen. Attempting it produces strain, and strain is the surest sign that something has gone wrong. Nee’s rule of thumb was simple: if reckoning has become hard work, go back. You are trying to believe something you have not yet been shown.

Two accounts to keep

Notice that the verse has two halves, and Nee insisted on both. Dead indeed unto sin — that is the negative side. But alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord — that is the positive. Christians who attend only to the first become preoccupied with death, introspective and gloomy, forever taking their own spiritual temperature. That is not the apostle’s balance. The purpose of the death is the life. We are not called to be corpses; we are called to be alive to God with an aliveness we did not previously possess.

Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. GALATIANS 2:20

How reckoning works in a real temptation

Nee was practical about this, and it is worth setting out concretely, because here is where the doctrine either works or does not. Temptation comes. The old response is to fight — to summon willpower, grit the teeth, resolve. And the more we fight in that way, the more the thing occupies our attention, and the more likely we are to fall. Every wrestler knows that the harder you grip your opponent, the more firmly he grips you. The new response is to turn. Not to fight the sin, but to look away from it to Christ, and to hold the fact: I died. The person to whom this appeal is being made no longer legally exists. I am not obliged to answer.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. ROMANS 6:12

Observe that Paul does not say sin is dead. Sin is very much alive; that is why he tells us not to let it reign. What has died is not sin but us. Sin remains as a power in the world and a pull in the body, but its legal claim upon us has been dissolved by death, because he that is dead is freed from sin (Romans 6:7). A creditor may shout as loudly as he likes at the grave of a debtor. The debt is uncollectable.

When we fail

What of the times we reckon and fall anyway? Nee’s counsel here was full of common sense and free of condemnation. Failure does not disprove the fact. If a man falls out of a chair, the chair still exists. When we fail, we do not go back to the beginning. We confess, receive cleansing by the blood — if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9) — and we return to the same ground. The ground has not shifted. Our standing was never established by our success in standing.

Nee summed the matter up in a sentence that recurs in various forms across his ministry: it is not our reckoning that makes the thing true; it is because the thing is true that we may reckon. Faith adds nothing to the facts. It simply consents to them.

Fact, faith and feeling

Nee used a picture here which had been current among deeper-life teachers before him and which he made his own. It concerns the order of three things. Imagine three men walking along the top of a wall, in single file. The first is called Fact, the second Faith, and the third Feeling. So long as Faith keeps his eyes on Fact and walks steadily behind him, all three proceed safely, and Feeling follows without difficulty. But let Faith turn round to see how Feeling is getting on, and he loses sight of Fact — and Faith and Feeling both come off the wall together. The point is about direction of gaze. Faith looks at fact. It does not look at feeling, and it certainly does not depend on it. This is worth pressing, because the ordinary Christian instinct is exactly the reverse. We wake, we consult our sense of God’s nearness, and we conclude from it whether things are well with us. On a morning when we feel warm towards God we believe we are in fellowship; on a flat morning we assume something is wrong. Nee regarded this as one of the most reliable ways to make a believer miserable.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

Feelings are not sinful, and Nee never taught that they were. God made the emotions, and Scripture is full of them. Joy is commanded. The point is one of sequence: feelings are a poor foundation and a fine result. They make an excellent caboose and a disastrous engine. There is also a mercy in this. It means that a believer suffering from exhaustion, illness, grief or plain temperament is not thereby out of fellowship with God. His feelings may be flat for months. The facts have not moved an inch.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. 2 TIMOTHY 2:13

So the counsel is to establish what is true, stand on it deliberately, and let the emotions arrive in their own time — which, Nee observed, they generally do, though rarely on the schedule we would have chosen.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Distinguish this week between reckoning and pretending. When you assert your death with Christ, ask: on what am I standing — God’s Word, or my own willpower? 2. In the next temptation, do not fight. Turn. Say to God honestly, Lord, this is an appeal to a man who has died; I look to You.

3. Attend to the positive half. Ask each morning not only to be dead to sin but alive to God, and name one specific way you want that aliveness to show. 4. If reckoning feels like strain, treat that as a signal rather than a failure. Go back and ask for light. 5. After a failure, practise returning to the same ground rather than starting again from despair. Write down now what you will say to yourself when you fall.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have tried to make things true by believing them hard enough, and I have worn myself out. Forgive me.

You have not asked me to create a fact. You have asked me to count on one. Let my faith rest where it belongs — not on the strength of my believing, but on the finished work of Your cross.

When temptation comes today, keep me from wrestling. Turn my eyes to You. I am dead to sin; I am alive to God; and both are true because You have said so. Amen.