"Conversion is a gift and an achievement. It is the act of a moment and the work of a lifetime. You cannot attain salvation by disciplines-it is a gift of God. But you cannot retain it without disciplines. If you try to attain salvation by disciplines, you will be trying to discipline an unsurrendered self. You will be sitting on a lid. The result will be tenseness instead of trust. 'You will wrestle instead of nestle.' While salvation cannot be attained by discipline around an unsurrendered self, nevertheless when the self is surrendered to Christ and a new center formed, then you can discipline your life around that new center- Christ. Discipline is the fruit of conversion-not the root.
This passage gives the double-sidedness of conversion: 'As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith' (Colossians 2:6-7) Note, 'received'-receptivity; 'so live'-activity. It appears again, 'rooted'-receptivity'; 'built up in him'-activity.
The 'rooted' means we take from God as the roots take from the soil; the 'built up' means we build up as one builds a house, a character and life by disciplined effort. So we take and try; we obtain and attain. We trust as if the whole thing depended on God and work as if the whole thing depended on us. The alternate beats of the Christian heart are receptivity and response- receptivity from God and response in work from us.
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