(The Cross Ends the Old Life, and Grace Forms in Us What God Has Purposed in the Son)

There are moments when God brings truth before us with unusual clarity. Yet the purpose of that light is not merely that we should understand something we did not understand before. God is working toward something deeper: that what He reveals should take form in the life. The Cross stands at the center of that work, bringing the old life to its end so that what is of Christ may increasingly find expression in us.

The Mountaintop Is Meant to Make Us Something

Chambers writes:

“The mountaintop is not meant to teach us anything, it is meant to make us something.” (My Utmost for His Highest)

There is a difference between receiving revelation and being formed by it.

We can see something of God, understand something more clearly concerning Christ, or experience a moment in which His purpose seems remarkably near—and still reduce that moment to something we have learned.

But God is not merely accumulating truth in our understanding.

“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son…” (Romans 8:29, KJV)

The end toward which God works is conformity to the Son.

The mountaintop therefore cannot become a place where we remain admiring what we have seen. What is revealed there must enter the ordinary places of life—our decisions, relationships, disappointments, labor, suffering, and obedience.

Revelation finds its purpose when it becomes formation.

Repentance Brings Us to the Cross

Spurgeon writes:

“Old sins we must regret, but then we have had repentance which He has given us, by which we have wept our way to the cross, and learned the merit of His blood.” (Morning and Evening)

Spurgeon directs the heart away from endless occupation with what lies behind.

Sin is not made insignificant. It is brought to the Cross.

Repentance does not leave us circling continually around ourselves—our failures, our regrets, our inability to repair what has been done. It brings us to the place where confidence in ourselves gives way to confidence in Christ.

“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.” (Ephesians 1:7, KJV)

The Cross therefore does more than settle the record of yesterday. It brings an end to the old ground upon which life was lived—the self as its own source, measure, and sufficiency.

Grace opens another ground altogether: life received in Christ.

Where the Two Meet: From Revelation Through the Cross to Formation

Chambers speaks of what God intends to make us.

Spurgeon brings us to the Cross, where the old life can no longer stand as the basis of what we are becoming.

These belong together.

God does not reveal the Son merely so that we may possess better theological understanding. Neither does He bring us to the Cross merely so that yesterday’s sins may be forgiven while tomorrow continues from the same independent source.

The purpose reaches farther.

The Cross removes confidence in what originates from ourselves, and the life of the Son becomes the pattern and source of what God is forming.

“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image…” (2 Corinthians 3:18, KJV)

What we behold is meant to become formative.

The revelation of Christ, the work of the Cross, and the transforming purpose of God therefore converge in one direction: that the life which is of the Son should increasingly find expression in those whom God has brought into participation with Him.

Pastoral Orientation

There will be mountaintops—times when something concerning Christ becomes unusually clear. There will also be valleys in which what was seen must become lived.

Do not measure the value of the mountaintop merely by how much you understood while standing there.

Its fruit may appear afterward.

The Holy Spirit operates upon the human spirit, bringing what has been seen into the realities of obedience and dependence. The spirit of sonship responds not by attempting to reproduce the Son through natural effort, but by yielding to the life received from God in Christ.

And when the failures of the old life come again to remembrance, we do not establish our identity there.

We return to the Cross.

For the purpose of grace is not merely that we should know something different.

It is that, in Christ, we should become what the Father purposed His children to be.