Christ speaks to us and we become spiritually alive. No one can condemn us because Christ Himself is the Judge. He brings us out of death into spiritual life.

Then Christ devotes Himself to training us as a son of God. It is a long, difficult apprenticeship. Before the Lord speaks "tenderly" to us there is "hard service." We receive from the Lord's hand double for all our sins.

I find today that sometimes when Christians are faced with the cross designed to destroy their own willfulness and turn them to God's will they are astonished. After they have suffered for a month they believe they have gone long enough without what they desire and are ready to once more scheme and manipulate in order to escape from the prison in which they have been placed.

They do not understand that the Lord may permit the saint to go for forty or fifty years without receiving what he desires so fervently and that all such hopes must be placed beyond the grave.

It would be as foolish for us to live in immorality, drunkenness, and carelessness while we are hoping to be made a member of the royal priesthood as it would be for the young man to be involved in immorality, drunkenness, and carelessness while he was waiting for the day in which he would be made president of the corporation.

We Christians are determining our eternal destiny today. Grace is not an unconditional gift of membership in the royal priesthood. Grace is the opportunity to become a member of the royal priesthood, to become a son of God.

Every human being will be judged. The saints are first in line. The judgment of the world begins with us. It is taking place now. Every day the Lord brings us into situations that display the areas of worldliness, sin, and self-centeredness in us. We need the transformation that can come only through the work of Christ.

You can know if you are in Christ. If you now have a closer relationship with Christ than you did last year at this time, if you now are a more devoted, more obedient, more capable servant of the Lord, you are growing in Christ. You are pressing toward the first resurrection.

If you still are the same person, still committing the same sins, still pursuing your own life rather than bearing your cross after the Master, you are not abiding in Christ. You will not participate in the first resurrection. One day you will appear before Christ and will receive the things done in your body while living on the earth.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. (II Corinthians 5:10)

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. (Revelation 20:6) (from The Christian and Judgment)