Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.
—Luke 23:46
Like David, Christ had often committed His spirit into the hands of the Father for His daily life and needs. (See Psalm 31:5.) But here is something new and very special. He gave up His spirit into the power of death, gave up all control over it, and sank down into the darkness and death of the grave, where He could neither think, pray, nor will. He surrendered Himself completely into the Father’s hands, trusting Him to care for Him in the dark, and in due time to raise Him up again.
If we have indeed died in Christ and are now to carry about with us the death of our Lord Jesus in faith every day (see 2 Corinthians 4:10), this word is the one that we need. Just think once again what Christ meant when He said that we must hate and lose our lives. (See John 12:24–25.)
We died in Adam. The life we receive from him is death; there is nothing good or heavenly in us by nature. It is to this inward evil nature, to all the life that we have from this world, that we must die. There cannot be any thought of any real holiness without totally dying to this self, this “old man” (Romans 6:6). Many people deceive themselves because they seek to be alive in God before they are dead to their own natures—something as impossible as a grain of wheat producing a crop without dying first. This dying to self lies at the root of true piety. Spiritual life must grow out of death.
And if you ask how you can do this, you will find the answer in the mind in which Christ died. Like Him, you may cast yourself upon God, without knowing how the new life is to be attained. But as you say in fellowship with Jesus, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,’” and as you depend simply and absolutely on God to raise you up into the new life, the wonderful promise of God’s Word will be fulfilled in you. You will know “what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19–20).
This is indeed the true rest of faith: living every day and every hour in absolute dependence on the continual and immediate quickening of the divine life in us by God Himself through the Holy Spirit.