This is the part where an attempt is made to give you some idea of what you are going to be getting yourself into with this book. Writing this has felt like stuffing a thousand bottles with messages and letting them drift out to sea, hoping that one gets through to someone. I hope that someone is you. My hope is that there will be something here for you – even if only one thought. It might be something you’ve never considered before, or something you just needed to be reminded of.
This is not a serious theological work, at least in the usual sense of that phrase. I am serious about these things, but you will quickly see that it is not an in-depth “exegetical” effort. It’s actually quite subjective at times. I may have taken things out of context. You just might accuse me of reading too much into Scripture. I’m alright with that. But the gravity of my seriousness finds it’s centre in the finished work of Christ – A work that is more complete than most seem to give him credit for.
I was told long ago that there are only two religions in the whole world. One is called “Do” and the other is called “Done”. I’m all about the one with the name “Done”. When Jesus said, “It is finished”, I believe he meant it. Everything that I needed to have done for me – He did it. He has covered needs that I never knew I had. And he didn’t ask my permission first. He went ahead and “gave himself for me”. That is the message that, like Jeremiah, burns in my bones.
I am indebted to so many who have pointed me back to the all-sufficiency of the Lord Jesus. People like T. Austin-Sparks, J.B. Stoney, William Newell, Miles Stanford, Ruth Paxton, Hannah Whitehall-Smith, and C.H. Mackintosh. Maxwell’s “Born Crucified”, Huegel’s “Bone Of His Bone” and Watchman Nee’s “The Normal Christian Life” have also been so helpful for me to understand just what Jesus did for me. Christ is my complete spiritual provision, so much so that I can say I am “complete in Him.” I can’t add to that. I just believe it and receive it.
There is one more person that the Lord has used to get through to me. His name is Paul. His letters have revealed to me a man who knew by experience that Jesus is life. We have his journal to see just how the Lord taught him that “to live is Christ”. Paul learned to value weakness over strength. He learned to say “when I am weak, then I am strong.” He settled in to the restful grace of Christ, and fought to preserve the integrity of that message. It is a message of grace and grace again.
The thing that has continued to stupefy me is that the grace I’ve found in Jesus is relentless. “Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” was the cry of Paul. It’s merciless grace. It’s grace that shows no mercy – no sign of giving up any time soon. I can’t exhaust it. I can’t get to the end of it. And that grace has meant judgment on things that I must accept, just as much as I accept the forgiveness it offers. The grace of Jesus is merciless toward sin. It pays no attention to the white flag sin might wave. The cross of Christ not only offers forgiveness, but it also condemns sin, judging it for what it is. Sin has not been excused. It’s been executed.
This may not be making much sense yet. It will as you go on. I believe that the experience of every Christian person bears out the fact that we all fail to live the Christian life. Why this is so, is always due to our misunderstanding of what he has done for us. And once you see it, you’re amazed that you didn’t see it before. It sounds too easy. It seems too simple. It’s simply trusting that God has already “condemned sin in the flesh” through Jesus Christ.
Once again, I hope there is something here for you. Maybe once you find it, you can just put this book down, and move on to higher ground. Along with Paul, my prayer for you is that you will have “the eyes of your heart” opened to see the finished, complete, and perfect work of Christ. Please pray the same thing for me.
1. Pardon Me
As the crowd feels you push through them, they hear you mutter the words, “Excuse me…” and “Pardon me…” and they instinctively know, as well as you do, that you don’t mean a word of it.
We ask for forgiveness, but it is more of a heads-up than anything else, isn’t it? “Pardon me…” we say, but we could just as well say, “Make way, coming through.” We don’t mean it. Tinged with sarcasm, we say it to a family member who has just accused us of eating the last everything bagel. We raise our voices a little and apologize for existing - “Excuse me for living.”
What if we meant it? “Excuse me for living… my whole life is in desperate need of pardoning.” Old Job wrote, “My breath is offensive to my wife.” For us, literally breathing is an offense. Our lives invade other lives every second of the day. Jesus’ disciples asked him how often they should forgive someone and he figuratively said, not seven times, but seventy times seven. If he only meant 490 times, then we would have all run out of forgiveness in diapers.
Helmets, shoulder-pads and the rest should be our uniforms, because we are on the offensive. We storm and lay siege to one another, whether it is through emotional-blackmail or using people as welcome mats to wipe our dirty feet. We’re in bad shape. Poor form. We need forgiveness. Without even considering what we may have done to the God who lovingly made us, we are still crying out for a clean-slate.
Deserving retribution, we so often get mercy. It happens so frequently that it becomes something expected. You let a driver squeeze into the spot in front of you and you get no wave. You hold a door open for an old lady and get no time of day. Even in the face of forgiveness, we offend. Did I say we are in poor shape? There is no geometric description for us.
Forgiveness is not just a spiritual or religious concept. Pick up your copy of Whatever Magazine and find out that being a better you involves being a forgiving person. No rocket-scientist performing brain surgery there. Simple. People who cannot forgive become these caustic personalities with permafrost of the heart. Put any two humans together and watch as the reasons for the need to overlook offenses pile up like rugby players on a ball.
Alright. Enough in that direction. I will make an assumption at this point, and place some faith in the fact that we are all well aware of our offensive qualities. If you are unsure of whether or not this is a sound thing to do, ask anyone who knows you at all to verify it. Better yet, use the short list of people you could ask as proof of this. It’s a given, then, that without pardoning, our grating little lives would spin off from one another into seclusion. Being alive is often being that gift people reluctantly accept in the hope that it might make a good door-stop or dog-blanket.
“The parade has been cancelled due to rain.” “The ribbon-cutting ceremony has been postponed due to the scissors being used in a crime.” The bad news is in. But what if there is more? Could it be worse? Yes. It could be, and is. If it isn’t bad enough that we offend just by living, the moral to the story is that forgiveness will not solve our problem. Forgiveness is like lubricant that keeps an engine from seizing, but it will not replace the worn-out parts. Something needs to be replaced.
As a young Christian, I remember being mystified by the whole concept of the Unforgivable Sin. What is it? Have I done it? I have since come to the realization that the unforgivable sin is simply a sin sinned by a sinner who doesn’t want forgiveness. You have to want it to get it. Forgiveness cannot be forced on another. By it’s very nature it must be received – accepted. You can offer it, but it can be turned down. This gets us back to the bad news - that just got worse. There is something about us that neither wants forgiveness, nor can even be forgiven. Sin actually is unforgivable.
Wait a second… Aren’t sins the reason for forgiveness in the first place? Ah – but I didn’t say “sins”. I said “Sin” – singular, not plural. There is a big difference. We normally think of sins as verbs, but what I’m talking about here is a noun. The first time sin is mentioned in the Bible is way back in Genesis, where God had to have a little talk with Cain about his attitude. He said to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Sin is spoken of as “it”. Sins are one thing, but Sin is quite another.
Consider for a moment a strung-out drug-addict. It started small, but very soon became unmanageable. Friends were pilfered and shops were lifted to keep the habit healthy. Soon he became even a scourge to his own family. His father loved him though. He put up with much. Forgiveness was doled out without a grudge. You see, this father remembered pushing his little boy on the swing out back and fixing up his bike. This father dug deep to pull memories to the forefront about fishing and answering endless questions about why what is what. He looked at his son now and hated the poison that ran through his veins. He hated what it had turned his little boy into. He forgave the stealing and lying and the things his son said while under the influence. But the addiction? There would be no forgiveness for that. It would be hunted down, smoked out, and summarily executed. It’s called rehab. Cutting off contact with the chemical would be the only way to get his boy back.
You have just heard your story – and mine. Sin is our addiction. It is a poison that has infected our souls. We are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sin-factories, pumping out the stuff from an endless supply of raw materials. Those sins are a problem. Forgiveness keeps things running smoothly, but what we really need is someone to throw a wrench in the gears. Jesus illustrated this perfectly when he gave the very practical advice of gouging out your eye if it causes you to sin. He also advised cutting off a hand or foot for the same reason. He meant for us to see where this was headed, and to realize that heart-ectomies should be scheduled for later today. Is there anything in us that does not cause us to sin? It’s rampant, infectious, and it doesn’t want forgiveness.
The sin nature that we all receive as a door prize for entering the world would actually love for us to think that forgiveness is enough. If we believe that it can be forgiven, then it can surreptitiously continue getting sin out through every crevice of our lives. This is not to underemphasize our need for pardoning. Going back to our engine metaphor, you have to have lubricant or it won’t work. But no mechanic thinks that a blown head-gasket can be fixed by pouring 10w30 all over it. The only fix is a new one. It’s not really a fix at all. New wine for new wineskins, Jesus said.
So, there we have it. Sin has set up shop in our lives and it likes it fine just where it is. It laughs at forgiveness and hopes that we think a pardon is good enough to keep it under control. But Jesus is not fooled. He knows the very day and hour sin came to town. He remembers the day Adam died. He looked down from his vantage point in eternity and saw the future of Adam’s sin-cursed race and said, “I’ll go, send me.” Jesus Christ came to do business with sin. Forgiveness is necessary, but that’s not enough to satisfy the kind of love we’re talking about here. The father we were thinking about earlier who loved his son enough to get him into rehabilitation, is just a drop in the ocean compared to the love of Christ for sinners. He came to stop sin dead in its tracks – and that’s exactly what he did.
How did Jesus do it? Why do I still sin? Those two questions need answering. Maybe you’re at the place in your life where you don’t want to be forgiven anymore because you can’t stand thinking about having to ask for it again. Maybe you’re tired of coming to God with the same sins time and time again, and you feel like He’s tired of it too. Most Christians are aware of the sin-repent-sin cycle. It’s not a washing machine option, but it does make you feel like you’ve been through one.
I’ve backed up the truck and dumped a whole lot of bad news so far, but I can’t wait to unzip the sky and let loose the good news for you. It’s so good. Jesus is good news. It’s exclusive too. I’m not about to give you another promise with a flat tire, offering a Jesus-plus-something-else. It’s Jesus-plus-nothing, here. I’ve been given the goods on Christ. So have you. It’s called, your Bible.
I’m writing all this because someone listened to me. He really listened. I went on about how I thought I was living the life the Lord had for me, but this guy knew I was missing out. He knew I didn’t know the whole story. I had half of it, but try riding a unicycle with half a wheel. Try running with one leg. Try asking God to do something that He’s already done and wonder why He doesn’t seem to be answering your prayer. That was my life. I didn’t think Jesus was enough. The guy that listened to me? He told me to read my Bible. He told me to read those hard places that I usually skipped over. I read them. I heard the sky unzip.
I hope you will pardon me for sounding holier-than-thou, but due to the fact that I so seldom hear what I’m going to spend the next - I don’t know how many pages - trying to get through to you, I can’t help talking like you are my little blacksmith in training. So I’m going to use the small hammer to give the sword on the anvil a tap, so that you know where to swing your big one. You have to come down on it with all your weight. You have to come to rest on it. The sword – you know – “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The only living I’ve ever known is from leaning hard on God’s word. He expects me to. He expects you to too. He’ll forgive you for not doing it. He forgives sins – just not Sin.
We ask for forgiveness, but it is more of a heads-up than anything else, isn’t it? “Pardon me…” we say, but we could just as well say, “Make way, coming through.” We don’t mean it. Tinged with sarcasm, we say it to a family member who has just accused us of eating the last everything bagel. We raise our voices a little and apologize for existing - “Excuse me for living.”
What if we meant it? “Excuse me for living… my whole life is in desperate need of pardoning.” Old Job wrote, “My breath is offensive to my wife.” For us, literally breathing is an offense. Our lives invade other lives every second of the day. Jesus’ disciples asked him how often they should forgive someone and he figuratively said, not seven times, but seventy times seven. If he only meant 490 times, then we would have all run out of forgiveness in diapers.
Helmets, shoulder-pads and the rest should be our uniforms, because we are on the offensive. We storm and lay siege to one another, whether it is through emotional-blackmail or using people as welcome mats to wipe our dirty feet. We’re in bad shape. Poor form. We need forgiveness. Without even considering what we may have done to the God who lovingly made us, we are still crying out for a clean-slate.
Deserving retribution, we so often get mercy. It happens so frequently that it becomes something expected. You let a driver squeeze into the spot in front of you and you get no wave. You hold a door open for an old lady and get no time of day. Even in the face of forgiveness, we offend. Did I say we are in poor shape? There is no geometric description for us.
Forgiveness is not just a spiritual or religious concept. Pick up your copy of Whatever Magazine and find out that being a better you involves being a forgiving person. No rocket-scientist performing brain surgery there. Simple. People who cannot forgive become these caustic personalities with permafrost of the heart. Put any two humans together and watch as the reasons for the need to overlook offenses pile up like rugby players on a ball.
Alright. Enough in that direction. I will make an assumption at this point, and place some faith in the fact that we are all well aware of our offensive qualities. If you are unsure of whether or not this is a sound thing to do, ask anyone who knows you at all to verify it. Better yet, use the short list of people you could ask as proof of this. It’s a given, then, that without pardoning, our grating little lives would spin off from one another into seclusion. Being alive is often being that gift people reluctantly accept in the hope that it might make a good door-stop or dog-blanket.
“The parade has been cancelled due to rain.” “The ribbon-cutting ceremony has been postponed due to the scissors being used in a crime.” The bad news is in. But what if there is more? Could it be worse? Yes. It could be, and is. If it isn’t bad enough that we offend just by living, the moral to the story is that forgiveness will not solve our problem. Forgiveness is like lubricant that keeps an engine from seizing, but it will not replace the worn-out parts. Something needs to be replaced.
As a young Christian, I remember being mystified by the whole concept of the Unforgivable Sin. What is it? Have I done it? I have since come to the realization that the unforgivable sin is simply a sin sinned by a sinner who doesn’t want forgiveness. You have to want it to get it. Forgiveness cannot be forced on another. By it’s very nature it must be received – accepted. You can offer it, but it can be turned down. This gets us back to the bad news - that just got worse. There is something about us that neither wants forgiveness, nor can even be forgiven. Sin actually is unforgivable.
Wait a second… Aren’t sins the reason for forgiveness in the first place? Ah – but I didn’t say “sins”. I said “Sin” – singular, not plural. There is a big difference. We normally think of sins as verbs, but what I’m talking about here is a noun. The first time sin is mentioned in the Bible is way back in Genesis, where God had to have a little talk with Cain about his attitude. He said to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Sin is spoken of as “it”. Sins are one thing, but Sin is quite another.
Consider for a moment a strung-out drug-addict. It started small, but very soon became unmanageable. Friends were pilfered and shops were lifted to keep the habit healthy. Soon he became even a scourge to his own family. His father loved him though. He put up with much. Forgiveness was doled out without a grudge. You see, this father remembered pushing his little boy on the swing out back and fixing up his bike. This father dug deep to pull memories to the forefront about fishing and answering endless questions about why what is what. He looked at his son now and hated the poison that ran through his veins. He hated what it had turned his little boy into. He forgave the stealing and lying and the things his son said while under the influence. But the addiction? There would be no forgiveness for that. It would be hunted down, smoked out, and summarily executed. It’s called rehab. Cutting off contact with the chemical would be the only way to get his boy back.
You have just heard your story – and mine. Sin is our addiction. It is a poison that has infected our souls. We are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sin-factories, pumping out the stuff from an endless supply of raw materials. Those sins are a problem. Forgiveness keeps things running smoothly, but what we really need is someone to throw a wrench in the gears. Jesus illustrated this perfectly when he gave the very practical advice of gouging out your eye if it causes you to sin. He also advised cutting off a hand or foot for the same reason. He meant for us to see where this was headed, and to realize that heart-ectomies should be scheduled for later today. Is there anything in us that does not cause us to sin? It’s rampant, infectious, and it doesn’t want forgiveness.
The sin nature that we all receive as a door prize for entering the world would actually love for us to think that forgiveness is enough. If we believe that it can be forgiven, then it can surreptitiously continue getting sin out through every crevice of our lives. This is not to underemphasize our need for pardoning. Going back to our engine metaphor, you have to have lubricant or it won’t work. But no mechanic thinks that a blown head-gasket can be fixed by pouring 10w30 all over it. The only fix is a new one. It’s not really a fix at all. New wine for new wineskins, Jesus said.
So, there we have it. Sin has set up shop in our lives and it likes it fine just where it is. It laughs at forgiveness and hopes that we think a pardon is good enough to keep it under control. But Jesus is not fooled. He knows the very day and hour sin came to town. He remembers the day Adam died. He looked down from his vantage point in eternity and saw the future of Adam’s sin-cursed race and said, “I’ll go, send me.” Jesus Christ came to do business with sin. Forgiveness is necessary, but that’s not enough to satisfy the kind of love we’re talking about here. The father we were thinking about earlier who loved his son enough to get him into rehabilitation, is just a drop in the ocean compared to the love of Christ for sinners. He came to stop sin dead in its tracks – and that’s exactly what he did.
How did Jesus do it? Why do I still sin? Those two questions need answering. Maybe you’re at the place in your life where you don’t want to be forgiven anymore because you can’t stand thinking about having to ask for it again. Maybe you’re tired of coming to God with the same sins time and time again, and you feel like He’s tired of it too. Most Christians are aware of the sin-repent-sin cycle. It’s not a washing machine option, but it does make you feel like you’ve been through one.
I’ve backed up the truck and dumped a whole lot of bad news so far, but I can’t wait to unzip the sky and let loose the good news for you. It’s so good. Jesus is good news. It’s exclusive too. I’m not about to give you another promise with a flat tire, offering a Jesus-plus-something-else. It’s Jesus-plus-nothing, here. I’ve been given the goods on Christ. So have you. It’s called, your Bible.
I’m writing all this because someone listened to me. He really listened. I went on about how I thought I was living the life the Lord had for me, but this guy knew I was missing out. He knew I didn’t know the whole story. I had half of it, but try riding a unicycle with half a wheel. Try running with one leg. Try asking God to do something that He’s already done and wonder why He doesn’t seem to be answering your prayer. That was my life. I didn’t think Jesus was enough. The guy that listened to me? He told me to read my Bible. He told me to read those hard places that I usually skipped over. I read them. I heard the sky unzip.
I hope you will pardon me for sounding holier-than-thou, but due to the fact that I so seldom hear what I’m going to spend the next - I don’t know how many pages - trying to get through to you, I can’t help talking like you are my little blacksmith in training. So I’m going to use the small hammer to give the sword on the anvil a tap, so that you know where to swing your big one. You have to come down on it with all your weight. You have to come to rest on it. The sword – you know – “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The only living I’ve ever known is from leaning hard on God’s word. He expects me to. He expects you to too. He’ll forgive you for not doing it. He forgives sins – just not Sin.
2. Romans Six Wasn't Built In A Day
It takes time to come to the point where you realize you don’t have it all together. I referred earlier to the sin-repent-sin cycle (which once again we might as well call the ‘spin-cycle’) that all of us come to know quite well. We come to Christ because we have sinned. The guilt drives us to Jesus. We see him there on the cross and know that it should have been each one of us. He took my place. He took your place. It changes you forever. You feel like a swimming pool full of thousand-dollar bills. You’ve been forgiven and you swear that you are never going to forget it.
How long did it take you to forget? At first you just couldn’t believe that Jesus allowed himself to be treated like he lived your life, so that you could be treated like you had been living his. But then life came knocking. Everyday, clock-watching, bill-paying, re-run life. Things you vowed to never do again, you did. And then you did it again. Spin-cycle. It made you sick to your stomach. It was even worse now, because you let Jesus into your life, and it’s a mess.
There is another dimension to the Spin-cycle that we should take a second to spot. It is what has been called, The Law of Diminishing Returns. It goes this way: You indulge yourself in some sin – gluttony, lust, greed, pride (self-inflation) – and it has a sweetness to it that you secretly enjoy. But the next time, it feels like someone switched the sugar for sweet-and-low. And after that, you begin to barely taste any sweetness at all. Hebrews 11 calls it “the passing pleasures of sin” - sin for a season. It’s all re-runs after that. Never as good as the first time. And then you move on to a new one. You constantly jump ship and swim to the next port for a chance aboard another. It takes time to realize that the fate of each is exactly the same. They all run out. There are holes in every bucket that promises to be bottomless. But for a while, you believe the lies.
Many Christians live in this place for a long time. They think back to when they first got saved, before the Spin-Cycle – before the Law of Diminishing Returns. They long for those feelings of joy from the early days. They sprung up quick, but the roots were shallow. They withered. Even wilted, they tried to prop themselves up any way they could. Maybe that was you. It was definitely me. I was a wilted Christian for 15 years. Sin still had this strangle-hold on me that I just could not shake. I hated it. It made me hate myself. It crippled my growth. I knew I was still forgiven, but that didn’t seem good enough. Why would God forgive me, but still leave me just as prone to need more forgiveness? Was this all my life was going to be? I wanted out of the washing machine.
Romans Six. It’s a chapter in the Bible. New Testament, after the four Gospels, after Luke’s sequel – the book of Acts (the Acts of the Holy Spirit), then we have Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. This is the first explanation we have for all of the stories that we just read. What came before was Lego, fresh out of the box. The Gospels and Acts are blocks of different shapes and colours. Romans is the little picture-book that comes with the set. You flip from frame to frame to piece the whole thing together. You don’t actually know what the thing is supposed to look like without it. That’s why people so often get the Gospel wrong. They try and piece it together without the instructions. They make it sound like Jesus gave us the flip-book in the Gospels. He didn’t. He said so himself, you know. John 16:12,13 says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth.” Romans is the Spirit speaking to us.
The first five chapters of Romans are spent trying to get through our coconut heads (ever tried to open one of those things?) the fact that we are guilty, cannot save ourselves, but that God in Christ did something about it. We read that even though God had sent three different wake-up calls, we just ignored them. Who are the three amigos, you ask? Three C’s – Creation, Conscience, and Commandments. They’ve been banging on the door from the start, but we pretend they are telemarketers who love their jobs a little too much. But another stands at the door as well. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He has not come asking for anything. He has come to offer you everything for free. That’s chapters one to five. Then we get to six. Pick up sticks. Big ones. Cross beams.
Jesus once said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” I thought for a long time that what he was talking about was the old idea of a “cross to bear.” It’s like this: You have this neighbour who has a habit of lining his eaves trough with beer bottles and his four dogs make it hard to go into your own backyard without gagging. You say, “Oh, it’s my cross to bear.” No it’s not. That is not what Jesus had in mind at all. Everyone puts up with the troubles and encumbrances of life. That’s what we complain about in line at the grocery store. But Jesus was not talking about putting up with bad neighbours or high gasoline prices. He was talking about you. He told us to take up our own cross. What is a cross? It is a place to die. Jesus walked the Via Delarosa with that cross-beam on his back, because he was going to Golgotha to die. Taking up your cross daily is to agree with the Lord about Jesus’ cross. The truth is, His cross is ours. His death is ours. That’s what Romans Six is all about.
Romans One to Five is good news for the lost. Jesus paid for the sins of the world by his shed blood on the cross, offering life for all for free – no strings attached. That’s good news. But there’s more. Romans Six to Eight is good news for the found. It’s good news for Christians, but once again, you have to know the bad news first. Once someone realizes that they are in debt to God for the non-recyclable waste they have made of their life, they are ready to receive his free gift of salvation. For the Christian, they need to realize that they have a deeper need for deliverance from sin itself before they will find it in Christ. This takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is Romans Six.
It takes about a year for most babies to learn how to walk. It is then at least another (long) year before toddlers are potty-trained. God allows young believers to crawl along until they are ready to take those first steps. If kids are encouraged to walk too soon, they can become like an old western gunslinger – bowlegged. Someone once said, “When God makes a squash he takes a few months. When he makes an oak tree he takes a 100 years.” It takes time to realize that crawling will just not be enough to get through life. You want desperately to stand up on your own two feet – to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, so they say. But that’s impossible.
My daughter was about two years old when she discovered that she could not pick herself up. She told us so. She was crouched in the kitchen with her hands under her thighs, groaning as she made the attempt. We thought there was something else going on at first… but when she said, “Mom, I can’t pick myself up” I had this epiphany. That is all of us from God’s perspective. He watches us try to levitate our lives into holiness and Christ-likeness, and he knows we can’t do it. What the Lord is waiting for, is for us to realize it.
Romans Six is gibberish until you need it. It seems redundant – like training wheels on a tricycle. It gets treated like its just another way of saying all that came before in chapters one to five. But the Spirit has Paul write these words, “Do you not know…?” The day you are born, you have no earthly idea what just happened. That’s probably best for many reasons. But when you are young, you have no clue about so many things. That’s why two-year-olds walk around saying “why?” all the time. Being spiritually reborn is just the same. Romans Six tells us that not only did Christ die as our substitute, but he died as our representative as well. His death includes our death. That might not sound like good news, but it is. It won’t sound good until you have exhausted yourself trying to be like Jesus, and give up trying.
Time is so necessary. Spiritual infancy can last three years – like it did for Paul who spent that time alone in the Arabian Desert. But it can take much longer. For me, it was 15 years before I gave up trying to be like Christ. It was only when I realized that I didn’t need help from God to be more Christ-like, that I began to accept what He had already provided for me in Christ. I didn’t need more life. I needed death. Romans Six tells us that our old man has been crucified. Once again, that’s good news for Christians. It goes on to say that “He who has died has been freed from sin.” The only escape from sin is death. Jesus provided that for me and you on the Cross. Anything else is only a bandage.
The Cross is spiritual surgery. The problem is that many things have anesthetized us into thinking that it never happened. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. If you have received Jesus as the ransom paid for your sins, then you got more than you bargained for. You died with Christ – and you were raised with Him too. It’s time to live up to the name “Believer”. The Lord wants to be believed. It’s time to take Him at His word. Romans Six declares that we are free from sin, right now, this minute, because of our great Saviour. It sounds too good to be true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.
How long did it take you to forget? At first you just couldn’t believe that Jesus allowed himself to be treated like he lived your life, so that you could be treated like you had been living his. But then life came knocking. Everyday, clock-watching, bill-paying, re-run life. Things you vowed to never do again, you did. And then you did it again. Spin-cycle. It made you sick to your stomach. It was even worse now, because you let Jesus into your life, and it’s a mess.
There is another dimension to the Spin-cycle that we should take a second to spot. It is what has been called, The Law of Diminishing Returns. It goes this way: You indulge yourself in some sin – gluttony, lust, greed, pride (self-inflation) – and it has a sweetness to it that you secretly enjoy. But the next time, it feels like someone switched the sugar for sweet-and-low. And after that, you begin to barely taste any sweetness at all. Hebrews 11 calls it “the passing pleasures of sin” - sin for a season. It’s all re-runs after that. Never as good as the first time. And then you move on to a new one. You constantly jump ship and swim to the next port for a chance aboard another. It takes time to realize that the fate of each is exactly the same. They all run out. There are holes in every bucket that promises to be bottomless. But for a while, you believe the lies.
Many Christians live in this place for a long time. They think back to when they first got saved, before the Spin-Cycle – before the Law of Diminishing Returns. They long for those feelings of joy from the early days. They sprung up quick, but the roots were shallow. They withered. Even wilted, they tried to prop themselves up any way they could. Maybe that was you. It was definitely me. I was a wilted Christian for 15 years. Sin still had this strangle-hold on me that I just could not shake. I hated it. It made me hate myself. It crippled my growth. I knew I was still forgiven, but that didn’t seem good enough. Why would God forgive me, but still leave me just as prone to need more forgiveness? Was this all my life was going to be? I wanted out of the washing machine.
Romans Six. It’s a chapter in the Bible. New Testament, after the four Gospels, after Luke’s sequel – the book of Acts (the Acts of the Holy Spirit), then we have Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. This is the first explanation we have for all of the stories that we just read. What came before was Lego, fresh out of the box. The Gospels and Acts are blocks of different shapes and colours. Romans is the little picture-book that comes with the set. You flip from frame to frame to piece the whole thing together. You don’t actually know what the thing is supposed to look like without it. That’s why people so often get the Gospel wrong. They try and piece it together without the instructions. They make it sound like Jesus gave us the flip-book in the Gospels. He didn’t. He said so himself, you know. John 16:12,13 says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth.” Romans is the Spirit speaking to us.
The first five chapters of Romans are spent trying to get through our coconut heads (ever tried to open one of those things?) the fact that we are guilty, cannot save ourselves, but that God in Christ did something about it. We read that even though God had sent three different wake-up calls, we just ignored them. Who are the three amigos, you ask? Three C’s – Creation, Conscience, and Commandments. They’ve been banging on the door from the start, but we pretend they are telemarketers who love their jobs a little too much. But another stands at the door as well. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He has not come asking for anything. He has come to offer you everything for free. That’s chapters one to five. Then we get to six. Pick up sticks. Big ones. Cross beams.
Jesus once said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” I thought for a long time that what he was talking about was the old idea of a “cross to bear.” It’s like this: You have this neighbour who has a habit of lining his eaves trough with beer bottles and his four dogs make it hard to go into your own backyard without gagging. You say, “Oh, it’s my cross to bear.” No it’s not. That is not what Jesus had in mind at all. Everyone puts up with the troubles and encumbrances of life. That’s what we complain about in line at the grocery store. But Jesus was not talking about putting up with bad neighbours or high gasoline prices. He was talking about you. He told us to take up our own cross. What is a cross? It is a place to die. Jesus walked the Via Delarosa with that cross-beam on his back, because he was going to Golgotha to die. Taking up your cross daily is to agree with the Lord about Jesus’ cross. The truth is, His cross is ours. His death is ours. That’s what Romans Six is all about.
Romans One to Five is good news for the lost. Jesus paid for the sins of the world by his shed blood on the cross, offering life for all for free – no strings attached. That’s good news. But there’s more. Romans Six to Eight is good news for the found. It’s good news for Christians, but once again, you have to know the bad news first. Once someone realizes that they are in debt to God for the non-recyclable waste they have made of their life, they are ready to receive his free gift of salvation. For the Christian, they need to realize that they have a deeper need for deliverance from sin itself before they will find it in Christ. This takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is Romans Six.
It takes about a year for most babies to learn how to walk. It is then at least another (long) year before toddlers are potty-trained. God allows young believers to crawl along until they are ready to take those first steps. If kids are encouraged to walk too soon, they can become like an old western gunslinger – bowlegged. Someone once said, “When God makes a squash he takes a few months. When he makes an oak tree he takes a 100 years.” It takes time to realize that crawling will just not be enough to get through life. You want desperately to stand up on your own two feet – to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, so they say. But that’s impossible.
My daughter was about two years old when she discovered that she could not pick herself up. She told us so. She was crouched in the kitchen with her hands under her thighs, groaning as she made the attempt. We thought there was something else going on at first… but when she said, “Mom, I can’t pick myself up” I had this epiphany. That is all of us from God’s perspective. He watches us try to levitate our lives into holiness and Christ-likeness, and he knows we can’t do it. What the Lord is waiting for, is for us to realize it.
Romans Six is gibberish until you need it. It seems redundant – like training wheels on a tricycle. It gets treated like its just another way of saying all that came before in chapters one to five. But the Spirit has Paul write these words, “Do you not know…?” The day you are born, you have no earthly idea what just happened. That’s probably best for many reasons. But when you are young, you have no clue about so many things. That’s why two-year-olds walk around saying “why?” all the time. Being spiritually reborn is just the same. Romans Six tells us that not only did Christ die as our substitute, but he died as our representative as well. His death includes our death. That might not sound like good news, but it is. It won’t sound good until you have exhausted yourself trying to be like Jesus, and give up trying.
Time is so necessary. Spiritual infancy can last three years – like it did for Paul who spent that time alone in the Arabian Desert. But it can take much longer. For me, it was 15 years before I gave up trying to be like Christ. It was only when I realized that I didn’t need help from God to be more Christ-like, that I began to accept what He had already provided for me in Christ. I didn’t need more life. I needed death. Romans Six tells us that our old man has been crucified. Once again, that’s good news for Christians. It goes on to say that “He who has died has been freed from sin.” The only escape from sin is death. Jesus provided that for me and you on the Cross. Anything else is only a bandage.
The Cross is spiritual surgery. The problem is that many things have anesthetized us into thinking that it never happened. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. If you have received Jesus as the ransom paid for your sins, then you got more than you bargained for. You died with Christ – and you were raised with Him too. It’s time to live up to the name “Believer”. The Lord wants to be believed. It’s time to take Him at His word. Romans Six declares that we are free from sin, right now, this minute, because of our great Saviour. It sounds too good to be true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.
3. Divine Stop Signs
Most people that have achieved some level of greatness have a story that goes this way: Born in obscurity and with little means, with the whole world against them, they kept striving toward the goal, finding new resolve after every failure, to finally push through and… get into the Guiness’ Book of World Records for baking the largest donut. Or joking aside, maybe it was changing local politics, or opening a homeless shelter, or any number of noble pursuits. Everybody has stories about disappointments and failures. Sometimes they come at us from such unlikely sources and from so out of the blue that you would almost think they were planned….
The truth is, they are. And no, you can’t blame the devil. He’s pretty much a mad dog on a rope that God gives some slack from time to time. It’s the Lord who plans our little downfalls. And it’s love that drives him to it. What people don’t realize is that God is always trying to shut down our efforts, and frustrate our attempts at making a life for ourselves, so that we will simply take from him the life he offers. He will eventually let us have our way if we continue pushing his hand away. You may have heard many a motivational speaker talk about setbacks and tell you that they are simply opportunities in disguise. No they’re not. The disappointments we face in life are simply the Lord saying, “No, don’t go that way.” They are divine stop-signs that you really shouldn’t drive through.
Too often there is this idea in our heads that we need to do something great for God, when all the while God has done something great for us that we simply ignore. King David is a perfect illustration of this. In 2nd Samuel chapter 7, we find David sitting in his lovely cedar home, telling Nathan the prophet that he would like to build a similar house for the Ark of God. You see, the Ark symbolized the presence of God on earth. It’s actually a wonderful picture of Christ. Inside it was Aaron’s rod that budded, the tablets of stone the commandments were written on, and the jar of manna. Those three things are each symbols of Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But David is moved to do something for God, and even Nate thinks it’s a great idea. The trouble was, God didn’t.
We are dreamers. Our imaginations can run wild and we can conjure up such wonderful ideas. But no matter how wild they are, they are never as wild as God’s. David was thinking too small. He was thinking of building a material, earthly house for God’s presence to dwell in. God was thinking so much bigger. He envisioned a house, but one that would outlast the earth. He was going to make a house out of us, not out of cedar or stone. Reborn, new creations in Christ are the very temple of God, that is presently being built. When David was told this, he gladly traded his dream for God’s. It left him speechless.
There are two paths in life. You can either take the life you’ve been given, or you can make one for yourself. “Life is what you make of it” the world says. Well, it can be what you make it, or it can be so much more. The Lord has put a staggering amount of thought into our lives. The apostle Paul said it this way when he was in Athens,
“God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” Acts 17:24-27
Notice that God determines when and where each of us lives. Each of us. Each of the 6 billion souls on the planet have been carefully planted right where God wanted, and right when God wanted. That shows his incredible sovereignty, doesn’t it? But there is more. Paul also said that the purpose of this meticulous people-planting by the Great Gardener, is “so that they should seek the Lord.” The events of our lives are designed to raise our eyes to our Maker.
And the Lord uses hard times to do it. Good times just don’t work. God graciously gives sun and rain, harvest after harvest, blessing and peace, prosperity and health, and all the while we pat ourselves on the back thinking it was all us. Isn’t it amazing that when something good happens we take the credit for it, but when something bad happens it’s the thing we put to God’s account? God gets blamed for the catastrophes of life with fists shaking in the air. Well, it’s staggering how close to the truth we can be and still not see it. It IS God’s fault. All of it. Blame Him. He wants you to. Give Him credit for toppling your house of cards. Thank Him for it while you’re at it.
How often do bad things happen in life? Every day? Every hour? Every second? Yes, yes and yes. Just how badly do you think God is trying to get our attention? Every disturbance, every tragedy, every failure, every minor setback and every catastrophic event is a wake-up call from the Lord. But we just keep blowing stop-signs. I once heard someone call them “Stoptionals.” The Lord lovingly brings us to our knees so that we can acknowledge that we need Him. We first discover our need for God when the guilt of our sins has crippled us. It’s then that we find Christ as the gracious gift that He is. There are more discoveries to be made. There are uncharted waters for each of us. Failure reveals our deep needs. We wouldn’t know them otherwise. God is always trying to reveal them to us, but we think it’s either bad luck or that we are being punished in some way. Wrong on both counts. The Lord is to be praised for the very things he is most often jeered for.
For those of us who have our sins forgiven – who have God’s money in the bank, in the currency of the blood of Christ, to pay for any and every debt still to come – failure still has a new lesson for us. We need to learn that sin is too big for us to handle on our own. Initially, it seems that God gives us easy victories over certain vices. New Christians seem to be able to quit smoking, give up alcohol, stop gambling, etc… cold-turkey. Excitement is there at the new birth. But it doesn’t last. Christians are still capable of gross sin. You hear about it all the time. It’s heart-breaking, but it needs to happen. The Lord who saved us, wants us to know what we have been saved from. We really have been saved from sin.
Many come to know Christ at an early age. Four and five-year-olds can truly receive the Lord as Saviour. Have they sinned? By the time they are four, they have lied, stolen, and been disobedient enough to have a wheelbarrow full of guilt over it. But at the same time, they would not know anything compared to a teenage sinner. A fifteen year old can be real monster. I know, because I was one. I had the mouth of a sailor and the eyes of Samson. The thing to remember though, is that both the four year-old and the teenager have the same sin nature. A murderer and rapist who comes to Christ is not more forgiven than a child who comes with a stolen cookie in his mouth. Sin is the same in everyone. Sins differ, but they come with opportunity. A shark in a cage, is a shark that would eat a whole tank of dolphins if it could. Jesus taught this when he talked about anger being equal to murder, and lust equal to adultery. “It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean” he said. But no matter how awful your sins are, you still don’t know what you are fully capable of.
Sin often plays it safe. It will make a glutton of someone rather than a murderer, because it is less conspicuous. It doesn’t seem so bad. But sin needs to be exposed for what it is. It is the very heart of the devil. And it’s in you and me. It would rather you think it under control than for you to look at Jesus on the cross and see that it took the death of the Son of God to beat it. Nothing else could do it. It’s that bad. We need God’s stop-signs to alert us to the danger of trying to go toe-to-toe with Sin. It will win every time if we do. We’ve been to Romans Six, but we need to turn the page. Romans Seven tells us that even though we want to do good, we can’t. And the thing we don’t want to do, we do. Allow those failures to turn your eyes to the Lord Jesus who has already beaten Sin.
I’ve penned much about failure in general. But for the Believer, failure to become Christ-like is the means by which God points us back to the cross. The greatest lesson any Christian can learn is that they cannot live the Christian life. It’s not something to be imitated. It’s not about being Christ-like. It’s about Christ being himself through you. The life of Christ is in you, and it is intended to grow and produce fruit. The Christian life is not a skyscraper to be built, but a tree to be watered and exposed to the sun. When our failure to make ourselves more like Christ becomes painfully apparent, we then have the wonderful opportunity of looking to Jesus himself and finding that he doesn’t need or want you to try. He wants to live His life through us. We get in the way far too often.
Failure is our friend. Stop-signs are gifts. Pay attention. If it looks like God is telling you to cease and desist, put your hands up and let Him arrest you. In the Book of Acts we find Paul and Silas in a Philippian Jail, and ecstatic about it. They were singing at midnight. They knew that God was saying, here is where I want you. God has put you right where he wants you, and is waiting for you to simply resign yourself to it. Even Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Don’t just slow down – come to a complete stop, and wait to see if the way is clear. You may even need to turn around.
The truth is, they are. And no, you can’t blame the devil. He’s pretty much a mad dog on a rope that God gives some slack from time to time. It’s the Lord who plans our little downfalls. And it’s love that drives him to it. What people don’t realize is that God is always trying to shut down our efforts, and frustrate our attempts at making a life for ourselves, so that we will simply take from him the life he offers. He will eventually let us have our way if we continue pushing his hand away. You may have heard many a motivational speaker talk about setbacks and tell you that they are simply opportunities in disguise. No they’re not. The disappointments we face in life are simply the Lord saying, “No, don’t go that way.” They are divine stop-signs that you really shouldn’t drive through.
Too often there is this idea in our heads that we need to do something great for God, when all the while God has done something great for us that we simply ignore. King David is a perfect illustration of this. In 2nd Samuel chapter 7, we find David sitting in his lovely cedar home, telling Nathan the prophet that he would like to build a similar house for the Ark of God. You see, the Ark symbolized the presence of God on earth. It’s actually a wonderful picture of Christ. Inside it was Aaron’s rod that budded, the tablets of stone the commandments were written on, and the jar of manna. Those three things are each symbols of Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But David is moved to do something for God, and even Nate thinks it’s a great idea. The trouble was, God didn’t.
We are dreamers. Our imaginations can run wild and we can conjure up such wonderful ideas. But no matter how wild they are, they are never as wild as God’s. David was thinking too small. He was thinking of building a material, earthly house for God’s presence to dwell in. God was thinking so much bigger. He envisioned a house, but one that would outlast the earth. He was going to make a house out of us, not out of cedar or stone. Reborn, new creations in Christ are the very temple of God, that is presently being built. When David was told this, he gladly traded his dream for God’s. It left him speechless.
There are two paths in life. You can either take the life you’ve been given, or you can make one for yourself. “Life is what you make of it” the world says. Well, it can be what you make it, or it can be so much more. The Lord has put a staggering amount of thought into our lives. The apostle Paul said it this way when he was in Athens,
“God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” Acts 17:24-27
Notice that God determines when and where each of us lives. Each of us. Each of the 6 billion souls on the planet have been carefully planted right where God wanted, and right when God wanted. That shows his incredible sovereignty, doesn’t it? But there is more. Paul also said that the purpose of this meticulous people-planting by the Great Gardener, is “so that they should seek the Lord.” The events of our lives are designed to raise our eyes to our Maker.
And the Lord uses hard times to do it. Good times just don’t work. God graciously gives sun and rain, harvest after harvest, blessing and peace, prosperity and health, and all the while we pat ourselves on the back thinking it was all us. Isn’t it amazing that when something good happens we take the credit for it, but when something bad happens it’s the thing we put to God’s account? God gets blamed for the catastrophes of life with fists shaking in the air. Well, it’s staggering how close to the truth we can be and still not see it. It IS God’s fault. All of it. Blame Him. He wants you to. Give Him credit for toppling your house of cards. Thank Him for it while you’re at it.
How often do bad things happen in life? Every day? Every hour? Every second? Yes, yes and yes. Just how badly do you think God is trying to get our attention? Every disturbance, every tragedy, every failure, every minor setback and every catastrophic event is a wake-up call from the Lord. But we just keep blowing stop-signs. I once heard someone call them “Stoptionals.” The Lord lovingly brings us to our knees so that we can acknowledge that we need Him. We first discover our need for God when the guilt of our sins has crippled us. It’s then that we find Christ as the gracious gift that He is. There are more discoveries to be made. There are uncharted waters for each of us. Failure reveals our deep needs. We wouldn’t know them otherwise. God is always trying to reveal them to us, but we think it’s either bad luck or that we are being punished in some way. Wrong on both counts. The Lord is to be praised for the very things he is most often jeered for.
For those of us who have our sins forgiven – who have God’s money in the bank, in the currency of the blood of Christ, to pay for any and every debt still to come – failure still has a new lesson for us. We need to learn that sin is too big for us to handle on our own. Initially, it seems that God gives us easy victories over certain vices. New Christians seem to be able to quit smoking, give up alcohol, stop gambling, etc… cold-turkey. Excitement is there at the new birth. But it doesn’t last. Christians are still capable of gross sin. You hear about it all the time. It’s heart-breaking, but it needs to happen. The Lord who saved us, wants us to know what we have been saved from. We really have been saved from sin.
Many come to know Christ at an early age. Four and five-year-olds can truly receive the Lord as Saviour. Have they sinned? By the time they are four, they have lied, stolen, and been disobedient enough to have a wheelbarrow full of guilt over it. But at the same time, they would not know anything compared to a teenage sinner. A fifteen year old can be real monster. I know, because I was one. I had the mouth of a sailor and the eyes of Samson. The thing to remember though, is that both the four year-old and the teenager have the same sin nature. A murderer and rapist who comes to Christ is not more forgiven than a child who comes with a stolen cookie in his mouth. Sin is the same in everyone. Sins differ, but they come with opportunity. A shark in a cage, is a shark that would eat a whole tank of dolphins if it could. Jesus taught this when he talked about anger being equal to murder, and lust equal to adultery. “It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean” he said. But no matter how awful your sins are, you still don’t know what you are fully capable of.
Sin often plays it safe. It will make a glutton of someone rather than a murderer, because it is less conspicuous. It doesn’t seem so bad. But sin needs to be exposed for what it is. It is the very heart of the devil. And it’s in you and me. It would rather you think it under control than for you to look at Jesus on the cross and see that it took the death of the Son of God to beat it. Nothing else could do it. It’s that bad. We need God’s stop-signs to alert us to the danger of trying to go toe-to-toe with Sin. It will win every time if we do. We’ve been to Romans Six, but we need to turn the page. Romans Seven tells us that even though we want to do good, we can’t. And the thing we don’t want to do, we do. Allow those failures to turn your eyes to the Lord Jesus who has already beaten Sin.
I’ve penned much about failure in general. But for the Believer, failure to become Christ-like is the means by which God points us back to the cross. The greatest lesson any Christian can learn is that they cannot live the Christian life. It’s not something to be imitated. It’s not about being Christ-like. It’s about Christ being himself through you. The life of Christ is in you, and it is intended to grow and produce fruit. The Christian life is not a skyscraper to be built, but a tree to be watered and exposed to the sun. When our failure to make ourselves more like Christ becomes painfully apparent, we then have the wonderful opportunity of looking to Jesus himself and finding that he doesn’t need or want you to try. He wants to live His life through us. We get in the way far too often.
Failure is our friend. Stop-signs are gifts. Pay attention. If it looks like God is telling you to cease and desist, put your hands up and let Him arrest you. In the Book of Acts we find Paul and Silas in a Philippian Jail, and ecstatic about it. They were singing at midnight. They knew that God was saying, here is where I want you. God has put you right where he wants you, and is waiting for you to simply resign yourself to it. Even Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Don’t just slow down – come to a complete stop, and wait to see if the way is clear. You may even need to turn around.
4. Night And Day
Let’s continue to unzip the sky. God does it every day, actually. We have this thing called a transparent atmosphere. It looks blue during the day when the sun shines on it, but at night we see straight through. Unzipped. Unbuttoned. Unveiled. It takes night to do it. When the sun hides it’s face from us, we get a chance to feel really small in this gargantuan universe the Lord of Heaven and Earth has made. He is so good to give us illustrations of deep truths that are in front of us every day. The most important one is the sun itself. This blue planet we walk on is absolutely and utterly dependent on something 150 million kilometers away. It affects the tiniest green plant with this artful process called photosynthesis. Oxygen is produced and we get to keep breathing. Brilliant really. But it was dark first. That’s what the Bible says.
Light was not the first thing made. It was the first thing that was spoken into existence, but “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void.” Genesis 1:1 It was dark. To punctuate the idea, every time a day of creation came to a close, we read, “and there was evening and morning, day one… two… three”. Day starts with evening. Jews today still include this as a part of their worldview. This principle must be crystal for us if we are going to get anywhere near the good news of Jesus. What came first, his resurrection, or his death?
Night precedes day, and death precedes life. You might be saying to yourself, “wait a second… did you just say caskets first, pacifiers second?” Yes I did. Spiritually speaking, death comes before life. Death is good news. Jesus came to die. That was his primary focus, and he went unblinkingly to it. He knew that it must come first before there could be any real life for those who put their faith in him. We were thinking just a minute ago about being able to see through our “see-through” atmosphere, to the blackness beyond. One thought here, is that you have to know dark before you stop taking light for granted. You have to know that you need light. You have to ache for it like they do in Nunavut after their month-long night. You need to know that death is what you really want.
Once again, spiritual death comes before spiritual life. That means, that in order for a person to spiritually live, they need to spiritually die. Jesus provides life for us by first providing death. Going back to Romans Six, verse three says, “do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” Don’t get too hung up on that word ‘baptized’. It just means ‘dipped’ or ‘immersed’. Having faith in Jesus as Saviour means that you were put into Him. Just like old Noah went into the ark to be saved from the flood, we are placed in Christ to be saved. Part of being put there, involves our death with Him. His death included us.
Let’s back up just a little. We started out by looking at how dark preceded light. Night – then Day. At night we look up through our transparent atmosphere and see into deep space. In a previous chapter we dealt with the idea that it takes a while before you are ready to take a second look at Jesus and find a whole lot more there than you initially thought. But when you see stars at night, you are seeing places that you can never get to. Light from stars takes, literally, an astronomical amount of time to get to us. Now, when God made stars he also made the light between them and us, but for us to get to them, it would take millions of ‘light-years’. The Bible is like looking into outer space. We read about Jesus saying, “Be perfect just as your Father in Heaven in perfect.” We read that we should love others as Christ loved us – and died for us. We are to have all this fruit of the Spirit, and be conformed to the image of Christ. We are supposed to be like Jesus. That is star-gazing if ever I heard it. You just can’t get there! Trying to be like Jesus is like trying to get to the Andromeda galaxy. It can’t be done.
But hold on. What if stars come to us? They live to be light to us. That is their purpose. God said so back in Genesis – “for signs and seasons.” They come to us in those rays of light that reach our very eyes. Those rays are like hands stretching out from places we can never get to, so that these places can come to us. Reading the Bible should make us feel like we’re star-gazing, but it should also include the discovery that galaxies have made the journey of light-years to get to us. Hearing the Gospel is realizing that God in Christ already paid your ransom. Getting saved does not involve us doing any of the saving ourselves. We are saved purely by Christ, by His grace. The same is true in the realm of living after-the-fact of salvation. We need the revelation that not only has God dealt with the fines for the sins we produce, but that he has already provided the kill-switch for the sin factory. Jesus paid for our sins, and he shut the plant down too. The universe just showed up.
Night and day. The Bible tells us that the darkness of death must come first. Death is the fear of all mankind, and yet God turned everything on its head and made death something to hope in. Sin is a monster with so many teeth, that the only escape from it is death. God created the world as a great object lesson to this effect. Think about agriculture for a moment. Even though farmers today use a lot of technology to produce crops, the simple process of germination remains the same. A seed goes into the ground and must die before it can reproduce. It breaks open, exposing itself to the earth so that it can sprout and push its way back to the surface. Is it not amazing to you that a great oak tree can come from such a small seed? Jesus used this exact metaphor when describing what he came to do. He said, “unless it (the seed) dies, it remains alone.” Death is the entrance into life.
God also illustrated this, by doing something rather remarkable the moment Jesus died. There was an earthquake, and Matthew tells us that after Christ yielded up his spirit, tombs opened and some saints rose from the dead and went back to hang out with old friends in Jerusalem. In case that was not enough, God then punctuated the moment by ripping the veil that hung in front of the Holy-of-Holies in the Temple. It was torn from top to bottom – a curtain as thick as the span of a man’s hand. Getting behind that veil was impossible for anybody but the High Priest. But God was saying here, “Come on in.” This all happened at the time of Jesus’ death.
So, if death must come first before there is life, then how do we die? Many times I have heard people tell me that in order to grow as a Christian you need to “die to self.” It’s the concept of self-denial. You really want both bacon and cheese on your burger, but you know you should stick to lettuce and tomato. Ok, there is some benefit to self-denial. Your arteries will thank you. But that is not how we die. We don’t do it. An old Chinese Evangelist named Watchman Nee used this illustration: Crucifixion is the death God chose for us. By it’s very nature, it cannot be self-inflicted. You cannot crucify yourself. You could get the nail through your ankles, and maybe even one into your left wrist – but the last nail would have to be done by another. Someone has to do it for us, and once again, the truth is – Someone has. The question to ask is not what do we do, but what has God already done? He has provided our crucifixion already. We have been crucified with Christ. It doesn’t feel like it, because we have been raised with Him also. But it happened. Just as surely as you’ve been born-again, you died first. Dark came first, then light.
The Old Testament is saturated with stories about going from death to life. Abraham was told that he and Sarah would have a son, but death was there twice over. Sarah was barren and they were both old. But it happened. They tried to go around God’s plan and involve poor Hagar, but Isaac did come. He came in a way that only God could bring to pass. That’s the only way they knew it was Him that did it. Mephibosheth should have been the last person in the world to ever eat at King David’s table, but there he was, all the same. Lame feet and all. He called himself a “dead dog” when David’s invitation came. It’s in the New Testament as well. No more so than when the Lord Jesus was on the cross. It got dark in the middle of the day. It was no eclipse, because it lasted for 3 hours. Jesus yelled, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But then the light returned. It got dark because God was doing to His Son what we had coming to us. Left in our sins, we would be in a Godless eternity. Christ was forsaken by His Father, so that we wouldn’t have to be. It got dark for Him, so that there would be light for us. He stepped into God the Father’s shadow, so that we could bask in the Son.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead. After he had taken our sins on himself and the very wrath of God as well, he left the tomb. The darkness of that grave vanished as the stone was rolled away by the angel. But Jesus was already gone. Resurrection meant that the impossible was no longer an issue. He didn’t have to wait for the stone to be moved before He could leave. That is the kind of life that has gotten into us. But it’s all because of that dark thing called the cross. It cast a shadow over His whole life, as it should ours. Sin cowers under that shadow. Only there do we see sin beaten.
Let night do it’s job. Let the darkness show you the stars. Allow the disappointments and frustrations of life to redirect your heart to the one who said, “It is finished.” The accomplishment of the Cross should be our preoccupation. The death of Jesus is hope for new life. Night – then day. Death – then resurrection. The only way to know that something is of God, is that it can survive death. Death is the worst this world can do. So God begins there, to show that our greatest weakness, is his greatest strength. Our day starts with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is that grain of wheat that went into the ground to die, but has been raised bearing fruit – you and me. The principle of death should be welcomed when we see what God did with it. The difference is night and day.
Light was not the first thing made. It was the first thing that was spoken into existence, but “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void.” Genesis 1:1 It was dark. To punctuate the idea, every time a day of creation came to a close, we read, “and there was evening and morning, day one… two… three”. Day starts with evening. Jews today still include this as a part of their worldview. This principle must be crystal for us if we are going to get anywhere near the good news of Jesus. What came first, his resurrection, or his death?
Night precedes day, and death precedes life. You might be saying to yourself, “wait a second… did you just say caskets first, pacifiers second?” Yes I did. Spiritually speaking, death comes before life. Death is good news. Jesus came to die. That was his primary focus, and he went unblinkingly to it. He knew that it must come first before there could be any real life for those who put their faith in him. We were thinking just a minute ago about being able to see through our “see-through” atmosphere, to the blackness beyond. One thought here, is that you have to know dark before you stop taking light for granted. You have to know that you need light. You have to ache for it like they do in Nunavut after their month-long night. You need to know that death is what you really want.
Once again, spiritual death comes before spiritual life. That means, that in order for a person to spiritually live, they need to spiritually die. Jesus provides life for us by first providing death. Going back to Romans Six, verse three says, “do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” Don’t get too hung up on that word ‘baptized’. It just means ‘dipped’ or ‘immersed’. Having faith in Jesus as Saviour means that you were put into Him. Just like old Noah went into the ark to be saved from the flood, we are placed in Christ to be saved. Part of being put there, involves our death with Him. His death included us.
Let’s back up just a little. We started out by looking at how dark preceded light. Night – then Day. At night we look up through our transparent atmosphere and see into deep space. In a previous chapter we dealt with the idea that it takes a while before you are ready to take a second look at Jesus and find a whole lot more there than you initially thought. But when you see stars at night, you are seeing places that you can never get to. Light from stars takes, literally, an astronomical amount of time to get to us. Now, when God made stars he also made the light between them and us, but for us to get to them, it would take millions of ‘light-years’. The Bible is like looking into outer space. We read about Jesus saying, “Be perfect just as your Father in Heaven in perfect.” We read that we should love others as Christ loved us – and died for us. We are to have all this fruit of the Spirit, and be conformed to the image of Christ. We are supposed to be like Jesus. That is star-gazing if ever I heard it. You just can’t get there! Trying to be like Jesus is like trying to get to the Andromeda galaxy. It can’t be done.
But hold on. What if stars come to us? They live to be light to us. That is their purpose. God said so back in Genesis – “for signs and seasons.” They come to us in those rays of light that reach our very eyes. Those rays are like hands stretching out from places we can never get to, so that these places can come to us. Reading the Bible should make us feel like we’re star-gazing, but it should also include the discovery that galaxies have made the journey of light-years to get to us. Hearing the Gospel is realizing that God in Christ already paid your ransom. Getting saved does not involve us doing any of the saving ourselves. We are saved purely by Christ, by His grace. The same is true in the realm of living after-the-fact of salvation. We need the revelation that not only has God dealt with the fines for the sins we produce, but that he has already provided the kill-switch for the sin factory. Jesus paid for our sins, and he shut the plant down too. The universe just showed up.
Night and day. The Bible tells us that the darkness of death must come first. Death is the fear of all mankind, and yet God turned everything on its head and made death something to hope in. Sin is a monster with so many teeth, that the only escape from it is death. God created the world as a great object lesson to this effect. Think about agriculture for a moment. Even though farmers today use a lot of technology to produce crops, the simple process of germination remains the same. A seed goes into the ground and must die before it can reproduce. It breaks open, exposing itself to the earth so that it can sprout and push its way back to the surface. Is it not amazing to you that a great oak tree can come from such a small seed? Jesus used this exact metaphor when describing what he came to do. He said, “unless it (the seed) dies, it remains alone.” Death is the entrance into life.
God also illustrated this, by doing something rather remarkable the moment Jesus died. There was an earthquake, and Matthew tells us that after Christ yielded up his spirit, tombs opened and some saints rose from the dead and went back to hang out with old friends in Jerusalem. In case that was not enough, God then punctuated the moment by ripping the veil that hung in front of the Holy-of-Holies in the Temple. It was torn from top to bottom – a curtain as thick as the span of a man’s hand. Getting behind that veil was impossible for anybody but the High Priest. But God was saying here, “Come on in.” This all happened at the time of Jesus’ death.
So, if death must come first before there is life, then how do we die? Many times I have heard people tell me that in order to grow as a Christian you need to “die to self.” It’s the concept of self-denial. You really want both bacon and cheese on your burger, but you know you should stick to lettuce and tomato. Ok, there is some benefit to self-denial. Your arteries will thank you. But that is not how we die. We don’t do it. An old Chinese Evangelist named Watchman Nee used this illustration: Crucifixion is the death God chose for us. By it’s very nature, it cannot be self-inflicted. You cannot crucify yourself. You could get the nail through your ankles, and maybe even one into your left wrist – but the last nail would have to be done by another. Someone has to do it for us, and once again, the truth is – Someone has. The question to ask is not what do we do, but what has God already done? He has provided our crucifixion already. We have been crucified with Christ. It doesn’t feel like it, because we have been raised with Him also. But it happened. Just as surely as you’ve been born-again, you died first. Dark came first, then light.
The Old Testament is saturated with stories about going from death to life. Abraham was told that he and Sarah would have a son, but death was there twice over. Sarah was barren and they were both old. But it happened. They tried to go around God’s plan and involve poor Hagar, but Isaac did come. He came in a way that only God could bring to pass. That’s the only way they knew it was Him that did it. Mephibosheth should have been the last person in the world to ever eat at King David’s table, but there he was, all the same. Lame feet and all. He called himself a “dead dog” when David’s invitation came. It’s in the New Testament as well. No more so than when the Lord Jesus was on the cross. It got dark in the middle of the day. It was no eclipse, because it lasted for 3 hours. Jesus yelled, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But then the light returned. It got dark because God was doing to His Son what we had coming to us. Left in our sins, we would be in a Godless eternity. Christ was forsaken by His Father, so that we wouldn’t have to be. It got dark for Him, so that there would be light for us. He stepped into God the Father’s shadow, so that we could bask in the Son.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead. After he had taken our sins on himself and the very wrath of God as well, he left the tomb. The darkness of that grave vanished as the stone was rolled away by the angel. But Jesus was already gone. Resurrection meant that the impossible was no longer an issue. He didn’t have to wait for the stone to be moved before He could leave. That is the kind of life that has gotten into us. But it’s all because of that dark thing called the cross. It cast a shadow over His whole life, as it should ours. Sin cowers under that shadow. Only there do we see sin beaten.
Let night do it’s job. Let the darkness show you the stars. Allow the disappointments and frustrations of life to redirect your heart to the one who said, “It is finished.” The accomplishment of the Cross should be our preoccupation. The death of Jesus is hope for new life. Night – then day. Death – then resurrection. The only way to know that something is of God, is that it can survive death. Death is the worst this world can do. So God begins there, to show that our greatest weakness, is his greatest strength. Our day starts with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is that grain of wheat that went into the ground to die, but has been raised bearing fruit – you and me. The principle of death should be welcomed when we see what God did with it. The difference is night and day.
5. Big Little Words
One of the most important questions in the world is: What is a Christian? It’s a great conversation starter. You can get a whole host of answers. “I was born a Christian” some say. “I’m a card-carrying member of the church” another will reply. “I read the Bible and pray” still another will say. Or from those who really are saved, many times the definition will come in the form of attitudes and behaviours that are suitable for saints. But Christians are not defined by their actions. “Fruit-inspecting” is not a safe way to determine whether or not a person has been spiritually reborn. Plastic fruit has fooled me many a time. So, what is a Christian then?
I love the Bible. One of the reasons for this is because it is a living book. It surprises me with it’s movements all the time. Verses that I thought I knew, turn their faces toward the Son to reveal something about themselves that I never saw before. Take John 3:16 for instance. Do you know what the literal translation of that verse really is? It goes this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes INTO him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” That word “into” sounds strange, doesn’t it? When the Philippian Jailer asked Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved, Paul answered, “Believe ON the Lord Jesus Christ.” Another strange sounding phrase. But these words “into” and “on” are really important when defining a Christian. A Christian doesn’t just believe “in” Jesus. He or she believes INTO him and ON him. Big little words.
Believing in something is merely recognizing its existence. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I do believe in Christ. I believe He was born around two millennia ago and that he died around the age of 33. But I think you can even believe that he rose again from the dead and still not be a Christian. A Christian pours his or her belief, emptying it into Christ. Paul said, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” That’s what I’m talking about. For the Christian, God is right even when everyone else is saying the opposite. The Christian doesn’t try to fit God into his or her system of belief. Christians make God’s beliefs theirs. That’s what that little word “into” is all about. You trade in your beliefs, for the Lord’s.
What about the word “on”? Believing ON Jesus is best illustrated by the man these words were spoken to. The Jailer fell down on his face before Paul and Silas. He was not standing on his own two feet anymore. Believing ON Jesus is coming to rest on him. It’s not an action. It’s a cessation of activity. We are saved by grace. That means that we have no part in that. Christ does the saving. The second you contribute even the slightest, it ceases to be grace. So, a Christian puts down his sack of beliefs on Jesus’ shoulders. Then He carries them for you. This was beautifully expressed by the Father of a demon-possessed boy in Mark 9 when he said, “Lord, I believe… Help my unbelief!” That’s believing ON Jesus. It’s saying you can only believe if He helps you.
There’s another little word that may be helpful in discovering just what a Christian is. We find it in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Did you spot it? We had to go to the good ol’ King James Version to get it, but it’s that big little word “of”. Paul wrote, “I live by the faith OF the Son of God”. Newer translations render that “by faith in the Son of God”, but that’s not true to the original language. Once again, there is some awkwardness to get over, but there is a big difference between my faith, and Jesus’ faith. Which would you rather live by?
Christ was faithful. He faithfully lived a perfect life here. He faithfully died a perfect death as well, being crucified for the sins of the world. His faith cannot fail. Mine does daily. My life in Him is based on His faith. He is faithful to me. His blood never fails. His resurrection life given to me is incorruptible. He stands in Heaven as my great high priest, interceding for me when I sin. He will return one day to remove me from the presence of sin. The quality of my life is dependent on whether or not I see his faithfulness as more important than my own. If I think my faith is the fulcrum, than I will teeter and totter my way through life, never finding balance. It is the faith OF the Son of God that I depend on daily. His faithfulness to me is much more important than mine. It is only when I am focused on His, that my own will be what it should be.
Into, On and Of are all big little words. But there’s one more that we should take some time to zero in on. It’s the word, IN. When defining a Christian, this word is paramount. Especially when it is joined to the word, “Christ”. The phrase “in Christ” dominates the New Testament letters. Before salvation, we are all “in Adam”. That should be an easy one to see. The whole race of mankind was in Adam when God made him. We were all there, in potential, right? Even Eve was there. That’s why God pulled her out during Adam’s little nap. We start off being born “in Adam”, but faith places us “in Christ”. There are only two men as far as God is concerned. We are either in Adam or Christ.
You see, Jesus Christ is actually the second creation of man. The Son of God had no beginning, but in becoming a man, he began a new race – a new line. Adam is the natural, physical line of humanity. But Jesus is the spiritual, supernatural line that anyone can become a part of, simply by believing (being convinced) that Jesus died for him or her. You get plucked out of the old family tree, and grafted into the new one. That makes you “in Christ”.
Right before the Lord Jesus went to the cross, he took some time to explain things to his friends. He called himself the Vine. And then he told them that they are the branches. He told them that each of them is “a branch in me.” A branch shares the same root structure as the vine. The sap that flows through the branches first came from the vine. Reborn new creations in Christ share his life. Peter wrote that we are “partakers of the divine nature.” That’s what it means to be “in” him. When you come to rest your beliefs on Jesus, you’re IN.
There is another thought here. “In Christ” means that you are secure and safe, just as Noah and his family were safe from the ravages of the flood, inside the ark. In Romans 8, we read the words, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Even though we can experience Romans 7 from time to time – not doing the things we want to do and doing the things we don’t want to do – we must trust that we are still free from the judgment of God. We will need to have our fellowship with the Lord reestablished, through confession of sins, but we need never fear banishment. Once we are in Christ, there is no getting out.
So, has this helped us to see what a Christian is? We could sink ships with books on the subject, but essentially, my hope is that it is clear that faith is the determining factor. “The just shall live by faith” we read, thanks to that prophet with such a great name – Habakkuk. (It sounds like a choking noise!) But faith is the issue. Am I a Christian? Well, underneath it all, I have a little live coal of faith that just keeps glowing. No “archeological proof” or revisionist historian has ever been able to put it out, even after dumping sky-scraper sized buckets of doubt on it. I’ve sounded foolish at times trying to explain it, and have looked silly doing some of the things its led me to do, but it’s Jesus’ fault. My faith is only anything because it has something to do with Him. You won’t talk me out of it. You may win the debate, but you’ll have lost me.
I identify with Peter quite a bit. He swore to a little girl that he did not know Jesus of Nazareth. But you know what? Where were Peter’s eyes when Jesus looked at him? I may swear to you that I don’t know him, but I won’t fool Him. That’s faith. May these four big little words: Into, On, Of and In – help you to understand faith. It’s all about the object of faith – the Lord Jesus. The one who loved me – and you – and gave himself to prove it. After all, it’s the object of faith that makes saving faith saving, not the faith.
I love the Bible. One of the reasons for this is because it is a living book. It surprises me with it’s movements all the time. Verses that I thought I knew, turn their faces toward the Son to reveal something about themselves that I never saw before. Take John 3:16 for instance. Do you know what the literal translation of that verse really is? It goes this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes INTO him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” That word “into” sounds strange, doesn’t it? When the Philippian Jailer asked Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved, Paul answered, “Believe ON the Lord Jesus Christ.” Another strange sounding phrase. But these words “into” and “on” are really important when defining a Christian. A Christian doesn’t just believe “in” Jesus. He or she believes INTO him and ON him. Big little words.
Believing in something is merely recognizing its existence. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I do believe in Christ. I believe He was born around two millennia ago and that he died around the age of 33. But I think you can even believe that he rose again from the dead and still not be a Christian. A Christian pours his or her belief, emptying it into Christ. Paul said, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” That’s what I’m talking about. For the Christian, God is right even when everyone else is saying the opposite. The Christian doesn’t try to fit God into his or her system of belief. Christians make God’s beliefs theirs. That’s what that little word “into” is all about. You trade in your beliefs, for the Lord’s.
What about the word “on”? Believing ON Jesus is best illustrated by the man these words were spoken to. The Jailer fell down on his face before Paul and Silas. He was not standing on his own two feet anymore. Believing ON Jesus is coming to rest on him. It’s not an action. It’s a cessation of activity. We are saved by grace. That means that we have no part in that. Christ does the saving. The second you contribute even the slightest, it ceases to be grace. So, a Christian puts down his sack of beliefs on Jesus’ shoulders. Then He carries them for you. This was beautifully expressed by the Father of a demon-possessed boy in Mark 9 when he said, “Lord, I believe… Help my unbelief!” That’s believing ON Jesus. It’s saying you can only believe if He helps you.
There’s another little word that may be helpful in discovering just what a Christian is. We find it in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Did you spot it? We had to go to the good ol’ King James Version to get it, but it’s that big little word “of”. Paul wrote, “I live by the faith OF the Son of God”. Newer translations render that “by faith in the Son of God”, but that’s not true to the original language. Once again, there is some awkwardness to get over, but there is a big difference between my faith, and Jesus’ faith. Which would you rather live by?
Christ was faithful. He faithfully lived a perfect life here. He faithfully died a perfect death as well, being crucified for the sins of the world. His faith cannot fail. Mine does daily. My life in Him is based on His faith. He is faithful to me. His blood never fails. His resurrection life given to me is incorruptible. He stands in Heaven as my great high priest, interceding for me when I sin. He will return one day to remove me from the presence of sin. The quality of my life is dependent on whether or not I see his faithfulness as more important than my own. If I think my faith is the fulcrum, than I will teeter and totter my way through life, never finding balance. It is the faith OF the Son of God that I depend on daily. His faithfulness to me is much more important than mine. It is only when I am focused on His, that my own will be what it should be.
Into, On and Of are all big little words. But there’s one more that we should take some time to zero in on. It’s the word, IN. When defining a Christian, this word is paramount. Especially when it is joined to the word, “Christ”. The phrase “in Christ” dominates the New Testament letters. Before salvation, we are all “in Adam”. That should be an easy one to see. The whole race of mankind was in Adam when God made him. We were all there, in potential, right? Even Eve was there. That’s why God pulled her out during Adam’s little nap. We start off being born “in Adam”, but faith places us “in Christ”. There are only two men as far as God is concerned. We are either in Adam or Christ.
You see, Jesus Christ is actually the second creation of man. The Son of God had no beginning, but in becoming a man, he began a new race – a new line. Adam is the natural, physical line of humanity. But Jesus is the spiritual, supernatural line that anyone can become a part of, simply by believing (being convinced) that Jesus died for him or her. You get plucked out of the old family tree, and grafted into the new one. That makes you “in Christ”.
Right before the Lord Jesus went to the cross, he took some time to explain things to his friends. He called himself the Vine. And then he told them that they are the branches. He told them that each of them is “a branch in me.” A branch shares the same root structure as the vine. The sap that flows through the branches first came from the vine. Reborn new creations in Christ share his life. Peter wrote that we are “partakers of the divine nature.” That’s what it means to be “in” him. When you come to rest your beliefs on Jesus, you’re IN.
There is another thought here. “In Christ” means that you are secure and safe, just as Noah and his family were safe from the ravages of the flood, inside the ark. In Romans 8, we read the words, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Even though we can experience Romans 7 from time to time – not doing the things we want to do and doing the things we don’t want to do – we must trust that we are still free from the judgment of God. We will need to have our fellowship with the Lord reestablished, through confession of sins, but we need never fear banishment. Once we are in Christ, there is no getting out.
So, has this helped us to see what a Christian is? We could sink ships with books on the subject, but essentially, my hope is that it is clear that faith is the determining factor. “The just shall live by faith” we read, thanks to that prophet with such a great name – Habakkuk. (It sounds like a choking noise!) But faith is the issue. Am I a Christian? Well, underneath it all, I have a little live coal of faith that just keeps glowing. No “archeological proof” or revisionist historian has ever been able to put it out, even after dumping sky-scraper sized buckets of doubt on it. I’ve sounded foolish at times trying to explain it, and have looked silly doing some of the things its led me to do, but it’s Jesus’ fault. My faith is only anything because it has something to do with Him. You won’t talk me out of it. You may win the debate, but you’ll have lost me.
I identify with Peter quite a bit. He swore to a little girl that he did not know Jesus of Nazareth. But you know what? Where were Peter’s eyes when Jesus looked at him? I may swear to you that I don’t know him, but I won’t fool Him. That’s faith. May these four big little words: Into, On, Of and In – help you to understand faith. It’s all about the object of faith – the Lord Jesus. The one who loved me – and you – and gave himself to prove it. After all, it’s the object of faith that makes saving faith saving, not the faith.
6. The Firebreak
There is a whole lot more to the death of Christ than any of us give God credit for. We begin seeing Jesus as the payment for the debt we racked up by sinning. But when we realize that there is still this criminal called Sin inside us, we get a little frantic and go to the authorities – the Self-Help movement. ‘We will help you help yourself’ they say. You read the books, you listen to the speakers, and you modify your behaviour accordingly. But Sin knows when to tone it down. It’s not dumb. It’s actually grinning from ear to ear because the very things you are now doing are in its territory. Trying to make yourself better is a slap in the face to God, because the cross emphatically says that God’s way is resurrection, not renovation. You make lemonade out of lemons, but not if they’re rotten.
So, we’re ready now to look a little closer at the Cross of Christ. How did Jesus do it? How did he beat Sin? I had a leak in my attic, and I didn’t know where to put the bucket, because the drip kept moving down the truss beam. A guy told me that all I had to do was create a “stop-gap” so that the drop would have to fall there. It meant cutting a little spot out of the wood. It was great – I made the drops go in my bucket. They had no choice. They had been stop-gapped. Jesus is the stop-gap where sin is concerned. With a forest-fire, one of the first things done is to create a firebreak. Guys with chainsaws go and cut a whack of trees down so that by the time the fire gets there, there is nothing for it to feed on. Jesus is our firebreak. He stopped sin on the cross.
How on Earth did he do that? Ask and you shall receive. Why did the stop-gap work in my attic? It came to an empty spot. By cutting a piece out of the wood, I stopped the drip from traveling any further. What about a firebreak? Once again, fire needs fuel. By removing the trees, the fire gets nothing more to eat up. Our forest fire is forced to go on a diet. So, in a similar way, Jesus is an empty spot. There is something about us that is missing from Christ. Sin plods along from parent to child, parent to child - Until Jesus. No sin there. Not-a-one. He was born without a sinful nature. Sin is like this raging fire that has consumed everything in it’s path until it comes to this place where all it needs is a single tree to jump to the next part of the forest. But that tree has been felled already. In that light, don’t you find it interesting that Jesus was hung on a cross – on a tree?
The Cross is our firebreak. Sin got to the cross, but went no further. Just as fire will lick at the empty air searching for something dry to bite onto, sin approached the Lord Jesus and found nothing to feed on. The Bible says, “He was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” He never gave in to a single temptation. Sin tried, and failed. The Devil tried tempting him in the desert, but Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to him and handed him his hat. Due to the fact that Jesus is missing sin, it has no choice but to stop at Him. But Sin still had to be directed His way. If it got around him somehow, we would still be in trouble.
The full brunt of sin was directed at Jesus. This raging fire was aimed right at him. Who aimed it? Well, who didn’t. The Jews, Rome, and Greeks all conspired against him. That means religious folks, government types, and the intelligentsia all got together and agreed that this perfect human being must die. But that’s not all. The Devil was involved too. Satan entered Judas, we are told, and had a hand in handing Jesus over to the Jewish officers. The Devil had wanted Jesus dead ever since he heard the promise in the Garden about the seed of the woman who would crush his head. It’s quite a group collected here so far, isn’t it? But there’s more. Not only did Jews, Rome, Greeks, and Satan want Jesus to die, but one more as well. Believe it or not, God the Father did too.
The Cross was not an accident. It was not something that the Lord turned around. He didn’t make the best of a bad situation. He’s the one that planned it along. We were thinking just a second ago about that promise in the Garden that got the Devil antsy. Well, part of that promise was that the heel of that promised one would be bruised. Then we read in Isaiah that “it pleased the Lord to bruise him.” Paul, explaining the cross to the Corinthians, said “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” God was involved – more than just involved – in the Cross. He was the mastermind behind it. He knew it was our only hope. He knew that sin needed to be confronted and dealt with, and the cross was the only way to do it. Why do you think it got dark for three hours when Jesus was up there? It was his father’s shadow.
So, sin was aimed at Christ by everybody – God the Father included. To be our firebreak, it had to be. If sin got around the cross, then we can still be burned by it. But it didn’t. It came to a head at Calvary. How? Well, everything else was already consumed wasn’t it? Sin had already licked up the dry tinder of all life on this earth. The ground is even cursed by sin. Sin infected all of life because of Adam’s disobedience. Born-again believers in Jesus did not exist yet. The firebreak was made so that future Christians could escape. But, with Jesus, sin saw an opportunity to get at something not yet scorched. That’s the way fire is. It has no prejudice – no bias. Anything not cooked, will be. It can burn cinder-blocks. But the fire of sin met its match with Christ. More than its match. It got fooled, actually. Sin thought it could consume Christ, because he let it at him. But Jesus was that fourth man in the fiery furnace way back in Daniel’s day. His presence there made the other three fire-proof as well. But fire doesn’t know something is fireproof until it experiments on it.
Sin was tricked by the Cross. It came at Christ with the heat of the sun behind it, but didn’t realize what Jesus was up to. When fire gets to a popsicle stick, it doesn’t waste a whole lot of time on it. When it gets to a 2,000 year old Sequoia tree named General Sherman (the largest in the world), it has quite the work out on its hands. It took all of the resources of sin to attack Christ. He let it. A verse we looked at earlier says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” Christ was made sin on the cross. That doesn’t mean that he sinned, but he was set ablaze by it, taking it all on himself like fire on a tree. What sin didn’t know, is that it would exhaust itself on him. And then it would be snuffed out.
Jesus died. He took sin upon himself, exhausted its resources and then yielded up his spirit to God. He willingly laid down his life, just as you would extinguish a candle. The incredible thing, is that the story doesn’t end there. He rose from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is life from the ashes of the Cross. Jesus snuffed out sin with his death, but was lit once again by God the Father when he rose that Sunday morning – right around the time General Sherman was a sapling. Christ, our firebreak, stopped the path of sin, but then offered something in its place. He offered himself. He took the fire of sin from us with his death, and with his resurrection he gives his own sinless life to be our life. The same life that wasted sin, is in you and I. It all stems from his resurrection. Our life with Christ began back when the mouth of the tomb yawned and the sun shone in there. We are all older than we know. That means you and I, and the General, go way back.
When Moses saw the Lord, it was in the form of a burning bush. But it was unlike any other fire Moses had ever seen. The bush was not consumed. It was still green. That fire did not reduce the plant to ash, but instead revealed Christ to us. God is a consuming fire, we are told. Isaiah says, “The strong shall be as tinder, And the work of it as a spark; Both will burn together, And no one shall quench them.” Humans are dry tinder, whose own works set themselves on fire. But not Christ. He became a man. He never stopped being God. The fire of his divinity and the green life of his humanity came together, and this is what we see in that burning bush. Jesus is a fire of another kind. The fire of sin only brought death, but the fire of Christ is a light that brings warmth with no fear of harm. We have the fire of Christ in us by faith in the living tree who was felled for us.
I hope this metaphor has been helpful. It’s just one side of the cross, but a crucial one to see. I hope it helps to answer the question of how Jesus stopped sin. Why does sin still trip us up? We will get to that. But before we get into practical matters, the theory has to be hammered into us. When Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus, he spent the first three chapters hitting home on the eternal truths that are true regardless of what condition we find ourselves in. He then expounds on practical issues – but only after using the word “therefore”. Why, what, where and when all come before how. The cross is the answer to those first four questions. The how has everything to do with them. If we think that sin was not stopped by Christ on the cross, then we are going to go about things quite differently. But it was stopped. Jesus did it. Where sin is concerned, there may be smoke, but that doesn’t mean there is fire. Fires smolder for some time after they’ve been put out.
So, we’re ready now to look a little closer at the Cross of Christ. How did Jesus do it? How did he beat Sin? I had a leak in my attic, and I didn’t know where to put the bucket, because the drip kept moving down the truss beam. A guy told me that all I had to do was create a “stop-gap” so that the drop would have to fall there. It meant cutting a little spot out of the wood. It was great – I made the drops go in my bucket. They had no choice. They had been stop-gapped. Jesus is the stop-gap where sin is concerned. With a forest-fire, one of the first things done is to create a firebreak. Guys with chainsaws go and cut a whack of trees down so that by the time the fire gets there, there is nothing for it to feed on. Jesus is our firebreak. He stopped sin on the cross.
How on Earth did he do that? Ask and you shall receive. Why did the stop-gap work in my attic? It came to an empty spot. By cutting a piece out of the wood, I stopped the drip from traveling any further. What about a firebreak? Once again, fire needs fuel. By removing the trees, the fire gets nothing more to eat up. Our forest fire is forced to go on a diet. So, in a similar way, Jesus is an empty spot. There is something about us that is missing from Christ. Sin plods along from parent to child, parent to child - Until Jesus. No sin there. Not-a-one. He was born without a sinful nature. Sin is like this raging fire that has consumed everything in it’s path until it comes to this place where all it needs is a single tree to jump to the next part of the forest. But that tree has been felled already. In that light, don’t you find it interesting that Jesus was hung on a cross – on a tree?
The Cross is our firebreak. Sin got to the cross, but went no further. Just as fire will lick at the empty air searching for something dry to bite onto, sin approached the Lord Jesus and found nothing to feed on. The Bible says, “He was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” He never gave in to a single temptation. Sin tried, and failed. The Devil tried tempting him in the desert, but Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to him and handed him his hat. Due to the fact that Jesus is missing sin, it has no choice but to stop at Him. But Sin still had to be directed His way. If it got around him somehow, we would still be in trouble.
The full brunt of sin was directed at Jesus. This raging fire was aimed right at him. Who aimed it? Well, who didn’t. The Jews, Rome, and Greeks all conspired against him. That means religious folks, government types, and the intelligentsia all got together and agreed that this perfect human being must die. But that’s not all. The Devil was involved too. Satan entered Judas, we are told, and had a hand in handing Jesus over to the Jewish officers. The Devil had wanted Jesus dead ever since he heard the promise in the Garden about the seed of the woman who would crush his head. It’s quite a group collected here so far, isn’t it? But there’s more. Not only did Jews, Rome, Greeks, and Satan want Jesus to die, but one more as well. Believe it or not, God the Father did too.
The Cross was not an accident. It was not something that the Lord turned around. He didn’t make the best of a bad situation. He’s the one that planned it along. We were thinking just a second ago about that promise in the Garden that got the Devil antsy. Well, part of that promise was that the heel of that promised one would be bruised. Then we read in Isaiah that “it pleased the Lord to bruise him.” Paul, explaining the cross to the Corinthians, said “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” God was involved – more than just involved – in the Cross. He was the mastermind behind it. He knew it was our only hope. He knew that sin needed to be confronted and dealt with, and the cross was the only way to do it. Why do you think it got dark for three hours when Jesus was up there? It was his father’s shadow.
So, sin was aimed at Christ by everybody – God the Father included. To be our firebreak, it had to be. If sin got around the cross, then we can still be burned by it. But it didn’t. It came to a head at Calvary. How? Well, everything else was already consumed wasn’t it? Sin had already licked up the dry tinder of all life on this earth. The ground is even cursed by sin. Sin infected all of life because of Adam’s disobedience. Born-again believers in Jesus did not exist yet. The firebreak was made so that future Christians could escape. But, with Jesus, sin saw an opportunity to get at something not yet scorched. That’s the way fire is. It has no prejudice – no bias. Anything not cooked, will be. It can burn cinder-blocks. But the fire of sin met its match with Christ. More than its match. It got fooled, actually. Sin thought it could consume Christ, because he let it at him. But Jesus was that fourth man in the fiery furnace way back in Daniel’s day. His presence there made the other three fire-proof as well. But fire doesn’t know something is fireproof until it experiments on it.
Sin was tricked by the Cross. It came at Christ with the heat of the sun behind it, but didn’t realize what Jesus was up to. When fire gets to a popsicle stick, it doesn’t waste a whole lot of time on it. When it gets to a 2,000 year old Sequoia tree named General Sherman (the largest in the world), it has quite the work out on its hands. It took all of the resources of sin to attack Christ. He let it. A verse we looked at earlier says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” Christ was made sin on the cross. That doesn’t mean that he sinned, but he was set ablaze by it, taking it all on himself like fire on a tree. What sin didn’t know, is that it would exhaust itself on him. And then it would be snuffed out.
Jesus died. He took sin upon himself, exhausted its resources and then yielded up his spirit to God. He willingly laid down his life, just as you would extinguish a candle. The incredible thing, is that the story doesn’t end there. He rose from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is life from the ashes of the Cross. Jesus snuffed out sin with his death, but was lit once again by God the Father when he rose that Sunday morning – right around the time General Sherman was a sapling. Christ, our firebreak, stopped the path of sin, but then offered something in its place. He offered himself. He took the fire of sin from us with his death, and with his resurrection he gives his own sinless life to be our life. The same life that wasted sin, is in you and I. It all stems from his resurrection. Our life with Christ began back when the mouth of the tomb yawned and the sun shone in there. We are all older than we know. That means you and I, and the General, go way back.
When Moses saw the Lord, it was in the form of a burning bush. But it was unlike any other fire Moses had ever seen. The bush was not consumed. It was still green. That fire did not reduce the plant to ash, but instead revealed Christ to us. God is a consuming fire, we are told. Isaiah says, “The strong shall be as tinder, And the work of it as a spark; Both will burn together, And no one shall quench them.” Humans are dry tinder, whose own works set themselves on fire. But not Christ. He became a man. He never stopped being God. The fire of his divinity and the green life of his humanity came together, and this is what we see in that burning bush. Jesus is a fire of another kind. The fire of sin only brought death, but the fire of Christ is a light that brings warmth with no fear of harm. We have the fire of Christ in us by faith in the living tree who was felled for us.
I hope this metaphor has been helpful. It’s just one side of the cross, but a crucial one to see. I hope it helps to answer the question of how Jesus stopped sin. Why does sin still trip us up? We will get to that. But before we get into practical matters, the theory has to be hammered into us. When Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus, he spent the first three chapters hitting home on the eternal truths that are true regardless of what condition we find ourselves in. He then expounds on practical issues – but only after using the word “therefore”. Why, what, where and when all come before how. The cross is the answer to those first four questions. The how has everything to do with them. If we think that sin was not stopped by Christ on the cross, then we are going to go about things quite differently. But it was stopped. Jesus did it. Where sin is concerned, there may be smoke, but that doesn’t mean there is fire. Fires smolder for some time after they’ve been put out.
7. Dead On Arrival
“Oh, I just died when you said that.” “I’m dead tired.” “I’m dying to tell you something.” “I’m dead meat.” We say things like this. They’re called euphemisms. But I think there is a secret in this common usage of the concept of death that is worth taking a peek into. There is some truth when we say “you kill me.”
What is death anyway? Well, whatever it is, it’s not cessation of life. Sure, a person stops breathing and they stiffen up after a while, but there is more to us than a pulse. We are more than just a bundle of minerals and proteins. Scientists can tell us how physical things work, but when we get into the realm of the metaphysical – the spiritual world – we have to leave that to those better equipped to look into such things. Enter, the Bible. It says that death does not stop a person from living. It also says that living does not stop a person from being dead.
Alright, let’s better define death, so we can understand that odd sounding sentence above. If living does not stop a person from being dead, then death must be something that is not diametrically opposed to life. We often think that it is. Kids learn about opposites in Kindergarten. The opposite of open is closed. The opposite of black is white. The opposite of peanut butter is really hard to find but you have to try thanks to all these anaphylactic children in school. But the opposite of life is not death. Oh, it is if you have a real narrow definition for the word life. If you think life is simply breathing, then when you stop breathing, you can call it death, I guess, if you really want to. But you can do better than that.
Biblically, death is not simply being corpse-ish. In the Bible, death means “separation.” When a person physically dies, his or her spirit is separated from the body. There is no cessation of existence in Scripture. Even those who go to Hell for not simply receiving the free gift of life in Christ, are alive there – forever. You may say that it’s not really living, but there is existence going on. But what makes Hell, Hell, is that you are separated from God there. It is a living death. Revelation calls it “the second death”. If you can die twice, then it can not be the opposite of life. Death is separation. In that light, you can be alive and dead at the same time.
That’s the secret of our euphemistic use of death. When we say, “I’m dying to tell you something” it means that we are separating everything else that could be said from that one thing on the tip of our tongues. More than that, we are separating even other things we can be doing from that one purpose of telling someone, “Hey, I think your lawn is on fire” or “You closed the car door on my thumb.” We should listen to ourselves more closely. We could learn a lot. We could learn about our deadness.
We all begin life D.O.A. – Dead on arrival. In the first chapter, we learned that sin is something we got for our baby shower from Grandpa Adam at the very moment of conception. Even King David put this into one of his psalms – “In sin did my mother conceive me.” The way the New Testament puts it is that we are “dead in sin”. So, we start of being dead in sin. We are in it. We are inside sin and cannot get out. Just like being in a locked cage, we are born trapped – dead in sin. Being in sin makes us separated - dead.
Sin separates us from God. He is a holy God. Holy means unique, set apart – separate from sin, from all that is not holy. Due to the holiness of God, sinful creatures cannot be in his presence. For hundreds of years, only the High Priest of Israel could approach the Holy-of-Holies in the Lord’s Tabernacle – and only covered in smoke and blood the way God asked. It’s like this: God is fire, and we are dead wood because of sin. It is a mercy that God keeps himself from us while we are in that condition. But he sent Jesus to get us green with life once again. Just like Aaron’s rod that budded almond blossoms, God can take the dry tinder that we are and turn us into saplings. But we have to be reunited to him first. We have to become un-separated.
The way the Bible puts it, is that we have to go from being “dead-IN-sin” to being “dead-TO-sin”. We stay dead. That’s not a problem. We need to remain separated – just from the right thing. Being separated from God is being dead for no good reason. We need to be dead for the right reason. We need to be dead to sin. Dead toward sin. Dead in the direction of sin. Sin is that neighbour that needs to see the hearse parked outside our house. So, how do we do that? Good question. This answer should not be a surprise at this point. We don’t do anything. God already has! Whenever Scripture refers to us being dead to sin, it is always past-tense. It is because of Christ that we can say we are dead-TO-sin, not dead-IN-sin.
Separations have a cause. We were separated from God by Adam’s disobedience. We get separated from sin by Christ’s obedience. Death happens both times. Adam’s disobedience was straight into death. God told him it would happen. “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam’s death was separation from God. We know that because he kept physically living didn’t he? God was speaking of spiritual death, not physical. When it comes to Christ, he obeyed, and it led to his death. But his death produced separation from sin. Disobedience made death separation from God, but obedience to the point of death made death separation from sin. This is getting pretty wordy, but the point is, Christ’s death puts us in the casket and all sin can do is pay its last respects. Having sin out of the way, we can now be connected to God. Adam’s disobedience was cancelled out by Christ’s obedience. Separation from one thing brought connection to another.
Jesus’ death on the cross keeps us dead. It just makes us dead to the right thing. We were dead to God before, being dead-in-sin, but now we are dead-to-sin, and that makes us alive to God. Does your brain hurt yet? Mine is sweating. All the same, we need to get comfortable with these truths. The Bible says so, so we are to believe it. It may not feel that way, or “seem” logical, but it is. It’s only when we begin to bank on it that we see just how true it is.
Just as we were dead on arrival to this earth, we are also dead on arrival to Heaven. Separated from sin, we arrive having died with Christ to sin. Jesus included us on the cross with him. This should change our vocabulary of death. Being dead doesn’t make us ghosts. Being dead to the right thing makes us more alive than ever. Death can be a good thing. Only God could have made that possible.
One more thought. It’s about arriving, and maybe we can include another destination. We arrive at every temptation dead-to-sin. Even though we are separated from sin because of the Cross of Jesus, we still have access to it. It is no longer a master-slave relationship, but sin still wants to rule us. It will even pretend to be a friend in order to do this. But we have to recognize it for what it is: Something so heinous that it meant the death of the Son of God. There is no such thing as a small sin. Even when we are confronted with a seemingly trifling enticement, we need to “reckon” ourselves dead to it. We need to arrive everywhere knowing and counting on the fact that we have been separated from sin by Jesus.
We don’t say “reckon” too often anymore - unless we are from Alabama – but it is an important Biblical word. To reckon is to count something correctly. It’s an accounting term. It means taking a look at your bank account and knowing full well what your balance is. It is not guess-work or some kind of make-believe. Reckoning is believing that your bottom-line really is what it says it is, regardless of what anyone else might say. It’s trusting that the bank will give you what they say they have in safe keeping for you. Why does reckoning matter so much?
Because you don’t feel dead-to-sin. You feel very much alive to it. You still seem to be connected to it. But you’re not. You’ve just been so buddy-buddy with it over the years that it’s still a familiar and comfortable place to be. It’s your blanky. It’s your pacifier. It’s the fridge or the TV or anything else you reach your hand out to, to escape from reality. Reality is sobering. Reality is hard. But the truth is that we have already been rescued from this world. That’s why the Apostle Paul said that not only are we dead-to-sin but we are crucified to the world and the world to us. You’re dead to all of it the moment you believe on Christ. You need to reckon that. Recognize it and reckon it.
There is a whole lot of reckoning for us to do. Another big word for this is “appropriating”. It’s true, but we have to believe it. The Lord is trying to tell us time and time again that “if God is for us, who can be against us?” We are dead-to-sin and alive-to-God. It’s not something that we have to make happen. It happened already. We arrive to our new lives in Christ dead. Thank God.
What is death anyway? Well, whatever it is, it’s not cessation of life. Sure, a person stops breathing and they stiffen up after a while, but there is more to us than a pulse. We are more than just a bundle of minerals and proteins. Scientists can tell us how physical things work, but when we get into the realm of the metaphysical – the spiritual world – we have to leave that to those better equipped to look into such things. Enter, the Bible. It says that death does not stop a person from living. It also says that living does not stop a person from being dead.
Alright, let’s better define death, so we can understand that odd sounding sentence above. If living does not stop a person from being dead, then death must be something that is not diametrically opposed to life. We often think that it is. Kids learn about opposites in Kindergarten. The opposite of open is closed. The opposite of black is white. The opposite of peanut butter is really hard to find but you have to try thanks to all these anaphylactic children in school. But the opposite of life is not death. Oh, it is if you have a real narrow definition for the word life. If you think life is simply breathing, then when you stop breathing, you can call it death, I guess, if you really want to. But you can do better than that.
Biblically, death is not simply being corpse-ish. In the Bible, death means “separation.” When a person physically dies, his or her spirit is separated from the body. There is no cessation of existence in Scripture. Even those who go to Hell for not simply receiving the free gift of life in Christ, are alive there – forever. You may say that it’s not really living, but there is existence going on. But what makes Hell, Hell, is that you are separated from God there. It is a living death. Revelation calls it “the second death”. If you can die twice, then it can not be the opposite of life. Death is separation. In that light, you can be alive and dead at the same time.
That’s the secret of our euphemistic use of death. When we say, “I’m dying to tell you something” it means that we are separating everything else that could be said from that one thing on the tip of our tongues. More than that, we are separating even other things we can be doing from that one purpose of telling someone, “Hey, I think your lawn is on fire” or “You closed the car door on my thumb.” We should listen to ourselves more closely. We could learn a lot. We could learn about our deadness.
We all begin life D.O.A. – Dead on arrival. In the first chapter, we learned that sin is something we got for our baby shower from Grandpa Adam at the very moment of conception. Even King David put this into one of his psalms – “In sin did my mother conceive me.” The way the New Testament puts it is that we are “dead in sin”. So, we start of being dead in sin. We are in it. We are inside sin and cannot get out. Just like being in a locked cage, we are born trapped – dead in sin. Being in sin makes us separated - dead.
Sin separates us from God. He is a holy God. Holy means unique, set apart – separate from sin, from all that is not holy. Due to the holiness of God, sinful creatures cannot be in his presence. For hundreds of years, only the High Priest of Israel could approach the Holy-of-Holies in the Lord’s Tabernacle – and only covered in smoke and blood the way God asked. It’s like this: God is fire, and we are dead wood because of sin. It is a mercy that God keeps himself from us while we are in that condition. But he sent Jesus to get us green with life once again. Just like Aaron’s rod that budded almond blossoms, God can take the dry tinder that we are and turn us into saplings. But we have to be reunited to him first. We have to become un-separated.
The way the Bible puts it, is that we have to go from being “dead-IN-sin” to being “dead-TO-sin”. We stay dead. That’s not a problem. We need to remain separated – just from the right thing. Being separated from God is being dead for no good reason. We need to be dead for the right reason. We need to be dead to sin. Dead toward sin. Dead in the direction of sin. Sin is that neighbour that needs to see the hearse parked outside our house. So, how do we do that? Good question. This answer should not be a surprise at this point. We don’t do anything. God already has! Whenever Scripture refers to us being dead to sin, it is always past-tense. It is because of Christ that we can say we are dead-TO-sin, not dead-IN-sin.
Separations have a cause. We were separated from God by Adam’s disobedience. We get separated from sin by Christ’s obedience. Death happens both times. Adam’s disobedience was straight into death. God told him it would happen. “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam’s death was separation from God. We know that because he kept physically living didn’t he? God was speaking of spiritual death, not physical. When it comes to Christ, he obeyed, and it led to his death. But his death produced separation from sin. Disobedience made death separation from God, but obedience to the point of death made death separation from sin. This is getting pretty wordy, but the point is, Christ’s death puts us in the casket and all sin can do is pay its last respects. Having sin out of the way, we can now be connected to God. Adam’s disobedience was cancelled out by Christ’s obedience. Separation from one thing brought connection to another.
Jesus’ death on the cross keeps us dead. It just makes us dead to the right thing. We were dead to God before, being dead-in-sin, but now we are dead-to-sin, and that makes us alive to God. Does your brain hurt yet? Mine is sweating. All the same, we need to get comfortable with these truths. The Bible says so, so we are to believe it. It may not feel that way, or “seem” logical, but it is. It’s only when we begin to bank on it that we see just how true it is.
Just as we were dead on arrival to this earth, we are also dead on arrival to Heaven. Separated from sin, we arrive having died with Christ to sin. Jesus included us on the cross with him. This should change our vocabulary of death. Being dead doesn’t make us ghosts. Being dead to the right thing makes us more alive than ever. Death can be a good thing. Only God could have made that possible.
One more thought. It’s about arriving, and maybe we can include another destination. We arrive at every temptation dead-to-sin. Even though we are separated from sin because of the Cross of Jesus, we still have access to it. It is no longer a master-slave relationship, but sin still wants to rule us. It will even pretend to be a friend in order to do this. But we have to recognize it for what it is: Something so heinous that it meant the death of the Son of God. There is no such thing as a small sin. Even when we are confronted with a seemingly trifling enticement, we need to “reckon” ourselves dead to it. We need to arrive everywhere knowing and counting on the fact that we have been separated from sin by Jesus.
We don’t say “reckon” too often anymore - unless we are from Alabama – but it is an important Biblical word. To reckon is to count something correctly. It’s an accounting term. It means taking a look at your bank account and knowing full well what your balance is. It is not guess-work or some kind of make-believe. Reckoning is believing that your bottom-line really is what it says it is, regardless of what anyone else might say. It’s trusting that the bank will give you what they say they have in safe keeping for you. Why does reckoning matter so much?
Because you don’t feel dead-to-sin. You feel very much alive to it. You still seem to be connected to it. But you’re not. You’ve just been so buddy-buddy with it over the years that it’s still a familiar and comfortable place to be. It’s your blanky. It’s your pacifier. It’s the fridge or the TV or anything else you reach your hand out to, to escape from reality. Reality is sobering. Reality is hard. But the truth is that we have already been rescued from this world. That’s why the Apostle Paul said that not only are we dead-to-sin but we are crucified to the world and the world to us. You’re dead to all of it the moment you believe on Christ. You need to reckon that. Recognize it and reckon it.
There is a whole lot of reckoning for us to do. Another big word for this is “appropriating”. It’s true, but we have to believe it. The Lord is trying to tell us time and time again that “if God is for us, who can be against us?” We are dead-to-sin and alive-to-God. It’s not something that we have to make happen. It happened already. We arrive to our new lives in Christ dead. Thank God.
8. Jesus Has Left The Building
I confuse fairly easily, but a long-standing jumble in my brain had been caused by two things that Jesus said. He said that he was going away, but that he would be with me always. How could that be? It sounded like he was saying goodbye and hello simultaneously. It’s like he was telling me that he was going in one way, but really staying in another. It sounded a little too clandestine for God. Was Jesus going to be some sort of undercover cop?
I settled on that last answer for a while, but it still didn’t seem to make sense. Going away physically, but staying spiritually? Did that mean that Jesus was going to cease being a Man? Men have their spirits on-board. Jesus made the decision to become one, and I didn’t get any indication from the Bible that he was going to cease being a man either. So, what’s the answer? Well, I’ve become simplistic enough to simply take him at his word. He was going away, and yet he would still be with me always. That means that first of all, he’s not here.
Jesus has left the building. He has left earth. He did it very dramatically. He didn’t simply disappear like he did after suddenly appearing behind that locked door with the disciples after he rose from the dead. He chose to actually fly up into the sky and be lost from sight behind some clouds. It was very super-hero-esque. That doesn’t mean that he should be made into an action figure, but I have come to see that act as a very helpful way to burrow into my heart the fact that he is not here. He flew away. He’s gone.
Why did he leave? Well, our hearts are not to get too settled down here. They do pretty easily due to family, but God wants our treasures to be stored up in heaven, doesn’t he? “Where your treasure is, there is your heart.” The Lord wants us to prioritize. “Seek first the kingdom of God…” If Jesus left, then that should give us some motivation to keep our minds set on things above, where he is. That sounds like a good reason for such a dramatic exit.
But there is another reason. Jesus said that he had to go. He said that if he didn’t, the “other comforter” would not come. He wasn’t talking about a blanket. He was talking about the very Spirit of God. He said that He, the Spirit of Truth, would “abide with you forever”. Jesus was leaving, but another was coming. We are working our way to seeing how Jesus can say that he is with us always, and still leave this earth. A big part of that is seeing the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture as “He”. He is not simply a force or a spiritual battery of some kind. He is a He. He can be grieved. He can be pleased. There is personhood involved with the Holy Spirit. But Christ said that the Spirit would not “speak of himself”. He meant that the Spirit would not promote himself or seek to glorify himself, even though he is God just as the Father and Son are. The Spirit would speak of Christ and direct hearts to Him. That is his work. It’s quite the task actually.
But the Spirit does something else at the same time. When a person exercises faith in Christ, the door is opened for the Holy Spirit to come in and take up residence in the spirit of that person. The Bible says that we are “indwelt” by the Spirit when we get saved. There is no condition for us to meet to get the Spirit to live in us. The condition was met by Christ when he laid down his life to pay the ransom for our sins, rose again and ascended into heaven. That’s why he had to go, to meet the requirements needed for the Spirit to live inside us. It was a tall order.
Due to the fact that the very Spirit of God is inside us, everything is changed. We are talking about the God who knows everything, can do anything and is everywhere at once – and He is in you and I. How can Jesus leave this earth and still be with us always? Because we left too. Did you get that? Christ is in Heaven, at the Father’s right hand, and we are there as well. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says that we are “seated” with Christ, right now. The Spirit has made that possible for us. The Holy Spirit has become the conduit, so to speak, so that we can be on this earth and in Heaven with Christ at the same time.
The Spirit acts as a spiritual toffee-stretcher. When we get saved, we get really tall. We become part of the Body of Christ, with our Head – Jesus - in Heaven. We are connected to Him, by the Spirit. Jesus doesn’t come down here. He extends from Heaven and acts through his feet and hands – you and I – to complete the work of saving people. We get it backwards all the time. We often plead for God to come down here, and all the time he is wanting us to realize that we are above it all already, with Jesus.
Just to re-cap a little at this point, Jesus could say that he was going away and at the same time be with us always, because he left to send the Holy Spirit to connect us to him in Heaven. That means that we need to get our thinking off the ground. We need to be heavenly-minded. Heaven-centric. When Stephen was being stoned, his eyes were opened to see Christ standing at the right hand of God. He saw into heaven. Jesus was standing for him, in heaven – even though most of the time we read about Jesus being seated there. He stood for Stephen. Jesus rose to his feet as the Pharisees killed the man who offered life to them. The connection between Jesus and Stephen is so obviously there that we find them both saying similar things, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” He was forgiving his murderers. Sounds like Jesus. But Stephen was already home. Jesus stood to embrace his brother.
It’s a good thing Jesus left. That means we are with him. We have been taken far above all that this world can dish out. We are safe. We are free. We are heavenly citizens extending ourselves from there to be the Body of Christ here. It’s another thing for us to reckon. Just as we reckon ourselves to be dead-to-sin and alive-to-God, we need to bank on ourselves being lifted from this place and to simply abide in Jesus. You can’t make yourself at home until you realize where your home really is. We don’t hang our hats down here. We put our feet up beside Jesus. We rest in Him, with Him.
A great verse is found in Colossians chapter 3 and goes this way, “Set your mind on things above not on things below. For you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We died, it says. We are dead men walking. As far as earth goes, we are dead to it and it is dead to us. But as far as God goes, we are alive to him and he is alive to us. Our resources are heavenly, not earthly. We don’t need to worry about what this world can do for us, even in regard to the work of God. We don’t need money. We don’t need land. We don’t need worldly prestige. We won’t need political influence. We have all we need in Christ who is far above it all. And he has taken us with him.
His interests need to be our interests. What moves Him should move us. Where is his heart? What does he treasure? That is our task: Find out what makes the heart of Jesus beat faster and get in on it. It’s not hard to know, really. Ask a man soon to be married where is heart is, and you will get only one answer. The Bride is everything to Christ. The Church, the Body of Christ, the Bride – three terms for the same thing. Jesus’ heart beats for the Church. Does yours? Does mine? Have you given up on the Church? Jesus hasn’t. Not for a second. That is why when the Apostle John sees Jesus at the beginning of Revelation, he is walking among the candlesticks – another picture of the Church.
When Jesus ascended up into heaven, he was not leaving his Bride behind. His Bride didn’t even exist until the Holy Spirit united believers to him in heaven. He went away so that his Bride could come to Him. Jesus is gone, and so are we. Do you find that impractical? Do you find that hard to keep straight in your head? We all do. But it’s the same with all spiritual truth. Believing God is about believing what seems impossible to us. The death of Jesus gives us life. That is fools-talk to the world. Jesus rose again from the dead. The world says, no way – you have no proof! We are seated with Christ in heaven. Once again, the wise of the world would laugh us off. You just have to remember that it’s a world Jesus died to save from themselves. Believe it anyway. The world is so fickle. You don’t need their approval. Why not have God’s?
God has seated you with Christ whether you believe it or not. He has lifted you above this world even as you walk in it. See it from that vantage point. Use the eyes that faith has given you to see things the way the Lord does. Look down and see a world that needs to know they are lost, and that Christ is their only hope. See that the Lord’s business has everything to do with the Church – the Bride of Christ. God is not out to change the world – he is out to save it. Our primary citizenship is heavenly. Bring some heaven to your sphere. Reach down from your lofty position and be Jesus to a world who needs to know him. Let them know that they can leave the building too.
I settled on that last answer for a while, but it still didn’t seem to make sense. Going away physically, but staying spiritually? Did that mean that Jesus was going to cease being a Man? Men have their spirits on-board. Jesus made the decision to become one, and I didn’t get any indication from the Bible that he was going to cease being a man either. So, what’s the answer? Well, I’ve become simplistic enough to simply take him at his word. He was going away, and yet he would still be with me always. That means that first of all, he’s not here.
Jesus has left the building. He has left earth. He did it very dramatically. He didn’t simply disappear like he did after suddenly appearing behind that locked door with the disciples after he rose from the dead. He chose to actually fly up into the sky and be lost from sight behind some clouds. It was very super-hero-esque. That doesn’t mean that he should be made into an action figure, but I have come to see that act as a very helpful way to burrow into my heart the fact that he is not here. He flew away. He’s gone.
Why did he leave? Well, our hearts are not to get too settled down here. They do pretty easily due to family, but God wants our treasures to be stored up in heaven, doesn’t he? “Where your treasure is, there is your heart.” The Lord wants us to prioritize. “Seek first the kingdom of God…” If Jesus left, then that should give us some motivation to keep our minds set on things above, where he is. That sounds like a good reason for such a dramatic exit.
But there is another reason. Jesus said that he had to go. He said that if he didn’t, the “other comforter” would not come. He wasn’t talking about a blanket. He was talking about the very Spirit of God. He said that He, the Spirit of Truth, would “abide with you forever”. Jesus was leaving, but another was coming. We are working our way to seeing how Jesus can say that he is with us always, and still leave this earth. A big part of that is seeing the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture as “He”. He is not simply a force or a spiritual battery of some kind. He is a He. He can be grieved. He can be pleased. There is personhood involved with the Holy Spirit. But Christ said that the Spirit would not “speak of himself”. He meant that the Spirit would not promote himself or seek to glorify himself, even though he is God just as the Father and Son are. The Spirit would speak of Christ and direct hearts to Him. That is his work. It’s quite the task actually.
But the Spirit does something else at the same time. When a person exercises faith in Christ, the door is opened for the Holy Spirit to come in and take up residence in the spirit of that person. The Bible says that we are “indwelt” by the Spirit when we get saved. There is no condition for us to meet to get the Spirit to live in us. The condition was met by Christ when he laid down his life to pay the ransom for our sins, rose again and ascended into heaven. That’s why he had to go, to meet the requirements needed for the Spirit to live inside us. It was a tall order.
Due to the fact that the very Spirit of God is inside us, everything is changed. We are talking about the God who knows everything, can do anything and is everywhere at once – and He is in you and I. How can Jesus leave this earth and still be with us always? Because we left too. Did you get that? Christ is in Heaven, at the Father’s right hand, and we are there as well. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says that we are “seated” with Christ, right now. The Spirit has made that possible for us. The Holy Spirit has become the conduit, so to speak, so that we can be on this earth and in Heaven with Christ at the same time.
The Spirit acts as a spiritual toffee-stretcher. When we get saved, we get really tall. We become part of the Body of Christ, with our Head – Jesus - in Heaven. We are connected to Him, by the Spirit. Jesus doesn’t come down here. He extends from Heaven and acts through his feet and hands – you and I – to complete the work of saving people. We get it backwards all the time. We often plead for God to come down here, and all the time he is wanting us to realize that we are above it all already, with Jesus.
Just to re-cap a little at this point, Jesus could say that he was going away and at the same time be with us always, because he left to send the Holy Spirit to connect us to him in Heaven. That means that we need to get our thinking off the ground. We need to be heavenly-minded. Heaven-centric. When Stephen was being stoned, his eyes were opened to see Christ standing at the right hand of God. He saw into heaven. Jesus was standing for him, in heaven – even though most of the time we read about Jesus being seated there. He stood for Stephen. Jesus rose to his feet as the Pharisees killed the man who offered life to them. The connection between Jesus and Stephen is so obviously there that we find them both saying similar things, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” He was forgiving his murderers. Sounds like Jesus. But Stephen was already home. Jesus stood to embrace his brother.
It’s a good thing Jesus left. That means we are with him. We have been taken far above all that this world can dish out. We are safe. We are free. We are heavenly citizens extending ourselves from there to be the Body of Christ here. It’s another thing for us to reckon. Just as we reckon ourselves to be dead-to-sin and alive-to-God, we need to bank on ourselves being lifted from this place and to simply abide in Jesus. You can’t make yourself at home until you realize where your home really is. We don’t hang our hats down here. We put our feet up beside Jesus. We rest in Him, with Him.
A great verse is found in Colossians chapter 3 and goes this way, “Set your mind on things above not on things below. For you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We died, it says. We are dead men walking. As far as earth goes, we are dead to it and it is dead to us. But as far as God goes, we are alive to him and he is alive to us. Our resources are heavenly, not earthly. We don’t need to worry about what this world can do for us, even in regard to the work of God. We don’t need money. We don’t need land. We don’t need worldly prestige. We won’t need political influence. We have all we need in Christ who is far above it all. And he has taken us with him.
His interests need to be our interests. What moves Him should move us. Where is his heart? What does he treasure? That is our task: Find out what makes the heart of Jesus beat faster and get in on it. It’s not hard to know, really. Ask a man soon to be married where is heart is, and you will get only one answer. The Bride is everything to Christ. The Church, the Body of Christ, the Bride – three terms for the same thing. Jesus’ heart beats for the Church. Does yours? Does mine? Have you given up on the Church? Jesus hasn’t. Not for a second. That is why when the Apostle John sees Jesus at the beginning of Revelation, he is walking among the candlesticks – another picture of the Church.
When Jesus ascended up into heaven, he was not leaving his Bride behind. His Bride didn’t even exist until the Holy Spirit united believers to him in heaven. He went away so that his Bride could come to Him. Jesus is gone, and so are we. Do you find that impractical? Do you find that hard to keep straight in your head? We all do. But it’s the same with all spiritual truth. Believing God is about believing what seems impossible to us. The death of Jesus gives us life. That is fools-talk to the world. Jesus rose again from the dead. The world says, no way – you have no proof! We are seated with Christ in heaven. Once again, the wise of the world would laugh us off. You just have to remember that it’s a world Jesus died to save from themselves. Believe it anyway. The world is so fickle. You don’t need their approval. Why not have God’s?
God has seated you with Christ whether you believe it or not. He has lifted you above this world even as you walk in it. See it from that vantage point. Use the eyes that faith has given you to see things the way the Lord does. Look down and see a world that needs to know they are lost, and that Christ is their only hope. See that the Lord’s business has everything to do with the Church – the Bride of Christ. God is not out to change the world – he is out to save it. Our primary citizenship is heavenly. Bring some heaven to your sphere. Reach down from your lofty position and be Jesus to a world who needs to know him. Let them know that they can leave the building too.
9. This Place Is A Dump
Living in an apartment, in a large building, with three other guys meant one thing: Cockroaches. We would go into the kitchen, flick the light on and watch them scatter. I’m sure I’m giving you the creeps right now. Sorry. I had a nightmare once about holding two fly-swatters as I pasted them to the wall. But they moved from apartment to apartment living off our crumbs. We were why they were there. We invited them. They were quite confused I’m sure. We fed them, but didn’t want them around. Dumb humans, they thought.
It reminds me of these little bugs I once had in my pantry. I could not get rid of them. They ruined all the food, and the bug-sprays seemed useless. The only thing I could do was throw out the flour and potatoes and tea and everything else in there. I had to get rid of the source. They had gotten into my house through something – I couldn’t tell what. So it all had to go. Purging, they call it. You see, sins are like those little bugs. The only way to get rid of them, is to throw out their source – the Sin nature that makes them.
Just outside Jerusalem, there is this place called Golgotha. It means, the place of a skull. An aerial photograph would tell you why. You can see eye-sockets and the rest from a helicopter. But this hill was built on an old garbage dump. They used to burn refuse there, calling it Gehenna. Jesus actually used this name when talking about Hell. So, Jesus was crucified on Goglotha – a garbage heap. When people in that day walked by there, they would say, “Man, this place is a dump.” The Lord Jesus was thrown out there, for you and for me.
He was treated like garbage - As if he had no value. That’s why we find him being abused and abandoned, mocked and ignored, and finally crucified. He was treated as if he was the very worst of sinners – as if he had sinned every sin ever sinned. Once again, it wasn’t just us that treated him that way – God the Father did too. Jesus was forsaken by his Father. On the top of an old pile of refuse, nailed to a Roman cross, Jesus died the death of a common thief, after which the plan was to toss his body into a hole without a grave-marker.
So, Christ was put out by the curb. I do not mean to be sacrilegious. I want you to really get the point that the Prince of Life was not only killed, but that he was disposed of – and that we needed him to be. This is another picture, another metaphor, that I really hope to be of some help for you to understand how God dealt with sin. Just like I had to get rid of the source of those little bugs in my pantry, the Lord had to dispose of the sin nature that caused the creepy-crawlies of sin – lying, theft, greed, pride, lust… and the rest. I think it’s clear that Jesus was treated like garbage, but how did that do anything about our sin?
A verse of Scripture that has come up already, is found in 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, and verse 21: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Paul later in that chapter refers to the concept of “reconciliation”. That’s a money-word. Biblically, it means “to change currency.” When Christ was made to be sin for us, it was as if he was a gold coin that was changed into aluminum foil. It was like he became one of those chocolate loonies, from which the wrapper got crunched up and dropped in the trash. And the chocolate was bad, so it got spit out. We’re chocolate loonies too, but we were never gold. All we were good for was the garbage heap, so Jesus went there for us. And, in having himself thrown out, he took our trash with him.
Our sin was purged from us, by Jesus when he was crucified on Gehenna. He could do that, because he was made to be sin for us. He was made to be our garbage for us. He was actually made to be US for us. We got our sin from one person, Adam. And now our sin is disposed of by one person, Christ. Becoming a Christian means being a part of Christ. His history becomes our history. What is true of him, is in so many ways true of us. We are talking once again about a spiritual reality. So, when Jesus was crucified, we were there with him, and so he was able to dispose of our sin. We were there, so our sin was there too.
This stuff is not easy to fit in our heads. It runs contrary to our normal thinking. It’s backwards, really. But God has always worked that way, so that we know that it’s Him. Peter Larson put it this way: “The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin's womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked, "No Entrance" and left through a door marked "No Exit."
Our sin-nature was separated from us. We dealt with that earlier when we walked through the idea of being “dead-to-sin”. But the way it was done, was by the death of Christ. We don’t have to throw out our sin natures. We don’t have to put them in the disposal unit in the sink, or bag them up and wait for the truck. It’s already been done! The trash has been taken out. Jesus did it for you. He carried it off. You’re not sure, are you… I know. You are wondering why you can still smell it.
The problem we all have is that our sin nature is still available to us. It is not attached to us in the same way as it was before we got rescued, but we still have access to the dumpster. We still sin, don’t we? Hourly. We don’t have to, but we can. We are not forced to, but we sometimes go out of our way to do it. Our job is to leave the lid on the can. Our job is to trust that Christ knew what he was doing when he threw out all that stuff we used to love. Jesus really did purge our sin from us, so let’s not undermine that. Let’s not disagree with the one who loved us enough to become our trash for us. Leave it in the bin. After a while, you really won’t miss it. I promise.
That’s it, isn’t it - We don’t really think it’s trash sometimes. We think that there is still some good stuff in there. It’s like we are these spiritual pack-rats that are afraid to just let it go. “How dare you throw those out! Those are collector’s items!” we say. We are not really convinced that it is all sin. The Bible uses another word for sin. It’s the word, “flesh”. It’s a helpful word, because it reveals the nature of sin to us. The flesh can seem really noble. It can seem good. The flesh can dress itself up and be on its best behaviour. But it’s still “the flesh”. It is that part of us that is ambitious, determined to promote ourselves. It makes both the Olympic athlete and the crime boss. The ends do not justify the means. Much of what this world would call “great accomplishment” has been fueled by the flesh. It’s time to agree with God, and call it what he calls it – Sin.
The Apostle Paul talks about garbage in his letter to the Philippians. He says this, “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” He had just been describing how great he was. He was smart, dedicated, had the right genes, was an all-around good guy. But he calls it all garbage – “rubbish”. I think the actual word there means “dung”, but you get the point. Even sin at it’s very best had to go. It’s worth it. Trade your garbage for Jesus. He gave so much more than he took. He gave himself.
Putting it all together, I hope you can see that the cross was a place where our sin – the source of sins – was given the respect it deserved. None. It was garbage worthy of the dumpster. Jesus spiritually – supernaturally – included us with him on that cross, so that our sin could be purged from us. We were separated from it by the cross. That is our only hope. Anything else we choose to do with ourselves is only cosmetic. And really, we’re only fooling ourselves. Everyone else can smell our trash a mile away. Take the new life that Jesus gives – a life that cannot spoil – and rest in the fact that you are far removed from your old life, seated with Christ in Heaven. Remember, Jesus has left the building. You arrived at your new life dead too, right? The firebreak was made so that sin can go no further. Jesus was thrown out for you, but he rose out of that heap, never to go back. It’s a done deal. Trust in the cross of Christ. Lean hard on it.
One more thing: We still need to realize that this place is a dump. The earth is only fit for fire, Peter tells us. It will all go. The Lord is not out to change the world, but he is out to save people from it. Keep your eyes of faith open and remember that this world is a place that rejected Christ. It still does. And it will only get worse. That is not to say that nothing beautiful happens here. Wild flowers still grow at the dump. But this world is past renovating. We can be good stewards of the things God has entrusted us with, but don’t get too comfortable here. Abraham lived all his life in a tent, to consciously keep himself from getting too cozy on this planet. Consider yourself a camper – a foreigner, stranger and pilgrim here. This is not the promised land. Our citizenship is in Heaven, so let’s act like it.
I wrote earlier that when they crucified Christ, the plan was to throw him in a common grave, without any dignity. Well, that’s not the way it actually happened. Even though he was treated like garbage on the cross, his body was carefully laid in a rich man’s tomb, by Joseph of Arimethea and his buddy Nicodemus. It fulfilled an important prophecy found in Isaiah that said, “they made his grave with the wicked, but with the rich at his death.” When God made him to be sin for us, he didn’t stay that way. When the cross was over, Christ was actually deemed to have more worth than before, if that is possible… “Therefore he gave him a name that is above every name…” Jesus is the only one ever to have inestimable value in both directions. He was valued as both the least and the greatest. He is the First and the Last.
It reminds me of these little bugs I once had in my pantry. I could not get rid of them. They ruined all the food, and the bug-sprays seemed useless. The only thing I could do was throw out the flour and potatoes and tea and everything else in there. I had to get rid of the source. They had gotten into my house through something – I couldn’t tell what. So it all had to go. Purging, they call it. You see, sins are like those little bugs. The only way to get rid of them, is to throw out their source – the Sin nature that makes them.
Just outside Jerusalem, there is this place called Golgotha. It means, the place of a skull. An aerial photograph would tell you why. You can see eye-sockets and the rest from a helicopter. But this hill was built on an old garbage dump. They used to burn refuse there, calling it Gehenna. Jesus actually used this name when talking about Hell. So, Jesus was crucified on Goglotha – a garbage heap. When people in that day walked by there, they would say, “Man, this place is a dump.” The Lord Jesus was thrown out there, for you and for me.
He was treated like garbage - As if he had no value. That’s why we find him being abused and abandoned, mocked and ignored, and finally crucified. He was treated as if he was the very worst of sinners – as if he had sinned every sin ever sinned. Once again, it wasn’t just us that treated him that way – God the Father did too. Jesus was forsaken by his Father. On the top of an old pile of refuse, nailed to a Roman cross, Jesus died the death of a common thief, after which the plan was to toss his body into a hole without a grave-marker.
So, Christ was put out by the curb. I do not mean to be sacrilegious. I want you to really get the point that the Prince of Life was not only killed, but that he was disposed of – and that we needed him to be. This is another picture, another metaphor, that I really hope to be of some help for you to understand how God dealt with sin. Just like I had to get rid of the source of those little bugs in my pantry, the Lord had to dispose of the sin nature that caused the creepy-crawlies of sin – lying, theft, greed, pride, lust… and the rest. I think it’s clear that Jesus was treated like garbage, but how did that do anything about our sin?
A verse of Scripture that has come up already, is found in 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, and verse 21: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Paul later in that chapter refers to the concept of “reconciliation”. That’s a money-word. Biblically, it means “to change currency.” When Christ was made to be sin for us, it was as if he was a gold coin that was changed into aluminum foil. It was like he became one of those chocolate loonies, from which the wrapper got crunched up and dropped in the trash. And the chocolate was bad, so it got spit out. We’re chocolate loonies too, but we were never gold. All we were good for was the garbage heap, so Jesus went there for us. And, in having himself thrown out, he took our trash with him.
Our sin was purged from us, by Jesus when he was crucified on Gehenna. He could do that, because he was made to be sin for us. He was made to be our garbage for us. He was actually made to be US for us. We got our sin from one person, Adam. And now our sin is disposed of by one person, Christ. Becoming a Christian means being a part of Christ. His history becomes our history. What is true of him, is in so many ways true of us. We are talking once again about a spiritual reality. So, when Jesus was crucified, we were there with him, and so he was able to dispose of our sin. We were there, so our sin was there too.
This stuff is not easy to fit in our heads. It runs contrary to our normal thinking. It’s backwards, really. But God has always worked that way, so that we know that it’s Him. Peter Larson put it this way: “The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin's womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked, "No Entrance" and left through a door marked "No Exit."
Our sin-nature was separated from us. We dealt with that earlier when we walked through the idea of being “dead-to-sin”. But the way it was done, was by the death of Christ. We don’t have to throw out our sin natures. We don’t have to put them in the disposal unit in the sink, or bag them up and wait for the truck. It’s already been done! The trash has been taken out. Jesus did it for you. He carried it off. You’re not sure, are you… I know. You are wondering why you can still smell it.
The problem we all have is that our sin nature is still available to us. It is not attached to us in the same way as it was before we got rescued, but we still have access to the dumpster. We still sin, don’t we? Hourly. We don’t have to, but we can. We are not forced to, but we sometimes go out of our way to do it. Our job is to leave the lid on the can. Our job is to trust that Christ knew what he was doing when he threw out all that stuff we used to love. Jesus really did purge our sin from us, so let’s not undermine that. Let’s not disagree with the one who loved us enough to become our trash for us. Leave it in the bin. After a while, you really won’t miss it. I promise.
That’s it, isn’t it - We don’t really think it’s trash sometimes. We think that there is still some good stuff in there. It’s like we are these spiritual pack-rats that are afraid to just let it go. “How dare you throw those out! Those are collector’s items!” we say. We are not really convinced that it is all sin. The Bible uses another word for sin. It’s the word, “flesh”. It’s a helpful word, because it reveals the nature of sin to us. The flesh can seem really noble. It can seem good. The flesh can dress itself up and be on its best behaviour. But it’s still “the flesh”. It is that part of us that is ambitious, determined to promote ourselves. It makes both the Olympic athlete and the crime boss. The ends do not justify the means. Much of what this world would call “great accomplishment” has been fueled by the flesh. It’s time to agree with God, and call it what he calls it – Sin.
The Apostle Paul talks about garbage in his letter to the Philippians. He says this, “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” He had just been describing how great he was. He was smart, dedicated, had the right genes, was an all-around good guy. But he calls it all garbage – “rubbish”. I think the actual word there means “dung”, but you get the point. Even sin at it’s very best had to go. It’s worth it. Trade your garbage for Jesus. He gave so much more than he took. He gave himself.
Putting it all together, I hope you can see that the cross was a place where our sin – the source of sins – was given the respect it deserved. None. It was garbage worthy of the dumpster. Jesus spiritually – supernaturally – included us with him on that cross, so that our sin could be purged from us. We were separated from it by the cross. That is our only hope. Anything else we choose to do with ourselves is only cosmetic. And really, we’re only fooling ourselves. Everyone else can smell our trash a mile away. Take the new life that Jesus gives – a life that cannot spoil – and rest in the fact that you are far removed from your old life, seated with Christ in Heaven. Remember, Jesus has left the building. You arrived at your new life dead too, right? The firebreak was made so that sin can go no further. Jesus was thrown out for you, but he rose out of that heap, never to go back. It’s a done deal. Trust in the cross of Christ. Lean hard on it.
One more thing: We still need to realize that this place is a dump. The earth is only fit for fire, Peter tells us. It will all go. The Lord is not out to change the world, but he is out to save people from it. Keep your eyes of faith open and remember that this world is a place that rejected Christ. It still does. And it will only get worse. That is not to say that nothing beautiful happens here. Wild flowers still grow at the dump. But this world is past renovating. We can be good stewards of the things God has entrusted us with, but don’t get too comfortable here. Abraham lived all his life in a tent, to consciously keep himself from getting too cozy on this planet. Consider yourself a camper – a foreigner, stranger and pilgrim here. This is not the promised land. Our citizenship is in Heaven, so let’s act like it.
I wrote earlier that when they crucified Christ, the plan was to throw him in a common grave, without any dignity. Well, that’s not the way it actually happened. Even though he was treated like garbage on the cross, his body was carefully laid in a rich man’s tomb, by Joseph of Arimethea and his buddy Nicodemus. It fulfilled an important prophecy found in Isaiah that said, “they made his grave with the wicked, but with the rich at his death.” When God made him to be sin for us, he didn’t stay that way. When the cross was over, Christ was actually deemed to have more worth than before, if that is possible… “Therefore he gave him a name that is above every name…” Jesus is the only one ever to have inestimable value in both directions. He was valued as both the least and the greatest. He is the First and the Last.
10. Adding Insult To Injury
I see you have quite the gash there. Allow me to unscrew the lid off this salt-shaker, it comes out much quicker that way… Nothing like kicking a guy while he’s down. It’s like telling your friend that you saw his unsigned fire insurance policy on the kitchen table as his new house is burning to the ground. But you know, that’s what God is telling us in the Bible. He says that we are sinners, and that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Talk about adding insult to injury.
The cross is offensive. It’s insulting. It declares in no uncertain terms that our best is simply not good enough. Death is the only way out of sin. We balk at that, don’t we? We like to think that if a guy gives it the old college try, then there ought to be some recognition for it, right? Well, sounding good, doesn’t make it so. What we don’t realize is that trying to better ourselves is like pouring water on a grease fire. Good luck with that.
The truth is, we need to be offended. It’s good for us. Not that the actual act of being offended is good. There used to be these high and mighty terms for it like, “injured merit” or “affronted dignity”, that made it sound like being offended was a virtue of some kind. But don’t we read in the love-chapter (1st Cor. 13) that love is not easily offended? What I mean is that it is necessary for us to be offended. I don’t remember the exact quote, but someone once defined meekness as being pleased when you’re insulted, because the truth is really much worse. Did you get that? It’s like someone calling you a loser, and you thinking to yourself – “You don’t know the half-of-it buddy.”
You see, being offended pries the door to our souls open so that we can see in there. We don’t like what we see, so we begin either justifying or excusing it. But come on, get the chair out from under the handle and let the door come right off the hinges! The sooner we find out about ourselves, the better. God designs life that way. But so often we learn to disguise ourselves with the camouflage of self-righteousness. Filthy rags, the Bible says. I went to buy a pair of jeans and all I could find were “new” pairs with stains and rips already in them. That seems to really reveal our condition, doesn’t it? We can’t even be genuine about spilling stuff on ourselves. We’re good liars.
We lie to ourselves. There is a famous TV star with a quote you may have heard: “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.” It’s easy for us to start believing our own tall tales. “I’m a good person” you think to yourself, forgetting about earlier this morning when you… Insert that thing here that you don’t want anyone to know about. No one is good. Good deeds don’t make good people. Does talking make a parrot a person? Does using a computer make a chimp a man? All the good works in the world will not change the fact that we are sinners by birth and by choice. All our lying won’t change it either. We might as well agree with God that we are in trouble, and that only he can do something about it. That’s no lie.
Once again, the cross is offensive. Why? First of all, it shows us our sin. Can there be a worse sin than crucifying the Son of God? I don’t think so. But we did that. We killed the Prince of Life. The next time a little kid asks you what the worst thing you’ve ever done is (as my kids have asked me), tell them that you condemned an innocent man to death. That should get their attention. You didn’t swing the hammer, but you wanted him dead. Jesus said that’s the same thing, remember? (Hatred equals murder) You didn’t want your sin taken from you. It was your “precious” as Smeagol would say. You would do anything to hold on to it. The cross reveals that. It’s insulting.
It’s also insulting because not only are you responsible for it, but it is your only hope. It’s both ironic and paradoxical that the very thing we needed done for us, we inadvertently had a hand in. That doesn’t mean that we saved ourselves in any way, but the very thing that epitomized our distance from God, brought us close to Him. God used our weapon against him, to be a blessing for us. It’s a mind-bender, for sure. But we needed it. He died for us. That’s unsettling. Once again, we’d like to think that we can contribute, and give God a hand. He won’t accept it. The cross is God’s way of saying, I don’t need you. That hurts us.
But it’s a good kind of hurt. I’m glad God doesn’t need me. That would force his hand wouldn’t it? If he needed me, than he wouldn’t really love me. But he does love. Would you rather him need you, or want you? The degree to which he wants you was revealed in the death of His Son. He wants you that badly. God would treat Christ like a sinner, for you, just to have you back. Let your dignity be affronted. Let your merit be injured. He doesn’t need you – He wants you. Don’t you want to be wanted?
When the offense of the cross is active, we find places in ourselves that we have not yet resigned to the condemnation of our sin. That’s a mouthful, but let me say that another way. Uh… You’ve got some mustard on the corner of your mouth. No, the other side. Almost got it – just a second, I’ll get a wet-nap. Ok, there we go. Umm, there’s ketchup on your sleeve too. And on it goes. There’s lunch all over us. We sat in chocolate pudding and spilled our drinks in our laps. The cross is our Mom telling us all this stuff. Unless we agree with God that we had to be born-again, from above this time, we will be dragging around our old dead selves, propping them up against the wall, trying to just act normal. It’s insulting when someone finds us out.
There is more to us than just our sin. That’s where we are headed with this. If you are a Christian – a believer in Jesus who died for you – than you are a new man – or woman, respectively. You see, before, you sinned because you were a sinner. But now, you are a sinner because you sin. It gets reversed. Sin was not really an option before. It was on the surface, but underneath, it ruled you before you came to know Christ. Now, sin is only an option. It does not rule you. It feels like it does sometimes, but that’s a lie from the devil. As Christians, we choose it every time we sin. Sin was your old nature, but you are dead to that, in Christ. You are now alive to God, and that means there is a new principle working in your life. It’s called “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
We’ve been to Romans Six, and Seven – and now were on to chapter Eight. That’s were we find this new law present in us. The whole verse goes this way, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death.” Freedom! See what a little insulting can lead to? Offend me! Let me see what my sin really is so that I can place no stock in it. Let me put all my eggs in this new basket. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and behold all things have become new.” We died and rose again with Christ. We are new creations, growing up and out of the old. The old is still around, but the new will outlast it. Even if it barely peeks it’s head out of us during our lifetime here, it will be everything in the next. It’s all about this new law in us: TLOTSOLICJ. Quite an acronym. I don’t think it will catch on.
We get too familiar with our old sin nature still. We need fresh reminders that the cross severed ties with it. It offends us initially, but after, we wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything. Learn to recognize old Adam. When someone crosses you and you feel your blood begin to boil – Adam. When you are denied something that you thought you were entitled to and you start to sulk – Adam. Whenever you choose to put yourself first, whenever you go out of your way to promote yourself (verbally handing out your resumé), whenever you are disappointed with your lot in life (that God has dropped in your lap, don’t forget) – it’s all Adam. Adam and Adam again. Christ died to be the “Last Adam”, Scripture says. His death was Adam’s. His death was yours. It’s done. Hasn’t your Mom ever told you not to play with dead things?
I heard this quote once that I didn’t like, and I still don’t like it. But I’m going to share it with you anyway: “You know how far along you are to becoming a servant, by how you react when you are treated like one.” Ouch. Are you pleased to have your toes stepped on? Are you ecstatic when you get the opportunity to serve others – even when it’s inflicted upon you? Nothing shows spiritual maturity more than actually living out James 1:2 “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials”. There’s nothing like it. The world can’t touch that. That’s the life of Jesus coming out in you. Remember in Acts 5 when the apostles were beaten for preaching Jesus? It says that they went away “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.” It sounds crazy, but that kind of joy is available in Christ. He had it, so you get it too.
Where’s the joy? You won’t find it in your circumstances. Life will go your way sometimes, but our real unshakable joy is found in Jesus who had it even while they were crucifying him. “Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.” (Hebrews 12:2) Offenses will come. Insults are just around the corner. Let them come. Be found out. Let them go deep and reveal to you the difference between the old man and the new man. It takes time to figure it out, but start now. Let life be your waiter, and hear him say to you, “Would you care for some insult with your injury?” Say, yes please, and then go for a second helping.
The cross is offensive. It’s insulting. It declares in no uncertain terms that our best is simply not good enough. Death is the only way out of sin. We balk at that, don’t we? We like to think that if a guy gives it the old college try, then there ought to be some recognition for it, right? Well, sounding good, doesn’t make it so. What we don’t realize is that trying to better ourselves is like pouring water on a grease fire. Good luck with that.
The truth is, we need to be offended. It’s good for us. Not that the actual act of being offended is good. There used to be these high and mighty terms for it like, “injured merit” or “affronted dignity”, that made it sound like being offended was a virtue of some kind. But don’t we read in the love-chapter (1st Cor. 13) that love is not easily offended? What I mean is that it is necessary for us to be offended. I don’t remember the exact quote, but someone once defined meekness as being pleased when you’re insulted, because the truth is really much worse. Did you get that? It’s like someone calling you a loser, and you thinking to yourself – “You don’t know the half-of-it buddy.”
You see, being offended pries the door to our souls open so that we can see in there. We don’t like what we see, so we begin either justifying or excusing it. But come on, get the chair out from under the handle and let the door come right off the hinges! The sooner we find out about ourselves, the better. God designs life that way. But so often we learn to disguise ourselves with the camouflage of self-righteousness. Filthy rags, the Bible says. I went to buy a pair of jeans and all I could find were “new” pairs with stains and rips already in them. That seems to really reveal our condition, doesn’t it? We can’t even be genuine about spilling stuff on ourselves. We’re good liars.
We lie to ourselves. There is a famous TV star with a quote you may have heard: “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.” It’s easy for us to start believing our own tall tales. “I’m a good person” you think to yourself, forgetting about earlier this morning when you… Insert that thing here that you don’t want anyone to know about. No one is good. Good deeds don’t make good people. Does talking make a parrot a person? Does using a computer make a chimp a man? All the good works in the world will not change the fact that we are sinners by birth and by choice. All our lying won’t change it either. We might as well agree with God that we are in trouble, and that only he can do something about it. That’s no lie.
Once again, the cross is offensive. Why? First of all, it shows us our sin. Can there be a worse sin than crucifying the Son of God? I don’t think so. But we did that. We killed the Prince of Life. The next time a little kid asks you what the worst thing you’ve ever done is (as my kids have asked me), tell them that you condemned an innocent man to death. That should get their attention. You didn’t swing the hammer, but you wanted him dead. Jesus said that’s the same thing, remember? (Hatred equals murder) You didn’t want your sin taken from you. It was your “precious” as Smeagol would say. You would do anything to hold on to it. The cross reveals that. It’s insulting.
It’s also insulting because not only are you responsible for it, but it is your only hope. It’s both ironic and paradoxical that the very thing we needed done for us, we inadvertently had a hand in. That doesn’t mean that we saved ourselves in any way, but the very thing that epitomized our distance from God, brought us close to Him. God used our weapon against him, to be a blessing for us. It’s a mind-bender, for sure. But we needed it. He died for us. That’s unsettling. Once again, we’d like to think that we can contribute, and give God a hand. He won’t accept it. The cross is God’s way of saying, I don’t need you. That hurts us.
But it’s a good kind of hurt. I’m glad God doesn’t need me. That would force his hand wouldn’t it? If he needed me, than he wouldn’t really love me. But he does love. Would you rather him need you, or want you? The degree to which he wants you was revealed in the death of His Son. He wants you that badly. God would treat Christ like a sinner, for you, just to have you back. Let your dignity be affronted. Let your merit be injured. He doesn’t need you – He wants you. Don’t you want to be wanted?
When the offense of the cross is active, we find places in ourselves that we have not yet resigned to the condemnation of our sin. That’s a mouthful, but let me say that another way. Uh… You’ve got some mustard on the corner of your mouth. No, the other side. Almost got it – just a second, I’ll get a wet-nap. Ok, there we go. Umm, there’s ketchup on your sleeve too. And on it goes. There’s lunch all over us. We sat in chocolate pudding and spilled our drinks in our laps. The cross is our Mom telling us all this stuff. Unless we agree with God that we had to be born-again, from above this time, we will be dragging around our old dead selves, propping them up against the wall, trying to just act normal. It’s insulting when someone finds us out.
There is more to us than just our sin. That’s where we are headed with this. If you are a Christian – a believer in Jesus who died for you – than you are a new man – or woman, respectively. You see, before, you sinned because you were a sinner. But now, you are a sinner because you sin. It gets reversed. Sin was not really an option before. It was on the surface, but underneath, it ruled you before you came to know Christ. Now, sin is only an option. It does not rule you. It feels like it does sometimes, but that’s a lie from the devil. As Christians, we choose it every time we sin. Sin was your old nature, but you are dead to that, in Christ. You are now alive to God, and that means there is a new principle working in your life. It’s called “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
We’ve been to Romans Six, and Seven – and now were on to chapter Eight. That’s were we find this new law present in us. The whole verse goes this way, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death.” Freedom! See what a little insulting can lead to? Offend me! Let me see what my sin really is so that I can place no stock in it. Let me put all my eggs in this new basket. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and behold all things have become new.” We died and rose again with Christ. We are new creations, growing up and out of the old. The old is still around, but the new will outlast it. Even if it barely peeks it’s head out of us during our lifetime here, it will be everything in the next. It’s all about this new law in us: TLOTSOLICJ. Quite an acronym. I don’t think it will catch on.
We get too familiar with our old sin nature still. We need fresh reminders that the cross severed ties with it. It offends us initially, but after, we wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything. Learn to recognize old Adam. When someone crosses you and you feel your blood begin to boil – Adam. When you are denied something that you thought you were entitled to and you start to sulk – Adam. Whenever you choose to put yourself first, whenever you go out of your way to promote yourself (verbally handing out your resumé), whenever you are disappointed with your lot in life (that God has dropped in your lap, don’t forget) – it’s all Adam. Adam and Adam again. Christ died to be the “Last Adam”, Scripture says. His death was Adam’s. His death was yours. It’s done. Hasn’t your Mom ever told you not to play with dead things?
I heard this quote once that I didn’t like, and I still don’t like it. But I’m going to share it with you anyway: “You know how far along you are to becoming a servant, by how you react when you are treated like one.” Ouch. Are you pleased to have your toes stepped on? Are you ecstatic when you get the opportunity to serve others – even when it’s inflicted upon you? Nothing shows spiritual maturity more than actually living out James 1:2 “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials”. There’s nothing like it. The world can’t touch that. That’s the life of Jesus coming out in you. Remember in Acts 5 when the apostles were beaten for preaching Jesus? It says that they went away “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.” It sounds crazy, but that kind of joy is available in Christ. He had it, so you get it too.
Where’s the joy? You won’t find it in your circumstances. Life will go your way sometimes, but our real unshakable joy is found in Jesus who had it even while they were crucifying him. “Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.” (Hebrews 12:2) Offenses will come. Insults are just around the corner. Let them come. Be found out. Let them go deep and reveal to you the difference between the old man and the new man. It takes time to figure it out, but start now. Let life be your waiter, and hear him say to you, “Would you care for some insult with your injury?” Say, yes please, and then go for a second helping.
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