How dead is dead to God?
How much of your life can you still hold and make it through baptism into
death? You must completely die if you
are to be of use to Him or true to your new self. The end game of your
Savior is for you to be buried and your hopes and aspirations die with you that
the Lord Jesus Christ might raise you from the dead and make you good for God
and perfect for salvation. It is the buried seed that springs to life and
bears much fruit. Don't look upon your circumstances as a way for you to
straighten yourself up and get things together. Look at them as the power
of God to kill off your old self and make you completely new in Him. Our
hope is not to survive and chase our dreams. It is to be resurrected with
the life of Christ fully alive in us so that the work of God might be
manifested in all we do! The freedom we
have as believers is not a license to be some creature other than who we are in
Christ. Imagine a rose bush flaunting
its freedom living as a blueberry or a gardenia behaving like a poison
oak. Turtles don’t work at being
cheetahs and pigeons never behave like vultures. Those who have Christ in them are new
creations that are nothing like they were before they were born again. There is a difference of kind between a Christian
comedian and an unbelieving comedian. A
Christian physicist is not the same species as a non-Christian physicist and
born-again teachers have a different “DNA” than do those still dead in their
sins. God will not be stopped in this
process of raising you up in Christ. He
will not allow the diminishing of your soul as His new creation. The world may look at you as nothing more
than a rewrapped version of your old self but the world cannot see into your
heart and discover the complete transformation of your being into one who is
now joined with Christ and thoroughly remade into someone new. Be done with the fantasy that nothing
changed when God made you one with Christ.
A magical transformation has occurred and you will never be the same
again.
We were therefore buried with him through baptism into
death… Romans 6:4 NIV
Powerful..... never thought that way!!!
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