A Whole New You

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

Body and Soul

I was asked recently by one of my children what I thought he would be like if he had a different biological father or mother.  Of course this seems like a sensible enough question except for one misconception.  We don't exist as a person outside the body we have been given. The soul came into the man after the body was formed and not before.  Adam became a living soul or nephesh after the Lord breathed into the body the breath of life.  Before that, there was no "soul" of Adam.   There is no scriptural evidence for baby souls or incubating souls waiting somewhere for God to distribute into bodies.  Rather what we have is that the physical body initiates the birth of the soul.  Thus when the body is formed, the soul comes into place, is breathed into it by God.  The body is picked out and then the soul is created.  When the egg is fertilized by the sperm, it is a mystical moment of conception, not just with the forming of the body but the initiation of the soul as God puts life into place.  We don't exist before the body comes to be but when we are brought to life, we are from the outset God's life.  He breathes into the body its being, its soul.  David talked about the work God did knitting him together within his mother's womb and creating him stitch by stitch as it were.  But moving down just a bit in Psalm 139 to verse 16, we come to the most interesting part of this .  When God saw us in His mind before we were even formed, our days were already established; they were written in His book.  It is as if out moments are a part of our DNA; the days we have written even within our body.  But take this one step further.  Ecclesiastes 3:11 indicates that our bodies also contain eternity in them; the heart is the receptacle of forever.  The body is no mere addendum to the soul...and the soul is not as U2 implies stranded in "some skin and bones".  The body and soul are intertwined as one, each a part of the whole God established when He decided to create good.  The body is either the whipping post or idol of humanist thinking.  It must be neither.  It is created by the Creator to establish the person Christ died to save. You are peculiar in the best sense of the word.  Made by God, particular to God, defined by God, known by God, loved by God.