Romans Chapter 6
For God's intent in our dying and being buried with Christ is not to leave us lying powerless in the grave, but also to raise us with Jesus to live a transcendent life in him. Our old "sin and death" life was put out of commission through a mysterious co-crucifixion with Jesus. As a result, a life lived under the compulsion of our lower passions has passed away with a vengeance and such selfishness is no longer our master. We are dead and therefore liberated from the mandatory control of sin.
But, as I said, we didn't just die with Christ, we have been catapulted into life with him: Jesus only had to die once and he vanquished death once and for all through his resurrection. He died for sins just once, but he lives perpetually for his Father's pleasure.
Comments:
I believe that one of the deepest longings of a human spirit is to be transformed into a better person. Most people try to "make this happen" at points in their lives. Most of us fail to see transformation to any significant degree through our self-help strategies and programs. Many people give up on trying to change for the good at all and then dive more deeply into expressions of human depravity. One of the great attractions of the gospel of Jesus is the embedded hope and promise of radical personal transformation. Only, in the case of the gospel, the help we receive is not essentially self-help as we commonly understand the term (though we ultimately do participate cooperatively and meaningfully in the process), but it is the help that occurs through a powerful, gracious and undeserved divine intervention...acts of the very Holy Spirit himself.
The New Testament speaks of this transforming experience with God in the stark terms of a necessary personal "death" and subsequent "resurrection" that is not, first of all, physical...but is rather to do with our core nature...or the condition of our "heart". We must somehow both "die" and be "raised" for this core change to actually occur. However, the active principle...the animating force...of this change is not based on us "killing" and "raising" ourselves, but on accepting for ourselves the vital identification with Jesus Christ that God has amazingly arranged for us. What Jesus accomplished, once and for all, in his historical death and resurrection is relevant to our personal transformation because the power of the Holy Spirit rests and remains "all over" the message of it and is released upon and within us in "real time" when we simply believe in and humbly surrender to Christ as our Lord and Savior. After all, Jesus is dead no longer, but is alive and still acting in our world to perform this miracle of "new birth" in the lives and hearts of those childlike enough to accept this free gift.
Though this beginning can seem more or less dramatic in the way it actually takes place in the various stories of individuals...it is quite dramatic in the invisible realm nonetheless. And...it is the only sufficient and effective foundation for the kind of real and lasting personal transformation for which we long and yearn and journey toward in Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment