Sin is Dead to Us As Christ is Alive in Us
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
When you see Christ is truly alive from the dead, you start to re-define what life and death are. Jesus wasn’t just figuratively raised from the dead and enlightened. He really was dead and a few days later He really was alive. His living body was really lifted up into the air and hidden by clouds. (I don’t think it was like in the movies where a little Jesus gets tinier and tinier until He disappears like a speck. There were all kinds of clouds hiding people in the Old Testament. He probably went up a little bit and then disappeared.)
So many things that we do every day are scheduled and measured around death and the avoidance thereof. Like why in the world do we worry about death so much? Some of it is wisdom. I wear a seatbelt so that after a car wreck, I can stick around and function and continue to raise my family. I don’t eat cheeseburgers for every single meal because I want to live out a long life doing a variety of active things.
But at the point that fear and avoidance of death become my excuse to resist God’s plan or to go back to indulging my flesh, I’m messed up. Death is still a thing, and there will probably be a physical separation between all of us assuming the Lord doesn’t return in the next 80 years, but we don’t look at it in the same way as before.
A guy on my street is active in prison ministry. He said he used to be afraid of going to the jails and prisons, but then he realized that “None of us is getting out of this alive! We gotta do all the good for the Lord we can while we can!”
So we’re dead to sin and sin is dead to us. In exchange, we are alive to God in Jesus and He is alive to us. What if that’s true?! What if that became our prayer for a day.
“God, you say that I’m alive to you and you’re alive to me. Teach me what that means, Jesus. ”
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