Dead Man Walking part 4
I want to quote a bit of the passage where our key verse for this Rant series is found. Romans 6:11-14, "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace." Wow. There's a lot there. What I want to pull out of it for today is the juxtaposition between sin and God. Those seem to be the two side of the coin, right? Dead to sin... alive to God. Unrighteousness on one side and righteousness on the other. Law on one side and grace on the other. Old things that HAVE passed away on one side, and the new abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life of God on the other. The cross... the cross was so massive that I think, even 2,000 years later, that we don't fully understand it. My mom once said it like this, "Either the cross changed everything or it didn't change anything." I agree. Because everything needed to change. Not just a covenant. Not just a testament. Everything. There's a phrase in Matthew chapter 19 in the Amplified Bible where Jesus is speaking about "the new age [the Messianic rebirth of the world]." That, to me, is where we are now. On this side of the cross. BECAUSE of the cross. On the cross Jesus drew us all into Himself and died. The second death. The death OF death. The death that got us out of all of our trouble WITH sin and death. Basically making sure the coin that has God on one side and sin on the other could only ever come up on the God side. He cursed the fig tree (the tree of death, the tree of knowledge of good and evil) because it couldn't produce any fruit. He didn't want us to try to turn over a new leaf. He knew we needed to get into a totally new tree. The Tree of Life. In which He is the vine and we are the branches. The tree on which the fruit of the Spirit (which is love) grows. Jesus remade the world in His own image. Getting rid of everything NOT Him and leaving only love. The problem is with our reckoning. Sin isn't the problem. Our sin consciousness is the problem. What we need to do is yield ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead. Use the mind of Christ that's already in us. Let God renew our minds and watch everything else flow from there. The mind, the heart, our innermost being. That's what matters. That's who we really are. Jesus--God in the flesh, love in a body. God in OUR flesh. Love in OUR body. That's how we live. We don't try to live "our" best life. We don't even try to live Jesus's life. Too much trying. Nobody can live Jesus's life except Jesus. We live IN Him. We are dead and our life is his in Him. He is the one living... in us, and through us, and as us. All we have to do is rest. Believe. Walk by faith. LET ourselves (and each other) be who we really are. Grace. Not law. You can't legislate health, or happiness, or morality. Those are issues of the heart. What you CAN do is simply believe. Leave the old behind and walk in newness of life!