Christian, if you want to resurrect, you must first be crucified
Why its profoundly important for the old self to stay dead so that you can truly live your new life in Christ
Perhaps this is a compelling article to click on — or an offensive one of questionable context. To you, the title may sound barbaric and disgraceful and ‘not with the times’. In our increasingly liberal cultural climate, even those who consider themselves of the household of God may shy away from such strong, blatant verbiage.
If you want to resurrect, you must first be crucified. What on earth do I mean by that? And how can I say it without sounding like a cultish Christian? Whether you’re already a firm believer in the saving power of Jesus Christ or a skeptic or a downright atheist, let’s turn together to the book of Romans in the Bible to read the words penned by Paul the apostle some two millennia ago. I will say that this article is intended to refine those that are already believers, as it is quite meaty. But perhaps the Lord will reveal something profound to you through the reading of this Word and the answering of some question deep in your being, as his Word never returns void (Is. 55:11) — it’s never useless and it always reaps a supernatural harvest.
In Romans 6, Paul, a forerunner of the gospel message, writes to the believers in Rome regarding how they should behave now that they are “no longer under the law.” In other words, how should someone who claims to know God act (and view life) now that they are ‘dead to their old self’? Paul is speaking in human terms to give us the best understanding of how we are to view our lives before Christ (as dead) and contrasting it with our new life in the Spirit. We now bring God immeasurable glory through our faith in his Son. In summary, we go from dying due to our sin to living for his Son.
“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him,” (Rom. 6:6–7).
In these verses, Paul is laying a firm foundation on how we are to enter into our new life with Christ. And in order to most fully enter in, we must first die to the sins that once enslaved us and do everything in our power to not return to them. We hold within us the power to overcome our sin nature repeatedly because God lives in us. Will we be perfect? No. We will fail, but it’s not on account of God’s power in us but rather that we live within a broken realm, and we are still human beings. We must flee sin. Run from our old master. Fear God and turn away from evil like Job did.
Here is where I hold up the Word to my fellow Christians — Look around at your life. Which sins are still adamantly clinging to your soul? Not that you are to look at total mastery over any one sin as a sign of salvation, but rather what is your heart’s inclination towards defeating said sin at all? Does the sin that you are thinking of grieve you? Or does it still feel like a warm blanket enveloping you in the comfort of a past life? Repent of that! It is true that things which cause death (drugs, drunkenness, pornography, venting anger, indulging lust) can feel comforting, but they slowly choke the life out of us, and they steal away from us any fighting chance of becoming like the One we claim to love. So even though you don’t feel a hatred for a sin, pray for it. Pray that whatever compromises your desire to be like Christ would cause disgust, that its ugliness would be revealed in you and not just those around you; it’s always hardest to see the truth of our own sin first.
Paul then goes on to say, “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (6:21–23).
It no longer goes without saying that some sins must be defined in our current culture, not as a judgment upon another person, but as a proper categorization of what each of us are called to die to that we might live. This includes acting upon same sex attraction. This includes denying our natural gender and choosing reassignment. This includes self-harming in the form of obesity. It spans to normalizing emotional indulgences on social media and public criticism of leaders we’re charged with respecting even though we don’t agree with them in any way, shape or form. And I admit that I struggle with many of these listed sins also, please know this, yet none of us have resisted to the point of death like Christ did (Heb. 12:4).
Why go as far as to outline in such detail the sins we oftentimes fall prey to? Because having a clear vision of what we need to repent of and the standards God holds each of us to is of utmost importance. If we don’t know our sins, how can we turn away from them? Our world’s ability to discern what is inappropriate and offensive to God is dying and dulling. Our hearts appear more sensitive to the world’s demands on tolerance, but it’s our own hearts that are being tempted to harden.
With that, we oftentimes think on how Christ grants eternal life when we accept him as Savior, and it’s right for us to worship him as we come to this realization. As believers, we know that we are under the law of grace. But this free grace bestowed upon us came at the highest price for Christ — his life, the life of the Son of God himself. And in accomplishing this, in earning our freedom, he not only did what we could never do for ourselves but he revealed himself plainly to the world as God for anyone willing to see, to see. No natural being could ever do what Christ accomplished for us supernaturally.
All of this to say that to accept Christ as Lord and to accept this new life he offers to us is only half of the story. Though we accept him as Savior, it’s easy to disregard him as Lord and to overlook the death asked of us that leads to the freedom each of us seeks.
We are to choose obedience and to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to the very best of our ability in overcoming our sinful nature. “Do you now know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” (6:16). And though this obedience is oftentimes far from easy — when your husband is frustrating you or you’re exhausted from the mundanity of mom-hood or your burnt out from that job you can’t stand anymore with its constant demands — it’s necessary in order to truly live. Though it’s so much simpler to just choose the comforting, sinful thing that feels so tiny and nonthreatening, it’s more damaging to our souls.
So friend, don’t do it. Don’t keep living in the mire. Don’t keep choosing the convenient thing that keeps killing you slowly, because it’s just too hard to intentionally change course. It will take time and effort, resources that you might feel like you don’t have. But God will do it. He honors obedience. He changes hearts. He corrects courses.
And as our hearts transform and we desire better, as we desire Christ and his way of doing things, our loyalty to sin changes to a loyalty to righteousness (6:17–18) because that flows from our new nature, evidencing the Holy Spirit in us. As we inspect ourselves and look for sin that is yet to go, let us also look for signs of the fruit that God has been faithful to grow in us. If you are in him, he’s not finished with you yet. He is faithful to finish what he’s started (Phil. 1:6).
“So now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification,” (6:20). What is sanctification? It is the daily changing, often quietly blended into the backdrop of our lives, from who we once were into beautiful new creations — “little Christs” as C.S. Lewis so plainly put it. “The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else,” (Mere Christianity). I coudn’t agree more.
Why be a Christian if it’s not to be like Christ? We are to choose to be like him in his living and also in his death.
