LIFE/DEATH
We might well pray for God to invade and conquer us, for until He does, we remain in peril from a thousand foes. We bear within us the seeds of our own disintegration. Our moral imprudence puts us always in danger of accidental or reckless self-destruction. The strength of our flesh is an ever-present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life. Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees. God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance. Then He invades our natures with that ancient and eternal life which is from the beginning. So He conquers us and by that benign conquest saves us for Himself.1
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Who but someone very old and very conservative would insist upon death as the appointed way to life? And who today is interested in a gloomy mysticism that would sentence its flesh to a cross and recommend self-effacing humility as a virtue actually to be practiced by modern Christians?2
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The life that halts short of the cross is but a fugitive and condemned thing, doomed at last to be lost beyond recovery. That life which goes to the cross and loses itself there to rise again with Christ is a divine and deathless treasure. Over it death hath no more dominion. Whoever refuses to bring his old life to the cross is but trying to cheat death, and no matter how hard he may struggle against it, he is nevertheless fated to lose his life at last.3
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To die that we might not die! There is no contradiction here, for there are before us two kinds of dying: a dying to be sought and a dying to be avoided at any cost.4
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God salvages the individual by liquidating him and then raising him again to newness of life.5
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God has stepped out of His way to talk about certain persons being born, and we know that He never does anything without purpose. Everything He does is alive, meaningful and brilliantly significant.
Why should the great God Almighty, who rounded the earth in the hollow of His hand, who set the sun shining in the heavens and flung the stars to the farthest corner of the night—why should this God take important lines in the Bible record to talk about people being born?6
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In coming to Christ we do not bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. The corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die.7
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Mortality is the sentence of death. Death is the carrying out of the sentence of mortality. They are not the same. Death is the final act—man’s mortality lies in his knowledge that he can never escape!8
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If you are going to heaven, you had better begin to live like it now, and if you are going to die like a Christian, you had better live like a Christian now!9
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God’s gifts in nature have their limitations. They are finite because they have been created, but the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus is as limitless as God. The Christian man possesses God’s own life and shares His infinitude with Him.10
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No act is wise that ignores remote consequences, and sin always does that. Sin sees only today, or at most tomorrow—never the day after tomorrow, next month or next year.
Death and judgment are pushed aside as if they did not exist and the sinner becomes for the time a practical atheist who by his act denies not only the existence of God, but the concept of life after death as well.11