Day 18 :: From Death To Life (Excerpt taken and modified from A Gospel Primer for Christians by Milton Vincent.)
All Things Crucified
The gospel is not simply the story of “Christ, and Him crucified”; it is also the story of my own crucifixion. For the Bible tells me that I, too, was crucified on Christ’s cross. My old self was slain there,100 and my love affair with the world was crucified there too. The cross is also the place where I crucify my flesh and all its sinful desires.Truly, Christ’s death and my death are so intertwined as to be inseparable. God is committed to my dying every day, and He calls me to that same commitment. He insists that every hour be my dying hour, and He wants my death on the cross to be as central to my own life story as is Christ’s death to the gospel story. “Let this same attitude be in you,” He says, “which was also in Christ Jesus . . . who became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”104 Crucifixion hurts.
In fact, its heart-wrenching brutality can numb the senses. It is a gasping and bloody affair, and there is nothing The gospel is not simply the story of “Christ, and Him crucified”; it is also the story of my own crucifixion. For the Bible tells me that I, too, was crucified on Christ’s cross. My old self was slain there, and my love affair with the world was crucified there too. The cross is also the place where I crucify my flesh and all its sinful desires. Truly, Christ’s death and my death are so intertwined as to be inseparable. God is committed to my dying every day, and He calls me to that same commitment. He insists that every hour be my dying hour, and He wants my death on the cross to be as central to my own life story as is Christ’s death to the gospel story. “Let this same attitude be in you,” He says, “which was also in Christ Jesus . . . who became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”
Crucifixion hurts. In fact, its heart-wrenching brutality can numb the senses. It is a gasping and bloody affair, and there is nothing. Thankfully, the gospel teaches me that dying is not an end, but a beginning. For after Christ took up His cross and died, God raised Him from the dead, exalted Him to the highest heaven, and drew Him into His bosom. These facts surrounding Christ’s resurrection stand as proof positive that God will not leave me for dead, but will raise me similarly, if I would only allow myself to die. Indeed, on the other side of each layer of dying lie experiences of a life with God that are far richer, far higher, and far more intimate than anything I would have otherwise known. In God’s economy, death is the way to life. “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,” Jesus says, “but whoever loses His life for My sake, he shall find it.” Indeed, the more conformable I am made to the death of Christ, the more I experience freedom from sin and taste the power of the resurrection of Jesus Himself. The path to such power is paved with many dyings, and each stage of resurrection is achieved with each incident of dying to myself and reckoning myself dead to sin. The more I contemplate the gospel, the more I understand that this “word of the cross” stands as a blueprint for my own life story. The death that Christ died is the death to which I also am called, and the death to which I am called is my entry point to union with Christ and life at its fullest. So, come what may, I’ll let no one take this death from me!