Power to Obey, Part 4—Dead to the Old Life
David W Palmer
“For you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3 Lamsa Bible)
Yesterday, we saw that the apostle Paul had a problem; his head and free-will read God’s word, wanted to live by it, but found he couldn’t completely obey it by his own willpower. Did Paul ever resolve his dilemma? Did he ever give us the answer? Thankfully, yes! God chose him to write much of the New Testament because he understood this whole issue. So what can we learn from him? To find out, let’s read from the beginning of Romans 7, where he starts to deal with this issue:
(Romans 7:1–4 CEV) My friends, you surely understand enough about law to know that laws only have power over people who are alive. (2) For example, the Law says that a man's wife must remain his wife as long as he lives. But once her husband is dead, she is free (3) to marry someone else. However, if she goes off with another man while her husband is still alive, she is said to be unfaithful. (4) That is how it is with you, my friends. You are now part of the body of Christ and are dead to the power of the Law. You are free to belong to Christ, who was raised to life so that we could serve God.
The first point the apostle Paul makes here is about being alive or dead; the law only has sway over people who are alive. The Holy Spirit, through the apostle Paul, says in verse 4 that since your are “part of the body of Christ,” “you are now ... dead …”
We know what the terms “alive” and “dead” mean to us, but how does the Bible define them? According to James, “the body without the spirit is dead” (James 2:26 KJV). This shows that from God’s perspective, death is about separation, not annihilation; a dead body still exists, but the life has gone from it because the spirit is decoupled from it. Spiritually, a person is dead if they are separated from God. After all, Adam and Eve died [spiritually] when sin separated them from God; but they continued to exist on the earth physically for a long time:
(Genesis 2:17 NKJV) “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
(Genesis 5:5 NKJV) So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.
When our spirit leaves our body, we are classed as dead to this world; but our spirit continues to exist—and if we are “in Christ”—continues to receive life from God. Therefore, we are not dead by annihilation, nor are we dead by losing eternal life; we are only dead in that we are separated from our physical body, and are no longer able to express ourselves in the physical world through it. Being alive in this world, then, is when your spirit (you) gets to express himself through your body.
By this definition, death can happen in a second way—when your spirit doesn’t express himself through your body because someone else does. That is, when you allow someone else to express themselves through your body instead of you. In that case, by the Bible definition of life and death, they live, not you. The one who “lives” on earth is the one who expresses himself through the physical body of a human. This is precisely what the apostle Paul was talking about when he said:
(Galatians 2:20 EMTV) “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.”
Here, the apostle Paul says, “It is no longer I who live.” By this he means that he is not expressing his own will or volitions through his body. Yet, his body was not “dead” in the Western sense that it was lifeless and not functioning. It was still alive in the sense that someone was expressing their life through it; it just wasn’t Paul. So who was it? He goes on to say, “But Christ lives in me.” Paul makes a profound doctrinal statement: a genuine Christian person is someone who doesn’t express their own volitional choices through their body; they relinquish control of it to Christ, who lives in them—and thus through them. (This is the objective of the most basic Christian confession; Jesus is Lord. By confessing this in faith, we licence him to take up residence in us and to operate through us.)
If we are dead by allowing Jesus to live through us, we are not the one responsible for making the choices about what actions are expressed through our bodies; we allow Jesus to be responsible for that. After all, he did say that He came to fulfil the law (Mat. 5:17). If Jesus makes the choices of what actions are expressed through our body, and if he came to fulfil the law, then we can be assured that he is fulfilling it through us. This completely alleviates all the painful pressure of trying to fulfil law by our own efforts and willpower.
Allowing Christ to live through us is how we take on the amazing privileges associated with being “in Christ.” Another way to look at this is that we are in Christ when we are “born again,” “led by the Holy Spirit,” “walk in the Spirit,” “live by faith,” and “worship” God “in spirit and in truth” (Rom. 8:14 Gal. 5:16, 18 ; John 3:3, 4:24 KJV).
In doing this, we literally crucify our old self-life by denying its choice of actions; we replace them by yielding to the Holy Spirit’s leading instead. (I’ll explain how this works in a later study.)
Today, let’s prayerfully begin to take hold of this truth. When you become a Christian—when you give your life to Jesus and confess that he is now your Lord—you come under this principal:
“For you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3 Lamsa Bible)
Understanding this is a good step towards getting free of the terrible bondage of having to live a completely holy life by your own efforts. Quite to the contrary, God’s plan is that you stop allowing your own choices to have any expression through your body at all—that way, the law has no sway over you as you are dead to it; instead, you yield to Jesus living his volitions through you. This is a completely different process than trying to make your own choices holy by forcing your own free will to do it.
I encourage you to yield yourself completely to Jesus’s rulership of your life, by becoming a—minute by minute—living sacrifice:
(Romans 12:1 NKJV) I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
Via the process of worshipfully yielding step by step to the Lordship of Jesus, allowing him to take full control of our lives, we begin to understand what Paul experienced that lead him to make this sworn statement:
(1 Corinthians 15:31 Lamsa Bible) I swear … I die daily.