Living to God

You may have said to yourself that it’s great for me to talk about dying to self and living in faith, and that it sounds good to have no labor but only great joy, but how on earth does one accomplish that? Gotta love this stuff, because I can’t answer that question for you. You may recall that I commented, some months ago, on a statement that Job made: only God knows the way to wisdom. Another way of saying that is: only God knows the road to your cross.

Part of the entire dying to self process is that God doesn’t tell you how to do it! Nobody knows how to do it. The best anyone can do is to tell you how they did it, but if you tried to do it yourself, you won’t have done it.

You can’t crucify yourself. Only the Lord can put you just where you need to be so that He can work on just the things that need to die. Sometimes He kills things that need to stay dead—which is painful, but not particularly confusing—and sometimes He kills things that He intends to later resurrect. That’s the part that will drive you nuts, but it’s all part of the process, and all part of God’s character. Throughout the scriptures we see things like, "He kills, and He makes alive; He wounds, and He heals." He does this so that it is clearly all about Him. There wasn’t any self-will in the birth of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah greatly desired him, but they couldn’t bring it about.

They had died to themselves.

Sometimes people speak of this as "coming to the end of yourself." It’s when you realize you can’t do "it," whatever "it" is, yourself. (If weaklings have an advantage, it is that we come to the end of ourselves more quickly than strong people do.) That is when you die.

Death is certainly an essential step in the process, but do not by any means get bogged down there—because that is fatal! (Yeah, I know.) It isn’t enough to die; death is only beneficial if life comes afterward. Mind you, since you’re dead, you can’t make yourself alive. I know that, too. What I’m getting at is that when you’ve been resurrected, don’t stay so attached to being dead that you refuse to part with your grave clothes or take an active part in living.

See, when you’ve been resurrected, the Lord is definitely going to ask you to do some things that you know darn well you couldn’t do, even if you weren’t dead. (That is where the faith comes in, as does the "all about Him" stuff.) If you’re still tied up in your grave clothes, you won’t be capable of actively participating in the adventure to which the Lord is calling you.

When you’ve died, and you’ve been made alive, it’s really up to you if you’re going to live to God.

Got that?

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