Death Into Life -- by Linden Malki

"You are all dead men!" was the thundering message from a speaker at a conference I attended several years ago. We have to be willing to surrender our human, sinful lives to God's eternal destiny for us. This is perhaps the hardest part of facing God's truth: that we, in our own strength, cannot be the people we were created to be. I am becoming more convinced each day that we have to be willing to let go of anything that is not fit for the presence of God. In Romans 6, St Paul tells us that when we are baptised in His Name, we die with Christ Jesus and our old lives die with Him. And if we have truly died to our sins, we need to bury them. It is too easy to let them creep back into our lives, stumbling blocks that pull us backwards.

But look at the end of the story! Jesus died; our sins died with Him. But what looked at the time as an end was truly a beginning of something new. "We were buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life."* Look at how the glory of the resurrection blows away the sadness of death! We are not called to look backwards, but with St Paul, forgetting what is past and straining forward to what is ahead, to press on to win the prize for which we are called Heavenward in Christ Jesus.** He has told us that He is the Resurrection and the Life; that He came so that we can have Life and have it abundantly!

* Romans 6:4
** Philippians 3:13-14