There is no hope of sharing in Christ's resurrection except we also share in his death. We can only know the Resurrection as we are willing to die. We can only receive ne life when we are willing to let go of the old. Before Resurrection comes death. This means more than ceasing to breathe. It means to take upon oneself the unique death of Jesus the Christ.
What does it mean for us to die; to take upon ourselves the unique death of Jesus Christ?
It means, among other things, to die to the demand to be served and petted and pampered. Jesus Christ was not a man who had to be coddled and babied. Claudine recently told me of reading an article in which it was pointed out that the cause of many unhappy marriages is that each partner wants to be served. I suspect that these are both some of the unhappy marriages that end in the divorce court and those that end in endless years of boredom. Each partner wants to be privileged, to have his own way, to be waited on and pampered. I once heard a famous man say that one of the secrets to his happy homelife was that he and his wife tried to outdo each other in unselfishness. They tried to see how much they could give one another, not how much they could get. They had a delightful life year after year after year. If we would have new life, we must die to our demand to be served and petted and pampered.
If we would be resurrected, we must also die to the claims we have on the future. There is no way to guarantee the kind of future we would ike to have. (Some acquire stocks and bonds. Some build houses and buy real estate. Some go to church and pray. Now, none of these are evil in themselves. I would like to do all of them. But if we depend upon these for future happiness and security, we are likely to be disappointed.) In our churches we hear many words said about those who try to make the future safe by piling up material goods, but we must also speak a word about those who try to buy eternity insurance by going to church or performing some religious act. Jesus had something to say about the fool who tore down his barns to build bigger barns. But he had even harsher words for those so-called religious persons who used their religion as a means of acquiring God's favor, so that God would be nice to them. It is idolatry and pagan to think that God bargains to give us anything if we are righteous.
Do you remember reading about the Last Supper as recorded in the Gospel of Luke? The disciples had an argument about which of them would be greatest in the kingdom. Jesus made it plain that only the servants, only those who had given up any claim to greatness would be given the Kingdom. The Resurrected life is given to those who are willing to die to all claims on the future.
And then we must be willing to die in the physical sense of the word. No man has the option of whether he will die or not. But each of us must decide how we will meet death. To surrender our bodies back to God in thankfulness is to die as Jesus Christ. We were not asked whether we wanted to be given life. It was a gift, a manifestation of God's grace. And we shall not be asked if we want to be given death. This, too, is a gift, a manifestation of God's grace. Those who trust God through his revelation in Jesus Christ, those who are willing to die, will be raised from the dead in new life.
We have just gome through the season of Lent and the Week called Holy Week in which we again understand what it meant for Jesus the Christ to die to the demand to be served, to die to any claim he might have on the future, to give up his physical life. By faith in him we trust that if we too are will to die, we shall be raised from the dead by God our Father.
Who is our God? He is the one who has walked into the jaws of death itself and come out master. To trust this God is to have eternal life. To die before this God is to here and now be delivered from the power of death and to be raised to walk in newness of life.