Living according to the Soul & Law or by Spirit & Life

Finding out and finally believing who and what we are in Christ doesn’t suddenly make it true; because we are born into His family we have all the benefits that go along with it, not because we believe it, but because it’s true. So if you are a believer you are living in a new time zone, a new realm, eternity, whether you believe it or not. The battle is to believe it; the behavior will follow.

The Example of Lazarus

We are probably all familiar with the story of Lazarus, Jesus’s friend who died. Imagine yourself standing outside the tomb, and Jesus has just arrived. Lazarus has been dead for 3 days now, and “he stinketh.” Now Lazarus died of something; for the sake of our illustration let’s say it was pneumonia. It could have been he had had an accident and had broken his neck, but for now, let’s say he died of pneumonia, and has been entombed. What does Jesus have to do in order to raise Lazarus from the dead? He has to restore his life (get his heart beating and his brain functioning again, etc.) and heal what caused his death. If Jesus only restored his life, Lazarus would still have pneumonia, and would simply die again. And if Jesus only healed the pneumonia, Lazarus would be nothing more than a pneumonia-free corpse. So Jesus did both. He removed what caused Lazarus’s death, he removed the pneumonia, and gave him life, got his heart pumping again. He does the same for us: at His Crucifixion Jesus removed what causes us death — our inherited sin nature; at His Resurrection He gave us new life, His own.

Time On Our Hands?

God created time, He controls it, and does whatever He wants with it. In fact, He has so much time on His hands that He is spending every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day doing nothing but thinking, and planning, arranging and rejoicing over every circumstance in your past, present and future.