Yesterday, we said that coming to God means we cannot simply “clean up our act” and be moral—and therefore pleasing to God—on our own. This approach to life is called moralism, and it’s the opposite of Christianity.
The Christian way is to “die to ourselves” first, and then we “put on Christ,” who enables us to pursue the good.
In dying to ourselves, we are laying down our lives—acknowledging that we cannot be good on our own. In this process, Christ doesn’t want some of our lives but the whole.
Christ remakes us entirely; He gives us new life instead of ordering us to try harder to better our old life.
We are not reformed but transformed.
The apostle Paul sums up this truth in Romans 8:8: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
Did you catch that? If you are walking in the flesh according to your works, you cannot please God, no matter how hard you try. Only in coming to Christ can you have new life.
Freedom—at a Cost
Ironically, when you surrender to Him, you gain freedom—true freedom. Freedom from bondage to sin. This freedom does come at a cost: you are called to put to death the deeds of the flesh and walk by the power of the Spirit. This is less difficult in one sense, but much more difficult in another: our natural self does not want to die, but it must do so for us to have new life.
We tend to hold tightly to the things we suppose are valuable, or at least to the things the world declares to be important. Our natural self is one of those things. We grasp it with our fingers tightly clenched, and God has to take it out of our hands, opening one finger at a time. When we finally release our grip, we find that all we had was a bunch of tinfoil. God was going to give us diamonds, and we wanted to cling to that tinfoil. Even when we have finally released it, we can still be tempted to pick it back up again, returning to a temporal mindset instead of holding on to an eternal one.
As we die to our natural self and pick up our cross daily (see Luke 9:23), it helps to remember the price Jesus paid to give us His life. He died on the cross so that we would not be trapped in the ways of the flesh but could have true spiritual life in Him. We, too, must pick up our cross and submit our wills to God. When we do so, we will find that the new life in Christ is much better than what we are leaving behind.
Day 1 Scripture Readings:
Romans 8:8
Luke 9:23
Galatians 5
John 8:31–36