When you die to self, embracing the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for your sin, you lay your life down and the Holy Spirit comes to live New Life within you. You are no longer your own, but have been bought with the price of Jesus Christ dying the death and the separation from all goodness that you deserved. In this New and Eternal life, the Holy Spirit lives in the followers of Jesus Christ. Being united to both Jesus’ death and resurrection, physical death is now but a transition from this life to Eternal Life in God’s Presence. Dying before you die (thus bring united to the Life of Jesus Christ), when you die, you will not die (not be separated from God). The second death comes to those who have rejected the grace of God, those for whom God simply did not matter in earthly life. We are now in Holy Week. Please do not scorn the love of God, His provision of forgiveness, new Life, meaning and purpose.
THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY Martin Luther said that the human heart is an idol factory. The truth is that we were created to know and live by the gracious rule of and in the Presence of God who created us. Our peace, our understanding of meaning and purpose can only be truly grounded in God who created us for that meaning and purpose. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, their decision to do the opposite of what God said would make for life, resulted in spiritual and ultimately physical death. They chose to believe they needed something more than what God had provided. Their doomed attempt to try and live life without reference to God as the ground of meaning and purpose did not make life fuller, but emptied it. They wanted to decide what was good and what was evil without God and the disintegration of human life was the consequence. Rather than living in the Presence of God and by the gracious rule of God all around them, they turned from wholeness to brokenness, from fulfilment to scarc...
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