As Dying and Behold We Live

In Romans chapter 6, starting at verse 3, Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were both therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we had been united within a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. We know that our old self was crucified with Him, so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.

For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again.

Death no longer has dominion over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin, and alive to God in Jesus Christ.

Back at the beginning, when Jesus and the disciples first came together, the one thing that impressed the disciples about Jesus, marking Him as different, distinguishing Him from all teachers they'd ever met before, was that Jesus conveyed life. Most religious people, especially most religious teachers, have a tendency to convey death, frighten you, make you feel tense, defensive, sometimes angry, content. But when this man speaks, dead hearts come to life.

Sick bodies, blind eyes, deaf ears rise. How come your disciples don't fast? Can the wedding guests fast when the bridegroom is with them? How can they fast in the presence of such life? Or to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. But the life these men and women experienced as they walked with Jesus in flesh and blood was nothing compared with the life they encountered when they saw Him risen from the dead.

When they saw Jesus risen from the dead, they were looking at glory itself. They were looking at the last Adam who was never to die again. They were looking at one over whom death no longer has any kind of power, who is alive utterly and totally to God.

They are looking at the firstborn of a new creation of which they themselves are being made a part. They are looking at the outcome of the years of labor they are now going to be putting in as they fish for souls into the kingdom of God. Every soul, every fish that is caught in that net and survives the final separation will be just like Him.

But what was it that brought about this awesome change? Three days ago, He was weakness. Now He is power. Three days ago, He was a body of flesh.

Now He is a body of life-giving spirit. Three days ago, He was a man of dust, part of a race of dust. Now He is a man from heaven, alive with the very glory of heaven, stamped with the very image of heaven.

Now what was it that brought about this change in Him? During these three days, two things occurred. First, willingly, Jesus went down into death. Secondly, He was raised out of death.

This new Jesus that they are now looking at could not have possibly come into existence except through death. And what the disciples are now going to learn and what you and I are now going to learn is that if we are going to participate in this resurrection life, the only way is by going through some kind of death. See, if we want to be, in fact, the new wine skins with which God now pours, the new wine of the Spirit of His Son, we have to be willing to die.

If we are going to fish living souls from the sea of death, which is this world, and bring them into the life of God's kingdom, we will have to be willing to enter into death. No other way. Long before Jesus was nailed to that cross and long before He stepped out of that tomb, there were two things going on inside Him.

Daily, you could say, moment by moment, every second. Every second He was dying to His own will and being raised into the Father's will. He was going down out of Himself and being lifted up into God the Father.

That was His life. His baptism. In baptism, He goes down under the water, or however they did it, as a symbol of death.

He comes up under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is a symbol of resurrection. Then He goes right down again. The Spirit drives Him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

And in that wilderness, He experiences another kind of death. He dies to His own inclinations and to every shortcut to His goals. And He's raised into a life which is now ready to minister.

He goes back to His hometown. But He doesn't come as the hometown boy made good, big success. He goes into the synagogue and goes down in front of the eyes of these people who have known Him all His life.

He offends them. And they run Him out of town and want to push Him off the cliff. Now He's raised by the angels who bear Him up through the crowd into safety.

By the time we get to the fishing chapter of Luke 5, this pattern is not just going on in Jesus' life, but it's going on in the things around Him. For instance, this is how fish are caught in the kingdom of God. Their head goes down into the sea empty, a symbol of death, comes up hopping with fish, a symbol of resurrection.

This is how the sick are healed. A man is lowered down to the roof. Rose.

What is that but a symbol of burial, just like they do when they lower the coffin down into the grave, into Jesus' presence. There, in front of Jesus, His sins are forgiven and He's raised to His feet. What is that? It's resurrection.

Jesus' entire life can be described as a cosmic death and resurrection. Who? Though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. That's death enough.

And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name. That is the name of Jesus.

Every knee should bow and every tongue confess of things in heaven, things on earth, things under the earth. That Jesus Christ is Lord. To the glory of God the Father.

Resurrection. This is found, death and resurrection, in every single thing Jesus teaches. It's the heart, the kernel, the center of His teaching.

You can have your Ph.D. in theology, you can be the head honcho of the Bible college, you can be God's man for the hour or God's woman for the hour, but if you don't have that, not only in your head but in your life, you don't have anything. When you are invited by anyone to a marriage feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest a more eminent man than you be invited by him. And he who invited you, both, will come and say to you, Give this man a place.

Then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, Friend, go up higher. Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

To live by faith is to trust God so much that you are willing to yield yourself to a death of some kind, believing that as you do, God will lift you up, make you fruitful in a way you could never have been before you died. This goes on and on. Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone.

But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. The net will only be juggling with fish if it is willing to go all the way down to the bottom and get the fish. The apostle Paul, who is without a doubt the most fruitful of the apostles, understood and taught this very clearly.

For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So, death is at work in us, but life in you. We are treated as imposters, and yet are true, as unknown, yet well-known, as dying, and behold, we live, as punished and not killed, as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, yet possessing all things.

If you want to bear fruit, die. If you want to catch fish into the kingdom of God, die. To live by faith is to die and rise, die and rise, all the time.

Now you take care of the dying, and God will take care of the raising. It's our business to do the going down, and it's God's business in His own to do the lifting up. We don't lift ourselves.

And this dying and rising has to be done down in the ordinary, practical, down-to-earth areas. Not in the spectacular, and never in the dramatic. For instance, at Jesus' temptation, Satan was already throwing this at Him.

You know, if you're the Son of God, cast yourself down from this pinnacle of the temple. Let's see if the angels of God will bear you up. For Him to do it at that point, in that dramatic way, would have been a terrible mistake.

And He didn't do it. See, but His whole life was doing nothing but that. He was constantly going down, trusting that the Father would lift Him up.

For instance, there is a dying and a rising again, in the life of prayer. It doesn't matter whether you get on your knees to pray, or stand with your hands up like this, or do both. It doesn't become prayer until you go down, out of yourself.

Now, God, I thank Thee that I am not, as other men are, thinking that while I'm saying, you know, pious things. But God, be merciful to me, a sinner, even though you've been saved by the blood. Not, well, here I am, Lord, one of your chief prayer warriors.

But God, I don't even know what to say. I don't know how to do this. I've been at it for 50 years, and I still don't know how to do it.

But God can raise you up. We even have to die to our attitudes. When you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anybody, Jesus said.

If you're not willing to die to that attitude, how in the world are you going to pray with any kind of faith? Prayer involves continuously dying to our moods. Oh, I just don't feel in the mood to pray today. It's dying to our fantasies, our attitudes, our idealized memories, our resentments, our self-pity, going out of all these things so that I can concentrate on what needs to be brought up before his throne, those people, those needs.

When I do this, then God comes down and raises us up. And we may not feel anything, no joy bells, no goose pimples, no flashing lights, no thunder, no earthquake, but we will be raised up. And our prayers will move mountains.

Then there's the dying and rising again, found in corporate worship. We're so accustomed to having everything spoon-fed and easy to us. We want that done for us, too.

We don't want to have to think. Corporate worship is not 300, 400 people gathered together in one room, singing something we all like real loud, and while we still remain in our own little private compartments with our own hang-ups and our own prejudices and our own pet peeves and our special, private, delicate tastes. Corporate worship is when we come out of these compartments.

No. Can't stand that hymn 107. Why did they pick that? I'm not going to sing it.

I'll make my mouth go, so nobody will know. Corporate worship is when I, against my own feelings and tastes and all that stuff, come out of myself and enter in with brothers and sisters. Leave my little warm, moist compartment and join brothers and sisters in the hard atmosphere of reality where the angels walk to glorify the Father at the throne and the Lamb in front of Him.

Corporate worship involves the denial, always, of our personal preferences and our little private hang-ups and the entering in to an attempt to reach accord and unity with my brothers and sisters that I might praise Him with one mind and one mouth, together with them. When we do this, then the Spirit of God comes down to this motley assembly of saints who are having such a hard time but who are trying to work together and think together and praise God together and we are lifted up into the very cloud of His glory. There is a dying and a rising again in daily ministry.

Praise God! The Heavenly Father does not spell the word ministry in all English letters and break the letters in purple velvet. My ministry. He calls it service.

And what do you do when you serve? You spend yourself! You pour yourself out! You give yourself! Which is a form of death. Many of the favors people do for other people are really nothing other than investments. You know, I'll help you build your barn today so that in case my barn burns down tomorrow, you'll help me.

You'd better help me. Or maybe I'll tap you for some other favor. And maybe I'll get two favors for year one.

If I know how to do it. But when it's service in the name of Jesus, it is without strings. I don't mind whether they say thank you or send you a card when you're in the hospital or smile at you in Farmer Jack's.

You do it when people say it and leave it at that. It's a joy! When we so serve, spend ourselves, go all the way down to the bottom of this world's stratified sea and catch the little fish, calling them to repentance. Then, God comes down and lifts up the net, jumping with fish.

And our death is swallowed up in their life. We are even now moving into a time when we are going to see signs of God such as we have never seen before. With our own eyes, not on our television screen, but right smack in front of us.

We are going to see people turning to God in great numbers and with tremendous speed. We're going to see the fish coming into Peter's net with an abundance we wouldn't even begin to imagine and will begin to shake just like he did. This last hour move of fishing has already begun and it is being done by a peculiar people.

Who so live in the fellowship of the cross of Jesus that they are able to convey the resurrection life of Jesus. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake. So that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

So death is at work in us, but life in you. The Lord Jesus, who came forth from his tomb alive on this day and who is in our midst at this instant desiring to raise us from the dead waits for us first to die again today.