I’m sure many of you have had those times in your life where you are playing with a young child and you’re playing cops and robbers or something, and they shoot you with their finger and you pretend you are dead. Of course, they usually laugh and get into the act of pretend shooting you and watching you pretend to die. It’s all just a game of course, and you’re really not dead. At any moment, you can end the game and go back to normal.
That is the way many people seem to take the Word of God when it tells us we have to DIE to self and to the temptations of sin.
Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me…” And by that he didn’t mean that most of the time he considered himself dead, but at any moment he could just get back up and start living any way he wanted. When Paul wrote this, he didn’t mean he was just “playing dead” to self.
Jesus taught that if we truly want our life to count, we MUST die. Read what He said in John 12:24, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” We have to TRULY die to self, and allow God to do WHATEVER He wants in and through our lives in order to bear fruit that will honor and glorify Him.
Paul asks an important question in Romans 6:1, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” The sad answer is, many people who claim to have died to self, are only “playing dead”. And at any moment, when they get tired of the “game”, they can instantly go back to their old selfish and sinful ways.
The Apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 2:24, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. ” And Paul wrote in Galatians 2:24, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
If you want Jesus Christ to live through you, death to self can NOT be a game. It must be a DAILY reality.