Life Through the Spirit

"When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Then [Jesus] said to [His disciples]: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels."" - Luke 9:23-26 (NIV)

We talk all the time about relying on God. But what do we really mean when we say that?

To rely on God is not to rely on God to give us what we desire; to rely on God is to put our desires to death and rely on God to raise them from the dead!

"You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you." - Romans 8:9-11 (NIV)

The only way to know that we are relying on God, that we have been crucified with Christ, that we are living by the Spirit, is to put our desires to death and see whether we are still living for anything after that.

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." - Galatians 2:20 (NIV)

Either it is God's will or it is not God's will. If it is God's will, God will make a way. If it is not God's will, why do you want to make your own way?

If our desires are of God, God will raise them from the dead, in which case we will know that they are of God and not of ourselves. But we have to put them to death first.

Of course, God might not raise our desires from the dead, in which case we will find out that they are not of God in the first place. But in that case, they are not worth living for anyway.