Destined for the Cross

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.”  Romans 6:1-6

In order to enjoy the liberty and freedom gained by Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross, we too must make our journey to the cross and put to death the deeds of the flesh (“the old self”).

Of this, Oswald Chambers says:
“No one enters in the experience of entire sanctification without going through a ‘white funeral’ - the burial of the old life. If there has never been this crisis of death, sanctification is nothing more than a vision.

There must be a ‘white funeral’: a death that has only one resurrection - a resurrection into the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can upset such a life, it is one with God of one purpose, to be a witness to Him.”

The message of the cross - and the supernatural power which Christ’s death released - continue to be the foundation of our Christian faith. But if we are to benefit, we must know and understand and appropriate its truth.

“Dying with Jesus, by death reckoned mine;
Living with Jesus a new life divine;
Looking to Jesus till glory doth shine,
Moment by moment, O Lord, I am Thine.” -Daniel W. Whittle