You died

Lately my internal monologue has been dreadful. Unforgiving. "You can't do this," it says. "You're bad at everything. You're useless. Maybe you should give up. It would be better for everyone." And on and on it goes.

It has made being a leader difficult. Contending with a hectic work environment, other staff members' differences, and the needs of extremely vulnerable people, with a torrent of criticism of your own manifest inadequacy, is at best stressful and at worst punishing.

I was reading Colossians the other day and this really struck me.

"Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." - Colossians 3.1-4 (emphasis mine)

The other night we had dinner with two dear friends of ours. In frustration at our very human nature, my friend mentioned this. She said, "But of course we do this. We are dead. Dead! We are dead in our sinful nature. We need God to be alive again."

We are dead.

"You died," Paul writes. "and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."

There is a lot of power and poetry in Paul's writing. Elsewhere he elaborates, "Your sinful nature was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." (Colossians 2.11-12)

Dead. Buried. Raised again.

Most of the time, I don't live and go about my everyday life with the knowledge that I am dead. That what happened when I came to faith in Christ was that I died, my old self was buried, and I was raised back to life through Christ.

That I died, and am now alive only through, because of, and in Christ.

Everything about me - my mistakes, my flaws, my internal monologue, my pain and illness and regrets - all these things died and were buried. All my strengths, my successes, my sources of pride and love and passion, are what they are because they have been resurrected by God.

I cannot be alive outside of him.

I think living totally dependent on God's power must be pain and misery before it is unbridled freedom and joy. For to truly die a full death in this way is to feel and know and live in what you were, and then to feel the agony of death and surrender of things that were part of you. The death comes before the resurrection.

It must be amazing to know and fully live the power of Christ's victory. To know that God can give you all strength when you are weak, that you are an empty vessel waiting and ready to be filled by all the inconceivable power that God wants for you. To know that you are nothing without him, but that that is the point. That he wants you to be nothing on your own so he can fill you up.

That nothing can be accomplished living as your dead self.

I pray that I would be able to fully understand this on this side of heaven.