Death of the Old You (Birth of the New You)
By Marvin Elam
God has been revealing some things to me over the last few days and I am going to share this with everyone I know.
I have gone through a great deal over the last 14 years of my life and the last 5 have been the toughest. I started asking God why I need to continue to deal with my past, why won't it just go away. When will the guilt, hurt and disappointment of my past finally disappear? Well the guilt, hurt and disappointment had not changed because I had not been willing to be crucified.
God revealed something to me; we each have to have a real encounter with God before change can truly come. Just like there can be no victory without conflict and no growth without rain, we can not move into the anointed place of our calling without that one true encounter with God. If we move to soon without God’s design, we have no chance at sustaining it. And more often than not, God has to spend more time coming to our rescue, then working through us to bring others to Him.
Imagine Saul, the murder of Christians’, encounter before he became Paul the man of God (Acts 9 & 10). What about Moses’ encounter before he was used to save a nation (Exodus 2 & 3). David's encounter before he could be king. (1 Samuel 17; 33-51) Not convinced? Look at it this way. With every trial that God brings us through, we grow stronger. With every mistake we make that God forgives us for, we grow more humble.
I realized that Jesus had to be crucified on the cross, descend into hell only to rise again to ascend into heaven, all to give us a chance to have eternal live. His suffering wasn't for His sake. It was so that we would have the chance to choose life over death. If he told his disciple Thomas, that He was the way the truth and the light (John 14; 1-6); then we too have to be crucified before we can become the new man / woman that God called us to be.
I know what you are thinking, only Jesus had to be crucified, He already paid the price. And I agree, Jesus bore all our sins, but only to give us a chance to choose and follow Him, not to negate the choice (Romans 10; 9). Even after the resurrection of Jesus, Paul made it clear that we still needed to confess and believe in the birth, death & resurrection of Jesus Christ, before we could be spared an eternity in hell. We still had to make a choice.
The word crucifixion comes from the Latin word crucifixio, which means “fixed to a cross”. In Matthew 16; 24, after Jesus rebuked Peter, Jesus told his disciples to that if they were going to follow Him, they would have to deny themselves and take up their cross. In other words, in order for them to follow Jesus, they had to be willing to set aside their own desire to survive and be willing to die for Jesus sake. I believe Jesus was making it very clear that we to must be willing to be crucified if we were to ever reach the level of faith in God that is necessary for us to reach the level God called us to.
So just when you think things are as bad as they can get, remember that allowing the old you to be crucified in God's name is symbolic of Christ's willingness to die for us; it is the works of our faith that we now are willing to be crucified by the world as Christians who love Christ. And because we do this, God will allow that old man to die and the new Man of God / Woman of God to be resurrected. (Matthew 9; 15-17)
How many people are watching God work in your life and bring you through as a new, more powerful, faithful, anointed man / woman of God. We can't do what Christ did and save a world, but we can be willing to do whatever it takes to be what God called us to be. By doing this we become proof of who God is and the evidence that Jesus died so that we could be free.
If this doesn’t move you to seek a real relationship with God, then know this. For all the love, hopes and dreams we hold for our families and friends, the fact that you may be the one person in their lives that they will see Christ or the Devil. So if they are watching you, what do you want for them?