Most Christians understand that Jesus Christ died FOR believers. But few understand that believers also died WITH Christ.

To miss that distinction is to sign up for a Christian life filled with frustration.

On the night that I finally came to faith in Christ, my life was a seething cauldron of dysfunction on an Olympic scale.

Hours before, God had revealed to me, in a dramatic, terrifying fashion, what my final spiritual destination looked like if I stayed on my road to perdition.

In my pastor friend’s living room in the middle of the night, I must have looked like Wile E. Coyote upon the approach of a roaring runaway train — ears down, eyes bulging, nowhere to run, time running out.

Gulp.

My friend took me down an entirely different road that night, the so-called “Roman Road,” Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

That wonderful portion of scripture set forth both my extreme spiritual peril before a Holy God, and the only remedy to my condition — faith in the Person of Jesus Christ, and the redeeming work He did on the cross for you and me 2,000 years ago.

I seized on that Message with both hands as though my life depended upon it — because it did!

I would NEVER be the same again. So, imagine my surprise when decades later, I learned of the full extent of what happened to me that glorious, fateful night.

I died, in a manner of speaking. Let me explain:

Witness protection programs provide security and safety for government witnesses by giving them new identities, new locations and entirely new lives.

Now read the following passage from Galatians 2:19-21, with the concept of WPP’s in mind:

“For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”

All I knew on that wonderful night decades ago was that I had been born again and filled with the Holy Spirit. The evidence of my authentic transformation showed up everywhere I turned.

The theological term for this stage of my salvation is justification. I was made judicially “right” before God through the redemption via Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

I was no longer exposed to the consequences of my lifetime of sinning — Jesus became “exposed” on my behalf. All Good News.

From Self-Life to Christ-Life

After my conversion, I started out well. But then I encountered the remnants of that “old me,” the so-called “old man,” that remained.

I hadn’t realized that the “old me” had died positionally with Christ and had no more authority in my life. His days of being my master were over IF I did my part by denying his impulses to sin.

Christian author Miles Stanford wrote:

“God says in effect, ‘My child, as you reckoned on the substitutionary work of the Lord Jesus Christ for your salvation, now go a step farther and reckon on His representative work for your victory day by day.’ You believe the Lord Jesus died for your sins because God said so. Now take the next step. Accept by faith the further fact that you died with Him, i.e., that your ‘old man was crucified with Him’”

We Have a Part to Play

The Apostle Paul put it this way in Romans 6:13-15: “… and do not go on presenting the parts of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those who are alive from the dead, and your body’s parts as instruments of righteousness for God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under the Law but under grace.”

In a sense it’s up to us to do the “easy part,” by reckoning these things to be true. God already did the “hard part” by dying on the cross.

The night of my conversion, God took me back in time 2,000 years and put me up there on the cross with Christ and I died “in Him.”

I was also buried “in Him” and later, raised to newness of life “in Him.” This took me “out of Adam” and placed me “into Christ.” That is the essence of being born again.

Now while these things are true, I must believe them and live my day-to-day life in the light of my positional status as alive from the dead.

My old Bible teacher used to say, “We are to behave as ‘dead men on furlough.’”

How About You?

While new Christians are grounded in the justification truths related to salvation, many are lacking in the sanctification truths related to living the Christian life in the power of Christ rather than in their own strength.

Is that you? Are you stuck in a Romans 7 experience, “not practicing what I want to do, but I do the very thing I hate?”

You need to move on to Romans 8 in your life in which “… there is now no condemnation at all for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Otherwise, you will continually be frustrated by knowing what is right but being unable to live it.

“Grace brother, grace.”

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