Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
2 9 2024
Audio Version
1 Corinthians 15:3-4,
“For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day”.
The burial is a very different part of dying. They took Jesus’s holy tortured, molested, holy body and buried him. Do we need a higher picture of humility than this? He came to endure every crushing blow, the nails that pinned him to the cross for everything he didn’t do. A completely pure and righteous Son of God suffering beyond imagination to pay the price with his blood
so that you and I and all that would believe in him could live.
And then…they buried him. But have you thought that it was not just his life that ended and was buried… it was ours! how many times does one forget that because of his sacrifice…we too, died with him on that cross at calvery…We too were buried with all our sins and prejudices with him. Every bit of our old life, all the petty and the largeness of our sins were killed on his same cross, buried in his same sepulcher, never to be seen from or heard from again. As Paul says in Romans 6:4,
“We were buried with Him through baptism into death”.
Then he exhorts us, through Paul, under the annoying of the Holy Spirit saying, “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body” (Rom 6:12). And again He says, “Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness” (Rom 6:13). What does that mean to you?
If I have given you fine linen to wear to my banquet feast, why would you consider wearing your old filthy rags and insult me by appearing in them? Those garments were buried…I paid the debts for your past life. You should never want to return to those places and vices. Jesus gave us a new life…a new chance to live a true life of freedom. He is saying to leave the past buried. Leave that old sinful part of your past in the grave. Don’t resuscitate your old fleshly notions and habits. Don’t give up the ground Jesus paid for to visit the cheap artificial and counterfeit pleasures of your past. Don’t dig up what was buried. It smells.
When we bury a loved one, they stay that way until Jesus comes again. We may visit that grave site from time to time to remember them and what they meant to us but we do not exhume them. In fact, it’s illegal without a permit.
But we do! Some of us accepted Christ but instead of burying our past, they put it up on a shelf so they might take it out and play with it once in a while. That may look like revisiting the scenes of the past, A club where we used to get trashed, or perhaps hanging with old friends who used to have a different kind of fun with. Or you just drive by and look and reminisce about times past. How it was nice to get lost in those old memories and maybe just for a while revive them…pull them out of the grave for another tour of duty. And before you know it they have come alive again in you. The old ways of anger, infidelity, the imaginings that the grass is greener on the other side.
Have you ever? Kept a fantasy, and replayed it? Tucked it away. You never shared it with anyone for obvious reasons. I have. For decades as a younger man, I held onto them. It’s amazing how comforting they could be. I knew I could never. I knew I would never… but just to fantasize and play with those memories…those fantasies that I even embellished were so inviting.
In Matt 5 he speaks of gouging out an eye or cutting off a hand if it offends you… and it should offend us. It should wound our spirits because it has separated us from the holiness of our walk with Christ.
Jesus speaks of the extremes we must take to not revive our old lives.
Our struggle with sin should make it abundantly clear that we cannot walk in the shadow of the almighty without the power of the Holy Spirit. We cannot achieve true freedom from all the counterfeits in the strength of our own wills because it is “not by might, not by power by my spirit” Zech 4:6 says the lord. We need Jesus.
We need to depend on him and continue to grow in giving up our independence from him.
As we “lean not on our own understanding”. Prov 3:5 As we embrace the cross and what it did for us. As we grow in our knowledge of the goodness of Jesus and the truth of the personal relationship he desires with us, we get to walk in true freedom and the real joy of living a new life. At one point it is realizing it isn’t about what I had to give up but the realization of what I got to walk away from gladly to embrace a peace and joy that the world and man could never afford us.
The joy of the Lord has truly become my strength.
Casting Crown Voice of Truth
