Come and Die
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As we come to Christ, we go through a peculiar process. The bible likes to describe it as death. And oh, it certainly does feel that way. Seldom christians come to Jesus haphazardly, just wandering into the faith and feel a genuine connection with our Lord with actual fruit of the Spirit as a result. Even those of us who grew up in church ultimately come to this moment where rubber meets the road and we must decide: will we let our will for our life live on and navigate through our experience in this world in our own wisdom we’ve extracted from the world around us, or will we allow what we want, what we think, what we know and what we feel to all die in order to submit to Christ and allow Him to then, take the reigns of our lives.
This is the essential invitation from Jesus as we come into His kingdom: repent and believe the good news. Repent comes from the Greek word, metanoia, which means a change in one’s way of life. If we are to change our lives, a new attitude must be adopted. If a new attitude is adopted, an old attitude must die. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but ways of thinking that we’ve held onto for years and years don’t like to die that quickly. Perhaps we’ve always known certain patterns we’ve lived out are bad for us and wrong resulting in an easier death such as addictions. However, it’s the subtle attitudes that are harder to let die such as: financial gain is my rightful earning and I can do with it as I desire, I can cut out people from my life because they don’t fit my needs, I can cancel on any appointments that I feel like it because of self-care needs, and so much more.
Jesus doesn’t call us to an easy life. Jesus calls us to a simple life that is about devotion to His goodness, glory, grace and the service and love toward the precious human beings that He has sacrificed His own life for. And for this to happen, we must die. We must die to the selfish desires we have, the desire to control our own lives and outcomes, the ideas of morality that we’ve extracted from our own experience and submit to what He has asked… or we will never be able to properly carry out this task.
Is this death easy? Of course it’s not. It feels like dying. It feels like moving to a foreign land where you know nobody, the customs or how to move about in the world. It feels like losing all you once built up. However, there is a key phrase about what is promised on the other side of death that we have to lean into and cling to. "Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life". Galatians 2:20. All over the New Testament there is scripture after scripture about the new life that is given to us once we offer up our old life to Jesus.
As we head toward a new semester with incoming freshmen and returning upperclassmen, this is the call that is in the back of my mind. Not because I’m a masochist who loves to die over and over again in this life, but because I’ve walked this road with Jesus long enough to know there is life on the other side of death. Jesus died on the cross, and the Father raised Him up out of the grave to have life, and life to the fullest extent. Jesus, now, can never die. And though we will actually lose life from our bodies one day, when we say goodbye to our old attitudes and ways of living, God resurrects goodness and beauty out of us. He gives us a new life. The life that He offers us and gives us is so much more full and “abundant” than the one I was previously living.
And so, I invite you into this meditation as the semester begins: what is Jesus calling you to let go of this semester in order to walk into this new life? What needs to die in your life right now in order to live? What attitudes are you holding onto that are inconsistent with the life that Jesus lived and calls you to? What needs to be crucified on the cross so that more parts of you can live your life in the Spirit?
