By planting the gospel new life of the gospel goes from seed to fruit.
In “From Seed to Fruit,” Alex, Kent, and Nathan demonstrate how the gospel is the only legitimate evangelistic method and discipleship tool.
“From Seed to Fruit” Episode Notes:
Evangelize. Don’t proselytize.
Can you imagine Jesus publicly rebuking a group for working hard to bring a pagan into a covenant relationship with God?
He did.
The ends don’t justify the means because the means are the end.
Jesus blasted the Pharisees with 7 “woes” in Matthew 23. As you might imagine, a “woe” was a stern public rebuke. What had they been doing to merit official censure from the Son of God?
- Using their status and expertise to keep people from believing in Jesus.
- Creating legal loopholes which would allow them to foreswear themselves in business dealings while remaining “innocent” of any real violation of the Torah.
- Meticulous tithing of even their garden herbs while completely ignoring matters like justice, mercy and faithfulness.
- Fastidious observance of washing rituals while harboring greed and self-indulgence.
- Making a public show of their religiosity to be admired by others while the rot of hypocrisy and wickedness polluted their souls.
- Trying to both celebrate the prophets while imitating those who killed them.
The list turns my stomach even though I’ve been guilty of probably everything on it. Maybe that’s the reason for my visceral response. I know the malignancy of hypocrisy firsthand and I have no trouble identifying with Christ’s ire.
One among the woes doesn’t seem to fit, though. Woe 2 of 7 goes like this:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
(Matthew 23:15 NIV)
Surely, it’s bad to make someone twice as much a child of hell as you are, but what if you don’t know you’re a child of hell? Would a child of hell expend so much effort to convince someone to leave paganism and worship Yahweh? That must have been a noble aspiration, but Jesus doesn’t seem to agree. His woe doesn’t come back and affirm their proselytizing like he does with the one about tithing. It would have sounded strange if he had since his tone about their missionary journeys seems altogether derisive. The juxtaposition between “you travel over land and sea” and “to win a single convert,” lampoons (and harpoons) them. Their noble pursuit was neither laudable in its intent nor justifiable in its outcome.
Their methods made their converts children of hell because they made the Pharisees children of hell. Proselytizing is a dirty business fraught with moral hazards along the way. The proselytizer must gain his quarry’s trust which often requires at least some duplicity. They must think he is genuinely interested in them and not just in adding their foreskin to his collection, which is the real motive.[i] Judaism doesn’t prescribe proselytizing per se, so those who set out on the endeavor were necessarily seen as super Jews. Those who expended great effort were super-duper Jews. And those who won a proselyte would have been national heroes. The whole process of proselytization dehumanizes its object to prove the superiority of the proselytizer and his tribe.
Most Christians are familiar with the Great Commission. We know it says that we should go and make converts of all nations. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for? Here is the passage:
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
(Matthew 28:18-20 NIV)
The difference between Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees five chapters ago and this commission from him lies largely in the means. Our English translations lead most to believe that Christ’s primary imperative here is “go,” but that’s wrong. In the Greek, the word for “go” is in the participle form like the one for “baptizing” and for “teaching.” Only “make disciples” (actually just “disciple”) thumps with the force of a command in this text. That makes a lot more sense since one of Jesus’ last instructions to his disciples before ascending was, “stay.”[2] The Great Commission doesn’t tell us how to work for Christ, but how to work with him. Nothing between “all authority has been given to me” and “I will be with you always” is within our ability to perform. Christ is the goal, and he is the means.
Here’s the big difference: Religions gain adherents through proselytization while God’s kingdom expands through evangelization.
The former requires tons of resources because it requires the convert to adopt new manners, dress, language, friendships, recreational behavior, and rhythm of life. The latter requires that the convert believe a story. Since we can’t make anyone believe anything, we’re left with nothing but the telling.
Christ’s Parable of the Sower offers insight into the dynamics of discipling through evangelization. The farmer performs one function – he throws seed. He doesn’t perform soil tests or cultivate his land or plow furrows; he just throws everywhere. Later in the parable, Jesus explains that the seed is the word of God which I’ve demonstrated to be the gospel. While Mark 16:15’s “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” is probably not authentic, it does correctly give the ”how” to Matthew 28’s what. We, like the farmer, just need to recklessly scatter the gospel seed everywhere. Every time we do, we must let it truly leave our hands because the whole Christian life is contained in that germ. Attempts to “win” others through our efforts will only cause harm to us and to them.
Don’t hang out a shingle, hold up the cross.
Paul traveled sea and land to make converts, but his efforts have yielded good fruit because he planted good seed. In his words:
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
(1 Corinthians 2:1-2 NIV)
According to Luke in Acts 18, Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half. That’s one of his longest stays with his three weeks in Thessalonica as a point of comparison. While in Corinth, he was probably not able to devote as much time as he may have wanted since he worked a fulltime job through the day and ministered in the evenings. He didn’t have a family, though, so he could devote every discretionary minute in ministry. That’s a lot of time! And he filled it all with, “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Though he was bi-vocational, Paul’s one job was to proclaim the gospel. He knew that anything he might have done beyond that would have been proselytizing, so he left it out.
Paul had one job because the gospel is the seed of the kingdom but planting alone won’t produce a crop. That he was limited to preaching this “foolish” and simple message meant he had to look to God for the results. As he goes on to say in this same passage:
I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
(1 Corinthians 2:3-4 NIV)
Can you imagine a pastor search committee hiring someone whose résumé said he was nervous, timid, not particularly wise-sounding, nor persuasive?
Because the gospel is news the clearest, least embellished presentation is always the best. The power to make disciples is in the seed. The power to make that seed germinate must come from God. Paul’s choice to just tell the gospel made room for his hearers to encounter God personally. That kind of thing happens when the messenger has the faith of Christ to minister the faith of Christ to others. I’ve been saying that Paul had one; he also had one great privilege – the eager ear of God. Proselytizers put faith in their efforts, but evangelizers must trust in God who empowers us by his Spirit. Where the Pharisees through their great effort had made double sons of hell, Paul effortlessly produced people of sterling faith by God’s power.
Paul favored the simplest possible presentation of the gospel, but he did use visual aids. And they were good ones, too, because Paul berated the Galatians for not benefiting from them:
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.
(Galatians 3:1 NIV)
The Greek here translated, “clearly portrayed as,” connotes a public portrayal. No, Paul didn’t stage a Passion Play. He was the visual aid. Where Christ had been rejected by Israel and accused by her leaders, so jealous Galatian Jews turned out even from surrounding regions to oppose Paul. Christ was subject to unjust legal treatment from a consortium of Jew and Gentile leaders. Similarly, Paul was banished from Pisidian Antioch by influential Gentiles stirred up by the Jewish leaders.[iii] Paul didn’t have PowerPoint (gasp!) but he could still depict the gospel visually through participation in Christ’s suffering and demonstration of resurrection power. Just as Christ’s death resulted in victory, so Paul’s banishment cemented the faith of his converts. Acts 13 doesn’t end in defeat, but with, “And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.”
Paul preached the gospel with words and without because the two presentations were inseparable. Look at how he describes his ministry method:
For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself.
(2 Corinthians 4:11-14 NIV)
A taste of Christ’s death awaits anyone who believes enough to open their mouth and proclaim the unvarnished gospel. Attempts to “gain a hearing” or “earn the right to be heard” or “contextualize the message” seek to skirt the offense of the cross. They are all a shift from evangelization toward proselytization. Making a disciple is tantamount to raising the dead, but just as a student is not above his teacher neither will we be able to perform this feat while unwilling to partake of the cross.
From “children of hell” to kids of the King
There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll come out with it – the predominant outreach model in the American church is proselytization and not evangelization. American churches spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on lavish facilities, professional music, stunning multimedia, sunshiny kids’ ministries, and “sticky” youth ministries. Does this sound a bit like a modern equivalent to traveling sea and land? They may wordsmith some transcendent purpose for each of the copious investments, but the bottom line is more bottoms lined up in our plush conference chairs.
Church growth can feel synonymous to advancing the kingdom, so we justify the ends with the means. But in this time of crisis for the American church, the fires of trial are revealing just how much wood, hay, and straw have gone into its edifice. In the kingdom of God, the ends don’t justify the means, but they sure can condemn them. The attractional church has been churning out children of hell. They’re still greedy so we sell the lie that giving a little money now will result in God making them rich in this life. They’re filled with lust, so we get them hooked up with a recovery ministry. Their vanity punishes their gluttony, so we start a Christian weight loss ministry to help their vanity win. They love their children more than Christ, so we offer them childcare, child discipleship, and parenting training in the name of Christ. All of this grievously makes their kids twice the children of hell than they are.
Before you dismiss me as an idealogue (or something less charitable) let me share an example of how a large church maintained its gospel edge while responding to administrative demands.
In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.”
(Acts 6:1-4 NIV)
Notice that this food distribution program wasn’t an outreach of the church but their way of expressing the Kingdom norm of justice. And yet a concern over injustice arose regarding the administration of the food. This wasn’t a small issue. Widows were going hungry, and the church was beginning to split along ethnic lines. Against this swell of controversy, the apostles’ commitment to the main thing remained stalwart. They would not deviate from their calling to pray and distribute the gospel. These are the lub and dub of outreach and nothing can be allowed to detract from it.
As we will see in the next sections, church life encompasses more than prayer and preaching but these are the one proper method of kingdom expansion. An understanding of this point will focus our activity. Rather than attempting to entice lost people to church we can equip the church to prayerfully proclaim the gospel as they go to the store, the bank, school, communities, jobs, etc. There could be no more powerful force to reach the world than an army of the unashamed marching into persecution with signs following.
This brings me to the second of my four exhortations.
Retool discipleship.
A 2002 survey of over 3000 American teenagers found that nearly all of them saw morality as the purpose of religion and that they didn’t think religion was particularly necessary for a person to become moral. As the authors commented:
Most U.S. teens think that one of religion’s primary functions is to help people be good. But they do not view religion as necessary for anyone being good, because they see many means to being good and many good nonreligious people. Hence, most U.S. teenagers conclude that religion is a nonnecessary condition for achieving one of its primary functions. In other words, the thing religion specializes in does not actually require religion to achieve.
Is it any wonder that 2007 witnessed the beginning of a sharp decline away from affiliation with religion in America?
Speaking of 2007, that year Willowcreek Community Church conducted an intensive survey of their 20,000+ members to discover how the church’s ministry had helped them grow spiritually. The results published in a document aptly named “Reveal” showed that it hadn’t. Their most involved members were the least enthusiastic about their faith and nearly 40% had contemplated finding another church over the previous year.[v]
In 2016 several influential Christian leaders endorsed the Trump campaign going on record to christen a philandering, bloviating, elitist, thug as God’s choice for America. It was a shocking moment for many when the underbelly of Americanism hiding under evangelicalism finally showed itself openly. A rift formed within the evangelical church that has continued to widen to this day.[vi]
In 2018, Christian author and pastor, Joshua Harris announced that he was deconstructing his faith and no longer identified as “Christian.”[vii] He wasn’t the first high-profile Christian to go through that process or use that terminology, but his case brought the term, “deconstructing,” into the mainstream. As more Christian leaders have come forward to say they too have renounced their faith, “deconstruction” has come to refer to an overall trend. More than a trend, a harbinger fraught with dread and portents of American Christianity finally falling into ruin with the rest of the west.
As devoted Christians have grasped for the cause of these troubling trends, one answer always comes to the fore – bad discipleship in the church. There is surely truth in that conclusion, but the problem goes a bit deeper. While the teens in the 2002 survey obviously missed out on basic Christian education, it probably wouldn’t be fair to say that Joshua Harris had been inadequately discipled in his church. The disaffected at Willowcreek had received the most Christian content of any of the other demographics which they surveyed. Christians dismayed over their brothers’ political stance would likely find them as informed about the Bible as anyone. Bad discipleship in the church is the cause but the fix won’t involve a change in church as much as a change in our basic understanding of discipleship.
Everything is not a nail.
Bible learning isn’t discipleship. It was the Bible teachers of Christ’s day who conspired to have him crucified. How could this have happened if Bible knowledge equates to spiritual growth? Christ himself was a rabbi, but he almost never taught from the Bible. The apostle Paul blatantly disparaged religious knowledge in this passage:
Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.
(1 Corinthians 8:1-3 NIV)
It seems that not only does Bible study not grow people, but it might also even get in the way of their growth. Most serious Christians know from experience that this is true. In times of dryness or besetting sin reading the Bible rarely remedies.
Despite being obviously false, we continue to equate Bible study and discipleship. If you asked a pastor fifty years ago how his church was discipling its members, he would have pointed to the Sunday School program. Thirty years ago, he would have shown you his cutting-edge small group ministry along with reams of men’s, women’s and student study materials. If (since) that wasn’t enough parachurch has produced multiple additional learning tracks like Promise Keepers, Bible Study Fellowship and YoungLife. And yet when “What went wrong?” gets asked, the answer continues to be, “Not enough Bible learning.”
Some have attempted to push back against the glut of knowledge with an emphasis on obedience rather than scholastics. They might say they’ve transitioned from a Bible learning model to a Bible doing model. Depending on the amount of top-down control from disciple-maker to disciple these movements have exploded to reach millions of people. It’s a fascinating study in exponential growth but it’s also social control. Accountability is important in the Christian movement, but freedom is essential. It’s little wonder that yesterday’s dynamic disciple-making movement tends to become today’s controlling cult.[viii] And all the participants in these movements receive in exchange for their freedom is more of the same. Trading Bible learning for Bible doing retains the Bible as the discipling tool with a different methodology. They might perform better than the average churchgoer, but they won’t grow because the Bible is the wrong tool for the job no matter how it gets used.
There’s a saying that goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything will look like a nail.” Churches continue to whack away at their members with the Bible (Bible thumpers?) because it’s the only tool they have. Someone might propose that we instead choose to simply “follow Jesus” but that just means they should focus primarily on the four Gospels. Someone else could suggest that everyone listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, but that approach never works in practice because somebody always starts saying the Holy Spirit wants them to sleep with their girlfriend or something like that. Then the leaders must open the Bible to correct the convenient calling. They vow next time to make that kid learn his Bible before telling him to follow the Holy Spirit.
Whack!
We know that a disciple must follow his master to become like him but we’re not sure how to follow someone who’s not physically present. We can’t walk with him like his first disciples did. Even if we could, the opportunity doesn’t seem to have had much of a transformative effect on any of them. At the end of their time with him, they seem to have been every much as ignorant, fearful, and failing as they were when he called them. Jesus promised that the one who follows him will become like him, so physically walking behind Jesus doesn’t seem to have been what he meant. If literally walking with Jesus produced one betrayer, one denier, and ten defectors, maybe we shouldn’t idealize that period in salvation history. Maybe we should spend less time reading the Gospels and trying to imitate the life we find there.
Jesus told his disciples that his ministry years would be brief and preparatory for his real work on the cross. He promised that he would send them the Holy Spirit in his absence. Far from being a consolation prize, the coming of the Holy Spirit would improve upon their experience of him as he would live inside of them instead of just with them. Jesus said that only his disciples would be able to receive the Spirit since the gift would only be for those who knew Jesus.[ix] The disciples may have wondered why Christ didn’t just give them the Holy Spirit if he came to those who know him, and they had come to know him. And what about people who never met Jesus, how were they to come to know him if the Holy Spirit only came on the ones who know him? According to John, the Holy Spirit would not come until Christ’s glorification,[x] but why?
The Holy Spirit is the divine mentor, but he needed the right training tool which only Christ’s passion could provide.
Take up your cross and follow me.
We know we’re supposed to follow Christ, but we don’t even know what that means. Should we read about him in the Gospels and attempt to reproduce the details of his life? Should we learn his teachings and conform our lives to them? Maybe a combination of both? This probably sounds right to most. It’s been the thrust of a recent movement led by teachers like Francis Chan and David Plat.[xi] Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. As I’ve already observed, it didn’t work for the guys who originally walked with Jesus, and it won’t work now. Following Christ isn’t about imitating the life of Jesus of Nazareth or about trying to keep up with a new litany of commands. Rather than reproducing the character of Christ, this approach produces new, more judgmental Pharisees celebrating dramatic ministry achievements and looking down on more pedestrian callings.
Simply put, we follow Christ by walking in his steps. According to that guy who denied Christ after three and a half years in his inner circle:
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
“He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.”
When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
(1 Peter 2:21-23 NIV)
Peter denied Jesus on that fateful night because he still didn’t really know who he was. He hadn’t even begun to follow him. There just before the cock crowed, Peter declined to take up his cross and follow Jesus. The call to discipleship comes with a cross and only in taking it up can anyone begin to follow. That’s a steep demand. It’s too steep which is why even Peter couldn’t meet it. Only after Christ’s vindication could Peter see the beauty of the cross which his master offered him.
Not only was Peter now able take up his own cross he learned to help others take up theirs as well. That’s discipleship. The Christians Peter addressed in the passage above were slaves. They couldn’t chase a life of radical missional living. They were too occupied with literal planting and harvesting. But this didn’t mean they couldn’t follow Christ as closely as anyone else. Their circumstances provided all the identification with Christ they could want. And Peter didn’t want them to miss it. Through his letter, he discipled those slaves by insisting that they live by the faith of Christ in the grind of their daily lives.
The cross is the only training tool which can transform a sinner into the image of Christ. Under the weight of our cross we exercise the faith of Christ which is his essence. By the Spirit of his resurrection, we find joy and power flooding the vacuum dug in our hearts by the cross. So, discipleship is simply the repeated dying and rising with Christ that multiplies the faith and love of the Son of God with each revolution.
This was Paul’s understanding of his own pursuit of Christ:
I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 3:10-12 NIV)
Death and resurrection are the only process of discipleship. But Paul also looked forward to another resurrection. He doesn’t seem to mean the bodily resurrection at the end of the age since that’s not something we strive to earn and because he speaks of it as something he might have considered himself to have reached. So, Paul lived in a pattern of dying and rising in pursuit of a personal resurrection yet ahead of him, but not beyond his own horizon.
This resurrection provided a concrete focus for Paul’s personal spiritual growth. “Becoming Christlike” is too nebulous to strain toward. We can’t see it out there and we can’t recognize our own progress toward it. Of course, Paul wanted to become like Christ but for him that meant the achievement of the resurrection from the dead. As we will see, this resurrection was the conquest of sin within his body.
Life to your mortal bodies
The gospel transforms into the image of Christ because the cross is God’s one remedy for sin. The writers of the New Testament viewed spiritual growth as the death of sin’s influence in our bodies and the springing to life of the divine character out of its ashes. Spiritual maturity and mastery over sin were directly related for them. After centuries of collective failure against sin, these sincere Jews had found real victory over its power through the gospel.
Sinlessness is the goal of discipleship but that doesn’t mean we should devote our energies to sin management. We can’t return to a law of written requirements which would provoke the law of sin which would activate the law of death. Paul called his stalemate with sin, “death.” If that’s the case, we’ll never break the impasse in our own strength since we’re dead in sin. The only way to overcome sin, then, must be through resurrection.
After disarming sin through his declaration in Romans 8:1 that there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, Paul goes on to point to a fourth law which sets free from the law of sin and the law of death, “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans 8:2 ESV emphasis mine NAW)
The law of the Spirit of life begins with sin as already defeated. The work of Christ had already put sin on death row where it can’t threaten any of his people. They now become a threat to sin as they learn to renounce their own striving (flesh) at his cross and imbibe the life of his resurrection. Just as the law of death manifested in a consistent, degenerative experience, so now the law of the Spirit of life must manifest in consistent, regenerative experience. As Paul wrote:
But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
(Romans 8:10-11 ESV)
Paul speaks of a future, but penultimate resurrection here just like he did in Philippians 3. Notice that he doesn’t say, “he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give you a new body.” Instead, he promises that resurrection life will flow into their current, mortal bodies through the Spirit. Since “death” has meant the inability to overcome sin, “life” must mean power and even victory over it. The disciple must take up her cross to follow Christ because only through consigning her own efforts to the grave can she find resurrection power over sin.
The idea of consigning our efforts to the grave may sound like a cop-out but it’s so much harder than attempting to conform to religious rules. As a former legalist, I can attest that for all the misery of legalism it did have one perk. I could piecemeal my service to God and retain my illusions of autonomy and relative worth. At the cross we lay down our efforts because we acknowledge our inability. We take up his shame because he took ours. Our pretensions die and our rights are cast aside at the cross. At the cross we find that even our most noble aspirations and laudable achievements were born of ego and contributed to our downfall. The cross is the solution because we are the problem, but the cross is not the end.
We go to the cross to die, but death is never God’s goal. We take up our cross to receive resurrection power over sin. That’s the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. As Paul continues in Romans 8, he gives us a clearer idea of the dynamic of this law:
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
(Romans 8:12-17 ESV)
Rather than attempting to suppress wicked urges we kill them at the cross. All the precipitators of overt sin arise from our ego. We get stuck between lust and shame because lust attempts to bolster our deficiencies while shame arrogates our potential. Putting the deeds of the body to death means that we renounce ourselves altogether. No, we’re not entitled to “blow off steam” because our bodies are dead with Christ. No, we don’t get to wallow in self-loathing because there is no more self to loathe.
And yet we subject ourselves to this death to receive eternal life in Christ. The pursuit of the penultimate resurrection results in confidence for the ultimate resurrection. While some death may remain in our bodies, we continue to give them over to the cross of Christ which is what the Spirit leads us to do. We might have to confess with Paul that we’ve not yet attained the resurrection of the dead in our mortal bodies, but we know that we’re on our way. And being on the way is enough since just being led by the Spirit makes one a Son of God. And being a Son of God means being an heir with Christ.
Through the death and resurrection of Christ we enter confidently into the covenant of faith. We participate in that covenant as that faith urges us to die with Christ and as that faith find vindication in power to overcome sin. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, we can be assured that even though we’re still in process our identification with him means we’re saved now and will be saved forever. This faith isn’t mere agreement with a credal statement, though. It’s the faith of Christ that calls us to suffer with him and thereby share his glory.
But what does it mean to suffer with him? Did Paul mean to say that only people who live in restricted countries can be glorified with Christ? Not at all! Every person in this fallen world faces a plethora of opportunities to suffer with Christ every day.