Someone in despair said to me recently, “I’ve been praying that I would like to be separated from me – from the independence of me, the selfishness of me. I would like to be separated from me so that I can receive all that God has for me. Does that make sense?”
I replied, “Not only does it make sense, but it is the Gospel. You have been separated from you. We have been crucified with Christ (Gal. 5:24). We have been buried with Him. And when that becomes something you and I believe by faith, then we experience the reality. It’s Romans 5, 6, 7, and 8.”
I told him, “Read it over and over. There’s your prescription, because you don’t believe that you are dead.” And It’s hard to believe. We have to put ourselves into that grave constantly. There’s never a time that I can’t rise up and be the old me. There’s never a time when I don’t have the freedom to go back to the old life if I so choose.
The only solution to everything is reckoning yourself dead. There’s no other solution to sin, to the practical of life, to the essential of life, than to believe that I’m dead. And there is no other sin but this: to let the old man live.
