Lorenzo Palon

“Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore, we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.” – Romans 6:3-4 (NASB)

If you will try to search in your concordance how many times the word ‘death’ or ‘died’ or the derivative of death like ‘crucified’ or ‘buried’ or something like that occurs in the Book of Romans, you’ll be amazed the Book of Romans is replete with the idea of ‘baptism into Christ’s death. For the longest time, I thought this passage was all about a discussion of the symbolic meaning of baptism. Like what Paul was trying to say to us about baptism as in the sign of the fact that Christ died and rose again. But I have come to realize something else about this passage in Romans chapter 6. Something happened to me when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. I knew I was saved, but it’s taken me as far as I am right now to try to understand that somehow when Jesus died on the cross, I died with Him. That sounds nice and pretty, but what does it mean? What about the Christian and sin? What about the person who had been saved, indwelt by the fullness of the Spirit of God? What about the person who knows God’s Word and prays for God’s will but is continually bombarded by the fact that he cannot do that which is pleasing to God? How do we stand ourselves when we know that our sin is the very thing that put Christ on the cross, and yet we cannot quit sinning? I’m not speaking of sinless perfection, but I am most certainly speaking of sinning less. The world looks at us and says, ‘you claim to have the answer to my needs, but if you’re an example of what God has to offer, I don’t want any of it. For the longest time, I thought everything was right between me and God. But deep down within me, there was something lacking. I didn’t know where to go. I knew I made the greatest decision in life in accepting Jesus Christ, and that was true. But my Christian life was beset with struggle in sin and failure, and I felt like that there’s not a whole lot of what God can do for me. Well, I found out just the opposite. I found out that there is so much God wants to do for us. This enlightenment came to me when I realized more and more that I had really died with Jesus Christ. It’s spoken of repeatedly about death. How we have died with Christ (it’s aorist tense in Greek, past tense point of action, once and for all). It’s not that I needed to somehow die to myself or my sinful nature or my selfish ambition to life. That was not the question at all. The question was that when I accepted Christ, I had already died to my own life. But I never knew it. Nobody ever told me that I can have real, honest joy and happiness and peace. In the midst of a sense of seeming failure, no one ever told me that God accepts me just the way I am. He wants me to be better, and He’s working in my life to make me more like Jesus Christ. Friend, He accepts you, failure and all. In the midst of failure, you can have real and genuine victory.

Howbeit, in the course of my Christian experience, honestly, there were times when what I wanted was a sense of where’s God in my life on a day-to-day basis. All through the Bible, we read this glorious walk with God, this peace, this relationship, this knowing Him, this victory, but Lord, where was that in my life? Why is there such a struggle with sin? In the midst of knowing that You live within me, why do I still have no peace and joy in myself? What I read in the Bible just doesn’t describe my life – up and down, up and down. Thank God for 1 John 1:9; whenever I sin, all I must do is to come back to 1 John 1:9 for forgiveness; but only to find myself coming back again to 1 John 1:9 the next day, and on and on. Is that the fact of the Christian experience? That when I sin, God will forgive me? Is the rest of my life going to be one struggle? Have I got to fail to find God? Have I got to sin that I might feel clean in confession? Is that the way it’s got to be? Nay, I have found in my life to this day, that I have real victory, not in the fact that I am so much sinless than before. I have found out that my emotional makeup, my relationship to God, my attitude about myself, my relationship to others, commitment to Christ and to the church, and my family is not dependent on the fact that sometimes I sin and rebel against God. I have found out that in the midst of this struggle with self and sin, I can say to God, ‘Lord here I am, use me. I want to live for you.’ I have found out that all my selfish plans and will for my life have got to be put in the hands of God. And there is no other way that majority of Christians will ever know what victory really is in this life unless they surrender everything to God. We walk around defeated, and unhappy, and broken, because I think we major too much on how to be saved, and not enough on what it means to be saved. I am not disparaging the fact that there must be a conversion experience. But what I am saying is, there is a follow-up growth process for people who have been born again. You’re in the Kingdom, but you’re not enjoying the King. You know God by faith in forgiveness of sin, but you don’t know God in faith to live and enjoy every day.

When I gave my heart to Jesus Christ was the dawn of a new day. It was only the start, but there’s so much more; so much more than that first sweet day. There’s more, so much more with each passing day. “For I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Christ has left each one of us here for a purpose. And that purpose is to show those who may not know Christ, that we just don’t talk about joy, that we just don’t read beautiful Scriptures about victory, that we just don’t have a ‘pie-in-the sky’ someday kind of faith, that we just don’t talk about that God walks with us and promises never to leave us. But that somehow our lives have got to relate and radiate the fact that Jesus is alive. And He’s with his church today. And there’s no reason for God’s people to be down and discouraged, and disgruntled, and defeated in the face of the world, because the One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Listen to Paul as he speaks about this very thing: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). In Galatians 6:14 he says, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world”. And then again in 2nd Corinthians 4:7-11 Paul says, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 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”. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s so very hard to put into words what I’m trying to say. There’s more to the Christian life than what most Christians are experiencing. There is real joy in being a Christian. That truth came home to me for the first time when I saw in Calvary, that Jesus really, really, really paid it all. That everything since Calvary is uphill for me as a Christian; that I don’t have to be down on my tail, that I don’t have to be judgmental of others, that I can accept them for what they are, knowing that God is also working in their life as He’s working in mine. There was real joy when I finally discovered what Calvary is all about. When I finally discovered that if I have died with Christ in baptism by faith, that I am already alive in Christ, nothing can touch me. We’re not just beating a drum or clanking a cymbal. The Spirit of God has the power, as He wants so desperately to fill your life with the fulness of God.