In my quiet times, I am learning to dissect each verse, even each word, and really dig in and understand what God is saying to us through His holy word. If you’ve been reading and hearing God’s word your entire life, sometimes familiar verses lose their deep, heart piercing meaning. So this new quiet time routine has been excellent for “waking up” my heart.

There were quite a few words that stuck out to me in these verses. Although they were words I was fairly confident I knew the meanings of, I searched them out anyway. I’m glad I did because these verses should have such a deep and profound impact on our hearts. 

We are all familiar with what “crucify” means…it is a brutal, torturous means of inflicting death. But what does it mean to be “crucified with Christ”? Paul was not physically crucified with Christ. He is referring to crucifying the flesh-putting to spiritual death the passions and selfishness of the body that is prone to sin and opposed to God. Our flesh, our human nature, is us apart from divine influence. If left to our own devices, our flesh will always choose sin. 

Paul says we must live by faith in the Son of God. Faith is the conviction of a belief, the fidelity to that belief. In this case, Paul is referring to faith in Christ. We must live our lives in complete reliance on Christ for salvation-for saving us from our wicked flesh. Jesus yielded Himself to His Father’s will and surrendered Himself for me. We must not reject His undeserved, merciful kindness in that sacrifice, by living by the letter of the law only; by only having head knowledge and not heart knowledge. If we only live to say, “I followed all the rules!” while not loving our neighbors or harboring unkindness toward others or any other manner of “heart sin”, we make Christ’s death for naught. 

Daily we must put to spiritual death our sins, the desires of our wicked flesh, and live in total surrender to Christ, praising Him for the great things He has done for us!

-Jenn