Stop running from death

“Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the 

devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

It is not the fact of death that enslaves us. It is the fear of death. 

I am slave to the fear of the loss that death brings. Death of my dreams. Death of my possessions. Death of my loved ones. Death of my body. Losing these things means losing myself. It means pain and emptiness. It means suffering. 

But Jesus came and lost it all too, walked into that death and through that death and now death is the way to life, it is the pathway to the freedom he meant for us to have. If my life is hidden in Christ, and Christ sits above death and rules over death forever, then death can hold no fear for me. 

Yet I still fear it and run from it. Maybe if I would just enter into death, then I’d find the life I am looking for. Maybe if I really believed that I am set free from the fear of death, then I would be free. 

“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you” (2 Cor. 4:6-12).

In order to have his life, I must also carry his death. The word “carry” means “to carry round, to bear about everywhere.” The word “manifested” means “to make visible or known what has been invisible or unknown . . . to make actual and visible  . . . . to be plainly recognized.”

We who live are always delivered to death. But in Christ death is not the end; it is the beginning. The beginning of his life in us. When I carry around his dying, when I bear the death everywhere, I also bear the life. And the more I am given up to the death, the more his life is visible, real, and recognized.

And during this time of Lent, we choose to die. As Julie Canlis says, we have as much to learn from emptiness as we do from fullness. There are things in my life that need to die in the desert. I come to a truer understanding of grace when I am in the desert. “Lent is a desert you impose upon yourself to make room for God.”*

We are supremely distracted. And God is calling us to leave the shadowlands and find life. Death is the way through the shadowlands. Death is not a destination. It is a way. It is not a terminus but a trail, a place we travel through, MUST travel through, to get to life. And I cannot offer life to others until I have died, and the dying is myself, and the resurrection is myself in him.

*Julie Canlis, The Lent Project, http://ccca.biola.edu/lent/#