Practice Resurrection - 5

The only requirement for resurrection is that we be dead. Not just "mostly dead" as in this classic scene from The Princess Bride.

But in coming to Jesus, we often see ourselves as "mostly or partly dead". 

• We think of our sin as minor.
• We need a little fine-tuning.
• We need some minor adjustments.

But no.
We were dead.

Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4-6

because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus NIV

Robert Farrar Capon, in his 1997 book, "From Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace" writes:

Grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralising is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over—until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatization of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace call us.

It is only when we recognize that we were dead apart from Christ, that we can be filled with the life that is in Christ. 

And then we can practice resurrection, because Jesus is in us.