“Whosoever will save his life shall lose it” (Luke ix. 24).
First and foremost Christ teaches resurrection and life. The power of
Christianity is life. It brings us not merely law, duty, example, with
high and holy teaching and admonition. It brings us the power to follow
the higher ideal and the life that spontaneously does the things
commanded. But it is not only life, but resurrection life.
And it begins with a real crisis, a definite transaction, a point of time
as clear as the morning dawn. It is not an everlasting dying and an
eternal struggle to live. But it is all expressed in a tense that denotes
definiteness, fixedness and finished action. We actually died at a certain
point and as actually began to live the resurrection life.
Let us reckon ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God
through Jesus Christ.
And death is only the pathway and portal,
To the life that shall die nevermore;
And the cross leadeth up to the crown everlasting,
The Jordan to Canaan’s bright shore.