As I write this, I can look outside and enjoy the changing colors from summer into fall. Fall officially began a few weeks ago, but the color changes around me are really starting to shine through. Stop reading this for a minute, look up from your phone or computer, step outside, go see, and then come back and finish reading this. I’ll wait right here…
Did you notice that the landscape looked as if God painted it himself? Did you see the reds, yellows, oranges, browns, and greens? I marvel at the creation each time that it changes from season to season. Let’s soak in each aspect of it and give all the glory to the God who made it. Stop and Praise Him for his creativity and care for even the smallest details on this beautiful globe we call planet earth.
Have you ever thought about why the leaves change? The leaves are slowly dying, and their grasp on the tree is ever loosening a little more each day that passes by. The more they lose their grip, the less chlorophyll can transfer into the leaves—the less chlorophyll, the less tint of green in each leaf, the less green, the more other colors appear. Their dying process is beautiful.
Every day that passes by and every season that comes and goes, we too are in the process of dying. If we have chosen to follow Christ, then the process of dying to ourselves is just part of the Christian life.
Paul writes,
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? 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 as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 6:1-14
The more we die to sin, the more of our own will, our own pride, our own lust vanishes away, and the true color of Christ shines in our lives. Instead of being the color of “ourselves,” we become the color of Christ.
It’s a beautiful process.
Dear Father in heaven, help us all to stop living a life we have colored as ourselves. Help us to show the brilliant colors of Jesus and how we have died to ourselves because He died for us. In His name, AMEN!
I love you,
Alexander