All of humanity has physical life while we spend our moment upon the stage of the world. Most have a soulish, or mental life whether we exercise it or not. But only those who have been born-again and united with Christ have spiritual life.
Try to imagine a human being who has no wisdom or understanding, no mental activity beyond what it takes to move, eat, and exist. This person might be in great shape, but their true humanity would be gone, and they would exist more like an animal than as a human.
This is how it is when we have not been born from above or re-born of the spirit. We may be in great shape, we may even be famous, or rich, handsome, beautiful, and acclaimed by all but we wouldn’t be a child of God. We would be dead in our spirit and separated from all that truly makes life worth living: union with our Creator.
Like casting pearls before swine trying to explain spiritual things to anyone who hasn’t been joined to the Body of Christ and received the Holy Spirit is like trying to hold the opposite ends of a magnet together, they repulse each other by their very nature.
Think for a moment of any funeral you’ve ever attended. There was grief present. There may have been tears. There might even have been stunned silence as the mourners contemplated the suddenness of death and the transitory nature of life. One thing that is never there though is the one in the coffin taking any notice of any of this.
And that’s just how it is with the spiritually dead. The life of God’s Spirit is going on all around them. His Spirit is upholding and maintaining the integrity of all creation. His Spirit is alive and working in all the born-again Christians walking around them all day every day.
There is no more recognition of the passage, the work, or the presence of God’s Holy Spirit among the lost than there is recognition of all the life going on around a corpse in a casket. The spiritually dead read the Bible as it was just another book. They think of God as if He were a moral principle, the force, or a myth. They think of being born-again as something other people do, something that makes no sense, or else they don’t think about it all.
A person who is blind isn’t startled when you turn on a light. A person who is deaf doesn’t jump when you yell at them. It’s the same with those who are spiritually dead and living comfortably in sin, they couldn’t care less that God is holy and that He will not abide sin. They are neither frightened of the consequences of their sin nor are they enthralled with the rewards of salvation. They are blind. They are deaf. They are dead. When we speak of the deep things of God to these walking dead, we might as well be speaking to a brick wall. We are casting our pearls before swine. There is only one message we should seek to share with the lost: repent of your sins, accept Jesus as your Savior, and find life.
The whole meaning of the Gospel, the good news delivered to humanity through Jesus Christ, is seen in His resurrection.
Sin, death, and the devil are defeated when Jesus triumphed over them in the pit of hell disarming principalities and powers making a public spectacle of them as He led captivity captive. We must never forget that He was perfectly sinless and that He was delivered to the executioner for our transgressions and then He was raised for our justification.
Jesus didn’t come to die and then rise again to raise our awareness or further our education. He didn’t live a sinless life and then suffer for the sinful merely to provide us with a moral guide. God didn’t sacrifice His only Son to establish a cultural tradition. No, the passion of the Christ happened so that humanity may learn the truth about God’s love for us and His provision of a way to return to Him and become His children. This is the truth, and the truth has been revealed so that we may be free.
When someone has been missing for a certain length of time the authorities begin looking for them. If when they find them, they’re dead, after notifying their nearest family what else is there left to do except bury them. Because once we’re dead, we begin to decay rather quickly.
Preaching the Word without the anointing of the Holy Spirit is no more than searching for dead bodies. For without the Spirit there is no life. An old story says that once a man had a heart attack and died in a spiritually vacant church and it took the EMTs half an hour to figure out which one was the physically dead among all the spiritually dead.
Having scoured the highways and the byways for those willing to give up an hour on Sunday morning and pay their tithes these blind leaders of the blind can do no more with the breathing corpses than burry them in an upholstered pew. They preach a socially relevant something being careful to end the service in time to make it to the local buffet before all the other stained-glass graveyards get out.
It’s amazing but true, many who have never experienced the new birth will dispute with those of us who have what it is, how it operates, and what it does within us. Leave the laws, traditions, and ceremonies of the world behind and find the freedom that God wants you to have in Christ Jesus and don’t just live, be alive.
Author: Robert Owens
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, Global Studies, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2019 Contact Dr. Owens [email protected] Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens or visit Dr. Owens Amazon Page / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
