three steps to a new life

It occurred to me that there are three important steps to becoming a new person and discovering new life.  They all can be linked with the experience of people around and near Christ and His death and resurrection.  The first step we need to take is to identify with the ones who actually nailed Jesus to the cross.  After all, there were real people who literally drove the nails that attached Him to the wooden beams that led to his final suffering and death.  And the reality is that each of us and all of us are responsible for the necessity that those nails would pierce that skin and break through those tendons and bone.  We put Him on the cross because we are not the people we ought to be.  The second step is to identify with the people that took Jesus down from the cross and literally carried His lifeless form and laid it in the tomb.  After all, real people actually did remove those nails and did carry His body.  There were people who wrestled with the form of Jesus in death before they embraced Him in life.   The third step is identify with those who went to the tomb of Jesus on the third day after His death, only to find the stone rolled away and then to meet Him in resurrected form.  After all, real people did have that experience and real guards beheld the empty tomb that they had been entrusted with watching.  When we can identify personally with nailing Jesus to the cross, carrying His lifeless body to the tomb, and beholding Him raised to new life...then we personally move through a process of realizing our faults, wrestling with the reality of Jesus' death for us, and awakening to the new life He has made possible.  As we identify with the process of His death and resurrection, we also experience a form of death and resurrection on a personal level and find new life...free from bondage to sin or fear of death.

Isaiah 53:4 

Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;
    it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,
    a punishment for his own sins!
⁵ But he was pierced for our rebellion,
    crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole.
    He was whipped so we could be healed.
⁶ All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
    We have left God's paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him
    the sins of us all.

¹⁰ But it was the Lord's good plan to crush him
    and cause him grief.
Yet when his life is made an offering for sin,
    he will have many descendants.
He will enjoy a long life,
    and the Lord's good plan will prosper in his hands.
¹¹ When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish,
    he will be satisfied.
And because of his experience,
    my righteous servant will make it possible
for many to be counted righteous,
    for he will bear all their sins. 

blessings to all and to the many who will identify with the three people above, who nailed Jesus to the cross, who carried Him to be buried, and who beheld the risen Christ!  As we identify personally we come to see our greatest need and find our greatest answer.

Love,

Rob Smith