Friday is Always Before Sunday

Life is full of patterns. But an omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful God doesn’t need patterns. He created them for us because He knows we need them. Days and nights, years, seasons, awake and asleep, life’s hills and valleys, on and on.

There is one pattern that Jesus alone had to create that took care of our sin and opened the door to a relationship with God and a home in Heaven. That is:

1 — Crucifixion

2 — Resurrection

3 — Ascension

But I have found that this Christ-pattern gets repeated over and over throughout my life. Not regarding my salvation because Jesus took care of that work on the cross and in coming out of the tomb but rather the process of the Holy Spirit’s work today to get rid of me one layer at a time and then take on the image of Christ.

We have to die to something regarding sin and self before we can see the new life that Christ brings and then be “risen up” or promoted or whatever word we may choose to use for the new place that God wants to take us. This process requires only our obedience.

But we cannot and will not get to Resurrection and Ascension without first going through Crucifixion. We cannot experience God’s glory without first experiencing the cross.

Is there something in your life where you are praying for Resurrection or maybe even praying to go straight to Ascension? A relationship? The salvation of a relationship? A promotion? A career move? A change? A deliverance?

Maybe its time to stop asking Him for Resurrection in a situation and pray for the strength to agree to die to whatever you are holding onto?

And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives. Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. —Romans 6:4-8 NLT