Living on the Life side of the cross!
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:11
I have long realized that reckoning is the key to spiritual growth, but I have to admit that when it comes to reckoning I feel a bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she’s clicking her heels together and reciting, “There’s no place like home.” When I read/study about reckoning, I occasionally feel that reckoning myself dead to sin becomes a bit of a mantra. A positive thinking exercise.
I’m still slooooowly reading through my favorite book of the year, The Complete Green Letters, by Miles J. Standford. This book presents spiritual truth about salvation–past, present, and future–in a way that speaks to my heart. He discusses faulty reckoning, which is what I described in the last paragraph, and then moves on to a discussion of true reckoning:
True reckoning has its ultimate emphasis on the life side of the Cross; we count on our having died to sin in in order to count on our being alive to God. Since we are new creations in Christ, death is forever past; we were brought out of it in Him at His resurrection. As for the old man within, we continually reckon that source to have been crucified, so that it may be held daily in the place of death. We reckon; the Cross crucifies.
Look carefully at Colossians 3:3: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” However, we are not dead, but alive. Neither is self dead, but judicially crucified. We have forever passed beyond death. The NASB brings out the past tense: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” All this difference in the world! Once we see that our death to sin is in the past tense, completed, we are free to count ourselves alive to God in Christ Jesus, and to live –in the present tense!
Reckon, logizomai, is really an accounting term. It deals with facts, not suppositions. It happened. It’s done. Rejoice.
Leave a Reply