Is it a longing in your heart to die to self? I believe that those who say yes to that question long to live a life participating in the obedience of Jesus. I know that God loves to hear the cry of the heart that wants to be set free from self-centered living. I heard someone say years ago that “sin” could be defined as “radical self-centeredness.” At the heart of the Fall of mankind was the choice to live as an independent self, as opposed to a life of faith utterly dependent on God. The result of the emerging of the “independent fallen false self” was a humanity that is radically self-centered. It is important to remember that self-centeredness is not just about selfishness, but it is also about taking the burden on yourself to be the best person you can be. Therefore, the desire to die to self is not just a desire to die to selfishness, but a desire to die to all forms of bentness towards ourselves.
Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. You can’t die to self. If you could accomplish that, then the burden would be back on you to make it happen, and apart from Christ, you and I can do nothing. So, here’s the good news; Jesus has already accomplished the death of the fallen self for you. Jesus became sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. He clothed himself in our radical self-centeredness and died as that radical self-centered person we are on the cross. He became the old us, the old self that we were, and killed it. He not only killed it, He buried it where even He doesn’t remember where the body is (our sins and iniquities He remembers no more). In His resurrection we were raised up totally bent back toward God in absolute dependence on Him in Christ as our life. In Christ, we are no longer an independent self but a self that has been grafted into the life of Jesus. We are now, as individual selves (not independent selves), hidden with Christ in God.
What is our part in this being a living reality in our lives? Simply believe. Paul said, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:24 – 25a.
Quit trying to die to the “Wretched man.” Jesus has already accomplished it. Have you ever heard anybody describe their salvation experience as them being “radically saved?” Well, there’s no such thing as a saved person who hasn’t been radically saved. What Jesus did on the cross for us was radical, and it is true for every single believer. The enemy may have put blinders on you for years so that you don’t see how radical God’s solution to our fallen condition was, but trust me, the gospel is radical, and it is the truth about every one of us. Our own death and resurrection in Christ is the radical fact about all who have been born again. Think about that; you were amazingly “born again” as a TOTALLY new self in Christ, free from all self-centeredness.