Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah . . . has conquered . . . Revelation 5:5
But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . Galatians 6:14
You have been very angry with your Anointed One. Psalm 89:38
For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 1 Corinthians 2:2
Let the motto upon your whole ministry be - "Christ is All!" - Cotton Mather

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Burying Your Self Wholly In Christ

Some of my favorite quotations from Die Young . . .
Oswald Chambers: Identification with the death of Jesus Christ means identification with Him to the death of everything that never was in Him.

A. W. Tozer: The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing.

Pleasing Him is easy when it comes to what you have been given, because all it requires is thankfulness and trust that what He has given is the best thing for you.

. . . dying young leads to contentment because it sees life as designed and orchestrated by God Himself, meant to perfect those He loves and to draw them away from sin and toward holiness and His perfection. When you die young, circumstances and stuff matter less because self no longer demands to be pleased but to serve the one who pleases.

. . . your sanctification means the death of the part of you that clings to things that God rejects.

. . . to die young is to determine that all of your efforts to engineer your own life are in vain and that God is the only one who can truly set you free.

There is a death that comes that isn't meant to destroy you but to destroy that in you which was never meant to replace the hand of God in your life.

. . . complaint is our crying out for heaven on earth combined with the assumption that we deserve it.

When you look at your lack as something to be bemoaned, or when you feel envy over what you don't have that others do, you are accusing God of deceit and of failing to come through on His promises.

But you can make today the turning point in your life – the point when you determine to completely bury yourself in Christ so deep that nothing can ever really harm you again. When you do that, when His love is all that surrounds you and all that contains you and all that you contain, then life is a whole new ball game. What was down is now up, what was death is now life, what was less is now more, and what was weakness is now strength; there is no more death for you. It is all nothing but life. No one can kill you when you are already dead.
Michael and Hayley Dimarco, Die Young, Burying Your Self In Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 30-33, 62, 93, 95, 173.