If I am to be dead to sin and alive to God, remember it is in Christ that I am alive unto God. It means this, that my heart and spirit in simple faith follow Jesus up into God’s presence, and know Him as a living, glorified Man; and following Him thus, since God looks with infinite satisfaction upon His Son, it enables me to feel that I am there in Christ, accepted just as He is. It also gives me the thought that one day, side by side with Christ, I shall be presented in all the perfectness of the risen life, body, soul, and spirit, without stain. I thus realize what I am to God, and I get the power to live unto God. I “reckon,” I judge, I come to the conclusion, in the judgment of my renewed mind, that God hath made me eternally alive to Himself as much as Christ is alive to Him; and that it were a sin and a shame of which no sinner could be guilty that I, thus raised up with Christ, and presented in all the beauty and blessedness and glory of Christ before God, and knowing that it is so, should come down to this earth and walk as a man of sin, instead of as a living, risen man. I know that the lusts of the flesh can only be crushed by the power of the cross of Christ.
My word is this: Reckon yourselves to be dead unto sin in the crucified Christ; solemnly judge yourselves in the risen Christ to be alive unto God.; and no more think of yielding to sin and Satan than of perishing in hell; and no more withhold yourselves from God, to whom you are alive, than you would do any act of vice or crime against your neighbor, and yet expect to be accounted a righteous person. May the eternal Spirit of love lead us to pay an abiding visit into those regions of glory and brightness; and even then not lose sight of the fact that sin hath been “destroyed” in the judicial death of our Surety, that we may die with Him and live with Him. Thus we shall practically walk in the way of the Lord Jesus Christ.