Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.
Spend a few minutes discussing questions you have about the passage.Here are a few to get you started:
What does it mean to crucify the sinful nature within us? As Christians, should we continue to habitually sin? What other questions can you ask?Write them below:
The gentle rain falls on a post-soviet city around Chernobyl.When this rain falls, particles of radiation are contained within it. This rain still holds the beauty of rain that falls elsewhere in the world. Yet this rain is changed in a horribly insidious way. Sin is much of the same— it is the perversion of that which is good, true, and beautiful in our world. Sin is even so large that it affects systems. Yet in the heart of it, it is a perversion of something that is beautiful. Like lust— a misuse of a gift from God and a misunderstanding of love, twisted into some kind of half-love.
This shows us something about the cross. What did the cross mean? In the time of Jesus, the cross meant to the world that He was a traitor. The cross meant that He was a criminal, the lowest and worst element of society. For His followers, who would have seen and heard of crucifixion, Jesus dying this kind of death wasn’t what was supposed to happen. It was humiliating. Yet in this day and age, when we as disciples of Jesus talk about the cross we speak of it as if it was the logical conclusion to Jesus’ earthly life. Paul says in this passage that we, as followers of Jesus, have done this to our sinful natures. The same shame and horror was suffered to our sinful natures. In the same way today that we look at the cross and speak of the instrument of death as a tool of life, sin is shown in its proper light. Jesus took that which was shameful and made it into something beautiful. In the same way, we crucify the sinful nature and look at what it was distorting. Instead of anger, we forgive.Instead of lusting (not just sexually, but for material things etc), we choose love. Out of the horror of that sin, we choose the beauty that is born from it.
Earlier in the book of Galatians, Paul states that we have been crucified with Christ. Therefore, we, and our sinful natures, are identified with Him in His death. As we keep looking at the cross, we understand the depth that it brings. In the horror of the cross and the beauty it brings, we see that even though His way would lead to the execution stake (the cross), Christ still says that the way of compassion, love, and forgiving our enemies, is to be taken.
A man once asked, “If there were no heaven or hell, and we simply died at the end of life, would you still follow Jesus?” On the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, when Jesus was simply dead, was His way still good? We say yes, because Jesus teaches us what life really means, He shows us reality at its rawest, and He shows us how to live in a way that we are truly living.
So, as followers of Jesus, we embrace the cross, both as a means of following Jesus, but also as a means of killing the sinful nature.
Process:
– What beauty is being perverted in sin? Where are some places that you need to follow the cross in exchanging half-loves for full ones? Would you follow Jesus even if there were no heaven or hell? Why?
