T[ It is in Christ Himself that we see what complete death to sin means. To the most subtle and enticing allurements that this world, and the varying exigencies of a most complicated life in this world, could present, He was simply dead. How vain to offer Him, after He was risen, any prizes of this world ! How absolutely irrelevant and pointless any such offer or any such temptations appear ! How insignificant, how paltry, how past and done with, do all the gaieties, the affections, the dangers, the prizes of this life seem in the light of that new life. And it is
ROMANS vi. ii 331
that new life, it is that risen life of Christ, we are to share in now ; and we are to learn to be, and actually to be, as superior to temptation, as dead to sin, as He was. We are to keep impressing on ourselves that we belong to another world — " Beckon ye your- selves to be dead to sin." We are to keep impressing on ourselves that it is not in the ways of this world that we are to attain our ends, that we have an inheritance above, and it is through real sympathy with Christ Himself that we can alone reach this position.1
(3) Again, to be dead to sin implies not only a complete but a final severance from it. Death is a state from which no one returns to the old life. When death comes there is at once and for ever an end of what has been. So must it be with our sever- ance from sin ; so, one is tempted to say, it was with Paul himself, who realized his position in Christ. But so it is not always. There are animals which hibernate, and for months seem to be dead ; there are animals which become torpid, and for all practical purposes are dead for a season ; they do no mischief, they cease to be a terror to their natural prey, they entirely abandon their customary haunts and habits; but when the warmth of spring penetrates to their temporary burying-place there is a revival of their old instincts, energies, and habits.
TJ With many persons the abandonment of sin is a mere hibernation, not a death. For awhile they seem to have lost all taste for their old ways ; temptations which before were irresistible now flit past them and attract no notice, cause no movement ; for awhile, in the ardour of a newly conceived idea of life, the man is impregnable to all that would lead him from it. He is wrapped up in his new and strong resolve, and while that lasts he is insensible to the storms that would drive him from his path. Or something has made the world cold, distasteful to a man ; his love of it has got a chill ; his investments have not turned out well ; his prospects in life have become contracted or have been blighted, and he withdraws from his former keen engagement in this world's affairs. Or there comes to the man of pleasure or to the sensualist higher and better impulses ; the Spirit of Christ inwardly solicits him and strives with him, or some outward event warns and admonishes him, and for the present he becomes dead to the solicitations of appetite. Or a young person comes under the influence of some older and stronger character, of some one who does live a consecrated, unselfish, Christlike life ; the influence is
1 Marcus Dods.
332 A GOOD RECKONING
commanding while it lasts, but when it is removed it becomes apparent that it was merely a mesmeric state, which had produced not a real death, not a final separation from old weaknesses and habits. And so with all those temporary abandonments of sin ; they are mere swoons or fits, or sleeps, or states of torpor ; the soul of sin lives on securely underneath the insensible lethargic surface, and, when the period of slumber passes and the cause of insensibility has exhausted itself, will return again with renewed and stronger life to all its old habits and ways — a most melan- choly, most discouraging, but most common spectacle.
II.
Alive to God.
1. This is the other aspect of our participation in Christ, and it is even more important than the death to sin. To die to sin is but the necessary preliminary to the new life. By itself it is incomplete and ineffective. It is not death that can ever be in any form a desirable state, but only life, fulness of life, and it is because death of this kind promises fuller life that we pass through it. Some persons, however, are dead to sin, but they are dead to everything else. Eeligion, instead of enlivening and enlarging and inspiring them, seems to have benumbed and deadened them all round ; they would be larger and better men if they had no religion at all. For all the active good they do they might as well be in the grave. The poor man who needs help would as soon think of knocking at a tombstone as of knocking at their door ; active beneficence on their part would startle us as if the sheeted dead had come to our aid. Where there is fulness of life there is activity, joy, love, intensity; not coldness, selfish caution, parsimony, retirement, and seclusion from the woes, the wounds, the joys, the interests of men. And where there is life it will appear ; burying the seed beneath the clod, the life that is in it will work its way through, and show what it is. The body of Christ could not be held under the power of death, and if the spirit of life that was in Him be really in us, that life will break through all that overlies it and will appear.