Awakened to Life

It was a wonderful, life-changing experience the night I surrendered my will to God’s will.  In a moment of time, after asking Him to forgive my sins, I experienced an awakening of my dormant soul.  I had been like a dead man walking—lifeless, with passive ideas about life and blindness to boot.

I couldn’t see what God, through His Holy Spirit, had been showing me about His love for many years.  But I rejected the warmth of His love, choosing instead to allow the cold, dank surroundings of sin to encapsulate my soul like a tomb or crypt.

To put it bluntly, so that you understand exactly where my emotions and state of mind were at that time, I was like one of those skeletons you see at Halloween outside someone’s house—dead man’s bones—without life.  That’s how I was before the joy of the Lord filled me.

To see me then, without God in my life, compared to now, with Him in my life, would be like heaven and hell.  The comparison goes without saying.

Was I perfect in every way that night when salvation entered my soul?  I think not.  It has been a process of putting off the old man with his old ideas of trying to make sense out of life, and putting on the new man, with the Holy Spirit prompting me as to what is godly and what is not.

It’s like the old saying: “Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.”

I have been learning that I don’t need ungodly things to make it seem as though I was happy for a time, while being full of confusion.  Instead, I’m finding that the things of God bring lasting peace and harmony.

There is a word that may explain it better.  The word is sanctification.

What is sanctification?  In the Bible, sanctification means being set apart for God and made holy for His purposes.  When a person comes to Christ, he or she is set apart as belonging to God.  But sanctification is also an ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer—a lifelong process in which God changes us from the inside out, teaching us to turn away from sin and increasingly reflect the character of Christ.

Paul writes, “You are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” — 1 Corinthians 1:30.  And Scripture tells us that “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

I believe sanctification is the ongoing process of learning more about God, desiring more of Him, and becoming more like Christ as the Holy Spirit works within us.  It means gradually letting go of the things that once had a hold on our lives—things that were sucking the life out of us and, in a sense, producing dead man’s bones.

It doesn’t mean that we become perfect overnight.  It means that, day by day, God continues His work in us.  Inch by inch, step by step, the Holy Spirit teaches us, corrects us, strengthens us, and draws us closer to God.

And if God is for us, who can ultimately be against us?

No one and nothing can compare to the power, love, and presence of God.  His forgiveness reaches as far as the east is from the west, and His greatness extends beyond anything our finite minds can comprehend.

That is what it means to be awakened to life—not simply to have been changed once, but to continue being changed by God, inch by inch, day by day.

Written by,

Papa Boyd