When Jesus Christ shed His blood on the Cross, it paid in full for every sin you and I have ever committed. Once we accept Jesus as our Lord, He will accept us into the family of God. His death on the Cross assured us everlasting life in heaven.
Don’t worry about the day you would go to heaven but the day in which you wouldn’t. “Yeshua [Jesus] said to her, ‘I AM the Resurrection and the Life! Whoever puts his trust in me will live, even if he dies; and everyone living and trusting in me will never die.’” (John 11:25-26 CJB).
When Jesus Christ was raised from death to life, He opened up the way in which we, too, could be raised from death to life. For a believer, the first step of being raised from death to life can happen here on earth before they go to heaven.
Either Jesus is at the center of your life, or you are. “Therefore if you have been raised with Christ [to a new life, sharing in His resurrection from the dead], keep seeking the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1 AMP).
When Jesus was laid in the grave, His earthly body was dead. But by the power of the Spirit of God, His body was raised from death into life. The Holy Spirit has tremendous power because it is the Spirit of God who can do anything.
So long as your focus is on what you can do, the Lord won’t help you. “Then he [the angel] told me, ‘This is the message from the Lord to Zerubbabel: ‘You will not succeed by your own strength or by your own power. The power will come from my Spirit,’ says the Lord of heaven’s armies’” (Zechariah 4:6 ICB).
Before we were saved, we had a body that was consumed by our flesh and dead to the things of God. It was in bondage to the world and indifferent to the Creator of the universe. We were dead men walking, unable to understand any other way.
Until you get to the end of yourself, you need to keep going. “Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin [and your relationship to it broken], but alive to God [in unbroken fellowship with Him] in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11 AMP).
Once we are saved, we have our spiritual senses awakened and become aware of a new order in us. When we get filled with the Holy Spirit, we get filled with the Spirit of God and He will change us if only we will let Him.
When you are filled by the Holy Spirit, you are no longer just a man or a woman. Micah, the prophet, said, “But truly I am full of power by the Spirit of the Lord…” (Micah 3:8 NKJV).
If we want to be raised from death to life, we need the power of the Holy Spirit to do it. This is the same power that raised Jesus to life and it is a power that has no limitations. The only limit of His power in you is your unwillingness to yield to Him.
Just as the Holy Spirit raised Jesus Christ back to life, He can do the same for you. “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you” (Romans 8:11 NLT).
Some people say that we all have the Holy Spirit in us the moment that we are saved by Jesus. But the Bible teaches something different, that the Holy Spirit will come after, sometimes right away and sometimes much later.
You may have had your “on the road to Damascus” experience with Jesus Christ, but have you had your “Ananias” experience with being filled with the Holy Spirit? “And Ananias went his way and entered the house; and laying his hands on him he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 9:17 NKJV).
Some will teach that we are all filled and operating at the same level of Holy Spirit power. Take a look around you in the church and how quickly you will find such a teaching to be preposterous. It is the same Holy Spirit, but we all yield to Him at different levels.
As you yield more, the Lord will reign more, and your life will show it. “always carrying around in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the [resurrection] life of Jesus also may be shown in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10 AMP).
The more you die to yourself, the more the Holy Spirit can raise you to life. If you don’t die to yourself, then there is no raising you to a new life. We all think dying to ourselves should be easy, but nobody who has really done it would say that.
Until you have been crucified with Christ, His resurrected life cannot reign in you. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me…” (Galatians 2:20 NKJV).
If you have not yet determined in your mind to die to yourself, then do that today. It may take you a while, one area of your meager life at a time, but in each area that you surrender to the Holy Spirit, He will then reign in you.
The more you’re surrendered to the Lord, the more He will change you. “Hide Your face from my sins and blot out all my guilt and iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right, persevering, and steadfast spirit within me. Cast me not away from Your presence and take not Your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:9-11 AMPC).
Jesus was raised on the eighth day, the day of new beginnings. Are you ready for a new beginning? Are you ready for a new life? Are you ready to turn the Holy Spirit loose in your life so that His power will reign in you for eternity?
Jesus rested on the Sabbath, the seventh day, but on the eighth day, He was surely risen. “Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn…[the eighth day] The angel answered and said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for He is risen…’” (Matthew 28:1.5,6 NKJV).
The Holy Spirit can give you a new life. You will never want to give it up once you have it. But getting it will be the biggest crisis in your life because you have to willingly give up the right to yourself. Nobody can do this without it being a crisis like no other. Do it anyway.
You can’t have the power of a resurrection life without first having a crucified life from which you can be resurrected from. “That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection…” (Philippians 3:10 NKJV).
Blessings to you,
Paul Balius
Thank you so much.
You are most welcome!
“We must die daily”.
Oh yes! I have taught that we must die to ourselves each morning because each morning our old man or woman wakes up.
First, Happy Resurrection Day M. Balius,
What you wrote is so helpful. Thank you so much my brother in Christ. I like so much what you write and because of this I share your post. May the Holy Spirit continue to inspire you. M. Paul Balius, thank you again. Receive the Shalom of the Lord.
Hello Michele, thank you for the kind words and for sharing my post. We are so blessed that the Holy Spirit is available for us all to any degree that we are willing to let Him reign in our lives. May your life be saturated with the resurrection power through the Holy Spirit.
So blessed as I read this truth….so desire the Holy Spirit to help me die to myself so my life may be a vessel for Jesus to freely use ‼️‼️‼️
Keep asking and keep pressing in. There is no limit to where we can go with the help of God by His Spirit inside of us. I’ve been so amazed at how hard I have tried to make it only to see time and time again how very simple it is, to just let the Holy Spirit reign in me.
Unless Christ Jesus, my supreme Success, saves me from myself, I shall be unsaved everlastingly. I truly trust that He has, is, and shall save me from myself, doing in all actuality for me that which I could never do, doing that which He alone could ever do, as my undeserved all-sufficient Savior, arisen in me, superscending the letter of the Law, thus raising me in vitalmost union with Himself, sent from the Father of mercies, by the Spirit of grace and truth.
Because all my self-righteousness so-called is as filthy rags, all my self-effort at attempting to merit or earn my eternal salvation falls abysmally short of His uttermost standard of perfection to fit me for fellowship with Himself, the One Beautiful Triune God, in the now and forever in heaven hereafter.
Realistically, though none of us will ever live in completely constant self-surrender and entirely unfailing yieldedness to His sovereignty this side of heaven’s holy, happy highlands, we are to be enormously, exceedingly glad and grateful for the grace and gratuity of our generous God, in our sin battered brokenness pressing passionately toward the mark of the prize of His high, heavenward call of conformity to the character of Christ as He mercifully enables and munificently ennobles. To the God of all grace be all glory.
We are so blessed that our salvation does not rest on anything we can do or can’t do, but only that we believe in Jesus Christ and call Him our Lord.
“Without an understanding of justification by faith alone, we cannot truly perceive the glorious gift of grace—God’s “unmerited favor” becomes “merited” in our minds, and we begin to think we deserve salvation. The doctrine of justification by faith helps us maintain “pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3). Holding to justification by faith keeps us from falling for the lie that we can earn heaven. There is no ritual, no sacrament, no deed that can make us worthy of the righteousness of Christ. It is only by His grace. ” Ken Kovach
We are saved by grace alone.