A Better Life
I think that we all want to live a better life, don’t we? There are signs of it all over the place. In the check out aisles in grocery stores we see magazines promising us better marriages, better bodies, better jobs, better sex, better homes and gardens. One of the most popular books in recent years was Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now. You turn on the television, and there are all sorts of solutions: buy this car, this cheeseburger, this Sham-wow!, and your life will be better. We’re inspired by shows like “The Biggest Loser,” and can easily be convinced that for five easy payments of whatever, that bowflex, or gazelle, or whatever else will be the missing ingredient for our lives to finally take off.
Now of course, there’s a lot of disagreement about what our better life should look like, or how to get there. I remember when the Atkins diet was the next big thing (I kind of wish it would come back…something about a diet where you just eat all the red meat and bacon you can handle is appealing to me…but my wife’s training in the health care field has placed a permanent damper on my hopes of healthier living through deep-frying). But you have that option, and then there are weight watchers, the South Beach diet, the cabbage soup diet, and so on.
Some of these are better options than others. But at the end of the day, they offer us the same basic solution: self improvement through law (something we do). Now, as far as it goes, this isn’t a bad thing. But at the end of the day, it will never provide a deep enough solution to fix what’s really wrong with us, and give us the life that we truly need. Colossians 2.13 pictures us as dead and alienated from God on our own. No amount of self improvement is going to fix what’s wrong with a corpse. We can lose all the weight, build all the muscle, and implement all the positive thinking we’d like, but at the end of the day: “dead is dead” (Benjamin Linus).
So rather than offer us self-improvement through the law, Jesus offers us new life through the gospel. Through faith, when we are plunged into the waters of baptism, our old life is buried and gone, our defilement is washed away, and we are raised to a new life, a Jesus defined life (Colossians 2.12). In some cases, self-improvement will help us. But when it comes to our most important challenge, we need this far more radical solution: an entirely new life, an entirely redefined existence. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are brought into this new life. He doesn’t give us something to do. Instead, he does it for us, giving us something in which to believe.
Posted by: Gene Schlesinger
Good post Gene.
I like to watch Biggest Loser, although they take a 15 min show and make it 2 hours (I am thankful for DVR), but basically what happens is the people trade their food idol for the exercise idol.
One other thing,
“Through faith, when we are plunged into the waters of baptism, our old life is buried and gone, our defilement is washed away, and we are raised to a new life”
Could you flesh this statement out a little?
Rather than me flesh it out, I’ll let other people do so.
“having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.” (Paul, Colossians 2.12)
In essence, this goes back to the fact that sacraments are signs and seals of the gospel. As signs they depict it to our senses. A seals, they are also God’s promise to us that he surely does what is depicted for all who believe. When we understand them this way, we see that he sacraments are like props for our faith. They help us more fully enter into and experience the world created by the drama of the gospel.
Baptism does not save anyone. But it also does more than just get them wet. Exactly how it works is a mystery. But that it works seems beyond dispute. Look at the language used. We were buried with him in baptism, in which we are also raised with him. But this all happens through faith. As long as we are clear that salvation occurs by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone we have nothing to fear in being as realistic in our language regarding the sacraments as Scripture is.
Also see questions 66-73 of the Heidelberg Catechism.
“As long as we are clear that salvation occurs by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone”
Thanks Gene