Alive With Christ: What the Resurrection Changed About Your Life
Rev. Aniekan "Mbomboyo" Okokon ·
Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. — Ephesians 2:5–6
Christians are quick to say that Jesus rose from the dead, and slower to say that they did. Yet the New Testament will not let us keep the resurrection at arm’s length. Paul does not say Christ was raised and you were encouraged. He says you were raised with Him. The same verbs, the same event, the same life.
Three past tenses
Ephesians 2 gives three things God has done — not will do, has done. He made us alive together with Christ. He raised us up with Him. He seated us with Him. Each is a completed act. The believer’s position is not on a stairway somewhere between the grave and the throne. He is at the throne, in Christ, now.
Romans 6:4 fills in how. We were buried with Him by baptism into death, "in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." The purpose of the union is a walk. Resurrection was never meant to be a doctrine we defend once a year. It was meant to be the kind of life we live on a Tuesday.
No longer defined by death
Before Christ, Paul says, we were dead. Not sick, not weak — dead. Death was our defining condition; every appetite and ambition grew out of it. The resurrection did not improve that condition. It replaced it. Life is now our defining condition, and sin has become foreign soil rather than home ground.
- Temptation is real, but it no longer speaks from the centre of who you are.
- Fear of death loses its grip, because the death that mattered is behind you.
- Hope stops being optimism and becomes memory: you already know how the story goes, because you have already been raised.
- Power for godliness is no longer a resource you have to find; it is the life you already have.
Living from the seat
To be seated is to be finished with a task. Christ sat down because the work was done, and we are seated with Him. From that seat the believer engages the world — work, family, ministry, suffering — not as one clawing his way toward God, but as one sent out from His presence. You do not pray your way up to heaven. You pray from it.
The resurrection changed the address from which you live. Learn the new one.