Death and Life With Christ

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:3)
You are dead. In and with Christ you are habitually, constantly, dead. You are dead, and this very death is, in truth, your life.

For who shall slay you now, seeing you are dead already? He who is already and always dead, what fear can he have of any farther death? Does the law again point against me the thunders of its deadly threatenings of wrath? I am dead, and against the dead no charge can be brought. I am dead, and over the dead no enemy has power. I am dead, and to the dead there is no more fear of death.

This is my safety. This alone is my liberty to be always, in myself, dead. It is only as one dead that I am freed from sin, from its terrors, its temptations, its triumphs; and the more I die with Christ, entering into the meaning of his cross, reckoning myself to be condemned with him, the more am I able to defy every attempt to subject me anew, in any other way, to condemnation.

To every challenge at any time which would require me now to answer for myself as a criminal or as a rebel doomed to death, my reply is that I am dead already. Or rather, it is Christ’s reply for me. “He is dead in me. My death is his.” And I, believing through grace, acquiesce: “Yes; Lord, I am dead in thee. I live no more myself. It is thou who art my life. I live; yet not I: thou livest in me.”

— Robert S. Candlish