Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence, aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.
~Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)
But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of Him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in 2 Corinthians 2
Oh beloved, it is true. We are already dead, so we’re free. The person we were sensed the fragrance of Christ in another of His, and we went from our old life, to Life in Him. This change from one life to another is so profound as to have actually brought about the death of the old. And this death transports our lives across time in such a way that this old man was actually crucified along with the One bearing the cost and the pain of the event.
And this means… just about everything.
Everything is new.
Everything is different.
It is now, quite literally, no longer i who live, but Christ who Lives in me. He owns and operates the existence of a true believer. We are utterly imbued with the One who is Love Himself. And this One who is Love, cannot lie, does not change, and does not – ever – lose.
We are, in Him, a multitude.
We are, in Him, invincible.
This Power at work within us is the One who breathed the stars and dealt order to the multiverse we inhabit. This One has created infinity and eternity and existence itself as mere constructs into which He might build a habitation for Himself. And this Power – again – is in us. And we are in Him.
Can we see it? This, dear reader, is the reason His Word is simply drenched with the command imperative to never (read not ever) fear. Love (and the One who is Love) is the very power which holds the One who holds everything together – together. It is the superstructure within which we Live and move and have our being.
Now, our tiny minds will imagine the tomfoolery that if we injure the tents we live in, or lose the trinkets that crinkle and sparkle around us, we will be harmed. And this is one of the great lies of the evil one; he wants to foist on us the idea that that which we see is all there is. And surely this is a lie, for he himself is working from the true platform of reality in the realm of spirit.
And now, in Him though, we know the foolishness to be what it is. We know that to Live here is simply to Live a powerful, loving existence with Christ living in us and through us. And we know further, to die from this tent is immeasurable gain.
There is beloved, before us, an immense eternity. And there is nothing (read no thing at all) that can separate us from the Power (read Love) which is drawing us forward into that never-ending moment. We are, to put it literally, hyper-triumphant in Him. Jesus has kicked death’s ass. The game is over.
And it is time that we started to live like the Life we have is true.
