"One Died for All, Therefore All Died"
by Page Prewitt

The Bible says we "died with Him" (Rom. 6:6) and "in Him we are dead" (2 Cor. 5:14). What does that mean? What does that mean to you? When I used to think about it, all I knew were those words. They made no sense, and I had no understanding of what they truly meant. Even though the Bible talked about me being dead, I knew that I was very much alive. One of the reasons it meant nothing much to me was that I was also ignorant then of the fact that before my conversion I was joined to this other spirit–this wrong spirit–and needed to get rid of that spirit.

The way spirit gets out of a person is through death–which is not annihilation or ceasing to be. When you die, the spirit goes out of your body. So when Jesus Christ took us to the Cross in Himself, what he did for us was take on this sin nature. In some mysterious way–don’t ask me to explain it to you–for our sake "He made Him to be sin, [He] who knew no sin" (2 Cor. 5:21). He became sin for me! And he became sin for us so that "we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (also 2 Cor. 5:21).

Jesus Christ took on that sin spirit and He died, so the sin spirit went out. And when we take Him as our Savior, His death works the same thing in us. The way to get a spirit out of a person is for that person to die. So Jesus took that spirit of sin, died on the Cross, and that spirit went out. But did it go out of me when Jesus Christ went to the Cross? NO. It went out of me when I, by faith, took the work He did on Calvary to be my own.

So he died on the Cross, and I died in Him. In some mysterious way–I don’t understand how–the Bible just says in Him I died an din Him you died too. In that death, the old spirit of sin went out. And death is only the means to life.

The body of Jesus lay in the grave for three days. There was no spirit in it, being dead. Then the Bible says that God’s own Spirit quickened Jesus’ body and resurrected Him. The Bible also says that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now therefore lives in you. That very same Spirit quickened you and brought you back to life. This is the new birth of John 3.

So that is how you, at your spirit center, became joined to the Spirit of God. Your spirit becomes joined to the Spirit of Christ through this work of Christ. In 1 Cor. 6:17 we are told that he that is joined to the Lord is "one spirit with Him."

–From Alphabet Soup