A Matter of Life and Death: by TA Sparks

We had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:9)

You know that those who are not the Lord’s people are not alive to the fact that they are dead. Death is not the great reality to them until they come to their body dying. But in their ordinary life when things are going on and there is health and provision, death is no reality to them. But death is brought home to the child of God. Immediately we get into God’s hands this thing begins to be brought home to us – that we are not much good, we cannot stand up to things, we cannot go through. Our natural life and resources do not count here. The course of a true Christian life in the hands of God is that of being more and more brought to the experience of helplessness. Is that not true? Yes, of helplessness, of the impossibility of everything. Do not think things have gone wrong if that is becoming your consciousness. You may take it that you are in an immature spiritual stage if you have not come to that realization that in the realm into which you have been introduced in your relationship with God, you have no resource. You are as a dead man. The death fact is brought home to you, is made real.

Ah, but on the other side, resurrection is taking a certain form over against that. With that background and with that basis, more and more the child of God is being brought to the position where he or she has to say: "That was the Lord, it is the Lord; I cannot account for that, I am not the one who accounts for that, it is all of God," and you know quite well that resurrection is all of God. You can go a long way in many clever things and inventions, but you have not got as far as raising the dead yet. That is God’s prerogative. That is only God. And so in the hands of God the child of God is being brought progressively more and more, and still more, to the place where they have to say, "It is of God, it is all of God" and that is the testimony coming out. The Lord did that, the Lord is doing this. Is that not in Israel’s history in the wilderness? See how again and again they were brought to an end, which did seem to be an end... nothing beyond this, and then they had to come out with a new song – The Lord did it! It is victory over death, it is the power of resurrection Life.