Philippians 1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, I had not been living the resurrected life that Paul spoke about. Everything had been about feeling special, knowing God was on my side. Why else would He have worked super natural events in my life? Maybe it was because it was the only way He could get my attention.

The first part of my life was filled with an ego that was designed to hide the real me. Heaven forbid anyone should ever discover who I really was underneath the bluster. Little did I realize that the façade of ego would manifest itself in my new life by taking on the Super Christian mentality.

So what is a resurrected life? How do we transition from self-effort to God-effort? For me it had to begin with tearing down self-imaging habits and being vulnerable and real with others. That is a difficult thing to do for someone who has been hiding his whole life. I didn’t trust people and you cannot have true fellowship without trust. That was a huge gap in my life that I had to cross in order to live the life Christ had built for me.

Romans 9:22-24 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?

It wasn’t until I realized that this resurrected life was prepared for me to enter into and that it was for me to find out how to enter into that life. That could not happen with the old attitudes and behaviors.

Philippians 4:13 I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

This I confess because it applies to me and what happened to me. If it should in any way be a similitude of another’s life, it is not meant to point a finger.

The Lord has worked miracles in my life. I am not talking about your everyday blessings, I am talking super natural events that could only have been rendered by God. My attitude should have been gratitude and in some small part it was but the bulk of my emotions leaned towards feeling special. I took it to mean that God not only loved me but more than others around me.

I began to treat others like I was special and that they were something less. I was not humble. I looked down on others that just didn’t get it. This went on for a number of years until I realized my prayer life was bleak, tasteless, and meaningless. That was the first sign that I saw there was something wrong. How I treated others was still not a consideration. My prayer life however was all about me and I had no one to blame but myself.

The air of superiority was losing its shine. Then one day someone stood up to me and said what I needed to hear from a fellow Christian. “Don’t talk to me like that.” Nothing kills the air of superiority faster than seeing the pain I had caused another.

Causing pain was the old man who was supposedly dead and I had to admit, he wasn’t dead enough. This whole issue of dying to self had been vanity run amok. I had convinced myself I had been crucified with Christ and perhaps I had but where was the resurrected life I was supposed to be living?