Make-Believe

So, this is my first blog ever. Cool. I'm pretty sure that this blog will only ever be read by people who already know me, and only in my wildest dreams do I anticipate someone I do not know visiting this blog, except by accident. Given this, I believe an introductory blog to be unnecessary, but should it become necessary, I guess it will be done. but for now, here's...the blog.

Flyleaf, in their latest CD Memento Mori, has a song called This Close. I was listening to it the other day, and the very first lines stuck in my head.
"I had a dream that we were dead/ But we pretended that we still lived./ With no regrets we never bled/ And we took everything life could give/ And came up broken, empty-handed in the end."
The rest of this note is going to state two things: the first is that the secular life–indeed, the whole of secular history–is just one attempt after another by the dead to pretend that they are alive. The second is possibly even more sad–that all too many of us who are actually alive, spend our time acting as though we are still dead.

The first of my statements is to me self-evident. On the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they died, and we have all inherited that death. We are born dead, still-born in the truest sense, and, left to our own devices, we would never know what it is to be alive. Ezekiel paints a chilling picture of mankind without God; "The Spirit of the Lord... set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry" (Ezekiel 37:1-2). Although God is specifically showing Ezekiel Israel, it is just as true for all of us. We are the furthest possible we can be from life–we are bones, very dry and very dead. And, like bones, we have no power to bring ourselves back to life. But that doesn't stop us from doing what we see to be the next best thing. We pretend that we still live. Can anyone argue that this is not what the world has been doing since the fall of man? All of what we ironically call life is spent merely pretending to be alive, presenting the facade of life to all the other dead, in the hope that eventually we will fool even ourselves.
This is a vain hope. We are dead, and we know ourselves to be dead, and all our pretense otherwise is just that; pretense. We are like children pretending to be adults, doing what they think are adult things, drinking their coffee and driving to work, except that even children know that make-believe cannot last forever. We think that, if we feel pleasure, it will be like being alive, and so we fill our lives with every kind of pleasure we can think of–and afterwards, when the pleasures are gone, we find our bones still just as dry.

I am a Christian. As a Christian, I have been brought to life by Christ; sinews and flesh have covered my dry bones, and life has entered into me where before there was only death. As Christians, we are the only ones who are alive in this world, and God wants to use us to bring still more people to life. How tragic, then, that many of us, myself included, spend so much time acting as though we are still dead. We have access to the only truly lasting and fulfilling pleasure in this temporary, disappointing world, and we turn away from it. We leave the land of the living and willingly enter back into the valley of death, seeking pleasure where we should know there is no pleasure to be found. We are like the prodigal son, only instead of leaving the pig pen and running back to our father, we leave our father's house to dine with swine.

But we don't have to be like this. We are alive in Christ–we are new creations. We are no longer slaves to sin–let's live like it. Let God use us to bring life to the dead, and in doing so let us live more fully in Him who died for us.
I know that if I was able, in my heart of hearts, to fully believe what I am writing, I would sin a lot less. So I ask for prayer. To everyone reading this, I ask for your prayers to open myself more fully every day to the life that is in Christ, and every day to let more of my dead, sinful self go.