It’s Walk with Him Wednesdays, and as we continue our journey from the resurrection to the ascension, I’ve been exploring what it means for us to live in light of the resurrection.

In essence, the resurrection is the gospel. Had Jesus not rose from the dead, his death would have been powerless. When I think about resurrection living, I am continually brought back to the gospel. In our Christian culture, we often think of the gospel as something we share with those who don’t know Christ. While that is true, the gospel is also for us who are saved. We need the power of the gospel each day in our Christian walk. We need the power of His grace and mercy that took our sins upon Himself to help us with our daily struggles with sin. The gospel covers us once for our eternal salvation and it covers us each day as we fight against the sin in our hearts. Each day, we need to preach to ourselves the gospel of grace.

Jerry Bridges in The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, explains what it means to preach the gospel to yourself: “It is not our contrition or sorrow for our sin, it is not our repentance, it is not even the passing of a certain number of hours during which we feel we are on some kind of probation that cleanses us. It is the blood of Christ, shed once for all on Calvary two thousand years ago but appropriated daily or even many times a day, that cleanses our consciences and gives us a renewed sense of peace with God…To preach the gospel to yourself, then means that you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life. It means that you appropriate, again by faith, the fact that Jesus fully satisfied the law of God, that He is your propitiation, and that God’s holy wrath is no longer directed toward you.”

Each time the Spirit reveals the sin in our hearts, we need to wash ourselves again with the perfect blood of Jesus. We remind ourselves that each sin has been bought and paid for and it no longer enslaves us. This is life in the gospel; this is resurrection living.

“Join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God, who has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
2 Timothy 1:8b-10