Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed from sin. Romans 6:4-7.

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for the one that is lost until he finds it? Luke 15:4.

I have been reading the book, What St Paul Really Said, by Tom Wright. It is so worth buying and reading. I wanted to share this part with you: “The Transformation of Renewed Humanity: Holiness – What happens in between the beginning and the end of this renewed humanity? What happens, that is, between the moment when pagans, and indeed Jews, come to worship the true God revealed in Jesus Christ, and the moment when they find themselves transformed in the life of the resurrection? Paul’s basic answer is that the transformation begins in the here and now. The classic text is of course Romans 12:1-2: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God: this is your true and appropriate worship. Do not be conformed to the present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may approve the will of God, that which is good, acceptable, and complete. Here we have it all in a nutshell: worship and holiness joined together. Again, Romans 1:18-32 is explicitly reversed. The mind and the body are both fully engaged; indeed, what Paul is offering here is a re-integrated humanity, over against the disintegration which is the hallmark of Adamic humanity, pagan humanity, in Romans 1.”

And continuing our 351 Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Jesus Christ: 3. The bodily ascension to heaven illustrated: Genesis 5:24: Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. And: Mark 16:19: So then, when the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.

Again in What St Paul Really Said, I loved this: “What is more, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul sees that the Christian answer to the question, ‘What time is it?’ is radically different from the Jewish answer. As a Pharisee he would have answered: we are living in the last days before the great act of God within history to defeat the pagans and liberate Israel. As a Christian he answered: we are living in the first days after the great act of God within history to defeat sin and death and liberate the whole cosmos. He would then have added: these are also the last days before the great act of God which will bring to completion that which was begun in Christ. But the first statement is the more important; and it is this which offers not only a critique of paganism, in its view of what will happen to humanity after death, but also a critique of unbelieving Judaism. Paul’s view of the goal of renewed humanity, then, is that God’s renewed humans will share a resurrection like that of Jesus Christ; and this vision of the goal offers the reality of which paganism is the parody, and the reality towards which Judaism had strained but which it had not finally attained.”

Creator God – Father, Son, Spirit, is doing a work we cannot do. And He is faithful! Can we trust Him for all, so very much, we cannot yet see when He shows us every single day His faithfulness in the systems He put into place that sustain our lives living on a planet He created for us? He has already broken into the here and now. And He is continuing His work begun in Jesus Christ, our Shepherd, the Messiah for all of humanity. Can we look to Jesus, the face of Creator God, and not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind, so that we may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect? Oh, to be no longer slaves to sin…but to walk in newness of life with God!