What Does it Mean to Be Made Alive?

We have recently looked at our nature apart from Christ and our nature in Christ. When looking at our nature in Christ, we focused pirmarily on a section of Ephesians 2:5 that says that God “made us alive together with Christ.” We focused especially on the benefits of being made alive, but we need to ask the question, what does “being made alive” truly mean?

The same Greek word translated as the phrase “made us alive together with” is also used by Paul in Colossians, and it gives a fuller picture of what “being made alive” means. In Colossians 2:13-14 Paul writes, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” Paul describes being made alive as having our trespasses forgiven. This means being made alive is related to our justification – our legal status before God. We are no longer dead in our sin and trespass; our debt was canceled by Jesus’ obedience. But notice, Paul does not say this new life is easy.

When God makes us alive, it does not mean we enter a life where we do not sin. This is why John says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” But we are no longer controlled by sin. John says in the same letter, “No one who abides in [Jesus] keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him (1 John 1:8, 3:6).”

We see it in the Bible and in our own lives that when we are reborn, we enter a struggle. When God makes us alive, we are given fully the new nature of a child of God, but we grow into it. Part of that new nature is the awareness of our sin, the struggle to fight it, and the sorrow of our failures. The sin was there before our rebirth, but the struggle was not. The struggle is itself a mark of being born again.

Paul talks about this struggle in detail in Romans 7:13-25; I would encourage you to read through this section of Romans to see how this struggle looks in the life of a Christian, especially if you are relatively young in your walk with Christ. The struggle against sin can be very discouraging, but think about it this way: it is unreasonable to plant an acorn today and expect it to be a big oak tree tomorrow. The acorn has inside of it all it needs to become an oak tree, but by God’s design, it takes decades for the tree to develop into maturity.

In the same way, our growth into spiritually mature Christians will not happen overnight. Paul must have known we would this could cause us to be weary because he ends this section in Ephesians 2:6-7 by saying that God, “raised us up with [Jesus] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” God has raised us up and seated us with Jesus in the heavenly places. That is present tense, meaning that even though we are not physically with Jesus today, God has already made us alive, so it is already set in stone that our eternal future is to be seated with Christ.

When the struggle against sin wears us down day by day, let this reminder that we are already seated with Jesus encourage us to keep fighting, knowing that the victory has already been won through Christ.