Get A Life
“Getting a life’s a little like dying.”1
This line comes from a song by the band AJR, called The DJ Is Crying for Help. Telling the story of a mid-thirties floater who had refused to grow up, the song poses this thought when considering the need to mature and start living, rather than wasting his life.2 At its heart, the song considers whether a dead life could become a living one. In other words, we are presented with the idea of a “life-resurrection,” or the death of an old life for the resurrection of a new one.
Christianity is all about the idea of resurrection. The core message of the faith of the early church centered on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah and the Son of Man (1 Cor. 15:3-4). The idea that the crucified Jesus returned to life, three days after His execution, is the hope and motor of the Christian gospel. Without this resurrection of Jesus, the Christian message means nothing (1 Cor. 15:17). This resurrection of Jesus also promises a future resurrection for His followers and the defeat of God’s enemies (1 Cor. 15:20-21, 24). The heart of Christian hope itself beats to the drum of resurrection: the resurrection first of Jesus and then the resurrection of believers to come in the same likeness (1 Cor. 15:22-23).
While this resurrection promise for the future based on Jesus’ resurrection in the past is crucial to the Christian’s future, it also informs and demands that the Christian live a resurrected life in the present. In Romans 6:1-4, Paul explains that believers in union to Christ are dead to sin in the present, and thus should live like it in “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). The picture Paul paints using the imagery of baptism is theological: although we still await resurrected bodies, we are to live resurrected lives here and now (see Rom. 8:23).
In this expectation, we recall the lyric to the aforementioned song: “Getting a life’s a little like dying.” To live in the present is to die to the past. We must die both to what we were and what kind of lives we led. Although not yet changed outwardly, believers have been changed inwardly. We were dead men sleeping, now we can be living men walking, if we keep the old life in the past.
Yet, many self-proclaimed followers of Christ do not seem to walk in “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Rather than living men walking, they look more like dead men, barely walking if not walking at all. Friends, the resurrected One, Jesus, enables us to live lives characterized by the truth of resurrection today. Sin does not bind us, and we have the responsibility to live righteously (Rom. 6:13-14). Because of the great miracle of a dead man walking two thousand years ago, we have the opportunity to start walking alive. Put to death your old self, as it is already dead, and put on the new self, as it has already been graciously given to you (Col. 3:1-17). This new self is characterized by resurrection power, so we must keep what’s dead dead and live alive for the God who resurrects us (Rom. 6:11).
Are you living? If not, it’s time to get a life, so die to what’s holding you back from it. Live like you are alive. You are.
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Footnotes
1 “The DJ is Crying for Help,” by AJR, recorded 2023, track 8 on The Maybe Man, AJR Productions 2023, audio recording. O’ Theophilus does not endorse all views, themes, or content of the selected song or musical artist.
2 Ibid.