What was crucified with christ

Romans We have lusts in our mortal body, but we must not obey them. In other words, we are dead to our lusts. We have received power to do this by taking this stand of faith: dead with Christ, crucified with Christ. If Paul could believe that he was crucified with Christ, it must be possible for us too. Read also: How can I say that I have been crucified with Christ?

Why live without victory then? Whining and complaining about continuous defeat sounds so humble, but the root of it is only sin and unbelief. The same spring cannot bring forth both fresh and bitter water.

James Standing at the foot of the cross is no help; it was not down at the foot of the cross that Jesus overcame. We have to get up on the cross. That is where Jesus overcame principalities and powers and all the hosts of hell.

That is where we overcome too. Byzantium, though, was not the only Christian realm. In the Latin-speaking West, a millennium and more after the birth of Christ, a fresh revolution was brewing. Increasingly, there were Christians who, rather than keeping the brute horror of crucifixion from their gaze, yearned instead to fix their eyes fully upon it. Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your Creator?

Its author, a brilliant scholar from northern Italy by the name of Anselm, was a man of noble birth: a correspondent of countesses, an associate of kings.

No matter how high in the affairs of the world he rose, he never forgot that it was in lowliness, and nakedness, and persecution that his Savior had redeemed him. In his prayer to the crucified Christ, copied as it was and read across the whole of the Latin West, Anselm articulated a new and momentous understanding of the Christian God: one in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph, but upon his suffering humanity. The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists, twisted, bloody, dying, was a victim of crucifixion such as his original executioners would have recognized: no longer serene and victorious, but racked by agony, just as any tortured slave would have been.

The response to the spectacle, however, was far removed from the mingled revulsion and disdain that had typified that of the ancients to crucifixion. Men and women, when they looked upon an image of their Lord fixed to the cross, upon the nails smashed through the tendons and bone of his feet, upon the arms stretched so tightly as to appear torn from their sockets, upon the slump of his thorn-crowned head onto his chest, did not feel contempt, but rather compassion, and pity, and fear.

There was certainly no lack of Christians, in medieval Europe, to identify with the sufferings of their God. Rich still trampled down poor. Gibbets stood on hills. The Church itself, thanks in large part to the exertions of men like Anselm, was able to lay claim to the ancient primacy of Rome—and uphold it, what was more. And yet, for all that, something fundamental had indeed changed. That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognized by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch.

This awareness, enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. To the Roman aristocrats of the decades before the birth of Jesus, such a sentiment would have seemed grotesque. And yet it had come to pass. Contact us at letters time.

Here's What Changed. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. By Tom Holland. Get our History Newsletter. He says if we would seek to gain our life, we will lose it, but if we lose it for his sake, we will find it.

Paul owed a great penalty for his own grievous sin, and Jesus paid it. This, of course, was not just for Paul, but for everyone who believes in the name of Jesus and puts their faith in him to save them by his death on the cross.

In his resurrection, we are raised with him. Now we live an eternal life, though we are still on earth in this mortal body.

By faith, we remember that we are in him, having died with him, we live with him. Practically, this means that our old self with its passions and desires is done away with. He has put his own desires in us. He has put his own Spirit in us to guide us into all truth, and to empower a righteous life. This takes remembering by spending time with God in Christ and staying mindful of the fact presented here by Paul as we go through our daily lives having taken up our cross to follow Jesus.