"Now let us see how we were delivered. And as we lay our hands on our hearts and think of what God has done for us, let us prepare to bless and magnify His name. “You, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, has He quickened”—He has made you to live—“you has He quickened together with Him.” God, by His Grace, has made you to live in Christ. Do you not feel the difference between what you were and what you now are? Can you imagine what a change there would be if a dead man who had been lying in his grave clothes could suddenly sit upright, or rise out of the shell in which the undertaker had placed him? What a contrast between the state of death and the state of life! That is a very faint figure of the difference between what we now are and what we used to be. Do you not realize it, Brothers and Sisters? The things you once despised, you now value. And the things you then passed by with a sneer, you would now live for and die for! You used to hear about these things and it often seemed dull work to listen to a sermon. But now there is music in it from the first word to the last. That Bible of yours used to be like an old will to you, and old wills are very dry reading, but now you have found the record of a great legacy left to yourself and, oh, it is blessed work to read the will now—you could sit and study it all day long! Praying, also, used to be hard work. You managed to mutter, in a dead way, a few dead words, but prayer is now quite another thing with you—your whole spirit is alive when you draw near to God in supplication. In fact, you are a changed man altogether! I suppose that if you were to meet your old self, he would hardly know you, for you are so greatly altered. I daresay he would say to you, “Come, old fellow, let us go to the theater, or turn into this beer-shop, or let us go home and find some way of amusing ourselves.” You would reply, “No, Sir. I cut your acquaintance a long time ago and I do not mean to have anything to do with you, so you may go about your business as soon as you like. I am not what I was, for I have been crucified with Christ—and I am dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.” There was one of the old saints who used to keep company with a woman in his ungodly days, and when he was converted, she met him in the street, and said to him, “Austin, you know me.” “Well,” he said, “yes, I do. But I am not Austin any longer. At least I am not the person that I used to be.” Oh, it is a blessed thing when we can feel that we are not what we once were! True, we are not yet what we want to be and we are not what we shall be, but we are not what we used to be—and we shall never again be what we used to be! The Grace of God will prevent that, now that we have been quickened. But how are we quickened? Paul says that God has quickened us together with Christ. And by this he means, first, that we have been quickened mystically by Christ’s Resurrection. That morning when Christ Jesus rose from the dead, all His people rose in Him! The sun was not yet up, but the Prince of Life and Glory had lingered long enough in the sepulcher, so, awaking into life through Divine power, He began to unwrap Himself from the cerements of the tomb. He laid the napkin by itself for your use and mine, that we may wipe our eyes when our dear friends are taken away. But He took the grave clothes and put them together, that He might leave the house ready furnished against the time when we should be carried there—our last bed being thus supplied by Him with all the furniture we shall need when our time comes to sleep in it. Then He waited a while till the sheriff’s officer came down to set the hostage free, for the angel descended from Heaven, the stone was rolled away and Jesus breathed the sweet morning air again. He that had been dead arose and left the tomb, no more to die! And, in that hour, everyone who is in Him was virtually made to rise. The resurrection of all whom He represented was guaranteed by His Resurrection, as He said to His disciples, “Because I live, you shall live also.” That is the result of the mystical union between Christ and His people."
C.H. Spurgeon- "Death and Its Sentence Abolished"
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