God's purpose for all of His saints, His Christian people, is that they become, through Christ, life-giving spirits—not just living spirits but life-giving spirits.

Just how are we supposed to do that!

We do it through crucifixion and resurrection. Crucifixion and resurrection are the mainspring of the Christian redemption. The Christian faith is galactically more than a theology competing with the other theologies and philosophies of the world. The Christian faith is an experience with Christ, an experience of crucifixion and resurrection.

God is making man in two stages. The first stage is the adamic, animal creation. The second stage is the life-giving creation. As Christ is the Tree of Life, so are we to become through Him trees of life. This is our eternal role in the creation.

Adam never can become a tree of life. The first animal personality of ours is formed from flesh and bone. Its life is corruptible blood. Its mind is always hostile to God's will and way. Its purpose is to serve as root stock on which the true and eternal humanity is to be grafted. It lives, moves, and has its being in blood-enabled metabolism.

The new humanity also is flesh and bone. But its life is incorruptible Holy Spirit. It lives, moves, and has its being in the Spirit of God. Wow!

We start as Adam and we end as an integral part of Christ, as a life-giving spirit.

Probably every person in the audience would prefer to live in the incorruptible resurrection life of Christ rather than in our perishing animal nature. But how do we get there?

We get there by dying and being resurrected.

Paul said he was crucified with Christ and living by Christ. This is the true Christian life, that of the life-giving spirit.

Paul took it by faith that he was crucified with Christ and had the sentence of death in himself. From then on his life included numerous tribulations and imprisonments—suffering of all kinds. But God kept raising Paul up and the spillover of power brought life to those following him.

All true ministry comes from the death of the cross. We cannot sit in our walnut-lined study with The Pulpit Commentary and Jamison, Fausset and Brown, choose an introduction, three points, a conclusion, and three anecdotes, and expect to bring life to a congregation.

Life comes to others when we take up our cross and follow the Lord Jesus through numerous tribulations and imprisonments. We are knocked down continually but God raises us up. As He does, that same resurrection life flows out to others.

This is how we become an eternal human being.

This is how we represent God to His creation.

"The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."