3 Ways Christians Practice Death

Practice Death

Though Christians seek to exorcise death from the world, they also find that death is not only out there but also still within them. Christians believe that they themselves are to undergo a beautiful death. As Karl Barth, quoting Nietzsche, pithily reminds us: “Only where graves are is there resurrection.”¹ Christians practice resurrection by practicing death. Jesus said that Christians give up their lives in order to save them (Matt. 16:25).

According to C. S. Lewis, humans don’t simply need improvement, tweaks around the edges, or a moral upgrade. We need to die.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of a “hole.” This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death.²

I will explain that Christians are to undergo a kind of death by (1) killing personal sin, (2) depriving the body of food to train it for godliness, and (3) putting to death the desire for money by giving it to the poor. These actions display the beauty of the resurrection because they all aim to stimulate life by killing death.

Repenting as Dying to Ourselves

The best way to practice resurrection in the present is to kill the sin within. The apostle Paul rightly says, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13). He correlates putting sin to death with living. In an other letter he states, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Paradoxically, the way to live is to die.

The great nineteenth-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon compared killing our sin to Jesus’s being buried: “The best thing to do with our past sin, if it is indeed forgiven, is to bury it. We hope to see all our tendencies to sin killed and buried—buried so deep that not even a bone of a sin shall be left above ground.”³

The seventeenth century English Puritan theologian John Owen wrote a book on this topic called The Mortification of Sin. He argues that killing your sin is not merely a matter of putting on a good look on the outside, having a calm disposition, replacing one sin with another sin, or merely changing our behavior. Rather, killing sin is getting to the root of the sin. According to Owen, killing your sin is not done by a strict method, and we are powerless to do this outside the help of Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can kill sin. Therefore, the way to kill sin is to have faith in Christ’s work and believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to cleanse your sin.⁴

In short, the best way to kill sin is to die to ourselves a little every day. Christians are those who recognize that death still infects our bodies and even seeks to gain mastery over them. To kill death, we must bring sin into the light. This is difficult to do because often it means admitting that we are wrong. If a relationship is involved, there are usually two offending parties, and the temptation will be to point the finger at the other person. But Christians must trust that God will deal with other people’s sins. We must deal with our own.

To give one example, Paul says that Jesus’s resurrection should compel us to kill sexual immorality. To those in Corinth, Paul says that the body is not meant for sexual immorality because of the resurrection. Since God raised Jesus from the dead—and since Christians will be raised with him—then our bodies are members of Christ (1 Cor. 6:13–14). Paul insists that what you do with your body matters because it is not simply a clump of cells. A Christian’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and a member of Christ (1 Cor. 6:15–20). Therefore, how we treat our bodies—and the bodies of others—is of utmost importance.

This perspective is quite different from modern culture’s attitude toward the body. Many assume that we can use our bodies as we see fit—just like animals mating. Though we might think we have a high view of the body with all the body image emphasis, ironically, modern culture doesn’t have a high enough view of the physical body. Due to the resurrection, Christians believe that our bodies should neither be taken advantage of nor shared indiscriminately because our bodies are holy. We who believe in the resurrection have a higher view of the body than secular society; therefore, we must practice resurrection by killing the sin within that destroys.

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Fasting as Denying Ourselves

The Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis tells a story from his youth of going to see an elder monk in the mountains of Greece. He was immediately intimidated by this monk and his austere and self-denying lifestyle, so he questioned him:

“Yours is a hard life, Father. I too want to be saved. Is there no other way?”

“More agreeable?” asked the ascetic, smiling compassionately.

“More human, Father.”

“One, only one.”

“What is it”?

“Ascent. To climb a series of steps. From the full stomach to hunger, from the slaked throat to thirst, from joy to suffering. God sits at the summit of hunger, thirst, and suffering; the devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life. Choose.”

“I am still young. The world is nice. I have time to choose.”

Reaching out with the five bones of his hand, the ascetic touched my knee and pushed me.

“Wake up, my child. Wake up before death wakes you up.”⁵

The monk urged Nikos to practice death so that he might live. More specifically, he told Nikos to practice fasting. Fasting is perhaps the most neglected spiritual practice in the modern West. This is probably because self-denial is especially hard for comfortable Western Christians. We are critical of anything that sounds “monkish” or “nunnish.” However, the monk’s words should be a warning to us: “The devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life.”

One of the best ways to practice death is to deny ourselves. We may be tempted to think that this applies only to our heads and not to our bodies. Christians often talk about giving our hearts to Jesus and contemplating Jesus, but we don’t as often speak like Paul about offering our “bodies as a living sacrifice” to God (Rom. 12:1). Because of this, we don’t talk a lot about fasting in Western Christianity.

But for thousands of years, it was standard for Jews and Christians to practice death by practicing fasting. Most Jews would fast two days a week. Though the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable was boasting in his religious practices, we get a sense of how Pharisees lived when he says, “I fast twice a week” (Luke 18:12). Jesus said that when the day comes and he is taken away, his disciples “will fast” (Mark 2:20). Notice that he assumed that his followers would fast. In the Sermon on the Mount he didn’t say, “If you fast, anoint your head and wash your face” but “When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face” (Matt. 6:17). Jesus himself fasted for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1–2).

Historically, Christians also regularly fasted—typically on both Wednesday and Friday.⁶ Wednesday was the day when Jesus was arrested, and Friday was the day when Jesus died. The famed eighteenth-century preacher John Wesley said that he wouldn’t even consider someone for the pastorate who didn’t regularly fast.⁷ Fasting allows not only your mind but also your whole body to yearn for God as your grumbling stomach reminds you of your dependence.

Fasting is a way to practice death by allowing our bodies to decay for a brief time. It is a way to kill the desires of our flesh. Fasting introduces death into our body and is one of the best ways to cultivate a heart of self-denial. While we must remember that Paul says asceticism does not stop the desires of the flesh (Col. 2:23), we also know that our bodies are a means to remind us of our need for God. When we feel hunger pains—when we feel death—it causes us to remember our weakness. As a result, we should reach out to our Savior who is the true bread of life. He promises that on the other side of death is life. And on the other side of fasting is a great feast waiting for us.

Christians practice resurrection by practicing death.

Giving to the Poor as Sharing Life

A third way we can practice death is by giving to the poor. Jesus focuses on three activities in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:1–18). The last one is fasting, the middle is prayer, but the first is giving to the poor. This is what Jesus says:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matt. 6:1–4)

To connect giving to the poor with resurrection might seem strange initially; however, an Old Testament story links the two. When Elijah the prophet traveled to Sidon (outside Israel), he met a destitute widow who made clear that she was down to her last handful of flour and last drop of oil. But Elijah promised that her supply would not be empty until the Lord sent rain (1 Kings 17:14). Thus, Elijah miraculously provided for the poor woman.

Later, the woman’s son died. Elijah came to the widow, went to where the dead boy was lying, and stretched himself on top of him three times until the child’s life returned (1 Kings 17:21–22). (I remember reading this story to my kids who thought it was very strange that Elijah laid himself on a corpse.)

What Elijah was doing, though, was completely identifying himself with this poor boy. Elijah substituted his own body for this poor family. That he laid his body on top of the boy three times certainly points to the resurrection of Jesus, who rose from the dead after three days. Giving to the poor is part of how we live out the resurrection in the present.

In generosity to the poor, we take a small part of us that can easily control us—our money—and put it to death. We make it die by releasing its death grip on us. We take the life that God has given us and identify with the poor—thus sharing the life God has given us. This not only shows solidarity with the poor but also makes us a little more like them. We become poor so that they might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9).

Christians practice death to themselves by giving to the poor so that they might come out on the other side more alive. Perhaps God has designed us so that when we give to others, it triggers within us an experience of joy. We are nearly always more satisfied when we give rather than when we receive. Giving fills us up because this is what Christ has done for us. When Christians give to the poor, they imitate Jesus’s sacrifice and receive in return the life of Christ.

Christians can practice death by repenting of sin, fasting, and giving to the poor. Now that Jesus has defeated death, it is no longer something we must fear. Death has been transformed into a sort of friend. Tim Keller, through the words of George Herbert, was right to say, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him just a gardener.”⁸ Death used to crush us and be our worst enemy; now Christians can lean into death because all it does is plant us in God’s soil so that we can grow. God has taken what was evil and turned it to beauty. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said that graveyards are God’s acres where human harvests grow.⁹

This is what Jesus’s resurrection does. It reverses the order of things by transforming death into life. As Christians, therefore, we are to practice dying to ourselves. We know that through death comes life. If Jesus took up his cross, denied himself, and then entered into glory, that will also be the pattern of our lives. Resurrection practices are beautiful.

This article is adapted from The Hope of the Resurrection: How Jesus’s Defeat of Death Changes Everything by Patrick Schreiner.

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