Son Burn
No matter how much I guard myself, no matter how high the SPF on my suncreen is, no matter how many times I reapply, I can’t escape the summer without at least one nasty sunburn. You might be the same way. Have you ever wondered what actually happens when you get a sunburn?
The basic gist of the whole scenario is that the intense light and heat from the sun kills your skin cells. Your immune system detects the dead cells and sends more blood to the infected area, bringing in white blood cells to clean up the debris. The redness and heat in your skin is the result of the increased blood flow to the burnt part of your skin. The old dead skin then begins to peel away and after a few days things are back to normal.
So what’s actually going on in your body during a sunburn is that the pain you experience is actually a healing process, our bodies working to remove the dead and worthless pieces of our skin. It’s sort of like what God does in our life. In Colossians 3 Paul tells us to remove the dead and worthless pieces of our lives so that God can replace them with something new:
Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life – even though invisible to spectators – is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up too – the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.
And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That’s a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God. It’s because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger. It wasn’t long ago that you were doing all that stuff and not knowing any better. But you know better now, so make sure it’s all gone for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk. (Colossians 3:3-8)
Lust, impurity, irritability, profanity, meanness – these aren’t easy things to rid out lives of. In fact it’s quite painful to exorcise these demons from our everyday lifestyle. Initially we think that “doing whatever [we] feel like whenever [we] feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts [our] fancy” gives us great pleasure in life. Usually though living this lifestyle leads to pain and heartache.
The remedy to this situation is to let God come into your life and do some painful work. Let the Son enter into your heart and burn away everything that is dead and worthless and place a new skin and lifestyle on you. Get a “Son burn”. (Yes, I know this is an incredibly cheesy and imperfect analogy, but I think the point works.)
It’s funny though, that some people in life get tan, and some people (like myself) always just burn. Scientifically many people are just born this way, with an increased level of melanin in their skin passed on from generations before them, predisposed to be exposed to sunlight in a more favorable way than others. Then there are some people who are always just getting burned, whose skin continues to be assaulted by the sun and who continue to go through the painful process of removing it.
You could say the same thing spiritually though. There are some people who let God “tan” their lives, who expose themselves to the Son each and every day, whose skin accepts the light the He offers and who experience a deep transformation by it. You still have to work to keep this “spiritual tan” just like you would any other tan; it goes away if you don’t continually expose yourself to the Son, and sometimes no matter how dark your skin is you can still get burnt, fall into sin, and have to go through the painful process of removing the death from your life.
There are others who are continually experience a “Son burn”, who experience spiritual highs, moments where God rids them of sin and momentarily they are renewed. But after a few days these people lose sight of God and find themselves exposed to sin yet again, forgetting to protect themselves in God’s word and love and having to go through the painful process day after day of trying to remove the dead and worthless sin from their lives.
Again, this is an imperfect analogy. But I want you to look at your spiritual skin. Are you someone who is always getting burnt, continually falling into the same traps, or are you tanning? Are you growing? Are you going deeper in your relationship with God? Let God kill the dead cells inside of you, and expose yourself to His light more and more each day.
Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life – no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did. (Romans 6:6-11)
In Between Life And Death
Homer Finds Out He Has 22 Hours Left To Live
If someone were to show you how you were going to die, would you want to find out? There’s a great scene in the movie Big Fish where young Edward Bloom and his friends visit a witch’s house. The witch has a magic eye and when the boys look into it, they each see how they are going to die. (I couldn’t find that clip online, but the scene linked above of Homer Simpson finding out about his impending death is a good illustration as well. And any excuse to use a Simpsons clip is fine by me.)
As Edward Bloom sees it in the movie, finding out how you will die could empower you. This valuable knowledge could enable you to face everything else in life with no fear. After all, if you knew what was going to kill you, you would know that nothing else this world throws at you could.
Unfortunately, we can’t know the time or the place of our death. Maybe that’s why life seems so daunting sometimes. Maybe life seems so hard because it is so uncertain. Maybe that’s why we seem stuck somewhere in the in-between, somewhere in between life and death. We find ourselves too afraid to die to really live, and we end up living a lukewarm life.
I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish you were one or the other! But since you are like lukewarm water, I will spit you out of my mouth!
As Revelation 3:15-16 tells us, living a lukewarm life is unacceptable. Yet that’s where most of us end up. The key to escaping this lukewarm area is to change the way we think about life and death and to gain some courage from having a bit of certainty about our future. (more…)
