Verse By Verse Devotional On 2 Corinthians By Pastor Jack #15

Dying Every Day

1:10 "[God] who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope."

You may know that in most Bible translations words that are italicized are words that do not actually exist in the Greek (or Hebrew, as the case may be), but are included to help the English reader to understand the meaning of what is being said.

You may also notice that in v.10 the words "peril of" are italicized in your Bible. In other words, the Greek here actually says, God "who delivered us from so great a death."

Now I am not saying that God resuscitated Paul in Asia as Jesus did Lazarus from the tomb in John 11. However, Paul’s life involved daily "deaths" and so should ours. Paul himself makes it even more clear that daily dying is a normal part of the Christian life by:

1- the fact that he expects this process to continue by what he says later in v.10: He “will deliver us," and

2- the tense he uses in verse 9, where he talks about having had "the sentence of death within ourselves." The use of the perfect tense here means more than that Paul had AT THAT TIME a sense that he was going to die. It means that at that time AND EVER SINCE he has had a sense of this sentence of death. The crisis in Asia seems to have been a turning point in his ministry. It helped Paul to see that he was a dying man, a man destined to live his life in the state of dying, as Christ did for him. He was dying constantly, and all the while Christ was coming more and more to life in him. He was dying so that others could be brought to life:

"For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you." (2Cor.4:11-12)

Apparently referring back to the same incident in Asia (Ephesus) as he is speaking about here in 2Cor.1:8-10, Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, "I die daily." (1Cor.15:31-32).

All God’s children are called to die everyday. This is what it means to carry our crosses daily and lose our lives for Christ (Lk.9:23-24). We are to die to sin (1Pet.2:24). We are to die to ourselves so that "it’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." He died for us. Now He calls us to die for others.

O Father, please help me to trust You with my life so that I am willing to die and trust You to raise me up. Forgive me for how I keep clinging to my life. Forgive me for how I keep grasping after my own protection and provision, instead of trusting You to protect and provide. Help me to truly believe that by losing my life I will gain it, and that if I try to keep my life I will lose it. Make me a man who wakes up each morning and puts his life on the altar as a living sacrifice, dying to himself in order to live for You.