Jesus referred to death as ‘sleeping’.
To ‘awaken’ is to open your eyes to understanding & RISE up!
The understanding we need to rise out of is DEATH & mortality, & the understanding we need to rise INTO, is Life & immortality.
Paul saying it’s time to awake out of sleep here was an indication to me that there’s something already there, like it is right in front of my face, and if I would just open my eyes, I would see it.
So if I am rising out of death, then this is resurrection language, a returning to life. And it is obtained through a change in understanding.
God has shown me that this is repentance. Repentance is not feeling sorrowful for sin, etc, it is the turning from the false understanding that sin gave – a warped image that we took on as the truth about us.
Paul reveals God’s definition of death as the carnal mind. Carnal means ‘according to the flesh’, basically it means a mind set on things below, earthly things, the physical mortal realm. Paul says these things about carnality:
1 – it is the opposite of spiritual (Rom 7:14)
2 – it is enmity against God (Rom 8:7)
3 – it is an immature state (babes in Christ) (1Cor 3:1)
4 – it makes you unable to receive ‘solid food’ (1 Cor 3:2)
5 – it is evident where envy, strife, divisions are, and ‘behaving like men’! (1 Cor 3:3)
6 – the weapons that destroy the knowledge & arguments of the carnal mind are not also going to be of that carnal mind — we need to shift into the mind of God to bring its thoughts & imaginations down. (2 Cor 10:4)
7 – if I am living by the carnal mind, I am sold to sin because it causes me to try and fulfill the law by works (Rom 7: 14-17) & sin is living in & ruling over me.
Sin reigns through death! Death = the carnal mind! So we can see that sin can only reign if we remain in the carnal mind.
To awaken is to mature in our understanding by hearing the Spirit. And He will raise us up and we will rule over sin.
When God spoke to Cain about his sacrifice, His words were not ‘if you do good will you not be accepted’. The real wording here is ‘if you do good will you not be lifted up?’. I’ve mentioned before that to ‘do good’ is to believe the truth. It is not some type of work God was looking for – He searches the heart.
The next thing God said to Cain was that ‘if you do not do good, sin is lurking at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must rule over it’.
This story of Cain reveals what is going on with Cain – he had carnal thoughts coming – the image of sin he had of himself & of God was speaking loudly to him. It doesn’t tell us Cain’s thoughts but it does mention he became angry, & his face fell. For me, having experienced being human long enough, it’s pretty obvious that Cain took the rejection of his offering as a rejection of himself. Sin interpreted this through the carnal mind because it had already convinced his father Adam that God was partial, that works had to be done to please Him.
But God is telling Cain he can rule over sin at this point. He just needed to change his mind, to reject these thoughts he was having would have been repentance for him, & it would have meant accepting an understanding that God was for him – the truth.
Cain experienced death in his conscience because he didn’t heed God’s voice here – he spiralled into even more confusion & separated himself from God. This seems to me to be the goal of sin – to use the weakness of the carnal mind, present law to it in the form of ‘you must do’, in order to bring more and more separation from God in our consciences.
Death is every manifestation in our life of a conscience that says ‘I’m separate from God’. Bad emotions are an expression of death. A red flag to tell us death is there, rise above it!
That separate conscience was revealed when Jesus cried from the cross as the first Adam – “my God my God why have you forsaken me?”
We can rise from that death that living by the carnal mind brings!
We can listen to the Spirit & be willing to let go of what we thought, what we were taught about God. We don’t need to go by other people’s knowledge, we can know Him ourselves. Everything else is just GOSSIP! We don’t need the Gossip-el!
When we hear Him, we can simply believe, shifting into His mind, the mind of the Spirit. This is repentance. A turning around in our mind. And His truth RAISES us up and we rule over that false image of sin. That beastly image! We rule from a new image – as a king in His kingdom.
It’s high time to awake out of sleep – to open our understanding to the Truth so we can ARISE & shine, radiating Life. This Life – Jesus Himself – will swallow up all that death!