Attending Your Own Funeral

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”—Galatians 2:20

On November 2, 2009, Ademir Jorge Goncalves, a Brazilian bricklayer, attended his own funeral. Supposedly, he had been in a car wreck the day before and was killed. But family members misidentified his body, and the actual person in the wreck was a man from a nearby town. Mr. Goncalves’ live appearance stunned his family members, some of whom jumped out of the windows of the funeral home in shock and fear.

While most of us likely will never attend our own funeral physically, many of us have already attended our own funeral spiritually. The moment we placed our faith in Christ, we became participants in the death of Christ. His crucifixion became our crucifixion, His death became ours, which is why Paul could say, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Christ died for us, so that by faith in Him, we attended our own funeral because it was His body that was in the casket, not ours. And when He rose from the dead, we rose as well. Which is why it says in Romans 6:3-4,

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

We have a new lease on life because of what Jesus did on the cross. We have become a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and are “dead to sin” (Romans 6:11), no longer trapped by the sins and stains of our previous way of life. Christ paid the price of sin and freed us from its menacing grip, so that we might be free to pursue righteousness—the things that God desires that we pursue. And while we do not cease to sin as long as we inhabit these earthly tents, we do put to death the sins that remain from our old way of life, increasingly having mastery over them as we learn the Word of God and understand and obey the convictions that come to us through the Holy Spirit speaking to our conscience.

I pray that each of us might consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. We have attended our own funeral the moment that we placed our faith in Christ. We have been crucified with Him, and Christ’s life, like a small seed, takes root and begins to sprout. May the life of God’s Son be clearly seen within us as we grow in Him day by day. Amen.