Daily Manna · Day 69 · March 10
Resurrection Power
“But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”
It is a fair complaint. A verse about resurrection power, read by somebody whose marriage now runs on logistics and whose prayers dried up two years ago, sounds like it belongs to someone else's testimony.
So read what it actually promises, because it is both smaller and larger than the way it gets used. It does not promise you will feel alive. It promises a body. He shall also quicken your mortal bodies, and mortal is not a metaphor; it means the one that is dying. The reference is to a physical resurrection, guaranteed by a specific precedent that already happened once, to somebody with a name. And the argument runs from person to person: the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus is the same Spirit described as dwelling in you, so the two events are connected by an occupant rather than by an analogy.
Paul keeps the condition running, and he does it two verses later without softening it: if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. The power is enormous, and it takes an interest in how your week is spent.
But the thing feeling dead in you is not the thing this verse is measuring, and that is worth hearing today. Dryness is not evidence about the occupant.
So may the Spirit who raised Jesus and who is not a visitor in you keep his own address. May the dead-feeling part of your life turn out to have been February rather than a grave, and if it is a grave, may you remember whose speciality that is. And may the body you are disappointed with be raised in a form that finally does what you meant it to.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 69 is Before Anything Happened (Matthew 3:17).