Jesus lived every day in the prospect of the cross, and we, in the power of His victorious life, being made conformable to His death, must rejoice every day in going down with Him into death.  Take an illustration.  Take an oak of some hundred years’ growth.  How was that oak born?  In a grave.  The acorn was planted in the ground, a grave was made for it that the acorn might die.  It died and disappeared; it cast roots downward, and it cast shoots upward, and now that tree has been standing a hundred years.  Where is it standing?  In its grave; all the time in the very grave where the acorn died; it has stood there stretching its roots deeper and deeper into that earth in which its grave was made, and yet, all the time, though it stood in the very grave where it had died, it has been growing higher, and stronger, and broader, and more beautiful.  And all the fruit it ever bore, and all the foliage that adorned it year by year, it owed to that grave in which its roots are cast and kept.  Even so Christ owes everything to His death and His grave.  And we, too, owe everything to that grave of Jesus.  Oh! let us live every day rooted in the death of Jesus.  Be not afraid, but say:  “To my own will I will die; to human wisdom, and human strength, and to the world I will die; for it is in the grave of my Lord that His life has its beginning, and its strength and its glory.”

This brings us to our next thought.  First, Christ received life from the Father; second, Christ lived it in dependence on the Father; third, Christ gave it up in death to the Father; and now, fourth, Christ received it again raised by the Father, by the power of the glory of the Father.  Oh, the deep meaning of the resurrection of Christ!  What did Christ do when He died?  He went down into the darkness and absolute helplessness of death.  He gave up a life that was without sin; a life that was God-given; a life that was beautiful and precious; and He said, “I will give it into the hands of my Father if He asks it;” and He did it; and He was there in the grave waiting on God to do His will; and because He honored God to the uttermost in His helplessness, God lifted Him up to the very uttermost of glory and power.  Christ lost nothing by giving up His life in death to the Father.  And so, if you want the glory and the life of God to come upon you, it is in the grave of utter helplessness that that life of glory will be born.  Jesus was raised from the dead, and that resurrection power, by the grace of God, can and will work in us.  Let no one expect to live a right life until he lives a full resurrection life in the power of Jesus.  Let me state in a different way what this resurrection means.