From A Park Bench - Galatians 1 v 4

Galatians 1 v 4

Jesus gave his life for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live.

One of the best places to sit and enjoy the world is a park bench.  Every weekend when the weather is nice and the sun is shining I can be found at the park with my daughter, sitting with other parents as she happily plays.

As I sit there, in my own little world I sometimes connect with the life of the triune God that lives within in. It amazes me that Christ should desire and come and dwell within me. But that is exactly how God planned it, before time was created God planned that Christ would die in my place, as me and that I would be adopted into God’s family. All I had to do was to believe in him and trust him for my righteousness and not my own efforts.

Amazingly, when I believed I received a new nature and my old sinful nature was killed.

So as I sit with the other parents, I am totally different, I am seated in heavenly places although I am also seated on the park bench. 

John Crowder explains how we live in a different reality: -

The problem is not that you have a sinful nature. The problem is that you don’t realize you are new. This is why it imperative to renew the mind with the truth of the gospel. The good news is that you died, and now you are 100 percent new. Not just a new version of the old you. You are completely new in kind and quality. A supernatural child of God, fused into a whole new world – a whole new paradigm. You may be sitting next to a sinner on a park bench – and although it seems like you are both in the same place, you are actually in a whole different parallel dimension from him called heaven on earth. You are now seated in heavenly places. You are the righteousness of God. You are a citizen of Heaven. In Song of Solomon 4:7 he says of you, “All beautiful you are, my darling; there is no flaw in you.”

I have been rescued from the evil world, I live in a different realm, and my citizenship is in heaven. Christ in me is the hope of glory.