Mortification and Vivification

A man who has understood justification often arrives at the next question badly. If the verdict is settled and my standing is secure, what exactly am I doing now? The answers on offer are usually two, and both are wrong. The first is that nothing much is required, since the account is closed. The second is that everything is required, and the Christian life is a programme of self-improvement running on gratitude instead of fear.

Scripture describes something different from either, and it has two motions rather than one. The older writers called them mortification and vivification: the putting to death of what belongs to the old life, and the putting on of what belongs to the new. They are not alternatives, and neither works alone.

The command that assumes the verdict

Notice where Paul places the imperative. He does not tell the Romans to put sin to death in order to become acceptable; he tells them to do it because they already are.

The same order governs Colossians. Paul spends two chapters establishing what the believer has become in Christ, and only then issues the instruction.

This sequence is not incidental. Every attempt to reverse it produces either despair or hypocrisy, because it makes the verdict depend on the work rather than the work flow from the verdict.

Why behaviour management fails

Most attempts at holiness begin at the wrong end. We identify a behaviour, apply pressure to it, and are surprised when it either returns or is replaced by something worse. The reason is that behaviour is downstream. Paul locates the operative change at the level of the mind — not the intellect merely, but the governing disposition that decides what seems obvious and reasonable to us.

This is why a man can want to stop and cannot. He is applying force to the fruit while the root goes untouched, and the root is what he still finds credible about the old life — that it will satisfy, that it is owed to him, that the cost will not come due.

You cannot starve an appetite you are still secretly feeding with your imagination.

The second motion

Mortification alone produces a hollow man. Christ warned about the house swept and garnished and left empty (Matthew 12:43-45), and the warning applies precisely here: a vacated space does not stay vacated. Paul never issues a put off without a put on.

The positive motion is not self-generated either. It is described as walking — ordinary, sustained, directional movement in the company of another.

Paul is honest about the conflict. The two are contrary the one to the other, and the believer feels it as genuine warfare rather than as a smooth ascent. But the promise attached is precise: walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. The flesh is not eliminated in this life; it is outvoted.

The ground you are standing on

One more thing must be said, or the whole enterprise becomes anxious. The believer does not fight for victory; he fights from it. The decisive act is already past.

Have crucified — completed action. And Paul instructs us to treat that as settled fact rather than as an aspiration.

The Altar

Take one specific thing — not the general category, the specific thing — that you have been managing rather than killing. You know which it is; it is the one you have given a softer name.

Ask what you still find plausible about it, because that is the root and no amount of pressure on the branch will reach it. Then put something in its place. A vacancy will not hold. Whatever hour, habit, or company has belonged to it must be given to something that belongs to the new man, and given today rather than in principle.