I Am Because You Are September 17, 2025 Devotional

ROMANS 7:24 | ²⁴ Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

MATTHEW 22:31-32 | ³¹ And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ³² ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead but of the living.”

GALATIANS 2:20 | ²⁰ and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 

Jesus was disputing with the Sadducees over the reality of a life beyond life, which they vehemently denied. In a brilliant riposte He again teaches that the great figures of the Old Testament are alive and constitute an eternal community sustained forever by God. Membership is not automatic, however!

Each of us has a “body of death” described by Paul in Romans 7:24. Infected by sin and mortality, everyone is in a losing battle with disintegration, dust to dust, earth to earth, ashes to ashes. By connection to Jesus the death in us is killed! We are crucified with Him and then raised to a new and different and indestructible kind of existence.

The deadly part of you is dead and destroyed. You are a new creation in Christ. Thank God for this miracle.

Gracious God,

Root out in me all the vestiges of death—the dark habits, the negative thoughts, the devilish doubts. Let me feel, today, Your new life surging within me.

Amen.