Going to a funeral isn’t high on any of our lists. Funerals mean we’ve lost someone we know and love. We experience pain and sorrow, along with tears and crying. Not a very good time, usually.
Yet for us to get right with God, we’ve all got to attend what Oswald Chambers would call our own “white funeral”—the burial of our old lives. Jesus replied to Nicodemus, “I assure you, unless you are born again, you can never see the Kingdom of God.” (John 3:3 NIV) We call it a white funeral because our old natures—the accepted wisdom that has blown up our lives—must die. Most of us who know Jesus Christ as our personal Savior remember the exact time and date when we attended our own white funeral. Our needs changed from craving success, bling, status and perhaps alcohol, drugs, and sexual encounters to hungering for a relationship with Jesus. It was as if we became addicted to God. The Holy Spirit pulled at our hearts like a magnet. We became new persons on the inside.
For those of us who do not yet have a relationship with Jesus, we need a white funeral—to be born again. We may scratch our heads, not really knowing what that means. What it means is this: When we come to that place where our hearts cry out to God and we open them to the presence of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ enters into our hearts. If we truly appeal to God to change our lives in a transforming way, our old natures die and our new natures are born. We gain freedom from guilt, fear, anger, and an unforgiving heart. In its place is a heart that acknowledges sin and comprehends Jesus’ amazing sacrifice on our behalf. We become newborns—new creations in Christ (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). Our sinful selves die, and we begin a new life in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
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Comments 3
Wow thanks for this clarification,was reading this passage in “My Utmost for the Highest” by OSWALD CHAMBERS,I was Blanc by the word “white funeral”.
I still don’t get the “white” part.
Tried to put myself in the Era of Oswald Chambers, and still couldn’t grasp it. The burial of the old life, I get, so that is where I need to read this particular day, or I am stumped.
God is so faithful!!
I remember 1999 in the spring when I walk to a small church in South Detroit near the Detroit river a very windy humid blistering day. It was about a 2 mile walk and I was going head on into the wind the rain and sleep not knowing nothing about Jesus Christ or salvation or the wrath of God, which was upon me being a sinner I got to the church door, opened it up and the wind closed it behind me as I went in. I ran into an older lady about 4 foot nine who came up and hugged me, even though it was cold out I had a cold sweat. I was just detoxing from alcohol. I sat in the back, kind of hiding out as I do everywhere, but still listening to the message which wasn’t hard to do because it was for me that day and the only thing I could think of was when I got back to my sister’s house was to let her have it for: let this pastor know what a miserable rotten guy I was because I got so convicted during the message and felt so guilty of my evil ways. I just wanted to fade away and not make no more terrible mistakes, but at the end, the pastor explained that there was a man who made away from me upon across, and all I had to do was receive it into my heart, my soiled black heart and I would become a new creation second Corinthians 517 and I didn’t know I could have a new start and as I went home that day I knew something had happened. I could feel it in my inner most being and that said about a week later, I read John 33 which said I was born again and that verse and the one in Corinthians was exactly what happened to me. I was a new creation. I had been born again from my fleshly life, I’ve been crucified with Christ and I now strive to be a good witness and slave to Christ a loss so now I try to die to myself each day, please God, and make disciples