The world has been crucified to me
But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,
Says the Lord, your Redeemer. Isaiah 54:8
Read Galatians 6:14—18
In these little phrases I feel that the world around me is almost robbed from me. It seems to disappear. It has been killed off. ‘The world has been crucified to me.’ Yet in the same phrase, and its extension, ‘and I to the world,’ the whole world is given back to me so much better, ‘a new creation.’ I think what has died is a world that is without God. A world of my own making. A world spoiled by our own efforts to make ourselves and prove ourselves. But when the world-renewing achievement of God in Christ, the great renewal of the death of the old and the resurrection of the new is written over the life I now live, then everything, the whole world around me, is given to me in a whole new way. I am tasting the sweetness of new growth coming, not the bitterness, the sourness and the rot of decay.
Glorious Father, I have a life to live as the outcome of the cross of Jesus Christ. He was crucified for me. In that mighty deed you crucified an old world, and killed me with it. And in his resurrection you raised to existence a whole new world, a first taste and a promise of it, and me with it. So I have new ways to walk, ways of life. I need not cling to the old. I have new people to meet in the relationship of love. I need not cultivate hatred. The world is now more colourful, more thick with life. I praise you for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the renewal of the world.