Cal writes into ask, Pastor John, I'm reading through your book Don't Waste Your Life and

I have a question about Galatians 614 and boasting only in the cross.

Specifically, what does it mean to be dead to the world?

Let me get the verse right in front of us so we can hear how that phrase occurs.

Or be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world

has been crucified to me and I to the world.

So the question is coming, I think from that last phrase, I am crucified to the world or

I am dead to the world.

So my first question is, even before I ask, what does it mean to be dead to the world

is what does it mean to be dead?

And I think in Paul's mind that idea of Christians being dead starts with Jesus words

in a bunch of places in the Gospels, like Luke 9 where he says, the son of man must suffer

many things and be killed and on the third day be raised and he said to all, if anyone

would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Now when Bonhoeffer read that, he said, Jesus was saying, when I call you, I bid you to

come and die.

So to take a cross means to die.

So to follow Jesus is to experience a kind of death.

And the way he says it in Luke 9 is it's a daily taking up of the cross.

So there's a daily dying going on.

And then when Paul picks that up, I think, for example, when he describes baptism, he says

we were buried with him by baptism into death in order that as Christ was raised from the

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