Dear Lord of Creation, I believe with all of my heart that all things You created were to have an eternal existence. We were to strive and possess life to the fullest. There was nothing in Your original plan that involved destruction of anything that You created. Your intent was for Your righteous to be immortal. In Your character was a premise that injustice (disobedience) required punishment (death). My desire has always been to live a full life and be happy. But I live in a world filled with deceptions, errors and perversions. It seemed easy for them to find a way into my life. Adam and Eve, in an act of disobedience, allowed sin to enter the world and attach itself to me. I became its prisoner. You created me to be immortal and formed me in Your image and likeness. Because of Adam and Eve’s envy, to be wise like You, death entered the world and those who follow sin were destined to experience it.
As a result of the fall, it became easier for me to become vulnerable to the temptations of evil (just like my forbears Adam and Eve). My fallen state made me, and all of mankind, subject to sin from which I had no way to escape its grasp nor redeem myself from its penalties. However, in Your compassion, You saw my fallen condition and my powerlessness to escape the hold that sin had on me. Though I tried, I had no personal power to escape the allure of sin. I was vulnerable and powerless to change my condition. I struggled against the things that my conscious told me were evil, but my efforts to escape were futile. Through an abundance of mercy and grace, Your Father asked You to come to earth to be an offering for the forgiveness of my sins. Additionally, through Your sacrifice, the shackles of sin that bound me to sin were loosened and placed freedom from sin within my reach.
I understand that the wages for sin is death. However long I resist submitting to You, I will remain carnally minded and my reward will be eternal death with Hell as my home. If I turn my life over to You and get baptized … I am showing my identification with Your death and resurrection. I will become a beneficiary of a new life free from the punishment due for my sins and I will be pleasing to Your Father. As Paul proclaimed, “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then what was written shall come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’” The sting of death has been removed. The law no longer will make me a sinner because I cannot keep it on my own. I now have the power to overcome, death has been defeated and I have hope beyond the grave. And it’s in Jesus’ name I pray. AMEN!!
Hosea 13:14 “Where, o death, is your victory? Where, o death, is your sting?”