I just read the account of Lazarus in the New Testament today. On this reading I made an important spiritual application. We all know that Christ is our savior, that he saves us from sin, but how often to we feel crushed by our sins? Overcome by the difficulties of life? Killed, spiritually, because of the wrongs we've done? That is when we need the Messiah the most, yet perhaps ironically it's when we give up the easiest. We tend to be very good at convincing ourselves that we're to far gone, that our ship has sailed, that we're already spiritually dead.
Martha and Mary both said to Jesus, "If You had been here, my brother would not have died." Today, I realized this is a backward looking attitude which plagues many of us. After the fact we lament our wrong actions (which we should to some degree, after all we're not repentant if we're thinking "Man, I'm so glad I shot that hooker"-that's right I'm talking to you GTA fans) and we think, "If only I had kept the Spirit with me, if only I had been Christlike then, I would not have sinned." While we need to take every effort to avoid sin, when we fall we need to remember that Christ can bring us out of our spiritual death, just as He brought Lazarus out of physical death.
