Can't you imagine this man as he came back from heaven? He had seen it as a propositional truth, as a brute fact. He had been there, and looked at it, and then had come back. Would anything have ever looked the same to him again? It is as though he had died. It is as though he had been raised from the dead...the constant pressure to conform to the world about us, the social pressure and every other kind of pressure of our day - surely it would have been broken...All things would look different.
But Romans 6 does not leave us here, as though we were merely projecting our imaginations. There is more to it than this. "For in that He died, He died unto sin once for all; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God" (Romans 6:10). Jesus Christ lives indeed in the presence of the Father. This is where we are called to live. We are to be dead in this present life! Dead both to good and bad, in order to be alive to the presence of God...
This is what it means now, as I wrote earlier, to love God enough to be contented, to love Him enough in the present world to say thank you in all the ebb and flow of life. When I am dead both to good and bad, I have my face turned towards God. And this is the place in which, by faith at the present moment of history, I am to be. When I am there, what am I? I am then the creature in the presence of the Creator, acknowledging that He is my Creator, and I am only a creature and nothing more. It is as though I am already in the grave and already before the face of God.
True Spirituality, pp37&38
