Spurgeon: The old man Crucified
‘Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him.’ Romans 6:6
Crucifixion was a lingering death. Our old nature has not been put to death by the sword, or stoning, or burning; it has been crucified; this will bring on a sure death in time, but it is slow. A man crucified often lived for hours and days and, I have read, even for a week. Our old man will linger on his cross as long as we are alive on earth. Each one of our sins has a horrible vitality about it. ‘As many lives as a cat,’ John Bunyan said unbelief had; and the same may be said of every sin within us; it is crucified, but it is not wholly dead. Expect to have fight with sin, till you sheathe your sword and put on your crown. I speak with great respect to my dear friends who wear the honourable insignia of old age, but they may let one who is a child compared to them remind them that old age does not bring with it such a weakening in the man to sin, as to permit them to cease from watchfulness. When passions cannot be indulged, they often rage the more furiously; and if one sin be driven out by change of life, another will often labour to possess the soul in its place. Alas that men should ever begin to trust to their experience or their acquired prudence, for then they are the most likely persons to fall into sin. Your lusts are crucified, but they live, and there is vitality enough in them to make you rue the day, if the nails of grace do not hold them fast and keep the demons to their tree of doom. (C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 3), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2005), 99.)