By Darryll Davis

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live” (Galatians 2:20, King James Version). Few words pack more power than these. To identify with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ feels superhero-esque. OK, so maybe you can’t use superhero-esque as a one word plug-in for your championship Scrabble game; but what a vivid word picture it provides to explain what happens to us when we have been raised in Christ.

Changed

If you know Christ, you’ve been morphed. Altered. Converted. Images race through my mind of a guy like me, faced with a situation I can’t handle alone. But then I dash into a phone booth and emerge a totally new creature of sorts! Me, but a new me—“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). 

Crossed

The old me is not replaced, but regenerated, reborn into a new me. Scrawny me, regenerated into brawny me. The feeble and faint of heart me, now a focused, sharper-minded me. I have a new and better mind. As Paul wrote, “But we have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16, New International Version). And the old me with poor vision, who could not imagine or see beyond the scope of my own limitations, now has a whole new point of view. I now see the invisible. 

I have been transformed, raised with Christ. No one can take me captive and no evil force has power over me. I was once ruled by my humanity, but “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,” and in Christ I have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:9, 10, 15). 

I’m superhero-esque.

Darryll Davis lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife Marie. Recently retired from the Cincinnati Police Department, he now serves as the lead minister at Pathways Christian Church.