I am a person who believes that Paul’s confession, “I die daily,” is the most central verse that runs through the entire Bible.
This confession is not simply a religious slogan.
It is the excruciating process of daily crucifixion with the ever-growing “me” that is being nailed to the cross together.
At that time, Paul was an elite from the best academic school in his day, someone who held the exclusive knowledge of Jewish learning.
He had deep knowledge of the Old Testament law and Jewish tradition, so he must have believed that he himself was free from any defect—both academically and religiously.
In other words, he was carrying the perfect résumé that society recognized and an ever-inflated ego.
He believed that the answers the world spoke of—money, scholarship, knowledge, and the Tower of Babel built through constant comparison and competition with others—were the truth, and he filled every corner of his vessel with them as if they were the final truth.
He never knew how empty, how arrogant, and how utterly filthy the contents inside his vessel really were.
While Satan ruled this world, everyone was living with their own inflated egos, numbing each other and mistakenly believing that their inflated egos were the correct answers.
Everyone was deceiving everyone else, and no one knew it.
Paul, too, was deeply immersed in the conviction that the way he had lived was the only true answer.
But the moment he realized that his inflated ego was completely useless came.
It was the moment he had to face the fact that all his scholarship, his intellectual arrogance, and the “answers” he had stacked up over his entire life were nothing but empty shells made by society.
The moment he faced the light of Jesus on the road to Damascus, his eyes of the flesh were blinded.
Paradoxically, the bitter regret that he had lived in the world so thoroughly hit him like a truck.
For three days he continued his agonizing repentance inside that shock.
From the very bottom of his soul, the process of killing himself began to the point where he could not swallow even a drop.
It was the process of facing the truth and emptying everything filthy inside his vessel.
That was exactly what “deletion of the self” meant.
Through the Damascus event, Paul learned how to look at every worldly achievement he had once boasted of as nothing but excrement.
People usually say they have been saved just by confessing Jesus.
But there is one fatal thing they have overlooked.
Paul only wrote in his epistles that he had actually experienced the excruciating process of survival.
From his perspective, “accepting Jesus” was the moment his soul was stripped naked before the overwhelming light, and the ego he had built his whole life was completely crushed—after three days of not eating or drinking a single drop.
Since he truly witnessed the resurrection, his worldview was torn apart as it was, and in that excruciating repentance he confessed Jesus as Lord.
Of course he wrote it, thinking that if he himself had changed so much, salvation was obvious.
But today’s ordinary believers live in a huge illusion.
They only pull out a few verses from Paul’s survival memoir—“by confessing with your mouth you are saved”—and make them into a slogan.
At that time, the moment they confessed Jesus with their mouth, they were immediately sent to the execution platform.
After cutting out the self-deletion and the prerequisite of giving their life in the confession behind it, they think they have received a cheap “salvation ticket to heaven” with just one simple confession prayer and one word from their lips.
They are taking the confession of a person who went through the nuclear war of the soul and simply consuming it with cheap wordplay in the corner of their room.
And right now they are doing exactly that. Pastors are saying to draw in believers: “If you confess with your mouth, you will definitely be saved.”
But don’t you have to bear fruit?
How can a tree that is not a tree bear fruit?
They keep deceiving each other and resting in comfort.
The vessel that has been emptied by deleting the self needs a new process.
From now on, we must check from the perspective of a true observer what is genuinely good content.
It is not inserting some fake trends or values that the inflated egos of this world have dictated, but a process of putting in truly essential and correct values.
Since the world still constantly pushes fake answers and demands things from us, Paul had no choice but to scourge himself daily and die.
He knew to the bone that the content he had once filled was nothing but trash made by society.
Therefore, do not mistake the “me” that this world made for something you yourself created.
Kill that fake self and be born again.
Stop the religious show of just mouth-talking.
Finally, place your hand quietly on your chest and ask yourself:
Is the resurrection you believe in real?
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Corinthians%2015%3A31









