Lord, teach me that being Your disciple is a life-or-death matter. Jesus said, "The words that i have spoken to you are spirit and are life" (John 6:63). He did not say, My words are living"; He said, "My words are life." This means that wherever the Word is released, there is life. Whenever the Word enters a human being, that person begins to show (spiritual) life. That means that I must constantly be in a condition in which the Word can flow uninterruptedly through me. The moment I block the flow by disobedience, pride, or perverseness, that moment life stops.
It is difficult for me, as an evangelical believer, to imagine that I can be the bearer of spiritual death. But it is true. The kind of spiritual death I'm thinking about here is not the death by salvation but the death of my godly influence. Outwardly, the Pharisees obeyed every rite and tradition; but because the Word had stopped through them, they were inwardly like tombs (matthew 23:27). And so I may conform to every orthdox doctrine and yet, because I refuse to let the Word continually flow through me, I may be harboring inward putrefaction and decay.
At any given moment I am the minsiter of life or death. It all depends upon my relationship to Jesus' words. This explains why Achan was destroyed after he stole the "devoted" thing (Joshua 7, ASV). God could not allow a man who had disobeyed His word to minister death to the entire camp.
I am sobered by my responsibility. Yet I rejoice because I can indeed be the channel of life to my surroundings. I can be God's oasis to a barren environment. Lord, let me be a contagion of Your life! May I be like Ezekiel's river, which brought greenness to a parched and barren land (Ezekiel 47:12).

"For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who **are being saved** and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life" (2 Corinthians 2:15-16). *AMEN*