In the movie The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis’ character meets a boy who is ‘gifted’ with the ability to see ghosts – dead people. But these dead people don’t realize they are dead. They go on with their ‘lives’, moving around their old haunts, talking to those they knew… all in ignorance of their condition, until they suddenly realize what has happened. The movie is fiction, but the concept is real on a different level.

I see dead people every day. I pass them on the highway. I work with them. I talk with them. But they don’t realize they’re dead. They see the stars in the night sky, they hear the birds sing, and the feel the wind on their face. They talk among themselves. They have physical life in them, but they’re dead all the same.

They are cut off from the living God because of their sin.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

– Ephesians 2:1-3 (ESV)

Do you see dead people, too? …or are you dead yourself – dead in your sins? A dead person is not aware that he is dead. He has no idea that his sins have separated him from God. He thinks he is okay and sin is okay. But a living person is aware that he is alive. He remembers the time when God forgave his sins in Christ and gave him new birth. He perceives the life of God in him. It is not just a doctrine he believes, but God actively assures him of it through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:16, 1 John 4:13, 5:10). And he seeks to avoid being in that sinful state he was in before because he values his new relationship with God.

Has God given you new life in His Son? Do you have the internal Witness?

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

– John 3:16 (KJV)