Falling into Freedom with Todd Tomasella and Travis Bryan III

Salvation and sanctification is a recurring falling down into God. We fall or collapse out of situations presented to us by life.  We fall through life into God.

This feels like we are dying or free falling into oblivion. We can either faith through it or we can rake and scrape to rescue ourselves from falling. At the bottom of our fall we have a choice: to shake our fist at God in bitterness or accept it and cry out to God as our only deliverer.
Conversely, we never climb up into God. We don’t rise up through human effort to keep rules of law. Through the experience of the cross, we must fall. We fall out of our ability to control, out of our comfort zone, out of our arrogance, pride, and self-centeredness. We collapse into death, resurrection and ascension with Christ. We descend into Christ-confidence, Christ-esteem, and Christ- centeredness. We fall into His resurrection life and power. We descend into ascension.
Being saved and sanctified is often a being pushed down. We are knocked down by unfairness, failure or humiliation. We may be made weak through loss of health or finances. Salvation is something that happens to us which we respond to with faith. Salvation is not something we do. God allows Satan to knock us down as He did with His Son at Calvary.   
Saul became Paul on the Damascus Road. He first had to fall.  Acts 9:4. Then he arose and from then on was Christ’s faithful servant. This fall turned his life upside down.  He became a dier for Christians and was no longer a killer of Christians.
In Jeremiah 21:8-9, the “way of life” for the people of Judah was to walk out of the fortress and “fall” or surrender to their enemy. Self-preservation by remaining inside the fortress was ironically the “way of death.”