“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Or, what about this:

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.  Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

Romans 6:6

Aurelius is not at all far from Christian thought when you translate the wording. What Aurelius would call living ‘improperly’ would be what Christians called ‘sin’. What would ‘living properly’ look like to Aurelius? He would likely have been pretty close to the Greek philosophy of living virtuously. Something that required a well developed understanding and the self control to pursue the good while rejecting bad.

For the Christian, living ‘properly’ would be living as Christ taught – a life of love, service to others before self, and radical conversion of heart and mind. In the case of the Christian though, you do not need to do this alone. By forming a relationship with Christ over time, He takes upon himself the pain of your sins, paying for them with his own sacrifice, and then leads you to live a new life in grace and conversion via his teaching – with forgiveness when you fail. For the Christian, living a new life is not something you do alone. You have a companion always there to pick you up, find forgiveness, and start anew on the path to conversion which leads to true happiness for all eternity; as well as other travelers along the same path leading to the same truth.