We will recognize the perverted logic of a society that exalts the individual life, spending billions of dollars to prolong the lives of the hopelessly ill, while aborting the lives of millions of children because those individual lives might make demands on their parents or society. We will comprehend at last the panic-stricken need to give in to every impulse for food, for sex, for drugs, for drink, for money, for divorce, for power, for all of the plagues of our paganized society. And so we fear death. The alternative that St. Paul offers, it must be very clear, is not a love of death. We know that Jesus Christ wept the night before his own death, and that he wept before the tomb of his friend Lazarus, even trusting in his Father to raise him and his friend from the dead.
Death is the pain of sin, and that pain is very real.
God doesn't require us to love that pain, any more than he required his Son to love the pain of the cross. But the God of love requires love in return, and love is a death to self, as our Lord Jesus Christ proved once and for all on the cross. There is pain in repentance and the return to God, and sometimes the closer we grow to God the more pain we must endure as we are purged of sin and death, and life takes their place. Jesus Christ has that life now, and we will have it in the end. This promise is so trustworthy that we can say that the Christian is dead to sin in Jesus Christ and alive to God.