Romans 6 (The message)
So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we've left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Didn't you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind...
Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life-no longer at sin's every beck and call...
When Jesus died he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on think of it this way: Sin speaks a a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That's what Jesus did. That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don't give it the time of day. Don't even run little errands that are connected with the old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time-remember, you've been raised from the dead!-into God's way of doing things.
Sin can't tell you how to live. After all, you're not living under that old tyranny any longer. You're living in the freedom of God. What is True Freedom?...Can we do anything we want?
Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you have let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master. One whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom. I'm using this freedom language because it's easy to picture. You can readily recall, cant you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing-not caring about others-not caring about God-the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is your life now as you live in God's freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?
As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing your proud of now. Where did it get you? a dead end.
But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin telling you what to do, what a surprise?
A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way!
Work hard for your sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master, Torn between one way and another.
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The Children's Place
15 years ago
