DEAD TO OLD HABITS – ALIVE TO NEW LIFE
Romans 6
Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ
1. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2. By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3. Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
5. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin 7. because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
8. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Slaves to Righteousness
15. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16. Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17. But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. 18. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
19. I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. 20. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When we have finally found ourselves in a place where we can only admit our own powerlessness, and then begin to rely on a power greater than ourselves in order to muster enough sanity to make it through our daily life, we come to a place where we know that we must begin to take charge of our own domain and start saying NO to the temptations to feed our habits and addictions. At this point, the part of us that believed that sin was a necessary part or our lives dies and once dead, it’s power over us is broken.
At this point, part of us can relate to Christ’s death, and resurrection as we die to an old way of life and begin a completely new way of life. The desires of our hurts, habits and hang ups are behind us, and in front of us is a true desire to live life differently from here on out.
There still exists grace for those days where we are weak, but overall, our life has taken a different path, and there begins to have meaning and feeling where once there was but sadness and death.
How’s that for a paradox? We spent our lives doing what we thought would make us feel full, good and right, and it only left us feeling empty, guilty and shameful in the end. Then we die to these habits and behaviors only to then find a new life that is full, and brings peace and happiness that we had never known before!
One of the advantages of taking a fearless inventory, and then sharing it with another person is that the power of those things to influence your life has lost it’s potency. This is like how Christ’s death actually makes death powerless over him from that point on. Once we face our fears, we find that they have much less power that we attributed to them.
What things in your life have become powerless since they have died through your confession?