Becoming Dead to Sin and Alive in Christ

Romans 6: Immersion in Christ Leads to Eternal Life


Since "the gift is not like the trespass,"  (5:15) I am tempted to take advantage of that power.  Grace brings life immediately through the presence and influence of God.  Sins cannot take away that life, that relationship.  That is the power of the gospel.  It overcomes sin completely.  The only thing that removes life is removing myself from life.

The way of grace is shown through baptism.  Just as baptism buries me in water, so my old self is buried through taking up my cross and following Jesus.  I am to "count myself dead to sin." (v.11)  This is not pretending or imagining, but learning how to count on a reality.  In my effort to deal with some arthritis that I have, I was lead into regular, rather intense exercise.  One thing I began doing was pull-ups.  One time about a year after I was training, I was in my garage, needing to get up to the rafters to get something.  I bemoaned the fact that in order to get up there, I would need to pull myself up there.  Suddenly, I remembered that I had already been pulling myself up all the time through pull-ups.  My mind had not yet "counted on" or "reckoned" that reality, even though it was already so.  This is how I am dead to sin.  I no longer have to sin any more; it is merely old habits and fears that need to be extinguished.

Baptism also shows new life.  Just as I come up out of the water, I am raised to new life in Christ.  This is a present reality with increasing fulfillment.  I am "alive to God in Christ Jesus."  Just as my sin is reckoned as dead, now God is reckoned as alive and present.  This reckoning, again, is not pretending or imagining, but counting on God as real and as revealed.  This reckoning is the life of faith.

So the power of the gospel is not that it excuses sin, but that it renders it powerless.  The power of the gospel is not that it enables me to be right through my deeds, but through a continuing relationship to God, who makes me good and right.  Baptism gives this picture, dead and buried to sin, but immersed in the life of God as a living, present, and eternal reality.

This departs from the law, which seeks to make up for sins through righteous acts.  Such a departure does not eliminate the need for obedience to God in righteous deeds, but shows that righteousness comes from what or who my heart is dedicated to.  "Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as a slave, 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?" (v.16)

The movement of goodness begins with immersion in Christ, not merely as an external act with water, but as a surrender of my desires and old habits and an acceptance of his grace and new life.  Only the regeneration of Christ can begin this walk with God.

Following new life brought by Christ is obedience.  Obedience leads to righteousness.  What is good?  Trusting in Jesus enough to obey him.  This obedience brings true goodness, that is, righteousness.  That righteousness leads to holiness.  Holiness is being closely associated with God in a life as he intends and therefore being separated from the world and its ways.  The character of holiness is what results in eternal life.  The life that Jesus begins through regeneration, he completes through obedience, righteousness, and holiness.  The completion never ends and always grows.  It is eternal.

Lord, may I reckon myself dead to sin and live to God.  May I stay the course with you of obedience, righteousness, and holiness and not be diverted to law or license.  I do not want to try to manage my sin or just ignore it, I want to see it dead and buried as it is.  Change my heart and mind to accept these realities and embrace your eternal life of living in and with you.  Amen.

The power of the gospel can lead to unwarranted conclusions, such as in verse 1.  Since God's grace so completely covers and defeats all sin and suffering without our righteousness, I have been tempted to conclude that my efforts toward salvation are unnecessary.  Although effort toward my own salvation is what self-righteousness is made of, not all effort toward salvation is self-righteousness.  To put it another way, all self-righteousness requires effort, but not all effort leads to self-righteousness.

Immersion into Christ-likeness begins with the cross.  The image of baptism is one of death.  I begin my walk with Christ by renouncing the devil, the world, and my flesh.  I choose God's way over my way.

The Gift Is Not Like the Trespass

Romans 5: How Faith, Hope, and Love Relate to Being Good


In answer to the question "Who is well-off?," Paul answers in chapter 3, "The one who is justified freely by God's grace." (v.24)  This is in direct contrast to the one who seeks to justify himself and seeks to obtain goodness on his own.  Such a blessedness from God frees me from boasting and worrying about how I am doing compared with others before God.  Instead I am free to be good because it is a gift that God gives by the blood of Jesus, which reconciles me to God.  That is, it places me before him in the relationship as son; it brings me into the home of the Trinity as family.  I am justified and made right by the work and invitation of Jesus.

In chapter 4, Paul explains that any boasting based on being a Jew is excluded because Abraham is the father of all who trust is God, whether Jew or Gentile.  Everyone is blessed through Abraham's trust in God.  His faith does not belong to the covenant of circumcision, but precedes and transcends it.  Circumcision comes from faith; faith does not come from circumcision.  Who is well-off?  Who is good?  Anyone who will trust in God and embrace the door he has opened into his home through Jesus.

Now Paul explains how I am justified or made good.  He moves into the question "Who is good?"  Paul describes goodness with three words: faith, hope, and love.  Faith gives me access to God's grace.  By trusting him, I obtain his favor and his ability to do what I cannot do on my own.  Such trusting brings hope.  I find that I am confident about my present and future life because I trust in God and his grants his grace.  Even suffering brings hope because through trusting God in suffering, I find perseverance and then a real change in my character.

I have experienced this change in an experiment in which I explored the power of the gospel.  Is it really enough?  Can it really satisfy my deepest longings and set me free from my most addicting habits and sins?  To this I found it to be remarkably able.  I let go of the remedies in which I had been seeking and trying to fix myself and manage my own goodness.  I surrendered to God and did what he asked and found that even though it seemed at first "the long way around," he addressed the root of my problem - my trust and love of him - and changed my character - the center of my own personal "kingdom" - into something else.  Such inward and outward change has brought me hope, so that I seek to grow daily into the likeness of Christ.

Such hope can only disappoint me if I am not continually bathed in love.  Faith (trust) is fleeting if I do not know who I trust in and what he is like.  Hope disappoints me if I the reason for my confidence is not based in the trust of a loving God.  Without love, changes in character quickly become a source of empty self-righteousness and boasting, which lead to bitterness, envy, and death.  Only love keeps hope from becoming senseless positivism.

Paul explains the great love of God: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (v.8)  God does all the work before there is any promise of our accepting and enjoying it.  The feast is laid out before he knows if we will come at all.  Actually, it is laid out as we actively rebel and attack him.  He plans for our arrival home even as we are abandoning him for our own desires and interests.  This is the love that God has.  When we were his enemies, he already had the treaty written out and waiting for our commitment.

To understand God's love, I must also understand myself.  To minimize or excuse my own rebellion against God, my own lack of concern, my own desire to have my own way, my own rejection of his love is to misunderstand how much God loves me and empty the cross of all its power.  Without sin, the cross is superfluous, even foolishness.  If I am "not that bad," then God is not that smart, or even enjoys cruelty for the sake of cruelty.  I must embrace my origin as sinner and never let that go in order to see God's love for what it is.

So Paul explains simply that from the time of Adam, "sin was in the world."  His evidence for this is that even though people "did not sin by breaking a command" before Moses, "death reigned."  The outcome of sin is death, so even without a command to break, the outcome of sin was still obvious among all people - death.

God's remedy is not a simple reversal of the problem.  "The gift is not like the trespass." (v.15)  I do not have to "make up" for each and every sin that I have made in the pattern of my predecessor Adam.  His one sin is the father of all sin - a lack of faith.  All sin is not trusting or loving God.  I do not have to climb back up out of the pit I have dug through my lack of trust and separation from God one step at a time.  Instead, "the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification."  (v.16)  I am made into a son by Christ's one act of grace rather than having to "make up" for all my acts of disobedience and mistrust.

In this way, the gift is like the trespass.  Adam's sin is the model and picture and precursor to all sin.  It is faithlessness, no more and no less.  Christ's work is the work of ultimate faith.  It is the complete opposite to Adam's betrayal.  "Just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."  (v.19)

What a picture of God's grace!  Who is good?  The one who trusts in God's love, receives God's love in his own heart, and finds hope in the changes that love brings to his life.  Such goodness is not earned by a simple reversal of doing good for all the bad I have done.  Instead, it is embraced by trusting that Jesus' work on the cross has indeed made me good enough to bring home to God and live in his presence and be changed completely from the inside out.

Lord, I am so grateful that your gift is not like the road I have taken away from you.  You have brought me back to you with one sweep of your mighty, loving arms through Jesus obedience to the cross.  The way is before me and there is much work to do, but none of it will bring me home to you.  I am already there, already in your presence daily because of Jesus.  My work will only make me more at home with you, more like Jesus.  That is what it is all for.  My praise to you!  You have made an everlasting way to you that I can walk for all eternity even though I started out as your enemy.  Amen.

Listening to God

Listening to God is not really the same way twice, which makes listening for me real work.  Yet, there are consistencies in my relationship with God.  Often it is more a matter of letting go of something than doing something.

A couple of nights ago my daughter Sami was tired and worried and said that God hadn't spoken to her in "forever."  But she had told recently of something that God had said that spoke to her powerfully and in a way that I thought fit her current troubles well.

Maybe she didn't want to hear what God was saying.  Also possible is that she heard and thought she understood what he had  said a week ago, but his word to her needed to be remembered and lived out to really be heard.

So one of the things that can help in listening is writing things down and reviewing them.  A journal or just a sticky note with something God has said that impresses or confuses me can really help me to hear God.  Sometimes the "daily bread" of what God gives supplies my needs for days to come if I am not too eager to "move on" or gain "greater insights."

It reminds me of Psalm 131:

My heart is not proud, LORD, 

  my eyes are not haughty;

I do not concern myself with great matters 

  or things too wonderful for me. 

But I have calmed and quieted myself, 

  I am like a weaned child with its mother; 

  like a weaned child I am content.

Israel, put your hope in the LORD 

  both now and forevermore.

Lord, let me not go on before I have received your word.  Let me learn how to remember, wait, and trust.  Amen.

The Goodness that Makes Life Worth Living Is Obtained by Trusting God and His Ways

Romans 1:  The Problem Is Shame in What God Has Supplied as the Way to Life

When we ask again: ‘How is it that when he enjoined us in this book of yours not to do anything or receive anything without witnesses, you did not ask him: “First do you show us by witnesses that you are a prophet and that you have come from God, and show us just what Scriptures there are that testify about you”’—they are ashamed and remain silent. [Then we continue:] ‘Although you may not marry a wife without witnesses, or buy, or acquire property; although you neither receive an ass nor possess a beast of burden unwitnessed; and although you do possess both wives and property and asses and so on through witnesses, yet it is only your faith and your scriptures that you hold unsubstantiated by witnesses. For he who handed this down to you has no warranty from any source, nor is there anyone known who testified about him before he came. On the contrary, he received it while he was asleep.’ (John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, Heresies, concerning Islam)  

Take note of verse 2.   The prophets testify about Jesus and lead up to him.  This is important to Paul in his writing about the gospel.  It is new.  It is unique.  It is also foretold and anticipated.

Paul received grace and his calling to apostleship for this gospel which in verse 5 he explains as "obedience that comes through faith."  We do not believe the gospel so that obedience is optional or unnecessary.  We believe the gospel so that we might complete our obedience to God.  The law and the gospel go to the same place and describe the destination the same, but only the gospel can get me there.  The law taken rightly is more descriptive than prescriptive.

His visit is for mutual encouragement, the heart of spiritual gifts (v.11).  Spiritual gifts, then, are about a connection between believers and not merely possessed in one's own life.  Without mutual edification, spiritual gifts are not really spiritual gifts.

The point of Paul's letter to the Roman church is addressing the shame that some people place on the gospel.  People prefer other "ways" to God and tend to leave the gospel because of its apparent weakness and unpopularity.  In contrast, Paul says that the gospel is God's power revealed as a righteousness by faith from "first to last."  (vv.16-17)

Shame in the gospel is nothing new.  It's unapologetic dependence on God as well as its unmitigated promise for real goodness in the lives of those who embrace and exercise it make it unpopular at all times.  People prefer to rely on their own resources.  They also prefer to have a goodness that appeals to people around them rather than a goodness that really changes them.  We all wish the world could be a better place, but we are largely unwilling to cling to the goodness that God gives because it requires real change to our lives.

Of course, righteousness by faith will be fleshed out in this letter, but at the outset, I find it helpful to understand this righteousness that Paul preaches answers the important life questions "What is real?" The power and ability of God.  "Who is well-off?"  Those who are being delivered from this evil age.  "What is good?"  What God has revealed in the gospel.  "How does one become a good person?"  By trusting in God's work through the gospel.  Faith is trust and always implied is trust in God and his ways.

Lord, may I shed my shame and embrace this faith that places your good news at the center of my life as the one thing I can count on and the one thing that will bring goodness and well-being to myself and others.  Amen.

The Good Thing, the Bad Thing

Good deeds do not always lead to God.  There are good deeds that can take us away from God.  This is a tragedy in life.  One of the main reasons that Jesus died was because he pointed this out repeatedly and severely.  He pointed out the difference between the "good" deeds of the Pharisees and the good deeds of many of the sinners.  In one of his teachings he said,

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven.  Many will come to me one that day and say, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons and perform many miracles?"  Then I will tell them plainly, "I never knew you.  Away from me, you evildoers!"  (Matthew 7:21-23)

It is possible to do "good" things, but not the good thing.  As a matter of fact, many "good" things keep people out of the kingdom of heaven and away from God.  What keeps us out of the kingdom is the idea that there are some things that are good in themselves apart from being with God.  Jesus came to say, "Only God is good."  There are no actions or intentions performed by people on their own that oblige God to allow their entry into his kingdom or his life.

Since no "good" deeds can oblige God to bring us into his family and into his life, we can only enter by grace, God's strength and undeserved favor.  Grace is opposed to earning.  "Good" deeds that do not lead or contribute to a personal relationship with God are efforts to earn.  This is why Jesus constantly pointed out that the "sinners" of his day were entering his rule before the "good" people.  They were not doing "good" things to earn (demand) God's approval, but instead were seeking to be near to Jesus and follow him.

From this we also learn that there is no bad deed that can exclude us from God's kingdom.  If bad deeds lead to regret, sorrow, rethinking how we think (repentance), and seeking Jesus, then they become good.  Bad deeds become bad when they separate us from God (which they do), but can become good if they lead us to confession and repentance and doing truly good things.  "Bad" people can find God sooner than "good" people because of repentance.  For most of us, we find it easier to repent of the bad things we have done rather than repent of the "good" things we have done.

Really, there is only one good deed:  Jesus' death on the cross.  Anything good must come out of this goodness.  Any "good" thing done outside of this goodness as competition to it, as evidence that I don't need it, or in willful ignorance of its necessity end up taking me away from God and his plans for me and all people.  When my good deeds come from gratitude for the cross, praise to the God who planned such a deed for my sake, and desire to imitate the cross in my life by putting to death the things that come "naturally" but lead me away from God, then they are truly good because they come from the good of the cross.

Perhaps there is also only one bad thing.  Perhaps that is what Original Sin is about.  All bad things come from that first willful act of disobedience and distrust of God.  There is nothing new under the sun.  Bad things can look surprisingly "good," but when they lead us from the loving arms of God they are bad.  Such bad things can be unrepentant actions of self-service that hurt ourselves and others, or they may be acts of self-righteousness that ignore our daily need of God in our life.  Either way they come from a lie that is told: "You don't need God; you can be your own god."  They come from a world living out that lie to its fullest.  They come from an inward propensity to "make it on my own" and "do what I want to do."

Certainly, God is merciful.  He will not turn away people who want to be with him, even at the last moment.  The thief on the cross stands as an icon of hope.  Our good deed may not be much, but when it is turned toward Jesus as our hope and deliverance, it is enough because of the grace poured out on all of us through the cross.  There have been people reported in the Bible who have been delivered by God without knowing much about him: Rahab the whore, a Syrophoenician idol-worshiper, and a thief on a cross.  This shows the kind of God we might serve.  One who is "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love."  (Psalm 103:8)

However, we must be honest about each of these people.  Rahab was one of an entire city.  The thief was one of a great crowd who gathered to see Jesus die.  Many will not come to grace.  The gospel is God's power exerted to save people, his last, best word of mercy and grace, his effort to open up his kingdom to everyone and anyone.  God's mercy to people who do not know Jesus is not the good news primarily, but a loophole of his kindness.  The good news is that we need not guess nor do we have to wait until we are at death's door to draw near to God.  We can see his mercy and live in it through Jesus.  The good news is that the good deed is done and that we merely need to live with it and live by it and live in it.  The kingdom of God has always been, since God has always been king, but now we see that his rule is one of grace and mercy and those who can accept this through Jesus can enter.

The reason we know we are delivered is that we can live with God's voice in our hearts and God's presence at our side daily.  He will not abandon us to death any more than he abandons us in this present age.  The life we begin with him will continue and grow, just as existence without him will also continue and degrade.  The gospel, the good news is that we can start living with Jesus and like Jesus now.

So not all "good" things lead to God and not all bad things lead away from him.  What is needed is a will set on choosing Jesus and his way rather than our own.

Lord, may I learn to see and live in your goodness rather than my own.  May I allow my sins to lead me to your feet.  May I live by the cross so I might be raised with you in every aspect of my life.  Amen.