May we heed Your word, today, Father. It was straight and true…may we not let it slip through our minds and hearts like sand through our hands. Amen.
Romans 6:1-4 (<<click here to read the passage)
This is one of those days when part of today’s sermon connected with today’s blog. Romans 6 wasn’t even part of the sermon, though it could have been.

Should we continue in sin and practice sin as a habit so that [God’s gift of] grace may increase and overflow? Certainly not! How can we, the very ones who died to sin, continue to live in it any longer? Or are you ignorant of the fact that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We have therefore been buried with Him through baptism into death so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory and power of the Father, we too might walk habitually in newness of life [abandoning our old ways]. AMP

Many know that I grew up in the church. I could not begin to count the number of men and women who came to accept Christ as their Savior during those years of my dad’s ministry. I witnessed time and time again a major life change in them. Their old lives of sin were abandoned, and new lives of righteousness, holiness, and pleasing God were adopted. They lived out the expectation that you quit the sin business when you accepted Christ. Now I would imagine that that was not the case in every circumstance, but all in all, it was.
It seems to have become a more prominent mindset today, that those who lay claim to salvation in Christ, continue to hang onto sin even after making a profession of faith. Is it ignorance? …stubbornness? Or have we bought into the notion that we’re just poor miserable sinners and have no hope of overcoming the addiction to sin in our lives?
If Jesus is going to forgive us no matter what we do, what’s the point? Wouldn’t it just be easier to continue in sin and practice sin as a habit so that [God’s gift of] grace may increase and overflow? v1 Should we just learn to live with sin, mastering sin management? And I reiterate Paul’s exclamation, “Certainly not!”
How tragic it would be if God only came to save us but not fix us…to give us tickets to heaven but leave us to wallow in our sinfulness and addictions?
Jesus enables us to overcome our bondage to sin. If we want to be set free, we can be. Our lifestyles and life choices matter to God and His standard has always been, and always will be, holiness.
Paul points out that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death. v3
There’s an interesting note in the Amplified Bible.
“Baptize” [here] means to submerge an object into liquid. In this passage, Christ becomes the liquid, metaphorically, and those who are baptized into Him remain in Him forever and benefit from His experiences, including His death. The best news is that Jesus was resurrected, so believers will also experience resurrection… But even now believers experience a kind of resurrection in that they live new lives (as Paul says, “walk in newness of life”) in a wonderful new relationship with God and their fellow believers.
God has miraculously transformed us. Our responsibility is to obey, and obedience means to surrender. The wonderful thing about that surrender is we lose only what is destroying us and we gain that which will bring us to heights and wonder of which we have never dreamed! Surrender allows us to become the person that God intended for us to be! Amen!

Dec 11th, 2022, Sun, 7:14 pm