Dead Man Walking

Paul made some earth-shaking claims that we seem to take lightly. In Romans 6 he says, "How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?" (Rom 6:2-3) We are dead to sin. He didn't say, "We are dying to sin." He didn't indicate a process. He simply stated it as an accomplished fact. So he says later, "Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Rom 6:11). That "consider yourselves" is "recognize the fact that" rather than "start to feel this way." "Here's the fact," he says. "You are dead to sin. Now see yourself that way." Then he claims, "Sin shall not be master over you" (Rom 6:14). Not "should not." It is, again, a truth claim, a statement of accomplished fact. If you are in Christ, you are dead to sin and sin shall not be master over you.

Now, I suspect I'm not the only one that has trouble identifying that way. I suspect that all of us struggle with sin. I'm fairly confident that we all have sins that really seem to have mastery over us. Even Paul complained about it in his own life (Rom 7:12-24). He calls himself "a prisoner of the law of sin" (Rom 7:23). So, on one hand, we can be quite confident that we who are in Christ are already dead to sin and will not be mastered by it and we will continue for the rest of our lives on Earth to struggle with sin.

Which leads me to the next claim Paul makes that we often take lightly -- the reason we continue to sin and the solution. In answer to his "consider yourselves to be dead to sin," Paul makes an application. "Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God" (Rom 6:12-13). Did you get that? The reason we struggle with sin is because we choose to. We "let sin reign." We present the members of our body to sin. The solution? Stop it! Stop believing the lie that we must sin. Stop believing the lie that we sin because we have to. Unbelievers fall in that category; we don't. We don't have to sin. Stop it! Go in a different direction. Present yourselves to God as instruments of righteousness. The most literal translation of that word "instruments" is "weapons." Turn from presenting yourself to sin and turn toward finding every opportunity you can to present yourself to God to be used as His instrument of war for righteousness. It's quite stunning when you think about it, but how many of us live that way? Why not? Because we don't recognize the truth and act on it. And that's called "insanity".