For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ
was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we
also may live new lives. – ROMANS 6:4 (NLT)
Paul in his letter to the Romans has been speaking of the grace and love of God
that we have been given as a gift, and how this gift changes our lives significantly.
One of those blessings is our freedom from sin. We all love our freedom. It is
celebrated in the United States every July 4th with fireworks and an abundance of
food. My neighbours ‘go all out’ each year with fireworks that can last for over an
hour; and I mean large fireworks that light up the whole sky.
We want freedom to do what we like, freedom from the oppression of ourselves
and that of others. Freedom to get a respectable job and education and to live life to
what we often say is to ‘the fullest.’ We want to live the best lives possible. These
are all things we fight for and try to obtain on our own, but God has even more
than this in mind for us. He has obtained for us freedom from the sin that robs our
lives of the things God has planned for us, things we only find in him. This is
something we cannot do for ourselves. This is a release from the things that have
chained us, but it is not an open door for us to continue in the same way we have
lived before we recognised and accepted Jesus. God is not our band aid; he is our
redeemer. God is making us new, and in Christ we already are new, and we now
need to begin to live in this reality.
I remember when my oldest daughter went to kindergarten. There was a school
that believed in no formal structure, in letting the children do whatever it was they
wanted to do and they thought that eventually the children would find their path in
life and excel on their own. They did not want to hinder or burden them with rules,
so that they could find the person they really were inside and allow their gifts to
flourish. When I talked to one of the parents, they said that they found out soon
enough that all this brought chaos and it was nothing more than a day care. The
students learned nothing and had no structure for any future.
Sin leads to death and God saved us from this death, but not to stay where we are,
but to move forward under his care, direction, and structure. We are to have a
future with him and be freed from the sin that weighed us down and robbed us of
God’s good desire for our lives. Now that we have seen what sin does to us, what it
does to those around us, and the way it has torn apart our world, how can we
continue to condone it by reliving it again in our lives?
God has shown us what leads to death. God has shown us the way to life – a
flourishing life. God does not want to leave us where we were, and so the Father
sent the Son and he personally dealt with the sin in our lives. Jesus broke the power
sin had over us. We are now released from its grip. We are now able to live in the
reality of who we are; whom God made us to be.
Prayer
Father, we thank you for sending our rescuer from our bondage to sin. We
thank you for Jesus. Jesus, we praise you for the rescue that brought us out of
death and back into life. We thank you Spirit for being willing to dwell in us and