May 5, 2020 NEWNESS OF LIFE
Romans 6:4-7! “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.”
Sometime we are slow to get it-at least I am. It is one thing to know something in our mind, but it is something else getting what we ‘know’ into our spirit. There is nothing more unfulfilling than trying to live the Christian life out of a mental agreement or acceptance of the scriptures without having the truth of the scriptures embedded in our spirit. Obviously, we are to use our minds to learn and to study the scriptures, but we need the Holy Spirit to make real in our spirits what we learn as we read and study. Today’s verses are a good example of this. The vast majority of believers would readily agree that they have been crucified with Christ, and have even been baptized; the water baptism is a picture of being buried with Christ. The key point of being buried with Him is that our old self-who we use to be-has died! I think that is the part we often do not get. We have difficulty in believing and embracing the fact that the old us, the sin nature we had, has been crucified with Christ. (Without going into detail-we can still sin, but we do so by choice, not because it is our nature to sin since we have been given a new nature.) There is a second key point we must not miss; note that the verse above says that “If we have become untied with Him in the likeness of His death,” The word if is an important word. Jesus accomplished all He needed to accomplish for us to walk in newness, but we have a part in the process, and that part is believing, receiving, accepting it as so that our old nature was has been crucified, that the body of sin has been done away with, and that we have been freed from sin-all because we have died! Seeing ourselves as sinners is in opposition to seeing ourselves being freed from sin. Can we grasp the fact that our old man has died and that we do not have to sin? Here is the good news: just as Christ did not remain in the tomb, neither did we when we were crucified with Him! But, it was not our old self that was raised up, but the new us. This is difficult to digest, but our being raised up is in the likeness of His resurrection. As a result of us being crucified and buried with Christ and being freed from sin, we can walk in newness of life! Isn’t that what we all want-newness? We no longer have to battle with sin, we no longer have to ‘try our best’ to do the right thing, and we can get off the spiritual roller coaster. This is not all pie-in-the sky theology-it’s real. I think it all boils down to us accepting, believing, and walking in the truth about what these scriptures tell us about our being buried with Christ and sharing in His resurrection; we may not totally understand it, but that does not mean that we cannot receive it as true. May the Holy Spirit reveal to us the fact that our old self has been crucified and we have been raised in newness. Proclaiming and choosing to walk in our newness is a day by day choice, also known as walking according to the Spirit.
Romans 6:11 “So you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
Blessings, Buddy
RSS Feed