Once we’re born-again our lives no longer belong to us, and we are to pick up our cross every day and follow Christ…
Which means we no longer continue in sin?
Our confidence is based on the fact that the risen Christ will never die again.
Death no longer has dominion over Him.
Death did have dominion over Him for three days and nights, but that dominion is forever passed.
Christ can never die again!
When the Lord Jesus died, He died to the whole subject of sin once for all.
He died to sin’s claims, its wages, its demands, its penalty.
He finished the work and settled the account so perfectly that it never needs to be repeated.
Now that He lives, He lives to God.
In one sense, of course, He always lived to God. But now He lives to God in a new relationship, as the Risen One, and in a new sphere, where sin can never enter.
The general subject is sanctification—God’s method for holy living.
As to our standing before God, we are seen as having died with Christ and having risen with Him.
This is pictured in baptism.
Our death with Christ ends our history as men and women in Adam.
God’s sentence on our old man was not reformation but death.
And that sentence was carried out when we died with Christ.
Now we are risen with Christ to walk in newness of life.
Sin’s tyranny over us has been broken, because sin has nothing to say to a dead person.
Now we are free to live for God.
Paul has described what is true of us positionally. Now he turns to the practical outworking of this truth in our lives.
We are to RECKON ourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
To reckon here means to accept what God says about us as true and to live in the light of it.
It means believing what God says in Romans 6:6 and knowing it as a fact in one’s own personal salvation.
“… knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.”
This demands a definite act of faith, which results in a fixed attitude toward “the old man.”
We will see him where God sees him—on the Cross, put to death with Christ.
Faith will operate continuously to keep him where grace placed him.
This involves us very deeply, for it means that our hearty consent has been given to God’s condemnation of and judgment upon that old “I” as altogether unworthy to live and as wholly stripped of any further claims upon us.
The first step in a walk of practical holiness is this reckoning upon the crucifixion of “the old man.”
We reckon ourselves dead to sin when we respond to temptation as a dead man would.
One day Augustine was accosted by a woman who had been his mistress before his conversion.
When he turned and walked away quickly, she called after him,
“Augustine, it’s me! It’s me!”
Quickening his pace, he called back over his shoulder,
“Yes, I know, but it’s no longer me!”
What he meant was that he was dead to sin and alive to God.
A dead man has nothing to do with immorality, lying, cheating, gossiping, or any other sin.
Now we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.
This means that we are called to holiness, worship, prayer, service, and fruitbearing.
SELAH (let us pause and calmly think about these things)
____
Friday, April 12
My Utmost for His Highest
by Oswald Chambers
MORAL DOMINION
Death no longer has mastery over him. . . . The life he lives, he lives to God.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. — Romans 6:9-11
When Jesus Christ walked among us, the life he exhibited was eternal life.
Eternal life is not a gift from God. It is the gift of God—the gift God makes of himself to his children.
This same life, not a copy of it, is manifested in us when we are born of God.
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you” (Acts 1:8).
The power we receive isn’t a gift from the Holy Spirit; the power is the Holy Spirit.
The energy and the power which were manifested in Jesus will be manifested in us by the sheer sovereign grace of God once we’ve made the moral decision about sin.
The life that was in Jesus is made ours by means of the cross when once we make the decision to be identified with him.
As soon as we do make the decision, we receive the full life of God.
Jesus came to give us endless supplies of life:
“That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).
Eternal life has nothing to do with time.
It isn’t life but Life, and its only source is the Lord Jesus Christ.
The weakest among us can experience the power of Jesus Christ if we are willing to let go.
If instead we cling to our own power, we will blur the life of Jesus inside us.
We have to keep letting go, keep identifying with him.
Slowly and surely, the great full life of God will invade us in every part of our being, and those we meet will sense that we have been with Jesus.
—-
Come join the Adventure!
Skip 🕊️
SB SALT AND LIGHT MINISTRIES 