Reading Romans

Parents,

I hope you're week has gotten off to a great start!  Let's dive into Romans, chapter 6, which your students took a look at yesterday morning during Sunday School!

READING ROMANS
Living a New Identity


Paul ends chapter 5 by giving us a nugget of hope when he states that "where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more."  That's encouraging right?!  That statement lets us find comfort and confidence in the fact that no matter how big or small our past sin, it is covered by God's grace.  Surely this would motivate us to live apart from sin, as a response of gratitude to the Lord for his generous gift!  But this evidently wasn't the way that everyone in Rome was thinking.  Paul determined that someone might actually ponder the idea of continuing to live a life filled with sin.  I mean, God's grace is superior to sin's power in every way, so why don't we just keep on sinning and therefore evoke more and more of God's grace to cover it?  Hopefully, you find the previous question absolutely ridiculous!  But isn't this still how our world lives today?  We accept God's grace, but somehow we keep letting sin, a lot of times the same sins, regain a foot-hold in our lives.  Paul expounds in Romans 6:1-4 why we can live apart from sin.

See, Paul points out tin verses 2-3 that we have died to sin!  When we as sinners come to Jesus...when we repent and come to faith in Christ, we are baptized into Christ Jesus.  While the act of baptism is not a required action to receive salvation, the act itself stands for so much more....it is a visual representation that we have been baptized into His death.  The truth of our salvation is completely the work of Christ, and we are joined to Him in faith to receive the benefit of His sacrificial death on the cross!

Now it's important for us to understand something very clearly here....Paul was not teaching that sin dies to the believer but rather that the believer has died to the power of sin.  Sin is always going to be a temptation for me, for you and for your kids, but our faith in Christ enables us to have the power to avoid it and reject it.  This is often times extremely difficult because of our human weakness, but we cannot use that as an excuse.  The power of God which raised Christ from the dead also raises us from the death of sin and enables us to live in a new way of life!  How awesome is it to just think on that for a moment....the same power that was used to raise Christ from the dead is the same power at work in our lives as believers!!  Are you kidding me!  That's awesome!

Living as God Wants


As Christians we falter when we choose to follow the world's way rather than the Lord's way.  As believers we are now free not to sin!  This is one of those gifts that someone receives only after trusting in Christ....see before Christ, we are incapable of not sinning...but in Christ we are empowered to choose otherwise!  So Paul encourages his readers to not let sin reign in their lives!


We must be prepared to do battle everyday against the schemes and temptations of the Devil and the evil ways of the world.  In this fight we can often times find that our minds, tongues (speech), hands or feet serve as weapons - either in service of the unrighteousness or in service to God as weapons of righteousness.  Which way are you using them?  Which way am I using them?  That's an important question we have to ask ourselves.

As we read through Chapter 6 it became very apparent that God has released us as believers and has given us the power to reject sin, to flee from it and the power to conquer it in our lives.  The question that remains then is do we really want to leave our sins behind or do we somehow, strangely and perversely enjoy our sin more than we enjoy the freedom we find in Christ?  It's something for all of us to think about this week.

Next Sunday we'll be jumping into Chapter 7, so read through it sometime this week if you want to follow along with us!

Heffe