Bible In A Year | Read: Romans 6
18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. 19 I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:18-23
Mission Impossible
Thoughts on the verses
Humanism says that we are masters of our own fate, that we can save ourselves. Religion declares that if we work hard enough, and our good deeds outweigh our bad, we are guaranteed eternal life. But at the heart, humanism and religion are rooted in the same thing — pride and stubborn self-reliance. The good news of the gospel is that the work is already done. Jesus did it. No matter how much we’re struggling or how much we’ve messed up, no matter how terrible our past or how unforgivable we feel, Jesus paid our debt, and He is the true master of our fate.
Overview of Chapter
This chapter and the next two emphasize how we successfully live as followers of Jesus after we have trusted him. As he did in chapter 3, Paul repeats that God’s grace should not be used as an excuse to continue sinning. He reminds us that when we trusted Jesus, our old self died and a new one came into being. The old one was the unwilling slave of sin. The new one should be the willing slave of God. Paul cannot understand a person wanting to return to that old way of life.
The old way of living can look pretty tempting sometimes. People who live like that sure seem to be having fun. Maybe it’s only tempting to sin a little bit. Our former slavery to sin still has a hold on us. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we came to Christ because we recognized how bad our sin was. Why would we go back to what we at one time recognized was self-destructive?
Action Steps
Bible: What is God showing me? What am I going to do about it?
Bless: Serve one person through word, action, or gift today.
Have you ever thought it would be cool to hear some C3 leaders discuss the daily verses, share about their lives and mostly just talk about nonsense? Of course not!…even though nobody has ever thought that we are still doing it. You can follow along with us each morning in a brand new podcast – Friday’s Gift & The American Dream.
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