Don’t you remember how it was? I do, perfectly well. The law code started out as an excellent piece of work. What happened, though, was that sin found a way to pervert the command into a temptation, making a piece of “forbidden fruit” out of it. The law code, instead of being used to guide me, was used to seduce me. Without all the paraphernalia of the law code, sin looked pretty dull and lifeless, and I went along without paying much attention to it. But once sin got its hands on the law code and decked itself out in all that finery, I was fooled, and fell for it. The very command that was supposed to guide me into life was cleverly used to trip me up, throwing me headlong. So sin was plenty alive, and I was stone dead. But the law code itself is God’s good and common sense, each command sane and holy counsel. I can already hear your next question: “Does that mean I can’t even trust what is good [that is, the law]? Is good just as dangerous as evil?” No again! Sin simply did what sin is so famous for doing: using the good as a cover to tempt me to do what would finally destroy me. By hiding within God’s good commandment, sin did far more mischief than it could ever have accomplished on its own.
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4 Days
The Word encourages us to resist every enemy - even when our enemy is ourselves - and teaches us to receive Jesus’ victory in our lives.
What do you think about sin? About salvation? About your life in Christ? In this devotional, Think Like a Roman, we are renewing our minds through the book of Romans. What we believe is essential to the way we live, to our growth, our walk with Christ, and our future in Christ. Our thoughts determine our beliefs, our beliefs determine our actions. Over the next four days, join us as we dive into our understanding of doctrine relating to sin, salvation, and freedom in Christ.
5 Days
Whether you’ve been a Christian for a few days or a few decades, you have probably asked yourself at some point, “Why does the Christian life seem so hard?” This devotional plan answers that question by digging into the most famous Christian struggle in history—that of the Apostle Paul in Romans 7.
Christians are different. They can’t help it. When you’re born again and filled with the Spirit, it changes you. This leads to different values about right and wrong, and a different lifestyle to match it. This 5-day plan uses the 10 Commandments (following the classic Augustinian ordering) as a vehicle for an alternative, Christ-like morality and Jesus-way of living.
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