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Now You Know

Yesterday, we saw that Paul talked about sin as if it were a noun. He talked about the fact that sin entered the world through Adam. When Adam sinned, it was as if all of us sinned; we came into this world with the guilt of sin, the condemnation of sin, and the fact that sin rules over us. The reason you keep doing things you don’t want to do, the reason there is a battle inside of you, is because sin lives in you. Sin is your master and, at times, it’s as if you have no option but to obey the sin in you.

However, Paul now introduces us to the solution. He says the solution isn’t a what, it isn’t you, it isn’t discipline, and it isn’t willpower. The solution for why you don’t do what you ought to do is a person—Christ.

The death of Christ on the cross means that you can be taken out of Adam and placed into Christ, and then you will be free from the power of sin.

Why would those of us who have been freed from sin continue to live in it? Why would you keep saying yes to a master who is no longer your master? Paul is saying, “Didn’t you know there is so much more to the fact that Christ died for your sin than the fact that you get to go to heaven someday and you get forgiven in this life? Didn’t you know?” To which you go, “No, I don’t think I knew.”

And now he tells us what we perhaps never knew.

Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.  Romans 6:3–4

Don’t you know that when you were baptized into Christ—that is taken out of Adam and placed into Christ—you were baptized into his death? When you were in Adam, what was true of Adam was true of you. You were a prisoner to the power of sin. In the same way, what is true of Christ is now true of you. The reason you get to go to heaven is because you’re in Christ. The reason you’re able to live a new kind of life now is the very same reason—you are in Christ. The part of you that has been ruled by sin is no longer under the power of sin.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Romans 6:6–7 

Sin is no longer your master. Sin is no longer your owner. Sin no longer controls you unless you say yes to the sin that used to be your master.

All I’m asking is for you to recognize something that perhaps you’ve never recognized before. Sin is not your master. It lost all authority over you, and you not only have permission, you have the encouragement of the God who loves you to say out loud, “Sin, you are not my master. You can prod and you can make me feel and you can taunt and you can tempt, but you need to know I’m in Christ. When he died, I died, and the death that he died to the power of sin, I died to the power of sin.”