Romans 6:5-14

I thought I would give you a verse that has meant a lot to me. It has to do as to the why we should let the Word of God into our life.

Colossians 3:16 (NIV)
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.

The word dwell means to take up residence. The Word of God should feel at home in your life. The Word of God or as it says here the Word of Christ should take up residence in a rich way. The Word of Christ should not be cheapened in your life by placing it in the basement of your life. The Word should be given top billing. The result is that we are equipped to help serve other people. It also helps in our worship of our Savior. Here is how it stated in the Message,

Colossians 3:16 (MSG)
16 Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God!

Now on to the book of Romans.

Romans 6:5-14 (NIV)
5 If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.
6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin--
7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.
10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
13 Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.
14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

We will camp out here for a bit. In verse six the body of sin is what we are apart from Christ. It is us in our Adamic state. Paul goes back and forth as to what Christ has done and what we are in Him. Paul is teaching us that in Christ we have experienced death, burial, and resurrection. We will see this clearly in Romans chapter 8. In verse 11 of chapter 6 Paul exhorts us to count ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God. We are to reckon it as so in our lives. In other words we are to have faith in Christ and appropriate this truth everyday of our lives. We are to have the audacity to believe that Christ has set us free from sin and act as if it were so. This is where Chapter 8 comes into play again because Paul talks about the Spirit life. We cannot appropriate this truth of dead to sin and alive to God in our own strength.

Let these powerful verses sink in through the weekend and we will pick back up next week.