Dead to Sin (Romans 6:1-14)

People of God, how do you think about yourself? What would you consider to be fundamental to your identity? If you meet someone for the first time and they say, you know, tell me about yourself.

Who are you? What are you going to say? Boys and girls, you might say, well, I'm, you know, such and such years old and I go to such and such a school and I play volleyball and I sing in the choir.

Maybe that's how you think about yourself.

Those things then would be fundamental to your identity.

Some of us might say, I'm a mother.

That's fundamental to our identity.

And when we think about who we are, that's one of the very first things that comes to our mind.

I'm a mother.

Others of us might identify with our work.

We might say I'm an engineer or I'm a builder.

I'm a small business owner.

Closely related to that, I'm retired perhaps.

You know, these are ways we identify ourselves.

These are things that we consider as being fundamental to our identity.

I imagine many of us would say, I'm a Christian.

I hope that's the case.

I hope that's one of the first things that comes to your mind when someone asks, you know, who are you? But we all have ways of thinking about ourselves and about who we are.

We all have things which we would consider to be fundamental to our identity.

Now that said, we ought to notice that God's word tells Christians exactly how they ought to think about themselves.

And we see it in verse 11 of our text.

There Paul writes, so you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

That's how the Christian is to think about himself, Paul says.

he or she is to consider themselves as being dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

And so understand, Christian, however you think about yourself, whether it's as a student or an athlete or a mother or a professional or what have you, do not fail to think about yourself also on these terms.

do not fail to recognize that fundamental to your identity is this, you are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.