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Believers Are Dead to Sin, Alive to God

What shall we say [to all this]? Should we continue in sin and practice sin as a habit so that [God’s gift of] [a]grace may increase and overflow? Certainly not! How can we, the very ones who died to sin, continue to live in it any longer? Or are you ignorant of the fact that all of us who have been [b]baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We have therefore been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory and power of the Father, we too might walk habitually in newness of life [abandoning our old ways]. For if we have become one with Him [permanently united] in the likeness of His death, we will also certainly be [one with Him and share fully] in the likeness of His resurrection. We know that our old [c]self [our human nature without the Holy Spirit] was nailed to the cross with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. For the person who has died [with Christ] has been freed from [the power of] sin.

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live [together] with Him, because we know [the self-evident truth] that Christ, having been raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has power over Him. 10 For the death that He died, He died to sin [ending its power and paying the sinner’s debt] once and for all; and the life that He lives, He lives to [glorify] God [in unbroken fellowship with Him].

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Footnotes

  1. Romans 6:1 Grace justifies believers, making them free of the guilt of sin, blameless, so that they may have eternal life.
  2. Romans 6:3 “Baptize” is a transliteration of the Greek word baptizo, which means to submerge an object into liquid. In this passage Christ becomes the liquid, metaphorically, and those who are baptized into Him remain in Him forever and benefit from His experiences, including His death. The best news is that Jesus was resurrected, so believers will also experience resurrection (those who are alive when Christ returns will experience a physical transformation). But even now believers experience a kind of resurrection in that they live new lives (as Paul says, “walk in newness of life”) in a wonderful new relationship with God and their fellow believers.
  3. Romans 6:6 Gr anthropos, i.e. man, person.

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