DEAD TO SIN...ALIVE TO GOD

1 Peter 2:21-25

“For God called you to do good, even if it means suffering, just as Christ suffered for you. He is your example, and you must follow in His steps. He never sinned, nor ever deceived anyone. He did not retaliate when He was insulted, nor threaten revenge when He suffered. He left His case in the hands of God, Who always judges fairly. He personally carried our sins in His body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By His wounds you are healed. Once you were like sheep who wandered away. But now you have turned to your Shepherd, the Guardian of your souls.”

Think about the perfect Lamb of God, God Incarnate, Eternal God, the Son, becoming fully human while remaining uncompromised and fully God. Jesus Christ was the only sinless person that has ever lived on the face of the Earth. Being Infinite God, He was able to take to Himself the full, but finite reality of the sin of the whole human race upon Himself. As the Creator, worth more than an infinite number of His creations, Jesus Christ, through Whom all things were created was able to take the full and absolute punishment and suffering our sin justly deserved. He paid the price for every human that has ever drawn breath and walked upon this planet.

“He personally carried our sin in His body on the cross SO THAT we can be dead to sin and live for what is right.” As I meditate on that verse, it strikes me that I must recon myself dead to sin. I can only do that by the Holy Spirit’s Life and power now being lived in me by grace through faith.

The power of the Gospel is so amazing; something our ancient enemy does not want us to see, embrace and rely on. I can go to a cemetery and stand at the gravesite of Billy Graham and try to tempt him with every sin known to man. What is his response? Does it move him to respond in any fashion to any of the offers set before him? No. Why? Because he is dead and sin can’t touch him. He is in heaven and evil and brokenness can’t phase him. He no longer battles against the lusts of the flesh that we who are still living and breathing here on Earth battle with.

For those who follow Jesus Christ as Lord and are experiencing Him as Savior and Redeemer, we still battle with the ”flesh”, the residue left over after the Holy Spirit cut away our old sin nature. We have a new heart and a new spirit, a new nature. Jesus Christ is NOW life within us. The Holy Spirit has united us to Jesus’ death and His resurrection. We don’t have to yield ourselves to sin in any form because the Holy Spirit’s Life and presence and promise in us is infinitely greater than the deceit and death of sin. Sin can never save nor satisfy. It can never give what it seems to offer. If sin did satisfy, we’d only have to sin once and thus be sated.

Our minds need to be renewed, reoriented, recalibrated by the Holy Spirit daily so we can see, understand, and embrace the fact that sin has no longer has authority over us. Our sin, not in part, but the whole of it was nailed to the cross and we bear it no more. To recon that we are dead to sin is not mental gymnastics, it is believing God and trusting Him to do in us what we could never do on our own. We don’t have to yield any aspect of our lives to what the Word of God defines as sin. Before Jesus Christ came to live His Life and Salvation in us, that was undoable. We were slaves to sin. We are that no longer as followers of Christ Jesus. God has set us free and now we are free to be “slaves” of goodness, righteousness, and wholeness. Sin is a cheat and when it comes in any form to tempt us to rely on anything but God to draw life, hope, comfort, joy, or peace, by the Holy Spirit, we can say no.

Everything in us may resonate to temptation assaulting us, because that is where we once lived in deception, but turning to God and resisting the devil in the Spirit’s power, the enemy will flee. How we feel no longer defines us. We need to believe what God has done, that by His finished work on the cross, Jesus Christ has rendered us dead to sin and alive to God. THAT is amazing grace. We can now live for what is right, what God has called us to in Christ Jesus: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…all produced by the Holy Spirit in us; a new way to be human.