1 What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For whoever has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:1-11 NRSV)
Dear Friend, May the grace and peace of the Lord Jesus be with you and yours. Please use this devotional time to pray for those who have asked prayers of us, i.e., your church bulletin's prayer list, etc. Also, from First Methodist Gonzales, we have this prayer request: Please pray for Bill Goins, father of Sandra Atkinson's daughter-in-law. He is dealing with serious health issues and needs prayers for healing.
As a child, the concept of sin took a hard minute for it to take root in my mind. I better understood it when someone taught it as "missing the mark," and demonstrated on a target. God expects us, I was told, to hit the mark and not to miss it. Sin is serious business and this is precisely what Paul is addressing in this passage.
Opening: The Question That Sounds Outrageous
Paul opens this passage with a question so extreme that he immediately answers it with his most emphatic Greek phrase: by no means — mē genoito — which carries the force of “Absolutely not! The very idea is unthinkable!”
The question was: should we keep sinning so that grace can keep doing its gracious work? It sounds absurd. But Paul is taking seriously a misunderstanding that was already circulating in the early church — the idea that since grace covers sin, more sin simply provides more occasion for grace to display itself. If forgiveness is free, why not keep drawing on it?
Paul’s answer is not primarily a moral argument. It is a theological one. And it is rooted in the same water and Spirit that stand at the heart of Pentecost. You cannot keep living in sin, Paul says, because you have already died. The person who used to live there is gone. And the one who has been raised in their place is alive to something entirely different.
Buried and Raised: What Baptism Actually Means
Paul’s argument turns on baptism — not as a ritual to be explained but as a reality to be inhabited. “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”
This is a staggering claim. Baptism is not, in Paul’s understanding, primarily a public declaration of personal decision. It is a participation in an event — in the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When a person goes under the water, something real happens. They are, as Paul puts it, buried with him. And when they come up, they are raised with him — raised to walk in newness of life.
The water of baptism and the fire of Pentecost belong together. Jesus himself, when he described what was coming, spoke of being baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire. John the Baptist announced it: “I baptize you with water, but he who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The water buries. The Spirit raises. Both are required for the newness of life Paul describes.
At Pentecost, when Peter finished preaching and the crowd asked what to do, his answer was immediate: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Water and Spirit. Death and resurrection. Burial and new life. The Pentecost pattern is exactly the Romans 6 pattern — going down into one kind of existence and coming up into another.
Three thousand people went into the water that day. Three thousand people came up into the newness of life Paul is describing here. The Spirit who descended in wind and fire at Pentecost is the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead — and he is the one who makes the resurrection of Romans 6 not a theological category but a lived reality.
The Old Self Crucified, the New Self Freed
Paul then introduces language that is both more personal and more demanding: “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”
The old self. This is not Paul’s way of saying that we used to be bad people who became good people. He is describing something more structural than a moral improvement. The old self is the self that was defined by, oriented toward, and enslaved to the power of sin — the self that lived as though death were the final word and the body’s appetites were its own masters. That self, Paul says, has been crucified. Put to death. Nailed to the cross with Christ.
And here is the liberating consequence: “For whoever has died is freed from sin.” Death, in the ordinary world, is the one thing that releases a person from all legal obligation. A law can only bind the living. If you have truly died — if the old self has genuinely been put to death with Christ — then sin’s claim on you is broken. Not weakened. Broken.
The Pentecost connection here is direct and powerful. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of the resurrection — the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead. Paul writes elsewhere that if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. The freedom from sin that Paul describes in Romans 6 is not a freedom you manufacture by trying harder. It is a freedom the Spirit enacts in the person who has been raised with Christ and now has the Spirit of the resurrection living in them.
The old self is dead. The Spirit is alive in you. That is the arithmetic of the new life.
Consider Yourselves Dead to Sin and Alive to God
The passage reaches its practical summit in the final verse: “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
The word consider — logizomai in Greek — is a deliberate, active reckoning. It is the word used for an accountant setting down a figure in a ledger, for a navigator calculating a position, for a person making a considered and settled judgment. Paul is not asking us to pretend. He is asking us to reckon with what is actually true.
The death happened. The resurrection happened. The Spirit has been given. The old self has been crucified. These are not aspirations — they are accomplished facts. And the call to consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God is the call to bring our daily thinking and daily choosing into alignment with what is already true about us.
This is where Pentecost becomes practical. The disciples in the upper room had already been forgiven. They had already seen the risen Christ. But they were huddled behind locked doors, still living from the posture of the old fear, still reckoning themselves as people to whom the worst had happened rather than people through whom the Spirit was about to move the world. And then the Spirit came — and they reckoned it. They counted the cost and found that the new life was larger than the old fear. They unlocked the doors and walked out into the daylight.
To consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God is to do what the disciples did on Pentecost morning: to step out of the locked room of the old way of reckoning yourself, and into the open air of what the Spirit has made you. Not perfect. Not arrived. But genuinely raised, genuinely freed, genuinely inhabited by the Spirit of the one who conquered death.
Walk in newness of life. That is not a command to achieve something. It is an invitation to inhabit what is already true.
For Reflection
Romans 6 and the Pentecost story are telling the same story from two different angles. Romans 6 gives us the theology: you have died with Christ, you have been raised with him, sin no longer has dominion, you are alive to God. The Pentecost narrative gives us the lived experience: disciples who believed all of this in theory, who had heard the promises and received the forgiveness, and who still needed the Spirit to come before they could actually live from it.
We are those disciples. We know the theology. We have heard the promises. We have been baptized into Christ’s death and raised with him into newness of life. And yet the locked room is a familiar address. The old reckoning — the one that says I am still defined by what I used to be, still bound by what once enslaved me, still the person sin knew before the cross — pulls with a gravity that is hard to resist.
The Spirit is the answer. Not as an additional experience to be pursued, but as the one who is already dwelling in you, already bearing witness that the old self is dead and the new life is real. The call of this passage is simply to reckon with what the Spirit has already done — to consider it, to align your daily thinking with it, to walk out of the locked room and into the daylight of what is already true.
Dead to sin. Alive to God. The Spirit says it is so. The question is whether we will reckon it.
PRAYER: Spirit of the resurrection, who raised Jesus from the dead and descended at Pentecost to raise us with him, help us to reckon ourselves truly dead to sin and truly alive to God today — and to walk out of every locked room into the newness of life you have already made real in us. In Christ Jesus we pray, Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one locked room in your life — one place where you are still reckoning yourself by the old self rather than the new — and this week make the deliberate, Pentecost-empowered choice to step out of it, counting yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
