Obedient From The Heart

 

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

 

Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

 

What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

 

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Romans 6:11-23

 

Satan has a secret in his past that he does not want people to learn about. His secret is that he no longer has the power to separate us from God. Our enemy doesn’t want anyone to know this truth because he desires to keep nonbelievers controlled by sin and believers entangled in it.

 

It is true that because of sin we were separated from God. But when Jesus died on the cross, He bore all our sins and took on Himself our punishment of death. God then raised Jesus from the dead, and now He reigns in heaven.

 

When we trust in what Jesus has done for us, a relationship with God begins and sin no longer has control over us. We are no longer separated from God. We are set free from bondage.

 

God always stands between the Christian and the enemy.

 

Our Daily BreadMarch 10, 2007