This chapter doesn’t bring fond memories. Not this chapter’s fault but it is on the door step of chapter 7 which was a battleground for so many useless arguments while in graduate school.
Yet the bright side comes from the first verses. Dr. Ed Blum used this passage to say, “We can’t live the way we once lived because we aren’t the people we used to be.” Paul says, “We have died to sin.” We have been given the privilege of being unresponsive to sin.
We have tasted death just like Jesus and we’ve also been served an eternal portion of his life. A life that was meant not only for the hereafter but for the here and now. Paul ends verse four with , “we too may live a new life.”
I just finished reading Dallas Willard’s The Great Omission about modern Christianity’s inability to share a gospel that gets to people’s soul. Father, I see that. I see it so clearly being in Africa. I not sure about the north but South Africa is suffering the plague of American Christianity, Christians in name only.
I wonder if this should be changed from Christianity to Labelism. Once you get a label you are in, rather than being introduced to a life-changing journey (on going, never stops) that challenges your personal theology to bring it in submission to a Biblical way of living.
I know that I didn’t understand the gospel or my response to it until I came to Romans 3 and understand that even though I didn’t have the typical life of a reprobate, womanizing, drug dealing louse, that my sin was just as abhorrent as anyone who has lived.
When that kind of understanding took hold of my life, grace began to bloom into the life that God intended, as Paul says, “we too may live a new life.”
Father, today I live in a warmth of your Fatherhood. You are not my just my Creator, but my Father who refuses to “not” love me. I know a little of that from my earthly father so it is much easier to feel than most that I know. But when I am exposed to that cesspool called my flesh, its motivations and desires, I desperately need to the vision of a new life. I was made for something so much more. I know that and long to cooperate with the Spirit deeply in my soul to surrender those areas, thoughts, actions and motivations to your authority.
Thank you for the security of your Fatherhood!
