A new Exodus! God’s people have been freed from sin and death. We have trekked our baptismal path through Jesus’ death and resurrection and have arrived at newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin (Romans 6:1-14). But Paul isn’t finished yet, and this discussion of freedom from our slavery to sin is about to take a strange turn. To belong to Christ is to be freed from the enslaving gravity of sin. However, Paul still describes our new, baptized…

I don’t know about you, but I experience a bit of whiplash when reading Romans, especially chapters 5-6. Paul is doing such a masterful job of defining for us reality as it really is. Reality according to Romans 5-6 is this: God is perfectly at peace with us and perfectly reconciled to us. Grace has defeated (humiliated!) sin and death. Baptism has immersed us into the death and new life of Jesus. What it means for us to be human…

How much time do we spend being disappointed in ourselves for not being able to move past our old and tired ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving? We desire to think, speak, and behave in ways that belong to a new way of being human, and we are regularly discouraged that it’s not happening sooner. Except, it is happening, nay, already did! Paul in Romans 6 makes an astonishing, impossible declaration. “We who died to sin cannot go on living…

When we read Romans 5, it’s like sin is a spreading sickness and Adam is patient zero. To exist under the power of sin is simply an undeniable part of what it means to be human. It’s been in our DNA since the first human being. And where there is sin, death is nearby. Death is sin’s partner, the great sign that God’s project of breathing new life into existence has been contaminated. Sin and death have “reigned,” says Romans…