Sin is in the world. Sin is more than what I do. Or don’t do. The sin principle touching us all; that principle that each individual holds to itself as the final arbiter of right and wrong, working through our lack of understanding that by simply choosing we have usurped God and replaced Him with our own conscience, is universally and impersonally true. It’s the circumstances of each man’s spiritual self-murder that remains intimately personal.
Paul’s epistle to the Romans says in chapter seven that sin took opportunity of my appetites to cause me to hunger and while promising to feed me, deceived me and killed me. Dying alongside was the belief that God would feed me. What sprung up in it’s place was the belief that if I didn’t feed myself, God wouldn’t give me what I deserved. I must strive to be my own source of life.
Paul’s well thought and profoundly insightful theology recorded in these chapters goes largely unheeded by ‘our worlds’ mainstream Christianity.
In one small but densely packed portion of chapter six, Paul gives the guaranteed prescription for all believers to secure freedom from Sin’s dominion:
Count yourself dead to sin.
Count yourself alive unto God, in Christ Jesus.
-that way, Sin can’t make you obey your body’s passions.
Do not yield your parts to Sin as instruments to play an unrighteous and inharmonic tune. Instead, yield yourself to God, as one brought back from death and into life, and then your members as finely tuned instruments, playing your life’s Magnum Opus of grace triumphing over sin for all to see and hear.
Thanks be unto God, He did not leave us without a clear pathway into freedom and life!