Dead to Sin, Alive to God: What It Really Means to Walk in Newness of Life

There is a question that has haunted the church since its earliest days, a question that sounds almost reasonable on the surface but carries a dangerous undercurrent. If God's grace is greater than our sin, and if grace increases wherever sin abounds, then why not keep sinning? Why not let the floodgates open and allow grace to do its work? 

The Apostle Paul confronted this question head-on in Romans 6, and his answer was immediate, emphatic, and almost startled in its tone. "May it never be!" he declared. Some translations render it even more bluntly: "God forbid!" There is a sense of shock in his response, as if the very idea were absurd to anyone who truly understands what salvation is and what it has done to us. And yet, the question keeps resurfacing in every generation, which tells us that Paul's answer deserves our full and careful attention. 

Grace is not permission to live in sin. Grace is God's power to transform sinners into people who love Christ, obey Him, and walk in the Spirit. 

The Problem With Cheap Grace 

I coined the term "grace pushers," many years ago as those who treat grace as a license for sin. This is folks who take the most beautiful gift in the universe and twist it into something that excuses the very thing it was meant to destroy. This kind of thinking has a theological name: antinomianism, which literally means "against the law." It is the idea that because we are saved by faith and not by works, moral conduct no longer matters. Paul was actually accused of teaching this in his own day, and he rejected it completely. 

The Cross itself is the greatest argument against cheap grace. If sin were insignificant, Christ would not have needed to suffer and die in our place. The weight of the crucifixion tells us everything we need to know about how seriously God takes sin. Jesus did not come to lower God's standard of holiness. He came to fulfill it on our behalf and then, through His Spirit, to write that standard on the hearts of those who belong to Him. 

As 1 John 1:6 makes clear, a person cannot claim fellowship with God while continuing to walk in darkness without living a lie. The two realities are incompatible. 

Baptism as a Picture of Union 

To explain why grace-fueled sin is such a contradiction, Paul turns to the practice of baptism, not because the act of baptism saves anyone, but because it serves as a vivid, visible picture of a profound spiritual reality. Augustine described a sacrament as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," and that is exactly how Paul uses baptism here. 

Going into the water represents death with Christ. Being submerged represents burial with Christ. Rising out of the water represents resurrection with Christ. 

Through faith in Jesus, believers are united with Him in all three. His death becomes our death. His burial becomes our burial. His resurrection becomes our resurrection. This union is so radical, so total, and so decisive that Paul says only the language of death and new life can adequately describe it. We have not simply been forgiven. We have been transferred out of one realm of existence and into another entirely. 

The Old Man Is Gone 

Romans 6:6 delivers one of the most liberating declarations in all of Scripture. The old self, the person we were before Christ, was crucified with Him. Not improved. Not rehabilitated. Not recycled or refurbished. Crucified. 

Who was that old self? It was who we were in Adam, the person shaped by a sin nature, living under the tyranny and lordship of sin. That person was a slave. Sin was the master, and obedience to its desires was the only way of life that person knew. 

But that person is dead. 

Romans 6:7 does not say that those who have died to sin are going to be freed from sin someday. It says they are freed. Present tense. Completed reality. The believer has been emancipated, liberated, set free from the bondage and authority of sin. Sin may still knock on the door, but it no longer holds the deed to the house. Sin no longer owns you! 

This is why the question Paul began with is so jarring to the regenerate heart. Why would a freed slave voluntarily return to bondage? Why would someone who has been emancipated walk back into chains? 

Resurrection Is Not Just for Easter 

Here is where the message becomes both deeply practical and profoundly hopeful. The resurrection of Jesus is not only a future promise. It is a present power working in every believer right now. 

Paul says we are to walk in newness of life. That word "walk" speaks of daily conduct, daily decisions, and daily relationship with God. The resurrection life is not something we wait for. It is something we are called to inhabit right now, in our thought life, our emotions, our relationships, and our choices. 

One day our bodies will experience the fullness of resurrection when Christ returns. But our spirits have already been made alive, and the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is actively at work in those who belong to Him. That means no believer is left powerless against sin. The resources of heaven are available for living godly while still in the earth. 

But there is a condition woven into this promise. As Luke 9:23 reminds us, the call to follow Christ is a call to deny oneself and take up the cross daily. There can be no Easter Sunday without Good Friday. There is no resurrection life without a crucified life. As we die daily to self, to sin, and to the old identity, we experience more and more of the resurrection power that Christ purchased for us. 

The road to newness of life always comes by way of the cross. 

And that is precisely why grace, rightly understood, is not an excuse to sin. It is the only power that can truly free us from it. 

In Awe of Him, 

Pastor Greg (PG)