This week we will be diving into Romans 6:1-2 & 7 with our High School students.
1What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 7Anyone who has died has been freed from sin. (NIV)
We will be learning what it means to be free from sin and how, even when free, we enslave ourselves to sin. A dead person cannot choose life. They cannot even really choose what happens to their body. They are a slave to death, they are a prisoner of death. A living person can choose life or death. They can live life to the fullest, they can travel, they can make money, they can help others, they can…fill in the blank.
Likewise, if you are dead in sin (you have not trusted Jesus Christ), you cannot choose to do the things of life. You can only surrender yourself to Jesus, accepting the grace that He offers, thus gaining life. If you make this choice, you can choose faith and life with it. You are free, but part of that freedom is the ability to subjugate yourself to sin.
Baptism is an excellent symbol of this idea. Baptism is one of the practices we use in our church to illustrate what Jesus did for us, the other is the Lord’s Supper (Communion). We baptize by immersion, meaning we dunk you in a body of water. Putting you under the water symbolizes your death to sin, to your old life. Pulling you up out of the water symbolizes your new life in Christ, your new freedom. In baptism though, we don’t get into the pool on our own and sink ourselves and then stand back up. No, we have a minister who submerges us and pulls us up out of the water. You cannot gain this freedom and this new life on your own, just as you cannot be baptized on your own. You need a savior to work salvation in you.
We will be challenging our students to embrace freedom and walk with Christ. We will be challenging them to walk away from the bondage or slavery that come with sin.
John-David M. Culbertson 