Everything changes when we receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
We are no longer subject to sin. We are now subject to righteousness.
It has nothing to do with who we are, but everything to do with Who He is. We enter into His holiness, into His righteousness. We put on holiness and righteousness.
We put off the old person who was steeped in sin and we put on the new person who is clothed with Christ (Col 3:9-10).
We are in Him.
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.
Colossians 2:6-7
Now we walk in Him. Where we were once impossibly associated with the sin nature, now we have been clothed with a new nature. We have become a new creation; a new creature in Christ.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
2 Corinthians 5:17
When we are in Christ we have already become new. The old is passed away. It’s as if we have died and come back to life in an instant.
Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:3-4
When we are saved, we are born again, we are baptised into Christ, we are plunged into His death, and raised in His resurrection.
Plunged into Christ
We enter into water baptism to signify before witnesses that we have made the decision to follow Christ and we agree to be plunged beneath the surface of the water and to be buried with Him in His death, only to be raised with Him when we resurface.
His death leads to our life in Him. We become resurrected beings; that new creation, whereby all things of our past are eliminated from the equation, and we walk away guilt free, forgiven and made completely new by Him, for Him, and in Him.
For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin.
Romans 6:5-7
Freed from sin. Oh, yes. Please read that again. We are freed from sin. We are no longer slaves to sin as we were before we received Jesus as Lord. But wait, there’s more.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:8-11
We have become dead to sin. We need no longer to be in bondage to those sins that easily surrounded us, tempted us and trapped us.
We can resist all temptation because, now, we have the power to overcome every temptation. Not because of our own righteousness, but because of His, and because, now, we are in Him, and, now, His righteousness becomes ours.
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 6:12-14
Oh, my! We have been empowered to resist sin and walk in righteousness.
The onus remains on us to walk in righteousness, but we have the power to resist the temptation that may still attempt to pull us away from Christ. We are now in the assentive in Him.
He says that we are responsible for not allowing sin to reign in our mortal body. We do not have to obey it. We can push it away.
Not only this, but we can have a focus on being instruments of righteousness, as we study the Word and show ourselves to be workers who are not ashamed of the Word but fully equipped to live in the Word.
The key to this is knowing that we are, once we have received Christ, in Him forever.
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