PODCAST
Who I Really Am
June 10th, 2022
Romans 6:1-10
“This isn’t like you,” my mother said to me when I was seven years old, after I confessed to stealing my sister’s favorite toy. She’s right, I thought as I sat with my nose in the corner. I’m not a person who steals. Why did I do that? My mother was calling me to a higher self—a greater identity—which I had forgotten in my transgression. She was reminding me of who I really was in the context of my young life.
Paul does the same thing in Romans 6, hot off the heels of his discussion of the radical hope of grace in the previous chapter. Given the abundance of all this grace, he imagines one might wonder if we should simply keep on sinning so that grace can keep on gracing.
But how could we? Paul asks. We died to sin. In other words: This just isn’t like you. If we have been crucified with Christ, then we have been raised with Christ, and now we are the sort of people who are free from sin. Freedom from sin is where we are to be found, if we are to be found in Christ. Sin isn’t like us; Christ is.
Author: Tara Thomas Smith
