Romans
Chapter 6
Overview
Paul addresses believers in Rome who might misunderstand God’s generous grace as permission to keep doing wrong. He answers by pointing to baptism: their old life has been joined to Jesus’ death, and they now share in the promise and power of his risen life. Paul then uses the familiar but severe image of slavery to describe how repeated obedience shapes a person. Freedom, in his argument, is not merely having no master; it means being released from sin’s deadly rule so that one can belong to God and live in a new way.
1What should we say, then? Should we continue living in sin so that God’s grace may increase?
2Absolutely not! We have died to sin. How could we still live under its control?
3Or do you not know that all of us who were baptized into union with Jesus the Messiah were baptized into his death?
4Through baptism into his death, then, we were buried with him. This happened so that, just as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the Father’s glorious power, we too might live an entirely new life.
5For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will also be united with him in a resurrection like his.
6We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body controlled by sin might lose its power and we would no longer be slaves to sin.
7After all, anyone who has died has been released from sin’s claim.
8Now if we died with the Messiah, we trust that we will also live with him.
9We know that the Messiah, having been raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer rules over him.
10The death he died was a death to sin, once for all. But the life he now lives, he lives for God.
11In the same way, consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God because you are united with Jesus the Messiah.
12Therefore, do not let sin rule in your mortal body and make you obey the body’s desires.
13Do not offer the parts of your body to sin as weapons for doing wrong. Instead, offer yourselves to God as people brought from death to life, and offer every part of your body to God as a weapon for doing what is right.
14Sin will not rule over you, because you are not under the rule of law but under God’s grace.
15What follows? Should we sin because we are not under the rule of law but under God’s grace? Absolutely not!
16Do you not know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you become slaves of the one you obey? You may serve sin, which leads to death, or you may obey God, which leads to doing what is right.
17But thank God! Although you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the pattern of teaching placed before you.
18You were set free from sin and became servants of what is right.
19I am using an ordinary human comparison because of your human limitations. Just as you once offered the parts of your body as slaves to moral filth and disregard for what is right, which led to even more wrongdoing, now offer them as servants of what is right, leading to a life set apart for God.
20When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the demands of what is right.
21What good result did you gain from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things end in death.
22But now you have been set free from sin and have become God’s servants. The result is a life set apart for God, and the final outcome is eternal life.
23Sin pays its wages: death. But God freely gives eternal life through union with Jesus the Messiah, our Lord.