Alive in Christ! - Dead to Sin

Come Alive! A Celebration of Easter!

“Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:11).

Sin rules like a powerful tyrant, an angry dictator. His realm covers the earth and reaches the most remote isle of the sea. None have escaped the sphere of his influence. But he is a dying sovereign. His demise was predicted and prophesied from the beginning of his reign.

God revealed the tyrant’s character as the serpent he is in the Garden crisis when sin contaminated the creation. “God told the serpent: “Because you've done this, you're cursed, cursed beyond all cattle and wild animals, Cursed to slink on your belly and eat dirt all your life. I'm declaring war between you and the Woman, between your offspring and hers. He'll wound your head, you'll wound his heel” (Genesis 3:14-15 The Message).

At Calvary, the death knell was sounded for the death dealing snake and sin’s power became subject to Christ’s authority. The Blood of Christ provided the perfect antidote to the poisonous power of sin. Those who come to Jesus for atonement will find release from the death grip of Satan’s grasp. The fangs of sins lose their sting. The sentence of death is dismissed by the executive pardon of an all-sufficient Savior.

From the moment of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there was no longer hopeless despair awaiting death and destruction, but there was mercy and hope, and “grace to help in time of need” (Hebrew 4:16). Our death is no longer the imposition of mortality on the body but the granted privilege of professing “death to sin.” Our promise is the opportunity to be “alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” and to have the future hope of everlasting life! “Whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

The life of conquered death provides the most abundant life possible. Jesus’ promise was “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). We must never give in to the old tyrant of death when we can now live under the reign of the Prince of Peace!

“…Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 5:20-21).