Newness of Life - Romans 5-6

Romans 6:4 (ESV Strong's)
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Newness of Life

It is always refreshing to get a reset.  We reset at the beginning of the new year.   We are able to declare new habits and new paths and push the old in the back of the mind as a “last-year” memoir.   We can, sometimes, do that same mental clarity on a long weekend.   A long vacation in the summer can do this.   A great spring break trip and rest us.   The problem with these type of mental gymnastics is they are only mental in nature.  The above passage talks about a spiritual reset that is centered on the sin in our lives.    When Jesus died for us He made it possible to give us a mental, psychological, physical AND, MOST OF ALL, a SPIRITUAL reset.    God’s Word teaches that believers, even before they came to faith to recognize the work of Christ, were IN Christ when He died.   Our sinful lives were IN Him when we He died and rose again.   Our sin, always with us, was “crucified” with Christ.  We still suffer from the smell of it in our lives and it hangs around like a dead body, but we have had our sin crucified and we have be risen with Christ in NEWNESS of life.   When Christ took OUR sin and died with it, He rose again, defeating death (and subsequently sin) and rose to a new life.  In so doing He took our sin and He gave us, by grace, His righteousness.  Paul says it this way in his letter to the church at Corinth:

2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV Strong's)
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

We “became” the righteousness of God.    That gives us a legitimate NEW life.    God took away our old life and killed it in death.  He, in turn, gave us Christ’s righteousness in our life.  We have a new life in Christ.  That is a true, spiritual, reset!!!   When we hang onto the sins of the past and allow them to dictate our lives we fail to recognize what Christ did for us.  That is like having a dead corpse chained to our bodies all day and the smell of that dead corpse dictate our decisions.   We are NEW in Christ.  We must claim this every day.