Co-operate With Him!
21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
1 Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.
It is too bad that those who compiled the Bible put chapter breaks in the letters written to us. Yes, it bodes well with us finding our place, dividing up our reading practices and/or giving us some basic paragraph breakdowns. But, the damage it that we sometimes don’t connect one chapter with the proceeding set of verses. In the above case we have a prime example of this problem. If we simply started reading chapter six, as the Bible reading program show us, we might not realize that 6:1 is a continuation of 5:21. What Paul JUST said makes what he is ABOUT to say, key. In 6:1, above, we read that we are to be “working together with him ...”. But, there is a small Greek preposition translated, “then,” that we might miss in a casual reading. In essence, Paul is saying, “since” Christ has been made to be our sin and we have been made to be His righteousness, we should “work together” with Him in our faith. It might be easy to read the word “work” and think this is a system of “good works” we are to do to fulfill and finish our salvation. But, to read it that way is to miss the key point Paul is making. He is stating that we have no “righteousness” of our own. It was given to us by God’s grace. We, therefore, are to walk along side God in cooperation, through faith, to allow that grace to control us. Remember, he just wrote that we are to “work with him” but “not to receive the grace of God in vain.” It is by God’s grace that we cooperate with Him, through faith. We are to rejoice in God’s grace and allow that grace to produced good works for Him that show us as great ambsssadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20). That is the context we must read 6:1 and not simply start the chapter as though it had no connection.
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