Deliverance from Sin (Protestant/Evangelical Devotional and Hymn Sing)

Email from "The Navigators" | 12/11/2020 | Jerry Bridges

[Gamecock]

Today’s Scripture: Romans 6:11

“Consider yourselves dead to sin.”

The guilt of our sin in Adam resulted in our being given over to sin’s dominion as a penal consequence. When a judge sentences a convicted criminal to five years in prison, that sentence is the penal consequence of his crime—analogous to what God did to Adam and all his posterity. Part of the penal consequence of Adam’s sin was being delivered into sin’s bondage.

When the prisoner has served his five years, his penal consequences are over. The broken law no longer has a claim against him. In that sense he has ended his relationship to the law and its penal consequences. He must continue to obey the law in the future, but the particular offense that sent him to prison has been dealt with forever. To use Paul’s expression, he has died to the law and its penal consequences.

How does this apply to us? Let me paraphrase from the comments of John Brown, a nineteenth-century Scottish pastor, theologian, and author of several commentaries: "The wages of sin is death. Until the condemning sentence is executed, a person is subject to sin, both in its power to condemn and its power to deprave [or exert dominion]. But let the penal consequences be fully endured, let the law’s penalty be fully paid, and the person is at once delivered from sin’s condemning power and its depraving influence or dominion. It’s in this way that all that are in Christ Jesus, all that have been justified by his grace, have died, not in their own persons, but in the person of their surety. They are therefore delivered from the reign of sin—from its power to condemn, and therefore, also from its power to rule in the heart and life."

[Gamecock]

Ping!

[sauropod]

Our pastor preached this at Wednesday’s service.

[metmom]

Excellent.

Thanks.