You Can Count on It - Evangelical Caucus/Devotional

“Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11).

A foundational biblical principle is that people must understand the truth before they can live it out in their lives. Put another way, duty is always based on doctrine. The first ten verses of Romans 6 lay the solid foundation of truth upon which believers can build their lives. Several times so far (vv. 3, 5, 6, 8) Paul has exhorted Christians to understand the truth of their union with Christ in His death and resurrection. Now he exhorts us to act on it.

“Consider” translates a Greek word that means “to calculate,” “to compute,” “to take into account.” Paul urges believers to come to a settled conviction about their death to sin through their union with Christ.

Why do some question the liberating truth that in Christ they are dead to sin? Some are victimized by an inadequate view of salvation, seeing it as a mere change in their legal standing before God. Salvation involves far more, however; it involves a transformation of life. Those who believe their Christian life to be a constant battle between their old and new selves will not be able to consider themselves dead to sin. The accusations of Satan (Rev. 12:10) and conscience also make it very difficult for some to count on their death to sin. But the biggest difficulty Christians face in believing sin is a defeated enemy is their constant battle with it. That struggle makes it hard to believe we’re really dead to sin’s power (Rom. 7:15-24). Nevertheless, the Bible teaches that Christ’s holiness imputed to believers has released us from sin’s dominion. Therefore, Christians can choose not to sin and are never forced to sin.

Consider yourself to be dead to sin, and experience the blessings of triumph over temptation (1 Cor. 10:13), sin (which can never cause you to lose your salvation, Heb. 7:25), and death (John 11:25-26).

Read the following passages: Hosea 4:6; Isaiah 1:3; Colossians 3:8-10. What do they teach about the importance of doctrinal knowledge in the Christian life?

The following is a pretty powerful sermon that goes along with the thread on just how much opposition God must overcome to save someone- but his grace is more powerful than even man’s resistance, and shows that his grace overcomes because man is not in total sin yet to the point of unsaveability because of the work of the restrainer which prevents all out sin from dominating a man’s mind

“Again in I Cor. 2:14 we are told: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.”

And why not?—”for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

He laughs at the things of the Spirit of God; he does not receive them because they are nonsense, folly and utter rubbish to him.

It is not only that he cannot receive them, but he is actively, bitterly opposed to them; he rejects them altogether.

This is the Biblical truth of the awful and fearful condition of natural man!”

https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/the-power-of-the-grace-of-god-dr-tom-badia-sermon-on-grace-278712

On meditating on how the translators handled the Koine Greek, it was greatly disappointing to see the softening of the import of this verse, particularly because the translators left out the one word μέν = INDEED that is distinct in the original; and also that the word λογιζεσθε is weakly rendered here as "consider," which seems to give the reader/hearer some options as to whether or not to endorse and personally practice aversion to sinfulness in self and in the assembly of which they are constituents.

The better translation is found in the King-James-Authorized Version:

Romans 6:11-12 (AV; explanatory superscripts added)
"¹¹Likewise reckon ye** also yourselves** to be dead indeed^{μέν,truly} unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
¹²Let not sin therefore reign in your** mortal^emporal body*, that ye** should obey it* in the lusts^desires thereof*."
-------------
Notes: * = singular; ** = plural

Yet even in the KJV/AV the reader, ignorant of the Greek grammar, syntax, and context, can miss a critical point.

This book is written to the church assembly that was meeting regularly as a corporate entity in Rome, within which are the members identifying with it, in which non-Christians observe their behaviors as defining the principles to which the particular local assembly is conditioning its members.

Verse 11 is rather more of the nature of a command to count oneself as a dead person that cannot commit sin, and with the others reckoning and behaving likewise, show the watching world that their local assembly as a whole illustrates what sinlessness is like.

The same isea is testified to by Beloved John to his faithful disciples-in-training:

1 John 3:9 (AV; explanatory superscripts added)
"⁹Whosoever is^stands born of God doth not ^habitually>commit sin; for his^God's seed^{the Word of God} remaineth in him^{the birth-in-spirit saint}: and he^{the reborn one} cannot sin, because he is born^{once for all time} of God.

One cannot be progressing in spiritual and behavioral maturity, without being reborn in the spiritual realm; and one cannot be reborn spiritually without being sanctified, set apart by God for His use; and he/she cannot be sanctified without being pardoned of one's sins, and one cannot be pardoned without ones sins being paid for in terms of Jesus' shed blood and substitutionary suffering, and that was not done because of Jehovah Elohim's love for His created human beings and hate for their sins that occurred when Satan, the god of this world, was their master from birth.

Has.

Each spiritually reborn has the power to set one's mind to overcome bad habits that are hated by God, for which He disciples His children saved by the Blood:

Deuteronomy 8:5-6 (AV)
'⁵Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee.
⁶Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him."
Psalm 128:1 (AV):
"¹Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD; that walketh in his ways."
Hebrews 12:5-11 ⁵And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:
"⁶For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
⁷If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
⁸But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
⁹Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
¹⁰For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we ~~might~~ be partakers of his holiness^{progessive sanctification}.
¹¹Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby."
1 John 2:14 (AV):
"¹⁴I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men^{spritually mature adults}, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.

Those whom the Blood has justified and pardoned, have been delivered from the penalty and the power of Satan and Sin as his mode of enticing his opposition.

When one forgets, one's Heavenly Loving Father chastens.

Reckon ye also yourselves as being dead regarding sinfulness, but very much alive and laboring with reference to righteousness in this temporal dimension, until (with the Holy Spirit) the moment of relinquishing residence in the flesh body comes, that one's soul and spirit be wholly, not just partially, engaged in God's eternal realm of Heaven.

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