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“What does it mean to be dead to sin?”

The phrase “dead to sin” comes from the language of Romans 6, in almost every translation you can find. Paul starts with “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” He ends with “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Fair enough. So what DOES that mean exactly?

Done to Us

In one sense, dying to sin is something that was done to us or for us. When we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ to save us, in the eyes of God we are forever identified with his Son. We are “in Christ”, indwelt with his Holy Spirit from the moment we trusted him and confessed him as Lord. God sees our old selves as gone forever, dead with Christ, and each believer as a new creature who came out of that empty tomb, with Christ and in him. Water baptism symbolizes this truth for us: the believer confesses Christ, goes down into the waters of death and emerges again to new life.

If that all sounds rather abstract, it has a very practical aspect: because the believer has died with Christ, Satan has forever lost his hold on him. “One who has died has been set free from sin.” The deceiver can tempt, but he cannot control. He no longer gets the last word. Sin has lost its iron grip on men and women raised from the dead.

Done By Us

That is the theology behind being dead to sin, but it is up to each of us to take what God has done for us in Christ and put it into practice. Paul continues, “Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

We need to change the way we think about ourselves. For the Christian who understands being dead to sin, there is no “the devil made me do it”. Making excuses for sin is for people who have never known the transformative power of the Holy Spirit of God.

Moreover, we need to change the way we behave, and death to sin has made that possible. So Paul adds, “Let not sin reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.” For the believer, sin is a choice. It is not inevitable. The believer who sins is consciously presenting his members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness. Instead, the apostle says, “Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.”

For the Christian, it is no longer an endless struggle to become something we are not, but a daily awareness of the new life God has placed inside us that enables us to act like what we are.