February 22

Read: Romans 6:1-2

Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? (Romans 6:1-2)

We Need To Be Freed From Sin

For the past several weeks we have seen that, due to the Fall, there is within the soul of man a deep-seated tendency to sin. The Scriptures clearly teach it. Paul writes, “The carnal mind is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7). What the Bible teaches, our own human experience confirms. We have seen it at work in ourselves and in others.

This inner spirit of evil seeks to destroy our concern for righteousness. Even when desires for goodness arise, carnality saps the moral energy of the soul. We find in ourselves a kind of spiritual paralysis so that we cannot do the good things that we desire. Paul describes it thus: “For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:18-19).

How is God ever to gather a people who are like Him in moral character — righteous and loving — when man has within him such a spirit of antagonism to goodness? How can a man ever serve God when he has such an inability to follow the ideals which his mind says are right?

Until such deep-seated inability is removed we have no sound hope for God’s will to be done in us. If our first parents failed to live holy lives even with God’s moral image intact, how shall we succeed, deprived of His likeness and depraved as a consequence?

If we are to live above sin, we need to have the carnal spirit destroyed. We need to have it replaced with something akin to an instinct for goodness as an integral part of the soul. Such a moral and spiritual transformation is our only hope for securing that quality of spirit of which Jesus spoke when He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).