Are you living the crucified life? (Part Four)

From the desk of Dr. Robert L. Taylor, Th.D. To help us understand and embrace the crucified life, we’re carefully examining the text of Romans 6:1-4. Romans 6:1–14 (the context) explores how believers in Christ should think about and respond to sin now that we are in Christ and our sins are forgiven. We read, “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). Paul isn’t talking about water baptism here. From the context of the chapter, we take him to mean a kind of baptism that happens when the Holy Spirit comes into a person at the time he or she becomes a Christian. In that baptism, a new believer is spiritually baptized into Christ (see 1 Corinthians 12:13) and thereby are united and identified with Him. Water baptism, on the other hand, is an outward sign or a public declaration that the believer belongs to Jesus. This is supported by the statement of having “been buried with Him through baptism into His death.” This speaks of our spiritual identification with Jesus in His death and burial. To identify with Jesus means thinking of His death and burial as being the same as ours. We died with Jesus to our former ways of living, “so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.” In other words, spiritually we experienced death and burial with Christ. Then God gloriously raised us from that spiritual death just as He raised Christ from physical death. God the Father did all of this to enable us to walk in, to experience for the first time, spiritual life! Praise God forevermore! This is living the crucified life. Be encouraged!