“Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Wow…that’s some more seriously tough teaching from Jesus. We spent Sunday digging into the meaning of this phrase. We found that one of the major characteristics of bearing a cross is the death of the bearer. Jesus demands nothing less than death from His disciples. To further explore this idea, we looked to Romans 6:1-14. Here, Paul unpacks the meaning and outcome of such death in the disciple’s life.

We partake in the death of Christ and are then raised in the same manner that He was so that we would “…walk in newness of life.”  We find that the point and purpose of our death is to die to sin and live to God, just as Christ did.  The moral of the story is that the disciple MUST die.  If we’re truly His disciples, we will be struggling with sin.  After all, we who died to sin can no longer live in it!

A great question was also asked about why, when we come to faith, we still struggle with sin (even some new ones).  The rest of Romans 6-8 looks at this difficulty.  We see that prior to our conversion, we were completely enslaved to sin and indeed could only sin.  With saving faith in Jesus comes freedom from this enslavement; our minds can now be set on the “things of the Spirit.”  However, we are still, in some sense, tied to this body of death.  Only when the covenant of grace is consummated with our Savior will we be eternally free from sin, rescued from this body of death, and completely set on the things of the Spirit.