Romans 6:1-11

¹So what do you reckon? We follow Jesus now, so can we keep on doing bad things so that God will keep on being really good to us?

²No way. Just think about that baptism ceremony. The church leaders baptised us to show that we joined up with Jesus Christ. And you know that Jesus died, and they buried him, but God, our really great Father, made him alive again. Well, that baptism ceremony was to show that we died, just like Jesus Christ, and we got buried too, just like him, but God made us alive again. So it is like we die to doing bad things, but God makes us alive again to do good things. If we live in a new way like this we will not go wrong any more. So if we start to think about doing something bad we have to remember that we are dead, and so we can’t do it. That’s the way we have to live all the time.

⁵We joined up with Jesus Christ and it is like we die, just like he died, and then it is like we come back to life, just like he came back to life.

⁶We know that they nailed Jesus Christ to that cross, and it was like they nailed a part of us there too, that old part of us that makes us do wrong all the time. It got nailed to that cross with Jesus, and it is dead. So now it doesn’t have any power over us. It can’t make us do bad things.

⁷You know, if something is dead it can’t do anything. Well, that bad old part of us is dead now so it can’t make us do bad things any more.

⁸It is like we died, just like Jesus Christ died, and now we know that we will also live again with him.

⁹He came back to life after he died, so we are sure that he can never die again. Nothing and can kill him ever again.

¹⁰He did die once, for people that did bad things, but now he stays alive all the time with God.

¹¹Well, we have to think about ourselves in that same way. We joined up with Jesus Christ, so now, if we start to think we want to do something bad we have to tell ourselves that we died, just like Jesus died, so we can’t do anything bad. We have to think about living God’s way and then we will be really alive, just like Jesus Christ is alive.