Summary
New Life
Springtime offers a fitting picture of what God works in the believer: dormant grass turning green, calves and kids in the fields, blossoms breaking out everywhere. The Christian life is no less a wonder. A caterpillar enters the chrysalis and emerges as a butterfly—an entirely new creature—and this transformation has long served as a picture of the believer who, through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the waters of Baptism, emerges from darkness into the freedom and beauty of life in Christ.
Paul takes up this very theme in Romans 6:1, responding to a dangerous misreading of his earlier words that "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" Romans 5:20. If grace grows greater where sin abounds, should we sin more so that grace may abound more? This is the slippery slope into antinomianism—the heretical teaching that, because grace covers all, the law no longer applies and the Christian is free to do as he pleases. Paul's answer is emphatic: "By no means!" The butterfly does not crawl back into the chrysalis. The one raised to new life does not climb back into the cramped darkness of sin. One cannot walk simultaneously in the light and in the dark.
The reason is that something decisive has already happened. "How can we who died to sin still live in it?" Romans 6:2. Sin reigns in death and through the curse, but Christ has defeated death and broken the curse. Sin therefore has no dominion over Christ, and no dominion over those who are in Christ. This dying to sin is not an ongoing labor we must repeat; it is a one-time event accomplished for us, joining us to the death of Jesus so that we might also share in His resurrection Romans 6:3-4.
That decisive event is Holy Baptism. As Jesus tells Nicodemus, one must be born again—born from above through water and the Spirit. In Baptism, salvation, forgiveness, and the very righteousness of Christ are applied to us. We are buried with Him and raised with Him; we are claimed as God's own children, brought into His family, and joined to Christ in a relationship more intimate than any other we will ever know. Faith and righteousness are not handed out separately; they come together as a single gift, along with the Holy Spirit who empowers the new life. Born by nature as enemies of God, children of wrath, we emerge from the font as new creatures—regenerated, reformulated, made new.
This is why Luther counsels that when we wash our faces in the morning we should remember our Baptism. He is not telling us to renew or recommit ourselves, as though the gift had worn off overnight. He is telling us to remember who we already are: washed in Christ's righteousness, joined to Him once and for all, free today to walk in the newness of life that has been given. There is one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins—one and done.
The new life in Christ does not mean the devil ceases to prowl 1 Peter 5:8 or that temptation disappears. It means that, in Christ, we now have the power to resist sin rather than persist in it. We do not look for ways to give Jesus more occasion to exercise grace; we live freely in the grace and mercy already poured out upon us. Sin does not have dominion over you. The new life you live now is itself a foretaste of the resurrected and glorified life you will live eternally with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So when spring's new life surrounds you, let it lead you back to the font, to the day God created new life in you—a life created in, for, and by Jesus Christ out of His love and mercy New Life (4-11-21).
Video citations
- "New Life" (4-11-21) — If you would please open your Bibles to the Book of Romans, the sixth chapter, the Book of Romans, the sixth chapter. I love springtime. I love it all of the flowers and the trees that are beginning…