First Sunday Of the Year

It is the very first sunday of 2011.
I woke up to go to church rather reluctantly...
and i'm really glad that I went.

The message was very timely for what i'm going through in my life now.
I love how God works in ways that you feel like you are connected to him and he's speaking to you directly.
Its when the pastor says something and you're like Woah! That is exactly what i'm going through and feeling now.

The verses in the bible that the message was about is from Romans.

Romans 12:1-2
(the message version)
So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.


I have memorised these verses ever since primary school, but its all the much clearer with this interpretation. 


And 
Romans 6:1-14 


Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ

¹ What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ² By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³ Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

 ⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶ For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with,^[a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— ⁷ because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.
 ⁸ Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹ For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. ¹⁰ The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
 ¹¹ In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. ¹²Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. ¹³ Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. ¹⁴ For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

The pastor began by saying that sin has no control over us and that it is by grace that we have been saved. As we are under grace we have been saved.

What does this mean?

When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, it was by his grace that he decided to sacrifice his life. He died for our sins. Thus it is also through his death that sin died along with him. Sin cannot control us and does not have a hold on us. 

We are forgiven from our sin as we are under his grace. But then we can't take grace lightly and abuse it. 

A child that does not love his father is one that continually sins against him.

In 2 Cor 5:17 it says that we are new creations in Christ and that the old is gone and the new has come. 

If you are in your old nature you are slaves to sin, we are made as new creations when we believe in Jesus Christ 

We can choose not to sin by rejecting it.

We all have the ability to chose what is righteous not evil.

However, we will be faced with the same temptation, a little voice in us saying that we might as well give up and sin since we are bound to mess up eventually. But that is a lie. 

We can chose to exercise self control and Christ provides us with the strength to resist the temptation to say a bad word or to act out on out anger. 

Instead we should surrender out rights and offer out bodies to Christ as a spiritual act of worship.

We can offer our mouth, eyes, ears, heart, mind, hands and feet.

I shall save it for another post. 

A part two to the message.