• Romans 6:13
  Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
• Romans 6:16
  Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
• Romans 6:23
  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
• Romans 7:5
  For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is littered with sin and death. Those who he is writing this message to came from a society filled with hedonistic pleasures. His comment about those passions being aroused by the law meant something different to them at that time because they were not Jews.

I would venture that the majority of my readers do not come from a Jewish background and what we know about the law has been taught to us on two levels, moral and spiritual. If we consider those are influences that help us define sin then we might see it leads to varied and confusing practices in identifying what is right and just.

Moral laws are societal, and are regulated by governing bodies. That varies from state to state and country to country. Spiritual laws are defined by God and are absolute. How we control sin in living in Christ affects our behavior and our relationship with God and each other.

Proverbs 22:6

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

That same principle is applied across all levels of worship, none more closely than those who do not know or love Jesus Christ. Religious laws are not spiritual, they are moral laws controlled by society.

Jesus died to set us free from the law of sin. That means it is important to know what sin is according to God’s righteous standard and not what mankind calls it.

1 John 2:12

I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake.

Glory is defined as the essence of who God is in personality and reputation. It is God’s reputation that is at stake here and it is for the sake of His glory that He forgives our sins.

That is a very personal matter for each of us because we have failed to protect His good name each and every time we sin. Mankind is a failed experiment if we think that His glory is dependent on our ability to be faithful to refrain from sinning.

• 1 John 1:8
  If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
  1 John 1:10
  If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

His reputation is too important to leave its care up to mankind when it is a fact that we are not faithful to refrain from sin no matter how hard we try.

Some have seen the futility in trying and have given up. They have lost sight of the greater issue which is God’s intent. The Hebrew word of sake means to bring about the desired end result.

In order to maintain His glory, His reputation, He forgives all sin for us that have become sons and daughters. This forgiveness of sins in the here and now by repentance and confession is to maintain this relationship in order to keep walking with God.

• Genesis 5:22
  Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters.
• Genesis 5:24
  Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

Others have done the math and it appears that Enoch was taken up to be with God rather than dying in the flood. That indicates to me that walking with God is extremely important, so repentance and confession is extremely important to bring about God’s intentions.

That means we have to stop making this all about ourselves.