Romans 6:23 (NIV)
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Paul doesn’t waste a lot of words in this passage. He lays out two paths, and leaves you to decide which one describes your life. A life ruled by sin produces shame and ends in death. A life shaped by God’s grace produces holiness and ends in eternal life. That’s it. Simple, clean, and kind of hard to argue with.
It hits harder when you read the the slavery language Paul uses. He’s not talking about people who occasionally make bad choices. He’s talking about people who are owned by sin, who don’t even have the capacity to live differently because they’ve never been freed from it. The gift of God, his grace through Jesus, is what breaks that. It’s not self-improvement. It’s a change of ownership.
For those of us who are already in Christ, the reminder here is that we don’t work for that old boss anymore. Sin doesn’t get to call the shots. That’s easy to forget, especially when life gets hard or when old habits come knocking at the door. It can feel like nothing has changed. But Paul is pretty clear that something fundamental has shifted for the person who belongs to God.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, personally. It’s not about being perfect or having it all together. It’s about remembering whose I am. When circumstances pile up and things feel out of control, it is easy to slip back into old patterns of thinking, like I’m still at the mercy of everything around me. But that’s not the reality for someone who has been given the gift of eternal life. The circumstance doesn’t define the outcome.
So this week the plan is straightforward. I’ll keep reminding myself of that. Not in some dramatic, loud way, but just as a quiet reset when things start to feel heavy.
“I belong to God.”
“I have been given something that no circumstance can take away.”
That changes how I go though the day.