Romans chapter 7 is a cold, wet rag of reality for anyone who thinks that being a Christian means you are free from sin. Those who speak of being a Christian in terms of the “victorious life” and living a sin-free existence while following “biblical principles” need to sit down and read Romans chapter 7.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6)

Another Sunday, another great text from Romans, today chapter 6, of which I just read the last verse. To fully appreciate this last verse of Romans 6, you need to grasp the entire chapter sixth chapter of Romans from the beginning. It really forms one complete thought. And that thought is this: You are dead to sin, dead to your self, dead to the Law. And at the same time, you are alive to God, alive in Christ, and free.

There are texts that grab you and won’t let you go until you say something about them. Romans chapter 5 is one of them. It more or less preaches itself, which saves the preacher a bit of trouble. But that’s not why I selected it. I want to preach this text because it goes to the heart of what we believe - that God justifies the ungodly in His Son, that God reconciles His enemies to Himself in the death of Jesus, that you and I as children of Adam are rescued from sin and death as a free gift of grace, God’s undeserved kindness, through faith.

No one likes to be an outsider. To be excluded. To be told “you don’t belong.” To have the door shut in your face or simply to be shunned, left alone, isolated. Have you ever been on the outside? Perhaps wanting to enter but being afraid you wouldn’t be accepted so you didn’t even try. Do you realize that there are people who are honestly afraid to walk into a church on a Sunday morning? They are afraid of being recognized as “outsiders,” as people who don’t belong in a place like this. “Unreligious people.”

I’m told that the way you learn to recognize counterfeit currency is by handling the a lot of the real deal. Genuine money. You learn to identify the fake by handling the real thing. Now that may seem a bit counter-intuitive. We tend to think that the way to get good at spotting counterfeits is to study lots and lots of counterfeits so you get to the point where you can recognize a counterfeit when you see it. But in reality that’s not how it works. There are so many varieties of counterfeits one can’t learn every one of them, and if you rely simply on your knowledge of counterfeits, you will miss one. But if you know what real money looks like, you can spot a fake. And so handling the genuine article is the best way to train someone to spot the counterfeit.