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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

March 17, 2023

Invitatory

To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, because we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by following his laws which he set before us.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading - Romans 6:1-11

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Meditation - Winnie Smith

This Romans passage follows one of my favorites in Scripture. In chapter 5, Paul writes about the nature of sin and the nature of people. We so often want to focus on our own sinfulness (I know I do!), but when we do that we often lose sight of the force in our lives far more powerful than sin: grace. Yes, our sinfulness can grab ahold of us and we can become obsessed with our own behavior, “but the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many” (5:15). God’s grace - promised through the sacrifice of God’s only Son - is given freely and abundantly. Our sinfulness will never be more powerful than that grace. This is totally freeing.

Then we come to today’s text, which Paul begins with comically rhetorical questions: “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” Of course not! God’s free gift of grace is not an invitation to freely sin. Rather it is the promise God made to us that through Jesus’ suffering and death, we would be freed from the power of sin and be reconciled to God. When we were baptized, we were baptized into Jesus’ death and given new life as Jesus was given new life after being raised from the dead. We use almost these exact words in our baptism service: “Grant, O Lord, that all who are baptized into the death of Jesus Christ your Son may live in the power of his resurrection and look for him to come again in glory.”

So what does this practically mean for us? Paul writes about sin as an active agent, as something that people are unable to resist without God’s help. But the power of our faith, of baptism and of a life with Christ, is that it empowers us to better resist the temptation of sin. We acknowledge that Jesus Christ defeated death with his resurrection and through that, defeated the power of sin. Not only for himself, but for us all. The challenge we now have is to remember that and because of it, to walk in “newness of life.”

As we draw nearer to Holy Week and Easter, consider the feast of the Resurrection as a resurrection for you, too. While we so often focus on Lenten disciplines as the way to prepare for Easter, I wonder if Easter might also be the starting point for another set of disciplines. Or rather, the starting point for a renewed sense of the freedom offered to us by Jesus in his death and resurrection. It is not the time to sin, knowing that God’s grace will find us regardless, but it is a time to resist sinful temptations all the more as a mark of our gratitude for a God whose generosity is boundless.

Prayer

O God of love, you are the true sun of the world, evermore risen and never going down: We pray you to shine in our hearts and drive away the darkness of sin and the mist of error. We pray that we may, this day and all our lives long, walk without stumbling in the way you have prepared for us, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God in glory everlasting. Amen.

From Daily Prayer for All Seasons, published by Church Publishing