Week 2: The Role of Grace in Change

Lesson 2 goes after the sin that hasn't moved. Most of us have one — the private one we carried down into the water and fully expected to leave there — and most of us handle it the same two ways: we tighten the screws, or we shrug and start calling our settling maturity. Titus 2:11–14 answers both doors at once. Grace appeared, with a date and a Person, and the same grace that pardons is the grace that trains; Paul's word for it is the one a first-century household used for raising a child.

Then Romans 6 takes up the man who heard that grace multiplies wherever sin does and drew the obvious wrong conclusion from it. Paul answers him with a burial rather than a rule: we were buried with Christ in baptism, and what came up out of the water was a person with a new life to walk in. That is why sin has lost the throne, even on a morning when nothing about us feels different.