Romans 6:8-11 – How Do We Live With Christ

Studying Romans brings us to the awareness of another reality that’s vital for us to understand.

Most of our lives are spent around physical stuff.

We shop for and cook our daily food. We buy, launder and wear clothes. We build houses and spend a large chunk of our lives maintaining them. We amass all sorts of toys, furniture, cars and a host of gadgets to provide luxury and entertainment. Shopping is a major part of life.

Then we work making stuff for other people so we can earn money to buy more of our own stuff.

An entire economy exists around physical, material things.

They control our desires and, as a result,  they consume our mind, our thinking and our energy.

Many of those physical things are needed to keep us alive and many are not but they occupy nearly all of the fleeting time we have in this physical world.

Religious people create religions around physical objects, such as crucifix necklaces, paintings, stained glass windows or so called gods made of wood or stone or precious metals.

Most religious people, including most professing Christians, pray for physical blessings, either wealth or wellness.

It’s possible to go through life without ever considering spiritual things and that’s most people.

So when God explains, through His word, that a signature, the main characteristic, of this dispensation of grace we live in today is not physical blessings but spiritual blessings many think that means God’s not involved in their everyday life.

1 Corinthians 2:14 says

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

 

However what’s most needful for us today is not physical but spiritual.

The present dispensation from God is not physical blessings in the form of a kingdom, hundredfold riches, more land, perfect health or daily bread. The trademarks of our present dispensation are spiritual things: grace and faith.

These can be far more profitable to us for eternity than our temporary physical necessities as 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 tell us. Paul’s epistles to the church force us to look beyond the physical and the material while making it clear that we still need to provide for ourselves and our families.

1 Timothy 6:7 reminds us that we brought nothing, nothing physical, into this world, and it’s certain we can carry nothing out.

The blessings we receive of God today are spiritual in nature.

Ephesians 1:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:

 

It’s only when our eyes are opened to the reality of spiritual things that we can see God’s abundant spiritual blessings freely given to us today.

The world, and large parts of professing Christianity, are blind to how God intervenes in our lives, hoping that He’ll pour physical blessings down from heaven.

When that doesn’t happen they think that God’s absent from their life or they try to induce those physical blessings through some sort of human act.

This results in the most absurd, teaching, and preaching that in turn often causes the craziness that we see all over social media today with people throwing themselves around and acting like they’ve lost all ability to reason and question and to learn sound doctrine.

It’s like trying to bribe the sun with a dance to make it rise. People sometimes act out strange or exaggerated behaviours—thinking if they jump through enough hoops, God’ll be impressed and send blessings.

But God isn’t manipulated by theatrics. He responds to faith, not performance. Only what He’s spoken in His written word can be relied on.

After years or even a lifetime of failing to receive God’s blessings through human acts or human reasoning, they often end up rejecting God altogether or seeing spiritual blessings as being useless in their materially driven life.

The idea is that Jesus healed and fed people when He was on earth and so did the disciples and so that must be the program for us today because, after all, Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever, right?

But there’s a huge question to be answered here.

Why did Jesus and the apostles perform miracles back then?

Picture the time in history.

Jesus is on earth claiming to be the long prophesied Messiah, sent from God, God in the flesh.

There’s no books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There’s no Acts of the apostles, only a man claiming to be God.

What’s the only way that the claim can be proven?

There must be evidence of the claim.

What’s the evidence?

Signs and wonders that so plainly, so obviously cannot be performed by anyone except God Himself.

The four Gospels record that Jesus consistently used signs and wonders to reveal His divine identity—not to impress.

These weren’t random acts—they were intentional proofs of His divine nature and mission, to prove He was the Son of God and the promised Messiah.

Likewise the signs and wonders that were performed by the disciples to confirm that the Word that they spoke wasn’t just tradition or some sort of new philosophy, but the very Word of God. No written gospels, or epistles were available, just the word of those that had a firsthand encounter with God Himself.

Through those signs and wonders Acts 5:14 records,

And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women.

 

Today the faith that we cannot please God without comes only the way Romans 10:17 says it comes,

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

 

We have something today they never did back in those past times, the complete Word of God, the Bible.

Faith doesn’t come from supposed signs and wonders or from the doubtful testimonies of people, or from weird circus type acts, or emotionally charged preachers or concert grade music, it comes from an understanding of the Word of God. Only the Word of God can be completely relied on to give us unadulterated truth!

2 Timothy 4:3 explains it this way,

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;

 

As we read through Romans we can’t help but see how the depth of wisdom that opens up Who God really is and His will for us today contrasts and makes foolishness out of many modern day church practices and teachings.

Through our study of Romans and all Paul’s epistles, we know better.

Last episode we ended with Romans 6:7 which told us, “he that is dead is freed from sin.”

That word freed matters. It doesn’t say “free from sin,” like we have no sin.

It means we’ve been set free from sin’s power. Sin can’t condemn us anymore. It can’t change who we are in Christ and it can’t bring God’s punishment on us. Why? Because we’re dead with Christ and in Christ’s death our punishment, the price, the wages of sin that we’re due, is fully paid for.

How are we dead with Christ?

We’re still walking around and breathing aren’t we?

Christ died on the cross and offers His death as our death when we trust in His death, burial and resurrection. That’s known as His substitutionary death, Him dying, taking the punishment for sin, which is death, in substitution for us.

The word of God which tells us about that act is called the gospel which we can see in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, and when we believe the gospel, His death counts for us, and that’s how we’re freed from sin.

But, it’s not physical! Something deeply mysterious and miraculous happens in our spirit and in the realm of the spiritual, that’s far more important to God than our daily physical lives.

When that happens the real life we live, the spiritual life, who we really are, is changed and we no longer have spiritual, eternal death as our destiny.

Eternal life, with Christ becomes our destiny, even though our physical, material world is unchanged.

Now, that spiritual change can very much affect our physical, natural life also but that comes as we study and learn and grow in knowledge, and prove what’s happened to us spiritually, that part of our existence that drives all the other parts of our being.

Romans 6:8 says,

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:

 

Everything Paul teaches here depends on being in Christ. Being “In Christ” is spiritual. It doesn’t change a thing about our physical body.

We can’t claim any of what Paul teaches is freely available to us unless we’re identified with Him.

Romans 6:3–5 already said we were baptised into Christ’s death, not by water but by identification, being placed into Christ. Communion also means our common union with Him.

It’s sad that church history turned baptism into water rituals and communion into arguments about wafers and cups, when Paul’s talking about our oneness with Christ, being planted together in His death and resurrection.

So Romans 6:8 is a kind of summary. The first part “dead with Christ” is what he taught in verses 5–7. That’s the crucified life. Our old man is dead. We’re freed from sin’s power. The second part, “we shall also live with him”, is the resurrected life, which is explained in the next verses. Christians live both: crucified with Christ and raised with Christ.

Being dead with Christ is not enough to answer the question, “How do I live now?” We live by the resurrected life.

Many Christians talk about Christ dying for them, but forget that He also lives for them. We can’t live the Christian life by only knowing the crucifixion. We must know the resurrection as well.

Romans 6:9, carrying on from what we just read in verse 8, says,

Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.

 

Here’s where we notice that Paul keeps using the word “know“.

Under the law it was “do this and don’t do that,” but living under grace starts with what we know.

In verse 3 we see, “Know ye not…?” In verse 6 it’s “Knowing this…” In verse 9 it’s “Knowing that Christ…”

See, we can’t live for God until our mind is changed and we know something we didn’t know before.

That can only be changed by doctrine, God’s Word, God’s truth. God gave us His word so we can know first, then walk.

We wouldn’t know how to live for God unless we first know the things Paul teaches in Romans 6. Knowing comes before doing.

Later, in Romans 12:1–2, after Paul explains salvation, our identity, who we are in Christ, and God’s work with Israel, he finally talks about the practical side of how to live.

He says to present our body a living sacrifice and to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

By Romans 12, that renewed mind has already been explained in chapters 5–8.

If we skip those chapters, we’ll think Paul’s teaching legalism, but he’s not. He’s teaching how to live by grace through the right understanding.

So Romans 6:9 says,

Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead…

 

We know, we’re fully persuaded in our mind that Christ rose from the dead. Paul talks about being fully persuaded in Acts, Romans and Timothy as do Matthew, Luke and Hebrews.

Without Christ rising from the dead there’d be no books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John or Acts and there’d be no Paul. Paul met Christ only as the risen Lord, not in His earthly ministry.

In fact, if Christ never rose from the dead the entire Bible would be what many sceptics believe it to be, a worthless collection of fairy tales.

That’s why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:16 that we no longer know Christ “after the flesh.”

His whole ministry, every word in every epistle, comes from meeting Christ raised and glorified, not Christ walking on earth. That truth shapes everything Paul teaches.

When we say “Christ is risen,” we don’t just mean it was a past event. We mean He’s alive right now.

He rose bodily, ascended to heaven, and sits at God’s right hand. Romans 8:34 says He makes intercession for us.

Ephesians 1:18–23 says the same power that raised Christ is working in us, and that Christ is seated far above all powers, with all things under His feet.

Because we’re in Christ, our hope and our position are tied to His resurrection.

The nation of Israel had an earthly hope. We have a heavenly one, because Christ is in heaven now.

So when Romans 6:9 says Christ dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him… that means eternal life. If He’ll never die again, He lives forever. And if we’re in Him, that’s our life as well. How do we live? We live with eternal life, the life Christ now has. If Christ were not risen, we’d have no hope at all — no salvation, no future, no hope, nothing to look forward to.

Colossians 3:1–3 says,

IF ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.

Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

 

That’s Romans 6 in a nutshell. Dead with Him. Alive with Him. Living the resurrected life.

That truth is the foundation of how we live. Christ is risen, alive forever, and because we’re in Him, we share that life. Death has no more dominion over Him — and in Him, it has no dominion over us either.

We’re dead with Christ, freed from sin’s power. But now he talks about death, which is different from sin. Sin brings death it’s what condemns us to death. Sin has no power over us anymore, but death still exists in this world. We still walk around in bodies that will die physically.

Many Christians think eternal life starts after they die, so they just wait for death. But Paul’s saying the opposite. If Christ is raised and we’re in Him, then our life right now is eternal life in Christ. We’re not living for death.

As God, Jesus Christ was never under death. But when God took on flesh in Christ, He stepped into a world full of sin and death but He wasn’t a sinner. He lived in a world cursed by sin, and He could die — and He did, for a glorious purpose, but now that He’s risen, death has no claim on Him.

Christ didn’t stop being a man after He rose.

He didn’t “put His deity back on” and drop His humanity. He’s still God and still Man right now in heaven.

That’s why we can be joined to Him. What He is as our Head is the pattern of what we shall be. And what He is right now is a Man who will never die again.

Hebrews 2:14–15 says Christ destroyed the one who had the power of death — the devil — and delivered those who lived in fear of death. Revelation says Christ holds the keys of death and hell.

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself.

Christ will throw death into the lake of fire. So Christ not only defeated the devil, He defeated death. And since we’re in Him, death has no dominion over us either.

Romans 6:10 says,

For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.

 

Christ died to sin once — not because He sinned, but because He lived in a world of sin and died under its curse.

Romans 8 says He came in the likeness of sinful flesh and condemned sin in the flesh. But now that He lives, He lives unto God, in the power of eternal life.

This is basic Christian living. His resurrected life, not His earthly life before the cross, is the life we now live.

People often preach that we should follow the life Jesus lived in the flesh. But Paul teaches that our life is patterned after His resurrected life, the life He lives now in heaven, free from sin and death. That’s the life we share.

No one before Paul ever taught that sin and death has no dominion over us, but now, because we’re in Christ, we have no reason to fear death. We live with the same eternal life Christ has.

Paul’s not talking here about the life He lived in the manger, or walking on water, or feeding the five thousand, or healing the multitudes and getting tired and hungry. Paul’s talking about Christ’s life in heaven, His glorified life. That’s Christ according to the revelation of the mystery, not Christ in His earthly ministry to Israel.

Christ lives right now, and the life He lives now is not the life He lived 2000 years ago and the life He wants us to live is not the earthly one He lived before the cross, but the resurrected life He lives now in glory. That’s Paul’s point.

Ephesians 4:24 says to “put on the new man,” created after God in righteousness and true holiness. That new man is Christ resurrected — not subject to sin, not subject to death, glorified with the Father. That’s the life we put on.

 

Romans 6:11 says,

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

We “reckon ourselves” because everything true of Christ in resurrection is now true of us in Him.

To reckon means to take an inventory, to estimate, to conclude, to count as, to impute, to suppose or think.

That’s an amazing truth. Christ is in heaven and we’re on earth, yes, but spiritually we’re in Him, and what He has, we have. His liberty from sin and death is now yours. His glorified life is the life we share and that’s the way we’re told to reckon or count ourselves as.

So, if we “likewise reckon ourselves” the question of Romans 6:1 — “shall we continue in sin?” — starts to fade.

If we’re dead to sin, why would we live in it? If we’re alive with Christ, why would we live like the old man?

Romans 6:11’s not telling us to stop sinning by willpower. It’s telling us to change our mind, to rethink, about who we are. Christian living starts in the inner man, not the outer actions. We renew our mind first as Ephesians 4:23 says,

And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;

 

Then we put on the new man as Ephesians 4:24 says.

Reckoning ourselves dead indeed unto sin means sin’s not our life anymore.

Christ died unto sin once — in the flesh — and He’s done with that life. He said on the cross, “It is finished.”

Now He lives unto God in glory. And Paul says: that’s us now as well. We’re done with the old life in the flesh.

We’re alive with Christ in His resurrected life. That’s our identity. That’s who we are, and once we know who we are, we can learn how to live.

Sin’s not the life we live anymore. We’re not called a “sinner” now.

Yes, we still sin, but that’s not our identity.

The Bible calls us a saint.

There’s a difference between a sinner who sins and a saint who sins.

The flesh hates that word, “saint” and the world hates it too. They think “saint” means someone super holy in their deeds and actions. And they’re right when they believe no one could ever earn that title. But Christ could. And we’re in Him.

We’re only a saint because of His righteousness, His holiness and His glorified life.

So when someone questions our sainthood, we don’t defend ourselves — we point to Christ. He died, He rose, He lives in glory, and we’re in Him.

So what does it mean to be dead to sin?

People often run back to the law here because they think Paul’s saying, “Live right, behave better.” But Paul’s talking about our identity, not our behaviour.

“Dead” means lifeless, powerless, useless, detached. A dead person can’t move, can’t be motivated, can’t claim rights or hold a position. Death separates. That’s the picture.

So when Paul says, “reckon yourselves dead indeed unto sin,” he means: sin has no claim on us. We’re detached from it. It can’t move us. It has no rights over us. We’re dead to it.

Galatians 6:14 says the same thing, the world is crucified to us, and us to the world.

The world’s dead to us, and we’re dead to the world. That means the world has no claim on us, and we’ve got no place in it. It’s not because we try hard to act holy, but because of our position in Christ.

We’ve been translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son as Colossians 1:13 tells us.

This is positional truth. It’s about who we are.

Are we still thinking of ourself as the same old person, struggling along until heaven? Or do we reckon ourself as someone who is already freed from sin’s power, already living a new life in Christ?

The most important part is what comes next, which Paul is about to explain. But before that, he warns: this does not mean sin’s removed from our flesh. It means sin’s control is broken.

We simply must know that before we can do anything about walking differently.

If we think sin is no longer present, we’re not dealing with reality. and Romans 7’s going to deal with that. Even saved people still commit sins.

Romans 6 is not teaching that sin’s gone from our flesh. Some holiness groups teach that once you’re saved and walking in the Spirit, you can go long stretches without sinning and that’s just blindness and fantasy. There’re many sins we commit every day that we don’t even know we commit. Pretending sin’s gone doesn’t remove it. It only hides it.

This is why verses like 1 John 3:9 confuse people. It says, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin… and he cannot sin.”

That verse is talking about Israel’s future under the New Covenant, as prophesied in Ezekiel 36, when God will cause Israel them to keep His statutes and remove sin from them.

That’s not what God is doing today in the dispensation of grace. Today, sin’s still present, but its power, its ability to condemn is broken.

This brings us back to Romans 6:11. where the most important part of the verse is not “dead to sin,” even though that’s true. The key is: “but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” If Paul only said “dead to sin,” we’d still be asking, “How do we live?” But he answers it saying we live unto God the same way Christ lives unto God.

Christ died once. We died once in Him when we believed the gospel. We’re not being crucified again and again. That old life’s over. Christ lives eternal life now, and that’s the life we have. Christ lives in the present — not waiting for glory — and so do we. Yes, our body will die, but that death’s just a change of location.

So we should live now with the same mindset we’ll have in glory. Christ lives unto God in holiness and righteousness — that’s the new man, and when we identify ourself that way, sin loses its grip.

It won’t disappear, but it loses its strength. Even when our flesh feels weak, our strength is in Christ because we’re living in Him.

Believers have two natures in the inner man: the old man from Adam and the new man from Christ. Only one of them has any rights over us and it’s not the old one. So Romans 6:11 tells me to change my mind about who I think I am. Christ has made me someone new.

When we come to Romans 6:12–14, in the next episode, we’re finally reaching Paul’s full answer to the big question he asked back in verse 1:

“Shall we continue in sin?”

Everything Paul says from verses 3 to 11’s been building up to that.

He’s already told us we’re identified with Christ in His death and resurrection and we’re freed from sin, not free of sin’s presence, but freed from its power. And he told us we have eternal life right now, not just after we die.

One other thing we should know is that our body is not the old man. The old man is crucified, dead in Christ even though our body’s still wandering around here on earth. Our body is not sin.

What does it mean to be dead to sin? The word dead is often used, but not often defined and hearing a definition might seem strange to us.

To be dead means to be without life, without a life force.

It means to have no power to function. To be dead is to be lifeless. All usefulness is gone.

When someone dies, their body and soul are separated. It’s not a cessation of existence. It’s a detachment of the soul, the spirit, from the body. The dead can’t move, can’t be motivated or motivate other people. They can’t inspire.

The spirit has left the dead. There’s no more relationship. We may have had a relationship with that dead person but that person’s not there now. The body lies lifeless.

There’s no possibility of a relationship to the dead. We can only relate to others with life and in life the dead can’t claim rights. The dead have no rights. They’re dead.

The dead has no privilege, has no power, has no control, has no position. You lose all position when you’re dead. In marriage, it’s till death do you part.

The dead can’t even speak. A corpse defines the dead. It’s a dead body. So when Paul says, reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin. he means lifeless, useless, detached from and having no movement or motivation to do anything regarding sin.

Our body is a tool, an instrument, a vessel, and Paul says don’t hand our body over to sin. Don’t let sin use our hands, our eyes, our mouth, our mind, our time or our energy.

We used to yield to sin because we didn’t know any other way when we were in Adam. We were dead in sins.

If we say that person is dead to me what are we saying?

We’re separated, detached from them. They can’t move us or affect us. They’ve got nothing to do with our life. They may have once but not anymore. They’re dead to me.

When Galatians 3:14 says,

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

 

It means the world’s dead to me, detached from me. It has no rights, no claim to me. It cannot move me or motivate me.

It doesn’t matter what the world says about me its dead to me. Then Paul flips it and says, and also I’m dead to the world, which is as if the world stands up and says, Paul’s dead to us. Why would the world say that? Because apparently the way that Paul’s living or thinking about who he is in Christ is useless to the course of this world, and so he’s detached from the world, living and thinking and regarding himself different to the world, just by virtue of his position in Christ.

We once walked according to the flesh. But now we know better. Now we have a new identity. Now we have a new life and now we have a new master.