United With Christ: Your Death in Christ — Romans 6:5–7

A life no longer defined by striving, because the old life has already ended in Christ.

Introduction: Revelation, Not Motivation

In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul is doing something that is often missed by well-meaning readers. He is not urging believers to greater effort. He is not motivating obedience through pressure. He is not outlining a strategy for moral improvement.

He is revealing something that has already taken place.

This matters because many believers spend years trying to live the Christian life without ever understanding what God has already done to make that life possible. The result is often sincere striving paired with quiet exhaustion. Growth feels slow. Victory feels fragile. Assurance feels conditional.

Romans 6 interrupts that entire framework.

Paul is not describing what Christians should become if they try hard enough. He is describing what became true the moment they believed. The Christian life, as Paul presents it, does not begin with striving toward death to self. It begins with a death that has already occurred.

Romans 6:5–7 takes us deeper into that reality, not as theory, but as identity.

Union Before Imitation

Paul begins with one of the most decisive statements in the entire letter.

“For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.”

Christianity does not begin with imitation. It begins with union.

Paul is not calling believers to die like Christ. He is declaring that they were joined to Him in His death. The verb he uses carries the idea of being grown together, fused, made one. This is not symbolic language. It is not poetic exaggeration. It is covenantal reality.

This union is not emotional. It is not progressive. It is not something believers slowly grow into through discipleship. It is something God Himself accomplished at conversion.

When you believed, God did not simply forgive you and then send you back into life to figure things out. He placed you into His Son. Your story became bound up with Christ’s story. What happened to Him counts as having happened to you, because you were joined to Him.

This is the ground on which everything else in Romans 6–8 stands.

Baptized Into Christ’s Death: Identity, Not Ritual

Paul has already introduced this idea in Romans 6:3–4, using the language of baptism.

“Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?”

Here again, Paul is not primarily speaking about water. Water baptism is a meaningful sign, but Paul is pointing to something deeper. He is describing identity.

To be baptized into Christ means to be placed into Christ. It means God identified you with His Son so completely that Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection are now counted as yours.

This is why the Christian life cannot be lived by effort. It does not begin with what you do. It begins with what God has done.

Effort always assumes distance. Union eliminates distance.

The Old Man Was Crucified

Paul then brings the argument into sharper focus.

“Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him…”

The phrase “old man” has often been misunderstood. Paul is not referring to the body. He is not referring to personality traits. He is not referring to humanity itself.

The old man is who we were in Adam. It is the self that lived independently from God. The self that functioned as its own source of life, wisdom, and direction. The self that was under sin’s authority.

That person was not rehabilitated.
That person was not educated.
That person was not improved.

That person was crucified.

This is where Paul’s argument decisively departs from self-improvement Christianity. God did not try to make the old self better. He brought it to an end.

This does not mean old patterns never tug at us. They often do. Paul will address that struggle clearly in Romans 7. But struggle does not equal authority.

The power behind the old patterns has been removed because the person those patterns once ruled no longer exists.

Freedom From Sin’s Dominion

Paul continues.

“…that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.”

Notice Paul’s precision. He does not say sin disappears. He does not say temptation vanishes. He does not say believers are incapable of struggle.

He says slavery ends.

Sin’s dominion is broken, not because the believer resists better, but because the believer died. Authority is lost when its subject no longer exists.

Paul then summarizes the entire argument with a statement that sounds almost legal in its clarity.

“For he who has died has been freed from sin.”

Freedom is not something you achieve.
It flows from death.

This is why so many sincere attempts at holiness feel exhausting. Trying harder assumes the old self is still alive. It assumes the problem is weakness rather than death. It assumes God is waiting for improvement.

Paul tells us something far more radical. God ended the old life. And because that life is gone, striving to manage the Christian life through self-effort no longer fits who you are in Christ.

Why Trying Harder Never Works

Trying harder belongs to a life that ended.

This is not because effort is evil. It is because effort is misplaced when it comes from the wrong source. Effort that flows from union looks very different from effort that flows from self-reliance.

When believers attempt to live the Christian life from the old operating system, even with good intentions, the result is frustration. The life God has given is designed to be lived from Christ as the source, not from the self.

The Christian life is not hard because you are failing. It feels hard when you are trying to live from a source God has already replaced.

Exchange Foundation #1: You Died With Him

This is the first foundation of the exchanged life.

You died with Christ.

Not as an experience you must recreate.
Not as a discipline you must maintain.
But as a fact you now live from.

The gospel does not call you to die. It announces that you already did. And the life you now live flows from Christ Himself.

This is not passivity. It is alignment with reality.

Closing Reflection: Relief, Not Pressure

Romans 6 is not meant to pressure believers. It is meant to relieve them.

God did not ask you to become someone new by effort. He made you someone new by union. As we continue through Romans, we will see not only what ended, but what began.

Not a better version of you.
But Christ living His life in you and expressing His life through you.

This is the abiding life.
And it begins where striving ends.