 In this Easter season we celebrate God's raising of Jesus from the dead as we see it explained and expounded in the New Testament Scriptures. What are we to say then? Shall we continue in the state of sin so that grace may increase? Certainly not. We died to sin. How can we still live in it? Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into the Messiah Jesus were baptized into his death? That means that we were buried with him through baptism into death so that just as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the Father's glory we too might behave with a new quality of life. That remarkable passage is where Paul finds himself where we find ourselves at this particular moment in the Church's year buried with the Messiah when Jesus was buried on the evening of Good Friday and then through what we call Holy Saturday. There's a time of waiting. What's going on? And Paul is unpacking that and saying we were buried with him and that means that we have to regard ourselves as having died with him and then being left behind in the tomb so that when he is raised we might be raised as well. Paul isn't just talking about what's going to happen when we are raised in the future when Jesus comes again. There is a new resurrection which happens already when somebody through baptism and faith comes into the family in which suddenly new life makes sense and it means us. We have to be that sort of people. Paul is here warning against a very familiar misinterpretation of the Gospel of Grace that when people really hear that God loves us so much that he came to give his own son to die for us they often think oh well that's amazing so whatever I do now it really doesn't matter because Jesus has died for me so all's going to be well whatever I do. Paul says how can you possibly think like that? The whole point of the Jesus story is that we share if we are in Christ the phrase Paul uses again and again if we are in Christ then what happened to Jesus happened to us and so this whole chapter unfolds as the Easter message saying now start one more time with the story we are with him in the tomb and now we are raised from the dead. That's how we discover what it means to be Easter people that as he was raised from the dead we too should be people who have a new kind of life and this question of status isn't a matter of well I feel like this today or I behaved like this yesterday it's a matter of who we actually are so that when a Christian does sin and Paul knows perfectly well he's a pastor and he's honest about himself too that we do still sin but when that happens it is as it were illogical it's behaving against the grain of who we really are I heard somebody say not long ago in answer to the question how come Christians still sin somebody said well it's like snow at Easter in my country often Easter is the beginning of summer or near the beginning of summer but some years occasionally you do get snow and in the same way for a Christian who has come through baptism and faith the natural state is the beginning of summer the beginning of the new life even though from time to time unexpected things happen that's how we ought to regard our moral behaviour as the outflowing of our new life in the Messiah Jesus having left behind in the tomb everything that belongs to the corrupt decaying world of sin and death