What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means.

How can we who die to sin still live in it?

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus

were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death.

So that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father we too might walk in newness of life.

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.

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed and we might no longer

be enslaved to sin.

For he who has died is freed from sin.

But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.

For 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.

I want to begin with a confession this morning, a confession that will be meaningless to a lot of you probably

and will sound heretical to others and a kind of ho-hum effect on others, but one that as I was pondering this text,

for some reason just came over me.

And I want to begin by confessing that I have a deep and a

nostalgic attachment to the word existentialism. Now the reason for that nostalgic attachment to the word

existentialism is because I was an adolescent

all through the 60s and the air we breathed was existentialism, along with a lot of other things like the Beatles

and Vietnam and Sonny and Cher and Peter Paul and Mary and the mamas and the papas and

...