Book of Common Prayer

³ Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into the Messiah, Jesus, were baptized into his death? ⁴ 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. ⁵ For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

Dead to sin, alive to God

⁶ This is what we know: our old humanity was crucified with the Messiah, so that the bodily solidarity of sin might be abolished, and that we should no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷ A person who has died, you see, has been declared free from all charges of sin.

⁸ But if we died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall live with him. ⁹ We know that the Messiah, having been raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has any authority over him. ¹⁰ The death he died, you see, he died to sin, once and only once. But the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹ In the same way you, too, must calculate yourselves as being dead to sin, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus.

The call to holy living

¹² So don’t allow sin to rule in your mortal body, to make you obey its desires. ¹³ Nor should you present your limbs and organs to sin to be used for its wicked purposes. Rather, present yourselves to God, as people alive from the dead, and your limbs and organs to God, to be used for the righteous purposes of his covenant. ¹⁴ Sin won’t actually rule over you, you see, since you are not under law but under grace.

The coming judgment

¹⁹ So Jesus made this response to them.

“I’m telling you the solemn truth,” he said. “The son can do nothing by himself. He can only do what he sees the father doing. Whatever the father does, the son does too, and in the same way. ²⁰ The father loves the son, you see, and shows him all the things that he’s doing. Yes: he will show him even greater things than these, and that’ll amaze you! ²¹ For, just as the father raises the dead and gives them life, in the same way the son gives life to anyone he chooses.

²² “The father doesn’t judge anyone, you see; he has handed over all judgment to the son, ²³ so that everyone should honor the son just as they honor the father. Anyone who doesn’t honor the son doesn’t honor the father who sent him.

²⁴ “I’m telling you the solemn truth: anyone who hears my word, and believes in the one who sent me, has the life of God’s coming age. Such a person won’t come into judgment; they will have passed out of death into life.