Throughout the pages of Scripture, we often find uncomfortable imagery being used to describe profound spiritual truths.  Whenever we encounter such images, the temptation can be to soft-sell them, to somehow make them more palatable to our vulnerable sensibilities.  We must avoid giving into that temptation in order to receive what God's word has for us.   And so it is that this week, we're going to talk about death.  

The statistics on death are remarkable: 1 out of 1 person dies.  It's ironic that the longer we live, the more death we encounter, until at last we too take our last breath.  Death is the great equalizer, the final ending that we will all face.  Understandably, we don't want to talk about death unless we absolutely have to.  That's why it's so jarring to see how the apostle Paul uses the notion of death to teach us a crucial truth about the meaning of life.

This week we arrive at Romans 6 in our series Live by Faith.  We'll find Paul answering a pressing question about the content of our lives by talking about death.  The question is this: can followers of Jesus continue to live sinful lives? (Spoiler alert: NO!)  Our identification with Jesus causes a type of death in us that needs to be explored and lived out each and every day.  Paul tells us that we must die in order to live.  What does that mean?  I'm looking froward to exploring this challenging passage with you.