Rom 6:6 (NIV) For we know that our old self was crucified with Him SO THAT the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.

It is a wonderful thing that we have had our old self crucified with Jesus by us being united with Him in His death. This set us free from having all our sins, shortcoming, failures, and misdeeds of our body held against us. We were CREDITED with perfection. But now, we want to be set free from our body being controlled by the dictates of sin. Since we have been CREDITED with perfection, this is able to take our mind off of the sin issue. Sin doesn’t need to be something we are always striving to break free from because we have also been credited with sinlessness.

Now that we are safe by Jesus’ death crediting us with perfection and sinlessness, we can concentrate on what it is going to take to start taking advantage of Jesus’ resurrection life.

Jesus’ life is powerful enough to drive out all the sin activities in our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions toward our self, and other people. We might think that Jesus’ life would simply heal and deliver us from all the sinful thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds we are involved in. Then we would be living a sinless life. However, sinlessness isn’t perfection.

We often think that we have arrived at perfection when we finally get all that sinning out of our life. This attitude causes us to concentrate on how many sins we have or haven’t committed in a certain time period. If we cease to be slaves to sin but don’t allow ourselves to become slaves to the things of God, we still aren’t living in the direction of God’s perfection. We become free to do nothing. We are all cleaned out, but empty. That isn’t what God wants. And, that is exactly what we are getting ready to see in Romans 6:18.