For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection….For in that He died, He died unto sin once: but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselved to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
—Romans 6:5, 10-11
In Romans 6, we are taught what it is to be one with Christ in the likeness of His death. Let everyone who truly longs to be like Christ seek to correctly know what the likeness of His death means.
Christ had a double work to accomplish in His death. The one was to work out righteousness for us. The other was to obtain life for us. Dying for sin means that God laid our sin upon Him, and through His death, atonement is made for sin before God. Dying to sin refers to a personal relationship through His death; the connection in which He stood to sin was entirely dissolved. During His life, sin had great power to cause Him conflict and suffering. Death ended all of this. Sin no longer had the power to tempt or to hurt Him. Death had completely separated Him and sin. Christ died to sin.
Like Christ, the believer has also died to sin—he is one with Him in the likeness of His death. The Christian who does not understand this always imagines that sin still has power over him and that he must sometimes obey it. But he thinks this because he does not know that he, like Christ, is dead to sin. If He only believed his language would be, “Christ has died to sin. Sin has nothing more to say to Him. He is freed from its power. The same is true of me as a believer. The new life that is in me is entirely dead to sin. Like Christ, sin has no right or power over me whatever. I am freed from it; therefore, I do not need to sin.”
O Christian, know the exceeding greatness of God’s power that works in you. It was in the power of eternity that Christ, in His death, wrestled with the powers of hell and conquered them. You have part with Christ in His death; you have part in all the powers by which He conquered. Yield yourself joyfully and believingly to be led more deeply into the conformity to Christ’s death. Then you can do nothing other than become like Him.