Romans 6:6, before you consider what Romans 6:6 means, you have to clear away what it does not mean, because two wrong answers have been stuck to this verse for a long time and they have crushed a lot of people. The first wrong answer is that the old self is your body, that your physical body is the problem, the enemy, the thing that keeps dragging you down. If that is what Romans 6:6 means, then the Christian life becomes a war against your own skin, you start to hate the body God gave you, you start to think the way out is to punish it, starve it, silence it. You start to believe that the flesh you live in is a trap you have to escape, that God is embarrassed by the body he made. But the Greek does not say that, Paul uses a different word for body, the body of sin, he calls it, but the old self is a different word entirely, the old self is not your body.
The second wrong answer is that Romans 6:6 is a command to crucify yourself morally, kill your sinful nature by sheer effort, white knuckles, gritted teeth and if that is what the verse means, then the Christian life is a self-improvement project you are failing at. You wake up every morning with the same list of things to kill and you go to bed every night with the same list still there. You measure your week by how many temptations you survived and you fall asleep ashamed of the ones you did not. You wonder why everyone else seems to have it together and you do not. That is not the gospel, that is exhaustion with a Bible verse attached.
Consider the actual word, the old self, in Greek it is palaios anthropos, the old man, the old person and here is what that means, it is not your body, it is not your personality, it is not your memories, it is who you were before Christ. The whole person, the way you were wired, the way you thought, the way you wanted, the way you lived, defined by sin. Paul uses the same contrast in his other letters, in Ephesians 4:22-24, he writes about putting off the old man and putting on the new man, in Colossians 3:9-10 the same language and in 2 Corinthians 5:1-17, so the old self is not a part of you that needs surgery, it is the whole person you were before you were united to Christ. The person who was in Adam, the person who was under sin’s dominion and here is the news that changes everything, that person is dead, not dying, not on the way out, dead, because of what happened on a hill outside Jerusalem.
The second wrong answer is that Romans 6:6 is a command to crucify yourself morally, kill your sinful nature by sheer effort, white knuckles, gritted teeth and if that is what the verse means, then the Christian life is a self-improvement project you are failing at. You wake up every morning with the same list of things to kill and you go to bed every night with the same list still there. You measure your week by how many temptations you survived and you fall asleep ashamed of the ones you did not. You wonder why everyone else seems to have it together and you do not. That is not the gospel, that is exhaustion with a Bible verse attached.
Consider the actual word, the old self, in Greek it is palaios anthropos, the old man, the old person and here is what that means, it is not your body, it is not your personality, it is not your memories, it is who you were before Christ. The whole person, the way you were wired, the way you thought, the way you wanted, the way you lived, defined by sin. Paul uses the same contrast in his other letters, in Ephesians 4:22-24, he writes about putting off the old man and putting on the new man, in Colossians 3:9-10 the same language and in 2 Corinthians 5:1-17, so the old self is not a part of you that needs surgery, it is the whole person you were before you were united to Christ. The person who was in Adam, the person who was under sin’s dominion and here is the news that changes everything, that person is dead, not dying, not on the way out, dead, because of what happened on a hill outside Jerusalem.
