Romans 6:3–4

When I started walking with Christ, I thought growth would feel like climbing a mountain. Step by step, up. Mostly it has felt like walking around the same mountain a different way.

If you’ve ever hiked a steep trail, you know how this works. The trail can’t go straight up. Too steep. So it switches back and forth. You walk sideways for ten minutes one direction. You hit a bend and walk sideways the other way. The summit is somewhere up there, but you almost never feel like you’re going toward it. You’re just going sideways. The boot prints in the dirt tell you everyone before you walked it the same way.

Paul wrote his letters from inside that kind of walking.

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

Romans 6:3–4, ESV

Notice the verb. It’s walk. Not arrive. Not sprint. Walk. Step by step, day by day, sometimes forward and sometimes sideways. The “in order that” tells you why you’re walking. The walking itself is what it looks like to be a baptized believer over time.

Solomon had said something similar centuries before Paul ever wrote a letter.

“Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.”

Ecclesiastes 7:13–14, ESV

Some paths are crooked because God put a bend in them. You don’t get to straighten them out. The new life you’re walking in happens on the path that’s actually under your feet. Not on some other path you wish you had.

There’s a loneliness that comes in the middle of all this. The old self has been pulled apart enough that you don’t recognize yourself in the old patterns anymore. The new self hasn’t come together enough that you recognize yourself there either. You’re somewhere in between, what I’d call the comma between buried-with-Christ on one side and walking-in-newness on the other. You know where you’re going. You can quote the verse that says it. But day after day it doesn’t feel like you’re going anywhere. The verses were supposed to make this clearer.

Then you read Paul.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

Romans 7:15–20, ESV

Paul wrote that. The apostle. Inspired by the Spirit. And what he confessed there is what most of us have felt at one time or another. Wanting to do right. Doing the opposite. Not understanding ourselves. The Holy Spirit didn’t edit that out of Paul’s letter to make him look like he had it all together. The Spirit let him say it. That confession is in the Bible because God put it there.

The book we’re trying to walk by was written, in part, by a man who didn’t always know which direction his next step was going.

So here’s the question. When the walking feels like it isn’t going anywhere, what are you actually walking toward?

I can’t always tell, honestly. Some days the slow climb up a switchback feels exactly the same as treading water and calling it walking with God. The next step on the trail feels just like the next step on level ground until you get to a bend and look back and see you’ve actually climbed. The difference isn’t in how the step feels. The difference is whether the path you’re on is going somewhere.

Romans 6:4 says the path does go somewhere. The verb in the verse is walk. Walking just keeps going, even on days when the going feels sideways. And the verse names where the walking ends up. Newness of life.

Paul says something like this again in a different letter, this one to the Christians at Galatia.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

Galatians 5:16–17, ESV

To keep you from doing the things you want to do.

That’s the sideways feeling again, named by the same hand that wrote Romans 7. It’s in the verses themselves. You’re not failing when you feel that way. You’re walking where Paul was walking when he wrote the words.

So keep walking. Take the same step you took yesterday. The summit is up there. The path goes there. The Bible says so.

Walk in newness of life. Just keep walking.

HEB