Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. (Romans 7:4 ESV) I remember an analogy my father used to tell my brother and I but never ever explained. He used to say, “boys, you can only get fruit once you bury the dead seed.” And naturally my brother and I would take the seeds from watermelons that we would spit at each other and bury it next to the trees lining our sidewalk and watch nothing happen. But that’s probably because the dead watermelon seeds we buried underneath the shards of glass and garbage along the sidewalk were never agriculturally “raised from the dead.” When we look at our passage here in the Romans, the Apostle Paul makes a similarly interesting analogy about how we live in a way that is holy and acceptable to God– we have to first die. Then, and only then, can we be raised from the death we just died to bear any type of fruit for God. Let me explain this. Humans institute a thing called religion. In religion, there are things you can and cannot do. For example, you can turn the other cheek; or you can honor your father and mother. Likewise, you cannot kill your brother; and you cannot steal. If you do one of the things on the “cannot do” list, then you can make up for it by doing things on a third list that we can call “penance.” It’s like the BestBuy “buy back program”, where you pay them to “buy back” your old stuff for less money than you gave them to “buy it back.” Am I right? These are the fundamental tenets of all religions. Paul understood this. In fact, what he is saying to all of us here is that the traditional tenets of religion suck and only leads to death because it’s impossible to be perfect. Further, these traditional tenets of religion should only lead to our despair because the “laws” make it clear that we are the furthest you can get from perfect. Now the good news is that the “law” is only applicable to us until we die. Just like student loans that condemn us our entire lives means nothing to us when we’re dead, the law means nothing once we’re dead. Except some of us don’t want to die and would rather get ripped off the rest of our lives by living under the tyranny of a condemning law code. Let me make this clearer: it is stupid to think we can one day get ahead of the law because you can never “buy back” as much as you owe. The recommendation then is to die “in the body of Christ.” Jesus makes it clear in the gospels that the perfect lamb of God fulfills the law. The penalties are satiated through his sacrificial death. We can join in that sacrificial death, that fulfills the payments we presently owe and theoretically will owe in the future, by having a relationship with Him. That is not having a religion (a list of do’s and dont’s) with Him, but a relationship (trust and reliance) with Him. In doing so, we die to ourselves because we are not trying to live for ourselves. We have died and the law, that is religion for the sake of do’s and don’ts, means nothing because we are dead. More good news: when we die, we are then raised back to life. This time, when we live, we live not to lose pieces of ourselves to pay back religion and be taken away, but to give away the “fruit” that being in relationships free from worry produces. We’ll get more into this tomorrow. For today, I want us to meditate on whether we’re playing the fruitless game of religion or emphatically in relationship with the God that raises us from the death caused by religion.