Live in what's already true!

When Paul turns from description to exhortation ([Rom] 6:11–13; 8:12–13), what he expects from believers is not that they create a new existence, but that they express what has already been created by and in Christ. Whatever may be said in the indicative is true of them only because it is true already of Christ; that primary reality can be neither created nor revoked. The secondary reality, their derivation from Christ, exists in a form that is contrary to its surrounding habitat: life in the midst of death. And such a life only subsists to the extent that it is active. To “present yourselves as alive from the dead” (6:13) and to “put to death the deeds of the body” (8:13) are the positive and negative poles of a demand to practice or exercise the new life that has been given. That new life cannot be said to be active within believers unless it is demonstrably acted out by them.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 503 (emphasis original)