"Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). According to this statement, before you believed you were guilty by virtue of being a descendent of Adam. Elsewhere, Paul puts it this way: "Since by a man came death, by a man also came resurrection from the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Cor.15:21-22). Paul says here that birth determines guilt or innocence. You are either "in Adam" by birth, or "in Christ" by the new birth. This is how God sees humanity. But this comes as a shock to our understandings if we give full credence to what Paul says. When he says in Romans 5:12 that "all sinned," he explains that this behavior resulted from our relation to that "one man." To dismiss any doubts, he restates this principle again in verses 18 and 19: "As through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous."

But this is not how we have interpreted our guilt. We often tell others that they are guilty because of their sins; but according to these passages they are guilty because they are "in Adam." In other words, they are not "sinners" because they sin; rather, they sin because they are sinners. Behavior flows out of identity. Who you are determines what you do. The one unrighteous act of Adam in the garden of Eden has caused the whole world to be guilty before God. In order for God to remedy the situation, He had to start a new "race" of people who were no longer "in Adam" but "in Christ." No amount of proper behavior would change our condition. If we can believe this principle we will have less trouble learning who we are in Christ. But how can you believe that you have received the very righteousness of Christ (2 Cor.5:21) if you believe you must first "act righteously" in order to get it? That is a twisted mindset left over from your former ways of doing things. The same mentality which insists that you must work to earn salvation deceives you into thinking that you must work to achieve holiness in your daily walk. Paul will deliver another blow to this thinking in chapters 6 and 7, but first he will step back and address your identity in Christ from another angle.