Are you looking for a great self-improvement course? You know, a really effective workout with terrific results? Here’s the best one I know: “Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11).

And here’s the follow-up question: How often is that your consideration?

Motivated by fault-finding questions, some of us have learned to live from one self-improvement course to the next, even though failure follows. What that ever-failing cycle reveals is that we’ve been set up to live from the truth of what Someone Else did for us that ends the cycle of self-defeat.

Here is that truth: there is no need to wrestle with self. There is no prosecution and painful crucifixion of an evil you that has yet to be accomplished. There is no need of getting a better you or of getting rid of a badder you, and there is no work of fashioning a you that stands against sin FINALLY.

There is no self-improvement course needed. You can give up on all that effort.

Jesus took care of all that because He took care of you when He died—He took you with Him on the cross. All that remains is to consider what He did in making you dead to sin through the cross, and alive to God through the resurrection. That’s where you’ll find yourself. That’s where your life is. That’s the workout that works because that’s how life for you works.

You live by faith in Jesus. You live by faith that Someone Else’s workout worked—that it was perfect and that it was for you; the old you that’s gone, and the new you that has arrived.

Consider that—again and again and again. There’s your workout.