Opening illustration: After a 4-year-old got into trouble at preschool, his mom asked him what he had done wrong. He explained, “I was angry with a playmate. But you told me that I should not hit anyone, so I asked my friend to do it for me!”
Where does someone so young learn that? The Bible tells us he did not have to be taught - he was born with it! It is part of the fallen nature that all of us have at birth.
But the Christian does not have to respond according to his fallen nature. Paul reminds us that “our old man was crucified with [Christ] … that we should no longer be slaves of sin” (Romans 6: 6). We are “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5: 17) and have been set free and have become “slaves of God” (Romans 6: 22).
Yet, as Christians we do still struggle with our flesh and its sinful desires (Romans 7: 18-19). But now that “we are alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” we can respond in a God-honoring way (Romans 6: 11).
Instead of being like the young boy who tried to get revenge, we can obey the instructions of Romans 6: 13 “Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God . . . as instruments of righteousness.”
We gain the victory when we give up sin’s pleasure in exchange for Christ’s power. (Illustration by C. P. Hia, Our Daily Bread)
Let us turn to Romans chapter 6 and see how Paul addresses the issue of Christians abusing grace.
Introduction: The church in America, as a whole, is more interested in fitting into the world than converting the world. We have become cowards. Those who stand up and declare God‘s ways will find themselves at odds with the very ones who should be supporting them.
The church is failing to live up to all of its holy potential and take hold of all of the spiritual blessings available to her because we are failing to do three things: study God’s Word with an eye towards doing His will, pray that God’s will is done in all ways (and mean it) and live a life of obedience. To be holy we must earnestly be pursuing all three.
The modern church is a dangerous blend of worldliness and godliness that is pleasing neither to the Lord nor to the world. Christians are to live separate and apart from the world. That concept is scorned today. Those whose lives stand out as different from those around them are laughed at - by those in the church. Those who stand up and condemn sin and worldliness are shunned - by their fellow church members.
We claim that we are following God but we aren’t. Not really. If we are honest we’ll admit that we just don’t want to be like our God. We appreciate His holiness, as long as we don’t have to be too holy. And we love Him for His love, as long as we don’t have to live that love out among our enemies or those who use and abuse us. We welcome God’s laws as long as we can bend them to fit our perceptions of what they should be. We expect grace to cover everything.
“Grace” is such an abused topic in most churches today. It is not some celestial catch-all to allow us to mess up and then say “God’s grace covers me.” Personal responsibility has a place in Christianity. God’s grace makes our spiritual growth and “perfection” possible. We say that God buries the old man and gives us a new nature (and its true) but then we engage in all of our old sins or creatively come up with new ones. For most of us in the church, our supposed “new man” looks and acts an awful lot like our old one.
When we are saved Jesus holiness becomes our own but that is not the end of the story; we have an obligation to actively pursue holy living. There are two parts to holiness: imputed (taking on Christ’s holiness) and imparted (growing in holiness).
If we aren’t thus desiring to be made into the image of the Living Christ can we truly say that we are His? Jesus said “if you love Me you will keep my commandments” (John 14: 15). One of His commandments was that we are to be holy as He is holy. We must know His Word to obey it. Most of us know more about the people in Hollywood than we do about God’s Word. We find time for everything but the most important thing. We don’t take His Word seriously.
How to live under GRACE and NOT ABUSE it?
1. Die to Sin (sensitive to the Holy Spirit and sinful lifestyle) ~ vs. 1-2, 11 & 14
“Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more.” But that radical concept opens a theological floodgate. The biblical writer Jude warned that it is possible to “change the grace of our God into a license for immorality” (Jude 4 NIV). Why be good if you know you will be forgiven? Not even an emphasis on repentance erases this danger completely. Here Paul spoke directly to the point. “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” He gave a short, explosive answer: “Certainly not!” (vv.1-2) and used an analogy that starkly contrasts death and life. “How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” (v.2). No Christian resurrected to new life should be pining for sin.
Yet wickedness does not always seem to have the stench of death about it. Sin can be downright appealing. Paul recognized this, so he advised: “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” and “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body” (vv.11-12). If we truly grasped the wonder of God’s love for us, we would spend our days trying to fathom and share, not exploit, His grace.
Death to sin is the opposite of death in sin. Death in sin implies living for self, or being dead to God’s glory and interests and only alive to our own glory. Death to sin implies the reverse of this. It implies a death to our own interests and happiness as an end of pursuit, and a living wholly to the glory of God, and for the up-building of his kingdom.
Dying to sin is NOT a one-time thing and it’s over. We are to die to sin daily. Jesus commands in Luke 9:23 to "take up our cross daily" and follow him. Being baptized into His death only starts the process. We have victory over sin by what Paul states in Romans 6:7 "he who has died has been freed from sin". But we must check ourselves daily. We cannot put our lives on cruise control and expect perfect victory. We must remember that dead men have no rights. Let us not forget that the wages of sin is death.
Even though you are dead to sin, sin’s strong appeal may still cause you to struggle with feeling that you are more alive to sin than you are to Christ. But Romans 6: 1-11 teaches us that what is true of the Lord Jesus Christ is true of us in terms of our relationship to sin and death. God the Father allowed His Son to "be sin" in order that all the sins of the world–past, present and future - would fall on Him (2 Corinthians 5: 21). When He died on the cross, our sins were on Him. But when He rose from the grave, there was no sin on Him. When He ascended to the Father, there was no sin on Him. And today, as He sits at the Father’s right hand, there is no sin on Him. Since we are seated in the heaven-lies in Christ, we too have died to sin. Let us not forget that Sin is not our master!
Christ already died to sin, and because you are in Him, you have died to sin too. Sin is still strong and appealing, but your relationship with sin has ended. I’ve met many Christians who are still trying to die to sin, and their lives are miserable and fruitless as a result because they are struggling to do something that has already been done. "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death" (Romans 8: 2).
I know God desires us to consecrate our lives to Him. To this end, Sin was killed on the cross, but sin is killed in our lives. Don’t Limit God. Accept His Gift to be Holy, as He is Holy. Do it Today, Do it Now. He provides us all the grace to accept His life of Purity Today.
2. Walk in Newness of Life (taking the baptism and Christ’s death and resurrection seriously) ~ vs. 3-5
As Christians, we are a new creation; we are no longer enslaved to our sin. Although Satan will lie to us and tell us we MUST still give in to our sinful nature, Romans 6: 11-14 makes it clear that we are dead to our old nature and that we are alive in Christ to a new way of life. 1 Corinthians 10: 13 says that when we are tempted, that in His faithfulness, God will always provide a way out.
When we place our trust in the finished work of Christ to forgive and to change us, there is victory in the strength He provides. He has already given us everything we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1: 3), so we can stand firm against the temptation to sin. But, John gives us the reminder that if we do sin, we still have an advocate (1 John 2: 2). Because we are dead to sin, empowered to walk in a new life, and upheld by the Holy Spirit, we need not fear condemnation (Romans 8: 1).
Christ died for our sins and was indeed raised from the dead through the glory of the Father and He has ordained a new life for His redeemed children. The apostle Paul uses the 1st person plural indicating that this was a very personal experience for him, not merely an injunction to his readers. The sense of this “new life” is active and ongoing.
Genuine conversion leads to a new life! The verb for live or walk is in the present tense. It seems we may have a tendency to see the “new life” as the time that immediately follows our conversion to Christ and it is indeed a real joy to experience this phase. But I accepted Christ nearly 33 years ago, some of you long before that and others more recently. We may feel this “newness of life” stage is long past. O, how we are mistaken!
Let us consider these words from the apostle Paul, who is surely very mature in his walk at this time. He speaks of living (present tense) in newness of life. So whether we are a new Christian or a seasoned veteran let us hear the word of the resurrected Lord and let us live this day in newness of life! My prayer for myself and for each reader: Lord, help us today to experience the new life you have given us!
Apparently God has provided us the new life through Jesus Christ and given us the power through the Holy Spirit and promised us this new life with a profoundly complete transformed lifestyle.
Illustration: In 1982 an unusual thing happened on the island of Guam. A Japanese soldier came out of the jungle. He had been living in the jungle for 37 years, since the end of World War II. Why? Because when the news came at the end of the war, he couldn’t believe that Japan had surrendered and the war was over. So for 37 years, he lived in the jungle.
Let me ask you a question. During those 37 years was he free? Sure. At any time from 1945 until 1982, he was completely free to come out of the jungle. It’s not like General MacArthur was coming in to get him. He was free. He could come out in 1950 or 1955 or 1969. He was completely free on a theoretical basis. But because he didn’t believe it - because he didn’t reckon the fact of his freedom to be true - he lived in self-imposed bondage in the jungle for 37 years. Was he free? Yes. Was he free? No, because he chose to stay in bondage, in hiding, in fear in the jungle.
Many Christians are still living in the jungle of sin. The war is over, Christ has won, but they refuse to believe it. They live in self-imposed bondage to sin. They are still in the jungle spiritually, because they refuse to believe that Christ has set them free. They don’t accept the new life in Christ … The power of the resurrection is seen even today. Do people see that in and through your life?
3. Be Instruments of Righteousness (not slaves to sin as willful sinning cancels Christ’s sacrifice) ~ vs. 6-10, 12-13; Hebrews 10: 26-31
Your practical holiness will become a reality through three basic steps. Those steps are: knowing, reckoning, and yielding. (i) Knowing - this is the theme of the first 10 verses in Romans 6. The thing we are to know is the doctrine of our union with Christ. We are identified with him, we share all he is and has. (ii) Reckoning - Reckon means: "to regard or consider something as true." We must keep on counting as true that we are dead to sin and alive to God. We are "in Christ" and because of this, we share his righteousness. (iii) Yielding - Know deals with understanding the truth, reckon deals with believing it, and yield deals with the will - acting on what we know and believe.
Predominantly God is the source of righteousness in our lives. The righteousness that we have comes as a gift of God. We are still capable of being used as instruments of righteousness. We have a choice whether we will do something productive or something that will be harmful. When we offer ourselves to God, we make ourselves available to Him and whatever plans He has for us. This thought scares many people because they like to be in control and to know what is going on. When God is in control though, we don’t need to worry because we know that things will work out better than when we are in control.
Being an instrument of righteousness isn’t always easy. Not only must we fight against our desire to sin, we must fight our desire for personal comfort. We must go outside of our comfort zones to be all that God intends us to be. Paul reminds us that our life is an instrument, a tool, a weapon that can be used for good or evil. When it is yielded to God, it becomes a means for working good.
Illustration: (a) Emmanuel Ninger was a great artist and a brilliant man, but he misused his talent as an artist and, along with his pictures, painted phony 20 dollar bills. Finally, he was caught and convicted. After his arrest, his portraits were sold at public auction for over $5,000 each. The irony of the story is it took him almost exactly the same length of time to paint a 20 dollar bill as it took him to paint a $5,000 portrait. The Bible says that a man’s life can be used to promote either evil or righteousness. It all depends upon the one to whom your life is yielded – Satan or the Savior.
(b) Haddon Robinson – “Even as pianos need constant tuning and regulating--not only when young and raw, but all through their careers of being used for brilliant concerts--so people who are being used as ‘instruments of righteousness’--or, in other words, living creative, fruitful lives--need constant refreshing, ‘tuning.’
Application: God does not save us by grace so that we may live in disgrace. —Faber
