When Mary and I were dating, I often used to leave here house quite late on Friday night or early on Saturday morning. On one of those occasions I was driving down Orange Grove Road in my bright yellow Ford Pinto when I was pulled over by a Pima County Sherriff’s officer. When he asked me if I knew how fast I had been going, I said. “No sir.” So he took me back to his car and showed me the readout on his radar gun that showed that I had been going 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. I didn’t say anything to the officer, but inside I was actually quite proud that my Pinto had actually been able to get up to that rate of speed so quickly after stopping for the red light at the last intersection.
After asking me some questions about where I was going and running my license and registration, the officer said, “As a student, you probably can’t afford a ticket can you?” “No sir”, I replied. He told me that he was going to let me off with a warning, but that if he ever caught me speeding again, he wouldn’t be so nice.
So having experienced grace from that officer, I can assure you that every time I drove that same stretch of road after that I was very careful to drive under the speed limit and not presume that I would receive grace the next time.
But for some reason, when it comes to our relationship with God, there are a lot of Christians who have taken the position that since God extends His grace to me when I sin, I ought to keep on sinning so that I can get more of God’s grace my life. On more than one occasion I have witnessed those who claim to be disciples of Jesus intentionally choose to do something they know to be sin and comment that it’s OK because they know that God will forgive them.
But does God really want us to presume on His grace like that? That’s the question we’ll attempt to answer this morning from Romans chapter 6. So go ahead and open your Bibles to that chapter. You’re going to want to keep your Bibles handy because I’m going to be referring back to our passage frequently this morning
But before I read this morning’s test, let’s take a moment to review what we’ve learned so far in the Book of Romans.
• The first three chapters of Paul’s letter teach us that we are all sinners whose sin has separated us from God.
• In chapters 4 and 5 Paul explains the idea of justification which deals with how Jesus takes away the penalty of sin. In those chapters we learned that there is nothing we can do to take care of that penalty through our own efforts and that the only way to do that is to have God credit us with the righteousness of Jesus by placing our trust completely in His life, death and resurrection.
• Now, for three chapters, beginning in chapter 6, Paul is going to address the concept of sanctification which deals with how Jesus overcomes the power of sin in our lives and the process by which God produces actual righteousness in our lives as we become more like Jesus.
Before I read this morning’s passage, look back with me to chapter 5, verse 20, which sets the stage for what Paul writes in chapter 6.
Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,
(Romans 5:20 ESV)
When we looked at that verse last fall, we learned that even though the law increased our sin in the sense that it revealed specific standards that we have chosen to step over, God’s grace didn’t just cancel that sin on a one to one basis – it completely obliterated it.
And now, in chapter 6, Paul is going to address a hypothetical question that would naturally arise out of that idea. Let’s pick up in chapter 6, verse 1.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
Paul anticipated what some of his readers were undoubtedly thinking – if grace abounds when I sin, then maybe I should sin more because I’ll get even more of God’s grace. Unfortunately, 2,000 years later that same mindset still exists in the church. So Paul answers that question in the most emphatic way possible:
By no means!
This is one of those Greek idioms that is almost untranslatable into English. Paul uses the strongest words he can think of to make it clear that such thinking has no place at all in the life of a genuine disciple of Jesus. But, as someone mentioned in our Monday morning Bible study, Paul doesn’t just leave it at that. He goes on to give us a detailed explanation of why we should never think like that.
How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
And now here is the key verse in this passage – verse 5.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
The word translated “united” in this verse literally means “growing up together”. It was used to describe plants that were sown at the same time and which sprouted and grew together. It is an incredible picture of the intimacy of our relationship with Jesus and the fact that as His disciples we are to find our identity in Him. The rest of this passage – both the preceding and following verses – are merely a description of some of the essential elements of that union.
We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
In many ways, this is a very difficult section of Scripture to deal with and there are certainly some differences of opinions among commentators and pastors about the exact meaning of some of what Paul writes here. But I actually think that the practical application for our lives is actually pretty clear here:
If I really want to live for Jesus
I must first attend my own funeral
In this section Paul uses a number of past tense verbs to summarize what happened to us at the very moment we put our faith in Jesus:
…we who died to sin… (v. 2)
…were baptized… (v. 3)
We were buried… (v.4)
… our old self was crucified… (v. 6)
… one who has died… (v. 7)
… we have died… (v. 8)
All but one of these verbs – baptized – deal with death. And every one of them are statements of facts that have already occurred in the past. Those facts are true whether we know them or not and whether we feel them or not. These are not present tense verb that indicate something that is going on in our lives right now – Paul does not day that we are currently dying. They are not commands that instruct us to die. Nor are they even exhortations that say we should die.
So regardless of whether you know it or not or whether you feel it or not, the fact is that if you are a disciple of Jesus, you died the very moment that you put your faith in Jesus. The reason that you died is that your faith so closely united you with Jesus that you share in His death. And knowing that fact is the key to living for Jesus in the present. And the best way for us to remember that fact is to attend our own funeral.
The kind of funeral I’m talking about is obviously not a physical event, although I am going to be addressing one physical act that is an important part of the process. It is instead an event that takes place in our mind as indicated by the verb “know” that we find in verses 3, 6, and 9.
The key to being able to live for Jesus is to make sure we know and understand the facts that Paul presents to us in this passage. In particular, we need to attend our own funeral by making sure we know and understand the impact of being united with the death and resurrection of Jesus and the impact that has on how sin operates in our lives.
HOW BEING UNITED WITH JESUS IMPACTS THE OPERATION OF SIN IN MY LIFE
1. In the past, I was set free from the penalty of sin
Let’s begin with verse 10. There Paul reminds us that Jesus died to sin once for all. Since we know that Jesus never sinned, what does Paul mean by that? We know that on the cross, Jesus took on all the sins of mankind as Paul reminded the church in Corinth in this familiar verse:
For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him [Jesus] we might become the righteousness of God.
(2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV)
So Jesus temporarily took on the sin of all mankind. And during the time He did that, He was subject to the penalty of sin. When He died on the cross, he satisfied the legal requirement for the penalty of our sin and paid that penalty on our behalf. He did that “once for all” so that we don’t have to do anything at all to try and pay that penalty on our own.
But there was also a sense in which Jesus was under the power of sin as well. And when He rose from the grave he entered into a new state in which he was no longer under that influence. So, as we’ll talk about more in a minute, he also freed us from the power of sin.
Augustus Toplady captured both aspects of this two-fold death to sin when he penned these words of the familiar hymn “Rock of Ages”:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure.
The death and resurrection of Jesus is a double-cure – it saves us from the wrath of God, the penalty, and it makes me pure by saving me from the power of sin.
Because of our union with Jesus, there is a correlation between His death and the fact that we died. In verses 3 and 4, Paul gives us some more details about how those two deaths operate in unison.
As we’ve talked about before, the English word “baptism” is a transliteration and not a translation of the underlying Greek word that means “to immerse” or “to place into.” So if we just replace the word “baptize” with the word “immerse” in these verses, it will make it much easier to understand what Paul is saying.
In the New Testament “baptize” is used two different ways. It can be used to describe water baptism – the symbolic act that testifies to the underlying reality of our salvation – or it can refer to the idea that at the time we place our faith in Jesus we are immersed or placed into the life of Jesus and His body the church. Although this passage certainly has important implications for water baptism that I’ll address later, Paul is primarily concerned with the second aspect of baptism here. Paul used baptism in that sense in when he wrote to the church in Galatia:
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
(Galatians 3:27 ESV)
Paul is not referring to water baptism here, but rather to the idea that when we place our faith in Jesus we take on a whole new identity in which we are clothed with Jesus. Or as Paul puts it here in Romans 6, we “grow together” with Him. At the point a person becomes a disciple of Jesus he or she becomes so deeply connected to Him, that he or she dies to sin in much the same way that Jesus did.
That obviously does not mean that we will become like Jesus in the sense that we will no longer sin. Nor does it mean, as some teach, that it is possible for us to ever get to a place in life where we get so spiritually mature that we no longer sin. But we can get to a place where we are no longer under the penalty of sin because we share in the death of Jesus. And, we can also be freed from the power of sin, which leads us to the second aspect of being united with Jesus, which also happens to be Paul’s main focus in this passage.
2. In the present, I am set free from the power of sin
In verse 10, we see that Jesus not only died to since once for all, but that in the present, “the life he lives he lives to God”. That obviously does not mean that the life that Jesus lived prior to His death and resurrection was not lived to God. But given the rest of this passage, the idea that Paul seems to be expressing here is that in the present, Jesus lives His life free from the cloud of our sin that was hung over Him right up until His death and resurrection. So there is a sense in which Jesus entered into a whole new way of life at that time.
The way that idea applies to us is explored further in verse 6, where we read that:
…our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin…
Here Paul expressed the same idea that we find frequently in his writings, that when we are united to Jesus in the way we’ve been talking about, we don’t just add Jesus to our lives, but instead Jesus radically transforms us into completely new beings. As he writes in verse 5, “we…walk in newness of life”. We’re reminded here of these familiar words of Paul:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
(2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV)
In Greek there are at least two different words that can be translated “new”. One means new in terms of time - “Today is Sunday. It is the beginning of a new week”. That is not the word Paul uses either here in Romans 6 or in 2 Corinthians. The word he uses in both place is a word that means new in nature. So the fact that we become a new creation in Christ means that our lives are completely transformed into ones that have a totally different character.
And you’ll notice once again that in this verse, it is a fact that anyone who is “in Christ” is a new creation. Paul is not saying that we need to try and become a new creation or that we’ll even necessarily feel different as a result of that transformation.
And, one of the benefits of being a new creation is that we have been freed from the power of sin. The body of sin – that is our propensity to engage in sin has been “brought to nothing”. I really like how the ESV translates that phrase since some other translations, including the KJV, can give us the wrong idea about what Paul means here.
Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.
(Romans 6:6 KJV)
Unfortunately, this translation has given some people the mistaken idea that sin has been completely eradicated from their lives. But the verb Paul uses there means something more like “lost its ability to control”, which is consistent with the idea that because we have been crucified with Christ, we are no longer enslaved to sin. So, even though “growing together” with Jesus doesn’t mean that sin will be eliminated from my life, it does mean that I am no longer under its power.
3. In the future I will be set free from the presence of sin
Although it is somewhat secondary to the main point Paul is making in this passage, verse 5 reveals that because we have been united with Jesus in His death, we will also be united with Him in His resurrection. It’s important to note the verb that Paul uses there, as well as the verb in verse 8, when Paul writes “we will also live with him”, are both future tense verbs.
Every disciple of Jesus will one day, just like Jesus, experience a bodily resurrection in which we will receive physical resurrection bodies that will live forever in the presence of God. And at that point, we will finally be set free from the presence of sin.
If I really want to live for Jesus
I must first attend my own funeral
As we’ve seen, that is a funeral that largely takes place in the mind where I come to know and understand that being united with Jesus means that I was freed from the penalty of sin in the past, I am free from the power of sin in the present and I will be freed from the presence of sin in the future.
I know that most of what I’ve shared so far is somewhat theological and theoretical and maybe not as practical as some of you would like. But without that foundation, we really couldn’t make the practical applications that I’ll close with.
IMPLICATIONS FOR MY LIFE
1. Don’t use God’s grace as permission to sin
It would have been stupid on my part to use the fact that the Pima County Sherriff’s officer treated me with grace as permission to speed the next time I drove down Orange Grove Road or even to do that today over 40 years later. And it would be just as stupid for a Christian to think, “I’ll go ahead and commit this sin intentionally because God has extended His grace to me in the past and He will forgive me again this time.”
We must not ever mistake God’s grace for His tolerance of our sin. Although God does promise to forgive the sins of those who have placed their faith in Jesus, that does not mean that He will always remove the consequences of our sins. And because God loves us so much and is so concerned with developing our holiness, He will discipline us for our sin, often severely.
So the next time you’re tempted to sin, and find yourself thinking, “It’s OK, God will forgive me”, I beg of you, please don’t take that road.
2. Meditate often on what being united with Jesus means for my life
As we saw earlier, in this section of his letter, Paul’s main emphasis is on what we are to know. He is not so concerned here about our experiences or how we feel about these issues. He wants us to know what it means to be “growing together” with Jesus. He wants us to understand the fact that we died to sin in the past and that we are free from the power of sin in the present.
So this is a section of Scripture that we ought to read on a regular basis, one that we ought to chew on and consider how it should impact the way we live our lives. I would encourage you to memorize all or part of this passage so that you can bring it to mind on a regular basis.
3. If I haven’t already done it, testify to my union with Jesus by being baptized
Although I don’t think Paul is primarily referring to the physical act of water baptism in verses 3 and 4, there is little doubt that he took Jesus’ command for His disciples to be baptized very seriously. And frankly there is no better way I know of to do something that will serve as a life-long reminder of the fact that I am “growing together” with Jesus than following that command.
Here in this passage, Paul gives a clear picture of why only baptism by immersion is an accurate picture of our union with Jesus. We go down into the water to picture the fact that we died with Him. As long as no one holds us under the water for too long so that we actually die, the brief time we stay under the water pictures being buried with Jesus. And then coming up out of the water pictures being resurrected with Jesus. Sprinkling or pouring water on the head just can’t serve as that kind of visual reminder of our union with Jesus.
The good news is that we already have some baptisms scheduled for next Sunday afternoon. So if that is something you’ve never done and you would like to be obedient to Jesus in that area of your life and experience a lifelong reminder of what it is like to be “with Jesus” then please let me know.
If I really want to live for Jesus
I must first attend my own funeral
There are a lot of people in this world, even some who claim to be Christians, who believe that living a lifestyle of sin, is the most enjoyable way to live life. But God understands just how unfulfilling and destructive that kind of lifestyle is. So He sent His Son to this earth to die on a cross and to rise from the grave to free us from both the penalty and the power of sin. So why would we ever want to use that grace as an excuse to return to that kind of life when the life we are offered in Jesus is so much better?
[Prayer]
If you’re one of our regulars, you know that we often have a greeting time near the beginning of the service. But at least for a while I want to try something different that I think will be much more meaningful and helpful as we work toward applying what we’ve been learning together. So after the message each week, I’m going to give you about 3 or 4 minutes to share with one or more people around you one thing about how this message impacted you. I’ve written down three possible things to share on your sermon outline and on the Connection Card on your bulletin as a reminder. After you’ve done that we will further respond to God with our offering and a closing song.
Share with someone else:
• One new thing I learned today is…
• One question I still have about this passage is…
• One thing I will do to apply this passage in my life is…
