On May 28 of this year four-year-old Isaiah Dickerson climbed under a fence and fell 12 feet down into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. In order to protect the boy zoo officials had to shoot Harambe, the 17-year-old gorilla, sparking a public outrage among many people.
Sin is a lot like a wild animal at a zoo. Although those wild animals are dangerous and can do us much harm, as long as we stay behind the barriers that have been put up for our safety, those animals can roar and growl all they want, but they can’t harm us. It’s not until we go around or under or over those barriers and get into the cage that we are in danger.
As we saw last week, because we are united, or growing together, with Jesus in His death, burial and resurrection, we have been freed from the power of sin. Therefore, sin cannot harm us or dominate our lives unless we choose to intentionally ignore and go around the barriers that come with being united with Jesus.
But even though Jesus has given us every tool we need to live a life that is not subject to the power of sin, that doesn’t mean that living like that is an easy thing to do. So in Romans 6, Paul gives his readers, and us, some very practical guidance about how we can live lives that are free from slavery to sin because we are “in Jesus”.
Hopefully you’ll remember that last week, we looked at the first 10 verses of that chapter and found that the key word there was “know”. Paul focused on the idea that because Jesus died and rose from the dead and we are united with Him that we, too, died to sin and have been freed from its power. So the focus there was primarily on our mind. And therefore one of the applications we made was to stress the importance of coming back frequently to this section of the Bible so that we’ll keep those facts at the front of our mind.
Today, we’ll pick up in verse 11 and see how Paul goes on to encourage us to engage our hearts and our wills in addition to our minds. Once again this morning, you’ll need to keep your Bibles open since I’ll be referring back to our passage throughout the message today.
We could illustrate the flow of this section like this based on the key verbs in each section:
know (mind)
(verses 1-10)
consider (heart)
(verse 11)
present (will)
(verses 12-14)
Last week, I really wrestled with whether to include verse 11 with last week’s message or to wait until this week to take a look at it. But the more I studied and meditated on this passage, it seems to me that verse 11 is one of those transitional verses that really ties together what precedes it with what follows. We can’t move from just knowing these facts to engaging our wills without first taking these truths to heart. So let’s begin this morning by reading that key verse – verse 11:
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
A number of commentators point out that this is the first command in the entire book of Romans. While I didn’t have time to go back and look at every single verb up to this point, a quick review leads me to believe that is indeed the case. And if it is, that means that Paul has spent five and a half chapters giving us all the information that we need to be able to obey that command. Again, what I love about Paul is that he rarely gives us commands or instructions without giving detailed information about why we should obey them.
The verb “consider” is used 41 times in the New Testament and over one quarter of those uses are in Romans chapter 4, where the ESV translates it “count”. It is an accounting term that means “to credit to one’s account”. When we studied chapter 4, we saw that Paul used that word to describe how our faith in Jesus results in God crediting our account with the righteousness of Jesus.
So Paul gives a command here to take what we learned last week about being united with Jesus and being freed from slavery from sin and move it from just our minds to our hearts. In a physical sense, the distance between our head and our heart is only a little over a foot. But as British politician Andrew Bennett once observed:
The longest journey you will ever take is the 18 inches from your head to your heart.
So what Paul is calling on us to do here is not to just know these facts intellectually, but to make a permanent record of them on our hearts. And in just a moment we’re going to talk about some practical things we can do to help these facts make that journey from our head to our hearts.
It is also important to note that the command “consider” is a present tense verb, so it is something that we must do constantly in our lives. We could accurately translate that verse something like this:
So you also must keep on counting yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
With that transitional command in mind, let’s continue reading in verse 12:
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Here is how I would summarize Paul’s teaching in these verses:
As a disciple of Jesus
sin may reside,
but it must not be allowed to preside
Paul begins this section with a warning. Remember that he is writing here to believers. So when he commands us not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies, the implication is that it is possible for that to happen even in the life of a Christian. That is because when we put our faith in Jesus, our old sin nature is not removed. So that sin nature still resides in the life of a disciple of Jesus and, if is left unchecked, it is possible for that sin to reign in a way that we end up obeying our earthly passions.
Once again, verse 12 is a command, not merely a suggestion. And there are two things we need to note about that command:
• First, it is possible for us to obey that command. God never gives us a command in the Bible where He does not also provide us with whatever is needed for us to be able to obey that command. In this case, it is possible for us to obey this command because we have been freed from the power of sin and our slavery to sin as a result of being united with Jesus in His death and resurrection.
• The second thing we must note is that we have a responsibility to actively work to stop the reign of sin in our lives. Paul does not merely write “Let go and let God”, but rather he calls us here to move from merely knowing these truths or even having them on our hearts, to choosing, by an act of our wills, to obey Jesus rather than obey our earthly passions. We could literally translate the command in verse something like this:
“Stop letting sin reign in your mortal body…”
In other words, Paul was aware that there were some Christians in the churches there in Rome who were allowing their lives to be lived under the continuous reign and rule of sin and they needed to quit living like that immediately.
In a few minutes, we’re going to look at verse 13, where Paul explains the actions we are to take in order to carry out that command.
But even though Paul begins this section with a warning, he ends it with a word of encouragement in verse 14. There he makes it clear that the reason that we can carry out the command in verse 12 and take the actions he calls for in verse 13 is because we are no longer under law but under grace. The operation of God’s grace in our lives ensures that sin cannot have dominion in our lives.
This is what separates Christians from non-Christians. Unbelievers can become more outwardly moral, at least in the short-run, by self-effort. But that is merely like putting a tuxedo on a pig. He might look nice for a while, but as soon as he sees a nice mud puddle the temptation is going to be too great. That is because the pig has done nothing to change his nature. The good news for us is, as we saw last week, that our union with Jesus changes us from the inside out and therefore grace gives us the ability to keep sin from having dominion over us.
We also see here that legalism will never enable us to keep sin from controlling our lives. That is why we need to be very careful in the church not to try and get people to live for Jesus by imposing a bunch of rules on them. Unfortunately, the church has often been guilty of doing just that, telling people that if they want to be a good Christian they are not to “drink or smoke or chew or go with girls who do.” But when we do that, we effectively remove ourselves from being under grace and put ourselves right back under law.
So far we have seen that…
As a disciple of Jesus
sin may reside,
but it must not be allowed to preside
But what does that look like in my life? How can I make sure that I don’t let sin reign in my mortal body? Fortunately, Paul answers those questions in verse 13, where we find two more commands – one negative and one positive:
Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
These two commands give rise to three important…
IMPLICATIONS FOR ME
1. Don’t make excuses for my sin
Although we probably don’t think of it in these terms, even Christians have a tendency to make excuses for our sin. Let’s see if any of these sound familiar at all:
• I know I have a temper, but I can’t help it because I’m Irish. My whole family has this problem and there is nothing I can do about it.
• I know I have a problem with lust, but that is just because I’m Italian, or because I’m young. Or we will even blame God and say. “That’s the way God made me.”
• I know that I have a problem with drugs, or with alcohol. But that is because I have a disease, so I just can’t help it.
• I know that I’m not the kind of employee that I should be, but it is because the people I work with make it impossible for me to do that.
• I know that I don’t love others the way I should but that is because of my upbringing and my circumstances and I can’t change those things.
Or the other common way that we tend to make excuses for our sin is to call it something else. Politicians are really good at this. They tell a lie, and then when they get caught, they will say something like, “I misspoke”. No, you lied. But before we’re too quick to condemn those politicians, we need to recognize that we have a tendency to do the same thing by calling sin a “mistake”, or “poor judgment”, or “a weakness”.
Last week in “Connections” we looked at this relevant verse:
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
(1 John 1:8 ESV)
When we begin to make excuses for our sin, regardless of what form that takes, what we’re really doing is trying to either let live or bring back to life that which God has declared to be dead. In essence we’re merely trying to make our old life suitable. But that can never work because, as we saw clearly last week, when we put our faith in Jesus, he transforms us into completely new creations – ones which are no longer subject to the power and dominion of sin.
2. Refuse to let sin get a foothold
Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness…
Paul begins here with a negative command.
The verb “present” here is a compound word that means “to place at one’s disposal” or “to present oneself for service.” And the form of the command conveys the idea of “stop doing this!” So it might be helpful to translate this command like this:
Stop putting your members at the disposal of your sinful nature as weapons of unrighteousness.
In other words, the position I must take in my mind is that I can have nothing more to do with sinning because God hates sin and I am a new creation, created for the purpose of pleasing and glorifying Jesus.
This is similar to the commitment I made when I married Mary. When I spoke my wedding vows and became one with her, one of the aspects of that union is that I gave up once and for all, even the possibility of being unfaithful to her with another woman - emotionally or physically. And as I’ve remained faithful to that commitment over the years I can honestly say that I have no thought of ever being unfaithful to Mary.
There are a lot of ways that I can apply this command in my life, but let me just mention two that I think are crucial.
First, I need to guard against the idea of the idea that some sins are greater than other and that it’s somehow OK to commit those “small sins”. That would be like in my marriage saying that it’s OK to fantasize about being with another woman as long as I don’t actually follow through and do that physically. If I’m not mistaken, I think Jesus had something to say about that in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus hates all sin, no matter how small we might think it to be and since we are united with Him, we ought to have the same mindset.
The second important thing we must do is to get the sin out of our lives immediately as soon as we become aware of it. Living here in Tucson, I can’t help but think of sin being like a desert broom. Those things pop up unexpectedly almost anywhere. But as long as I notice them right away, they are fairly easy to pull out of the ground, especially after a rain while the ground is still wet. But if I don’t pull them out right away, they become nearly impossible to remove pretty quickly. If you haven’t experienced that personally just talk to Gene Melzer about how he had to use his truck to pull out the ones on the south side of our property once they had been there for a while.
When we allow sin to remain in our life and get a foothold like that, the more stubborn it becomes and the harder it is to remove. So as soon as we become aware of it, we need to confess it to God and repent, which includes taking appropriate action to prevent me from returning right back to that sin again and allowing it to reign in my life.
But I’m glad that Paul doesn’t just tell us what not to do. He also gives us a positive command that exhorts us to…
3. Serve God
…but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness…
This is an idea that becomes the foundation for Paul’s conclusion to the first 11 chapters of his letter, when he writes this at the beginning of chapter 12:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
(Romans 12:1 ESV)
The idea in both verses is that the antidote to presenting our members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness is to present those same members instead to God as instruments of righteousness. In other words, I need to commit my entire person – body, soul, and spirit - to serving God. In fact, the word translated “worship” in Romans 12:1 is appropriately translated “service” in several of our English translations because the word conveys the idea of divine service.
We’ve talked about this before, but it’s never enough to just try and remove something bad from our lives. If we don’t replace the bad with something good, the bad has a way of returning to its former place. As important as it is to be relentless in getting sin out of our lives immediately so it doesn’t gain a foothold, if we don’t put something else good in its place that sin will just return.
And the way that I do that is to present myself to God as a willing conscript for His army. Every day I report to duty and make my life available to serve Him in every area of my life – my personal life, my family life, my job, my church and in my community. And while one of the benefits of living like that is that I gain victory over sin in my life, my main motivation for serving God like that needs to be that I want to please and glorify the one who purchased me with His blood.
The fact is that when I get busy serving God like that, I just don’t have a place in my life for sin. The more time I spend in His service, the less time and energy I have left to sin. So sin tends to become less and less of a draw for me.
I’d like to return to the diagram of the flow of this section of Scripture that I shared at the beginning of this message. But I’d like to add one more arrow to it this time:
know (mind)
(verses 1-10)
consider (heart)
(verse 11)
present (will)
(verses 12-14)
We began this morning by talking about how to get the truths from the first 10 verses of this chapter from our heads to our heart. But when I move from just having those truths in my heart to actually carrying them out by acts of my will, something interesting happens. The more that my actions reflect the truths we’ve been learning, the deeper those truths become imbedded in my heart. So what happens here is that I get caught up in this wonderful cycle where my heart and my will actually feed each other.
As a disciple of Jesus
sin may reside,
but it must not be allowed to preside
In his book “Listening to the Voice of God”, Pastor Roger Barrier shared that God once led him to preach a one sentence sermon. And some of you are probably praying for God to lead me to do that as well. But that one sentence sermon really summarizes well what we’ve learned this morning:
It is not possible to be content with your sins and really be a Christian.
There is no such thing as a Christian who lives continually under the lordship of sin, since by definition, a genuine disciple of Jesus lives under the Lordship of Jesus.
That does not mean that genuine Christians do not fall into sin, sometimes even gross sins. But if they are genuine disciples of Jesus they just can’t remain there because they will be miserable until they get right with God again.
Over 8 years ago when I was preaching through the book of Ephesians, Denny Howard shared with our Monday morning Bible study a saying that Pastor Adrian Rogers was fond of using and one that summarizes this section very well:
Unconverted sinners leap into sin and love it;
Converted sinners lapse into sin and loathe it.
So if you are not experiencing consistent victory over sin in your life really there are only two possibilities. If the fact that you are living under the dominion of sin doesn’t bother you, then there is a real possibility that you are not a genuine disciple of Jesus in the first place. And if that is the case then I can assure you that you will never get victory over your sin until you first make a genuine commitment of your life to Jesus and make Him the Lord of your life.
On the other hand, if the idea that you can’t get control over your sin really bothers you, then the other, more likely, possibility is that you haven’t done your part by taking to heart the truths that we find here in Romans 6. You haven’t adequately considered the fact that you are dead to sin as a result of being united with Jesus and you haven’t consistently reinforced that truth by engaging your will and choosing to present your life to God for righteous purposes rather than presenting it to sin for unrighteous purposes.
Wouldn’t you love to live a life that has been freed from slavery to sin? The good news is that God wants that for your life even more than you want it. And not only that, He has done everything that He possibly could to make that a real possibility in your life. Now you just need to do your part.
[Prayer]
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…
