Rom 6:1-11 – What kind of life support are you on?
Wanted poster for Osama Bin Laden
Our section in Romans today is God’s “Wanted Poster” but his is a little different
God’s wanted poster reads, wanted, Sons of God, “Dead AND Alive”
First three chapters of Romans talk about mankind’s hopeless condition – dead in his sins with no way of restoring his relationship with God
Chapters 4-5 talk about how we are delivered from sin by God’s grace
IN chapter 6, Paul anticipates the skeptics obvious response to the good news of the grace of God
1What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?
You mean I can have my cake and eat it too?
This is the best of both worlds – I can sin as much as I like, yet still be considered God’s child because of His grace
This is a question that has plagued the church for the last 2000 years -this tussle between “law” and “grace”
The exponents of the law have a genuine concern – they say if we throw out the law, and preach “grace” there will be anarchy in the church
This whole question is based on a false premise
That premise is to assume the law was meant to keep us in line – it wasn’t and it can’t
How many of us has a perfect record since our conversion
Let me straighten one thing out to begin with
You can no more do away with the law of God than do away with the law of gravity
The law is based on God’s nature. To do away with the law, you would have to do away with God
Our church is a law abiding church, we teach obedience to God’s laws
But not as a means to salvation – but as a means of helping us become more like God
We made the changes we did because we came to understand the Mosaic Covenant was ineffective in making us righteous
So God had to replace it with one that would make us righteous and acceptable to God and that was Jesus’ covenant
We have only done away with that aspect of God’s law made redundant by Jesus’ death and resurrection
These were the rituals associated with the Mosiac Covenant – foods, days, sacrifices, which were put in place as the tutor to lead people to Jesus
The limited law of God which was the Moses Covenant did its job in showing us we’re sinners and our need for a Savior
Can never do away with the great principles of God’s law
But God knows the law can never make us righteous not because there is a problem with the law but because we are the problem (Heb 8:7-9)
And the gospel of grace is the way around this problem
And the book of Romans is the blueprint of how God deals with the issue of sin and our sinful nature
Its no good just dealing with the sin problem and leaving us with a sinful nature otherwise we will just go on sinning
This is the comment that just horrified Paul – God forbid!
In the last couple of chapters we saw how God deal with the issue of sin – Jesus died for us
Now he goes on to show how God intends to deal with our sinful nature
2By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
God forbid! His argument is not just one of revulsion to the idea, its also one of possibility
Who’s ever seen someone on a life support system in an emergency room?
Pretty scary experience
Respirator, tubes feeding drugs, instruments monitoring vital signs, staff hovering around, concerned relatives
Well mankind is pretty much like that patient, but rather than being hooked to a life support machine, we are hooked up to this sin machine
And its like a big blood vessel feeding us
This vessel feeds us a constant stream of evil thoughts
And we can’t help ourselves anymore than the Israelites could even with God’s law – our nature remains unchanged –it’s a physical impossibility
The good news is at our conversion Jesus comes along with this great big axe and chops off that sin vessel
3. Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized intoChrist Jesus were baptized into his death?
That sin machine no longer has any control over a dead body anymore than a life support machine can help a dead body
4We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
But we aren’t just left there dead as a doornail
We have been saved from the sin machine, but we are still lying there dead
But Jesus isn’t finished with us yet. Not much good if we are saved from sin and still dead
So what does he do?
5If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.
Christ death has already dealt with the issue of sin, now we begin to see how God intends to deal with our sinful nature
Now God gives us a brand new start in life, we are literally in a spiritually sense, born again – a new creation as 2 Cor 5:17 tells us
This is why God wants us Dead AND Alive
He wants us dead to sin and alive to Him
6For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with,[1] that we should no longer be slaves to sin-- 7because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Now this is the point Paul is making at the beginning about “sinning so that Grace may abound”
We have died to sin control over us, we have a new life, so do we now go back and hook this new life backup to the old sin machine?
Like saying, let’s go and un-baptise ourselves?
And his response is, “God forbid”
Really asking the question, Why were you baptised in the first place, other than to save your skin?
There is always somewhat of a selfish motive to our profession of faith
After all, none of us wants to go to the Lake of fire for our sins – some benefits to us in the salvation process
But as our faith matures, it should be more and more about a relationship with a loving God, and less and less about saving our skins
here again is another aspect of the two sided coin of christianity
God didn’t save us just to allow us to continue in sin just to magnify his grace
No, He saved us first, because he loves us, and second, He wants us to become like him
Now don’t get me wrong, we ought to stand in awe of his grace.
But the way we demonstrate our awe of this process of Grace is to life a life of obedience, not one of disobedience
8Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
Here’s the answer to the type of life we are to live now that we are a new creation
9For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.
In the same way, we cannot die spiritually again, spiritual death no longer has mastery over us
10The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
What type of life did Jesus live now that he had mastery over sin and death?
“He lives to God”
11In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
What type of life are we now to live – to live for God
Robin Mark’s Song - “When its all been said and done, Have I lived my life for truth, Have I lived my life for you”
Rather than hooking back up to the old sin machine, a saved Christian now hooks himself up to the God machine
Legally speaking as far as God is concerned we are dead to sin because of Jesus’ death, and the spiritual reality of our new life in Christ is that we are also dead to sin
And to reinforce the concept Paul lists this as a command – “count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God”
We need to change the way we think about ourselves, believe this new reality, live this new reality
The Puritan theologian John Owens once wrote that his biggest challenge as a pastor was persuading non-Christians that they were slaves to sin and Christians that they were dead to sin
Does this mean a Christian doesn’t sin any more?
Hope none of us make that claim because if we do, the Bible calls us a liar
1 John 1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
So being dead to sin doesn’t mean ceasing from sin
Does it mean Christians no longer enjoy sin?
Well, if that’s true, then none of us are Christians yet, because sinful behavior still has its pleasures and excitement attached to it
No, again its part of this wonderful symbolism of baptism. When we express our faith in Jesus it as though we are embraced into his death and resurrection and in the same sense he died to sin, we died to it with Him
But this process only applies to those who are baptised, and who wouldn’t once we understand the process
However, Until the resurrection, God in his wisdom, and to our chagrin, allows us to drag around this old mortal body with us even though the mind has been transformed
This old body is the problem as it has these old habits and patterns of behavior we wrestle with. It has not been transformed like our mind has
People who used to smoke know the feeling. Find themselves reaching for a cigarette even though they gave it up years ago
Hit your finger with a hammer and see if any old habits come flooding back
The body itself is not sinful, its our bodily desires we struggle with - our body wants pleasure, it wants recognition, it wants comfort, it wants to see beautiful things, we want to possess beautiful things
Why do you think God has allowed us to struggle against these old habits?
Wrestling against these old habits is part of the process of transforming us into the likeness of his Son
We become more like Jesus when we allow the God machine to lead us
It teaches us faith and reliance on him
It makes us dependant on him
How we respond also shows God how genuine our profession of faith is
Failure to overcome drives us back to God for forgiveness
The continuing battle of overcoming sin plays a very important part in this process of transformation
An instrument of unique beauty
"Stradivarius had a touch that no other violinmaker has ever been able to duplicate. Today, nearly three hundred years after his death, his violins remain without peer in tone, quality and playability. The few that exist are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of them are locked away in well-secured display cases in great museums, to be removed only on the rare occasion when they are lent for a special even to a select few virtuosos who demonstrate their rare worth in concert. . . .
"For centuries the Stradivarius violin was a mystery. Why would just one violin maker be able to do what no one else has done before or since, particularly since he was poor and could not afford the best woods of his day? Recent studies have begun to answer the question. The prevailing theory is
that Stradivarius took most of the wood from the polluted harbor where he lived. This wood had been soaked in the sludge of the harbor for years. It was the choice wood that had been used to make oars, boats, and other seaworthy instruments. Broken and abandoned in the harbor, the wood
had fallen victim to the decay-infested microbes in the pollutants.
"Studies of the wood used in Stradivarius violins show that these microbes ate the cells of the wood hollow, leaving only the infrastructure of the cells to remain. In the hand of Stradivarius, these thousands of hollow chambers in each piece of wood were transformed from worthless empty spaces
into resonating cathedrals of sound with every pull of the bow. Stradivarius rescued worthless scraps of wood, hopelessly damaged and drifting in a polluted environment, and used them to enrich our world with a beauty found nowhere else.
Let me read the conclusion of this story of the Stradivarius
"We are all, even the best of us, like the wood, broken, abandoned and lost in the sludge of sin. And, by an incomprehensible act of the great God of the universe, we have been rescued and transformed. The hand of the Master Redeemer has crafted us into an instrument of unique beauty. The hollow cells that sin carved within us now resonate life sounds that glorify Christ and we in turn fill our world with the unsurpassed priceless harmony of His presence in us and through us."
Isn’t that beautiful
Why would we ever want to go back to the sludge of sin when our lives can resonate with the priceless gift of the grace of God
We can only say with Paul, “God forbid”
