What Kind Of Life Support Are You On

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.