Freedom from the Power of Sin

Laine's girlfriend's mother, yeah, she's checking him out. I don't know what that had to do with it. In the first five chapters of the book of Romans, Paul is dealing with sin and death and the law and faith. And in those four issues, he's been discussing the reality that all of sin, and he talks about people outside the Jewish faith have sinned because they've rejected what knowledge they had of God. And the Jews had taken the law and had made the law a substitute for God and had violated placing God in charge of their lives. So both of them were in equal standing with God. Both had violated what God had asked of them. His authority is supreme authority. And then he describes God's remedy for this is that he's come to present himself so that they could find life and that faith is the key in finding life. And this faith and trust comes, he uses Abraham as a model for it. And faith is what brings life and salvation to people. So in this long discussion, he's ended up describing the reality that sin and the law are connected in a way. And then he has a, which would be a startling thing for the Jews to think. They thought of, would have thought of the law as being a gift of grace. But Paul ties it to sin because the sin that a person commits when they read the law, then they realize how bad their sin is. And he connects that to that, to it connects grace and life and sin and death. And he connects the law with sin. The last part of chapter five, he sort of gives us this picture of what he's talking about, summarizes what he's been saying. The law was added so that trespass might increase. And where sin increased, grace increased all the more. So that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign or rule through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Now this summary would have been shocking to Jews because he connects the law and sin and they would have seen this not as a connection. They would have seen grace and the law as a connection. So by introducing this sort of startling idea, he begins to pick up with it in chapter six. He begins with it. So what shall we say? It's kind of like we would say, let me explain what I mean here by connecting these things together. I want to now explore that. Now in the first five chapters, he's talked about how sinful man has the opportunity to come to God through faith and receive the grace of God and be acquitted for their sin. Now he's beginning to talk about, in these next few chapters, about what happens in the life of a saved person. If you have yielded your life to Christ, what is the role that the law plays now? What is the role that sin plays in your life? How do you deal with that part of living this life of trust in God? What shall we say then? How can I explain this? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means, in no way. Now Paul is dealing with the same idea that he sort of dealt with previously in chapter three, where he was talking about how sin connects to a person in verses seven and eight. Someone might argue, if my falsehood enhances God's truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner? He was talking about that the more a person had sinned, it didn't mean that you were hopeless with God, but the more the sin in your life, the more that God's forgiveness and grace would enable you to receive forgiveness and be acquitted. So why am I still condemned as a sinner? Why not say, as we are being slanderously reported as saying, and as some claim that we say, let us do evil that good may result. Their condemnation is deserved. Now he's finding himself facing the same kind of criticism. If you say that because of our sin being great, God's grace is even greater, then why would that be a problem? If he gives God an opportunity for more forgiveness, wouldn't that be good for God? If he gives God an opportunity to give more grace, wouldn't that be a benefit to God? Why would he condemn me for sinning when it's really an opportunity to demonstrate his salvation and his grace? Paul immediately insists that in no way is that what he's talking about. So he now wants to address the issue of sin in the life of a believer. We died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? So he introduces his concept of what takes place at salvation. At salvation, whenever you place your trust in Christ and you depend on him and he becomes now the center of your life, you've closed the door in your life to sin. You've died to it. The idea being that whenever you're living and you die, your human body is gone and your human life is over. So when you live in this old era, chapters 1 through 5, where he's talking about this old world where sin ruled and death reigned, when you lived in that world and your life was controlled by sin, death was the result of it. Now, that life is over and you're dead to that. In the same way that a person in this world comes to the place where they die, their human body is over. No longer do they do anything that is similar to the normal human life. They can't breathe, they can't eat, they can't walk, they can't do any of the normal human things. That door is closed to them. So he uses this image of death to describe what happens in the life of a person that's following Christ. Why should we go on sinning? Because you have died to sin. Your life is cut off from the controlling power of sin over your life. And if you've died to sin, then it is impossible for a person to go on living controlled by sin. Now, here's a very important issue to raise. You see a lot of people who come to church, make professions of faith, are baptized, but still continue a lifestyle of sin. He doesn't say that if you make a profession of faith and you are baptized, that you're dead to sin. He's talking about the act of faith. You can say that you trust God without having faith in Him. You can be baptized without having faith in Him. And with either of those, it does not automatically result in the fact that you're dead to the world of sin. What does make the difference is a sin-controlled life. That is, when you allow Satan to control your mind, your will, your behavior, when you do that, Satan is in control. Sin now has the upper hand. When you place your trust in Christ, you renounce Satan's control over your life. And in faith, you place your life in God's hand, a dramatic transformation takes place. Christ forgives you, and then His grace enters your life. His Holy Spirit enters your life, and now you are dead to sin, because you have in your life a new controlling power or force. Now, this is important for us to understand, because if a person is not dead to sin, all efforts of teaching them discipleship will falter. They all will. Because a person still controlled by the power of sin does not have the ability to reject sin's control over their behavior and lifestyle. I can remember many times whenever people would make professions of faith and be baptized, and I would say, OK, I'm really going to disciple these people. I remember one man, I was going to teach him how to be able to live with God, and gave him one of the books we call the Survival Kit, and said, OK, you read this, and then you answer these questions, and I'll sit down and talk with you. Well, the first week, he answered most of them, and I sat down with him, and we talked a little bit. Then he said, you know, I'm just so busy, I can't do this anymore. So I said, well, let's go ahead and try, get as many as you can. It was five days of things, and so next time we met, I think he got part of one done. And then I thought, I'm shrewd, you know, I can really work this out. I said, you know, let's just go ahead and keep meeting. And then I said, at the meetings, I will just go over the points in that week that he should have learned in our session, and I will teach him all the things he should have learned anyway. Well, you know, after one week of that, he didn't have time to meet with me anymore. There has to be inside of a person a hunger to grow to be like Christ. You can't create it. It only comes whenever Christ controls the heart and mind of a person. If the death to sin does not occur, then the discipling process will be frustrated all the way through. Because what you have is a person whose heart and mind and will is controlled by Satan, and no matter how much you tell them about what God can do, if His power is not in control of them, they are helpless. They are helpless to do it. And our temptation is especially big with young people growing up. You have a lot of kids in your youth group that have never committed their life to Christ, and you're teaching them all these things about how they should live, and how they should talk, and how they should dress, and all these things. Their lives and minds are controlled by sin. They listen to all that, but they don't have the ability to act on it. They may even think it's probably a good idea, but they don't have the inner strength, the spiritual strength that God gives to say no to those influences that are so powerful and ingrained in their life. Every one of us when we come to Christ have a lifelong, no matter what age you come to Him, we have a lifelong practice of sin controlling our mind, our will, and our emotions. We are trained by Satan to think in a certain way, and we may be negative as a person, we may be critical as a person, we may be in our mind just automatically think those ways because we've been trained by it. We've been trained in our will to want things that are contrary to what God wants. We've been trained in our emotions to act on our own feelings without asking God whether or not that's what we should say, or how we should react, or how we should feel. So those things are deeply ingrained in us. But we do have, if you place your faith and trust in Christ, a new one who's standing beside you who's willing and able to help. This is where discipleship is helpful, because you can say to a person who is caught up in their emotions, controlling them, well here's what you do, you look at this, see the first thing that happens is, if they're controlled by their emotions, as soon as they do it, the Holy Spirit makes them feel guilty. That's the difference you see between a person that's alive to sin and dead to it. The Holy Spirit is saying, well you shouldn't have spouted off like that. So they know that there's a problem. If they don't have that concern, then you have a hint that perhaps they're really not dead to sin. So once they have that issue, then you can say to them, now the fact you know that that's wrong behavior is God talking to you. He's saying to you, do not do this. Now whenever you do it, you should stop, and whatever you've done wrong, you should fix it. If you've said something nasty to a person, you go apologize and ask for forgiveness. It's going to be hard, but you have to do that. Then whenever they do that a while, they'll begin to figure out as they're going through this process, you know I'm getting ready to lose my temper again. And then they can start saying before they do it, I must get out of here. I must do something different because I can see that I'm being led down this road that I wish I would never go down. And so they recognize after it's over, and then they recognize in the middle of getting angry, and then they begin to recognize before it even happens that this is one of those situations I just better not get in. It's the way God helps us with some of these deeply rooted issues. But the key is that they're dead to sin. It no longer has to control them because Christ is there to give them what they did not have before. So the key ingredient he's talking about is everything he's mentioned in chapters 1 through 5, particularly how faith and trust in God is critical for this life changing transformation. We have died to sin. And if we've died to sin, is there any way in the world that we can go on living in it? He's using normal logic. If you say this person is dead, is there any way in the world they can get up and have breakfast with you tomorrow? No, because their life is past living this human condition. Now we have a person who's been in control of sin. Sin's been controlling their life, and they're now dead to sin. Is there any way that they can continue to be controlled by sin? Not if Christ is there. That is not a possibility for them because the Holy Spirit is working to alert them to that problem. He doesn't mean that a person automatically becomes free of sin. But the possibility of sin controlling their future is not there. Now he's going to talk about all the way through this about how all of this works and what God does to help it take place. Verse 3, Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Now the word that's used here for baptism is really a word that means to be immersed. The Greek word for baptized means to be immersed. And that's critical to understanding this passage. Because here he talks about death, and now he's talking about baptism and as a burial. So that he's attaching the fact that you are dead to sin to the fact that you've been buried. The symbolic burying by baptism, by dipping in the water, putting you under the water. The word baptism in the Bible is from a Greek word. It means to immerse or to dip or to plunge. And it's transliterated in our scriptures rather than translated. Most of the words in the Bible are translated. But when the Bible, King James Version of the Bible was translated, they came to this word baptism. And by this time, the Anglican Church no longer immersed. The Catholic Church was immersing in the beginning, but they no longer immersed. So there was an agreement on the part of the translators of the scriptures that they would not translate this word. Because if they wrote in the Bible that a person was supposed to be immersed, then they would have all these people who were in the church and never been immersed who would be outraged at what they were saying. So they transliterated the word and created a new word. The word in Greek, baptizo, means I immerse. I take my donut and stick it in my coffee. And I pull it out. And the Greek would say, I baptize my donut. And now, you see, they take that word and they transliterate it and create a new English word by taking the Greek pi and making it a B beta and making it into the English B, the Greek alpha into the English A, the Greek pi into the English P, so that each word was changed from the letters in the Greek to the letters in the English. Now, when they do that, they've created a brand new word with no definition. And if you create a new word that's never been in the dictionary before, you have the perfect right to give it your own definition. So what they did was created this new English word and they gave it the definition of the right of initiation into the church. So your right for initiation into the church now can be done any way you want. You can pour, you can sprinkle, you can immerse, you can do whatever you want, and still everybody call it the same thing. But when the people who read this in the Greek language, they understood it to mean simply to dip. So if you were then buried with Christ, because you're now dead, so if you're buried with Christ, you were buried into his death. That makes sense. It connects death with burial. So he's saying that the process of immersion for them would have identified the fact that they had given their life to God and their old sin-controlled life was now completely gone, like a human being who was buried in the ground would be gone. So he uses this symbolism of the burial of a person in water to be similar to what was the death of Christ. Now, if you remember what happened to Christ, killed on the cross, buried in the tomb, absolutely dead. His old life was completely gone. Never again was he to walk on the earth as he did before. Now, if we go back a minute to talk about what he's getting at in the past. This life of faith or trust in which a person is declared innocent by God of all their sin and declared forgiven takes place because of the act of faith. This act of faith then makes us then new people in Christ and ends the old life and begins the new era. So we no longer then live in chapters one through five of Romans. We are now living in a new era. Like Christ living on earth, his day from his birth to his death was one significant part of his life. Everything on earth. But when he was resurrected, his whole future life was entirely different. The symbolism for us is the same. You've lived this life controlled by sin. It can dominate your mind, your will, your emotions. Now you've trusted your life to Christ. He closes that era of your life, that epoch of your life. And he opens up a new one. So like he was buried in the ground and raised up a whole different person, so you are buried and raised up a whole new and different person. Don't you know that we who were buried into Christ Jesus were buried into his death. So there's two burials here. Burying into Christ Jesus, which is this act of faith that we give ourselves, that we trust in him. And this act of being buried in his death, the symbolism of this new transformation of our life. The old world has passed, a sin controlled life. So he says you can't go on sinning so that grace may increase because you are dead to sin and you've been buried away from sin and you're buried with his death. So his death to this world is a symbol of the death in your own life to this control of sin. Verse four says we were therefore buried with him through baptism. He emphasizes this again. We are buried with him through this immersion or burial 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. He describes here the reason that he says you can't be controlled by sin anymore. The old life is finished for us and this new life has been started. As we were buried or immersed in the ground, so when we did this immersion in water into his death, this symbolizes this act of transformation for us. So that just as Christ was raised from the human death by God's glory, and here's the important ingredient. He's talked about the law in the past and how obedience to the law does not make you able to resist sin. All the law did was to make you more aware of how guilty you are of violating God's instructions. He doesn't say that by your human effort you'll be able to resist sin. It's one of the great difficulties that people have trying to allow themselves to be transformed or changed. You may have something in your life, a habitual problem that you've had for a long, long time. Part of your nature, your personality, your character. And when you come to Christ, he may just take that away like that. But sometimes there are parts of our lives that don't change in the same way. We still have those qualities about us. They hang on us. We look at those parts of our lives and we wish that they were finished. And sometimes we sit down and say, I am going to change this. A person in this new life with God is no more able to transform their character than they were before Christ came into their life. What he's talking about here is, as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father or the greatness of the Father, this is the key ingredient. Jesus was not in the tomb saying, I am going to get out of here. He was dead. It was the act of the Father that brought this resurrection about. It is the power of God that sets us free from the hold that sin has over us. And what difference does it make that we're dead to sin? That lets us know the guarantee that in the end, sin will never win for us. That's what gives us hope. However discouraging it is for you to do better and still be caught in that same web of sin. Why do I keep doing this? I hear people say, why can I not get rid of this out of my life? Well, if you genuinely died to sin, it is the process of God changing your nature and character that's at work. God has to do it. Now, he's going to talk about this as he goes on through, but what's important here to understand is that the process of your life being changed, and this is sometimes called sanctification, the doctrine of sanctification, how God makes you, that word means to make you holy or to be a saint. Once you are committed to Christ and you surrender to him, he makes you his child and then he develops in your life this quality of holiness. And it is the work of God to change your nature and your character. He won't do it without your cooperation and you can't do it without his. But what he lets us know is that if we've really genuinely surrendered our life to God, and that means you say to God, I'm willing to do whatever you want, in any way you want it, a complete surrender to his authority, then you're dead to the hold of sin over your life. But it doesn't mean that you're automatically where you're going to be. Because what you're dependent on is, you're dependent on the power of the Father, or here he calls it the glory of the Father, to create this new life in you. We were therefore buried with him through this immersion into death. In order that, or so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new kind of life. When Jesus was raised from the dead, he was no longer the man that he was before. They could recognize him. He had some characteristics they could see. But he was entirely different. The resurrected body and the resurrected life is different. So what Paul is saying is, you can't go on sinning because something has happened inside you that's changed you. You no longer submit to sin. In fact, you will no longer like it. You will find it uncomfortable to continue in sin because you know it doesn't fit you now. It is no longer you. I am not that person anymore. But the work of it is not completely done. For now, it is the power of God that has to work in you, as the power of God worked in the dead body of Jesus, to raise him up to the new life that he was going to have. God plans for every one of us to be transformed from who we were to be more and more like Christ. He's going to talk about that later on, how this process works. But the person who comes to know and surrenders their life to Christ, God's plan for them is that they will become more and more shaped like Christ himself. That process is guaranteed for us because sin no longer determines our future. See, this is really such an important thing for us. Because in our world, people think your human past will determine the kind of person you're going to be in the future. And if you don't yield your life to Christ, it is true that's what will happen to you. You'll be the chip off the old block. But you see, when you yield your life to Christ, suddenly everything changes. Now, Christ is in control of your life. The habits and patterns of your parents and your forefathers and the people around you will still be there as an influence. But now the primary drive in your life is the Holy Spirit, and he is shaping you to be more like Christ. So your future is to be like Christ, and the past life that you've had, family, friends, and whoever it is, while they will tempt you and sometimes distract you and sometimes catch hold of you, they are always, from now on, temporary. For your real future is what God is like in Christ. And the guarantee that you're going to have it is the guarantee that comes with the power of God. We live in a world where people say about folks, you know, leopards don't change their spots. That's true. But leopards don't die to sin either. Neither do they have the power of God trying to change their spots. The only thing that stands between us and this transforming power is one, the lack of genuine faith and trust to end the old life, and our dependence on the presence of the Spirit and the power of God to change us, yielding to God. When those two things are there, we will be changed. And if they're not, there's not a chance in the world that transformation will occur. So he said already, the old life is over, it's through. You can be guaranteed of it because of what God has done. And the future is open. And now he's going to start talking about how God changes us. What is a process he uses to make this transformation occur? How do we make disciples? That's his talk. Let's pray. Father, we're all caught in this world surrounded by sinful people, heavily influenced by the world around us. We have no hope of escaping this apart from you. Help us all to search our own hearts to see if our life is really surrendered to your authority, or if we're playing with you. If, Father, in my life or any of our lives, we really have not made this complete surrender, submission to you, we beg you to tell us. And Father, as we begin to live this life, dead to sin, we trust that your Holy Spirit would alert us to the hole that sin has in us, that we might denounce it and surrender our lives daily to you. Our future is dependent on your marvelous, glorious power. We look forward to what you're going to do in our lives. Amen.