The Gospel Of Christ - A New Existence

Romans 6 and the Reading of God’s Word

And please now remain standing for the reading of God's Word, which will be in chapter 6 of Romans. And I'll read verses 1 -14. The preaching will be verses 5 -7, but the reading, Romans 6, 1 -14. What shall we say then?

Are we to continue in sin that grace may bound? By no means. 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. 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.

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 to sin once for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God.

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 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. Please be seated. Let's pray and ask God to bless the preaching and hearing of His Word, Heavenly Father. Again, we are assembled before You to know what the Holy Spirit would have us to understand from this Scripture.

I pray for clarity and power in His proclamation, Father, as I look to Your Word, as I trust You, Jesus Christ, to empower such as myself, as You did this morning for Conley, to proclaim Your Word boldly, accurately, and clearly.

And, Father God, may it be heard that same way. May You open hearts and ears to hear this Word that I'm about to proclaim, Father. It is Your Word, the eternal Holy Word of our Holy God. And we ask all these things in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen. So this series has been the Gospel of Christ and it's personally yours. Never forget during this short series, which will be three or four more at most, where we started. Everybody should know this.

We started in Galatians, about the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. And I trust that you're taking my weekly encouragement to you to put your name in there, as I believe the Apostle Paul did.

The Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me, and put your name after me. And actually say it. I'm not saying there's extra power in the Word, nothing like that. But there is a reality to the personal attachment that we have with Jesus Christ that is amplified when we actually put our name in there.

No extra power. The power is from God. As Carly said this morning, faith is faith. And it's faith in the one who gives the faith, not ourselves. But for our own benefit. Put your name in there. This afternoon, we look at Romans 6, 5 -11 as we work our way through there.

A New Existence in Christ

And I'm speaking this afternoon of a new existence. By death of the old existence, by death of the old man, the old person, all that we were, gone. You know, in Gladiator, the Emperor Commodus says to his nemesis Maximus at one point, he comes out into the Colosseum grounds there after Maximus won that terrible battle that was a setup to have killed him.

And Commodus says to him, what am I to do with you? You simply won't die. Now, of course, Commodus was the bad guy and Maximus the good guy in that movie. But I'm going to reverse those for this illustration.

Because as Maximus not only did not die, but he only grew stronger, he became more and more of a problem for the Emperor. I want us to think that way about sin in our life. That it simply won't die. It's like some science fiction substance that the more you detest it, it picks up more energy and power and grows and seems to be harder and harder to overcome.

Do you ever feel that way? Like no matter what I do, I keep stumbling. Maybe not even in the same sin, what the Puritans call the besetting sin. Maybe just always stumbling in different directions. No matter what I do, this thing keeps growing.

What am I to do with you? You just won't go away. You think you have it licked, and back it comes like Maximus, alive and well after each plot's failure. And in fact, you know, in the next chapter of Romans, which we're not going to get to, we're going to stop at the end of the verse that I read this afternoon, but sin is actually personified.

Sin is something that takes advantage of you. Sin is something that comes upon you and takes advantage of your weakness at a certain point or arouses things within you. It's like a living creature. It's pictured as an entity, seizing opportunity, forcing things upon you as a hapless sinner struggling with your own resources against the nemesis that, so long as it lives, seems to always hold the upper hand.

Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever feel like I just need to get over that line? I just need to get that one more step, and I think I can get some momentum going against sin in general or sin in particular?

What do we need? If you ever feel that way, what do we need? What we need is what I think we have here in Romans 6, 5 through 7, a definitive break. A line in the sand, if you will. A definitive break no less final than what Commodus desired for Maximus.

Death. In last week's message on verses 1 through 4, what do we proclaim? That you have died to sin. If you're in Christ Jesus, you have died to sin. Now in verses 5 through 11, this afternoon, just 5 through 7, we continue that line of reasoning, but we have this added resource against sin.

Union with Christ. You have union with Christ. If we have been united with him in a death like his, you have union with Christ. A new existence. You see, at one time, you were in Adam. But now by faith, a new existence, which is union with Christ.

In Adam, we had sin and condemnation. In Christ, what do we have? Righteousness and pardon. In Adam, the outer self was wasting away, but united with Jesus, we are renewed day by day. In our sin, we wallowed in darkness.

In righteousness, we are bathed in the light that comes from the life of him who is the light of the world. And that's Christ Jesus. In Adam, we look upon things that others have and we covet them. And we say, why don't I deserve that?

In Christ, we look upon the cross and we say, look what I deserved. In Adam, we say, I'm going to get that thing that I covet, that I want. And in Christ, we give glory to God the Father, that Christ Jesus took what we deserve.

He who did not deserve. He who knew no sin. God made to be sin for me, for you. It's a definitive break. It's a new existence. It's that line in the sand, and it comes from what we have here in these three verses we're going to preach this afternoon.

Union with Christ. You are organically bound to Christ Jesus in his death. I hope all of you have been in Sunday school, hearing Pastor Conley teach about how marriage is organically linked to salvation.

And what he meant by that, and I asked him so I could quote him correctly here, it means that there's a true connection between the union between Christ and the church and human marriage. It's not something made up.

It's not what he called an artifice of human invention. It's not just a clever way of understanding things. It's a true organic link between that marriage that God gave us and salvation. And so we have the same idea here in Romans 6, 5.

Union with Christ and the Meaning of Being United

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. This word for united is only used three times in the whole Bible. Interestingly, twice in the Old Testament and once here in the New Testament and obviously only by Paul here in Romans 6, 5.

It's a really rich word. It's only used once. We can't flesh it out and get a lot of applications to it because we don't have all the nuances of its many uses. But the word itself does mean to unite something together like a wound.

Back in the day when it was first extant, that word, a wound would be slashed from a sword. You would want to bind it together, stitch it together. Hippocrates, he of the Hippocratic oath, he used the word to describe the process of fusing a broken bone back together.

Interestingly, and just as a side note and you get this for free and we'll go back to the message. Hippocrates, he of the Hippocratic oath, that oath included at one time, though not from him directly, these words.

Moreover, I will give no sort of medicine to any pregnant woman with a view to destroy the child. This is from several centuries ago. Another translation has it this way. I will never harm my suffering friend because life is sacred from the tender fruit that he once was in his mother's womb to the first sigh he gave out between her legs when he opened his eyes to the world.

Like I said, that's for free. I just picked it up. I was looking up a little bit about Hippocrates for this message. I guess a lot of med schools, the graduates have their fingers both crossed. The King James Version, if you're looking at that, it gets this word wrong by saying we're planted together.

It uses it in an agricultural way, but it's not agricultural. It's a biological term. Fusing bones together is the way Hippocrates first used it. I'm not sure this was Paul's intent. The meaning of this word, I mean, the fusing a bone together is just rich with meaning.

I mean, it's just a playground for an active-minded preacher, is it not? Here's what I came up with. It does justify my earlier word that it's an organic union you have with Christ Jesus. This definitive break you need from that old person you were before you met Christ, or he met you, and who you are now by the working of his Holy Spirit.

If anyone is in Christ Jesus, his new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Not just united with Christ because we believe, but fused into his very body. Ephesians 5 .23, Colossians 1 .18, Colossians 1 .24, the church.

You are the very body of Christ. And that's supported by this word that's used just this one time. Fusing bone together. A broken bone and putting it back to work and fusing it together in its organic connection.

And that's the word Paul uses to tell us where we are united with Christ. Fused together into him. Where does an imaginative preacher go with that? Well, the church is Jesus' bride. I mean, can you not hear him say, if we just tease out this word a little bit, when he looks upon the church, he says, now this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

This is she for whom I died and bled, and she for whom I've waited until the Father sent me to collect her. The bride. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This is how we're united with him. You're organically bound to Jesus Christ and his death, and that sounds a little odd, because organic sounds like a word of life, right?

When things are organic, they bring life, they bring health, they bring goodness. The actual wording uses a perfect verb when it says we've been united. Not that it's the most perfect verb Paul could have used.

A perfect in the Greek is a verb which has an action which begins at a definitive point of time, and that action continues to act upon its subject as long as the condition which it describes in the subject exists.

Okay? Perfect verb, united with Christ, an action which begins at a point in time. Now we could take this way, way, way back. Ephesians 1 -4 says you were chosen in him by the Father, chosen to be in Christ Jesus before the foundation of the world.

We could also take it to be, I think this would be more practical for us, that time when the Holy Spirit came upon you and applied the salvation of Christ to you. At that point of time, you become bound to Jesus' death.

That's when it becomes a reality. And from then until the condition that it describes stops being extant, you are organically bound to Christ Jesus. It's going to continue. So what's the condition that it's going to continue?

By this perfect verb of being fused together with Christ, united with him, organically bound to him? Well, we can say that God's choosing of you, like I said, became reality when the Holy Spirit changed your heart, opened your eyes and gave you faith to repent and believe.

That's Ephesians 1 -13 and 14. That's the Holy Spirit's work. So the condition described, this organic union with Christ in his death, will be true as long as that condition remains. So what's the condition?

How long will you be fused with Christ in this organic way? The second half of verse 5 tells us, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. So simply put, until the resurrection, until Christ returns, we are united with him organically fused together like a bone mended back together.

And while we live here in the flesh by faith, we are organically bound, we're united with Christ in his death. You proclaim his death until he comes, as we will in roughly an hour here. You're organically bound to that death.

It wasn't just a death he died because he was punished or he grew old, the death he died for us. You're organically bound to that. So this is that distinct change. This is that line in the sand. This is that new beginning that we need.

This is what we need to believe. It's sometimes hard when we look ourselves in the mirror and look at the past day and say, I said this, I did that, I thought this other thing. How can I be a new creation in Christ?

I'll give you one practical tip. That practical tip is to believe that you are fused together with Christ. You're organically linked to him as a member of his body. Believe that God really has done this work in you, that you can step over that line in the sand.

You can be what God has made you. One man wrote here, what the believer has been fused slash knit together with is the reality of Christ's epoch-ending, sins-dominion-breaking death. Did you hear that?

You're fused together with him, you're knit together him with the reality, the truth, the actual occurrence of Jesus Christ's epoch-ending, sins-dominion-breaking death, and that's his cross. That's where he paid the price for your sin.

That's when he was buried because he died truly on the cross. He was resurrected. And when he returned to his father, he sent his Holy Spirit. That's the end of the old epoch, the beginning of the new.

And sins-dominion has been broken because of his death. We say we've been united with him in his death like his. The New English translation gets a little better when it says in the likeness of his death, in the likeness of his resurrection, not his actual, literal death, of course, because no one lived at that time, and if we had, we didn't go to the cross with him.

People die together all the time, don't they? I mean, a war, a bomb hits a single place, and everybody within the blast area will die, and they die together, they die with each other. Think of the people who did not survive the Titanic and things like that.

But this particular with, where you're bound with Christ, means something different. It means that as God the Father put us in him, that he represented us. We're in him by God's predestined power in order that we might receive the benefits of his death, everything that Jesus achieved on the cross.

So how then, we might ask, is our death, one out of one will die, as they say. How is ours like Jesus? How can our death be in the likeness of his? Well, his death was like ours, or ours was like his, because for one thing, it was final.

I mean, that last breath is irrevocable, it's final, it's awesome. I don't mean that in the way kids use that word today. I mean, truly astounding and awesome. Nothing you can do about it. It's over. It was final.

His death was like ours, or ours was like his, in that it was real. See, Jesus, the real man, who was really God, and really man, he really died. There are few things that more closely identify Jesus as true man than this, that he died.

He lived as man in perfect harmony with God's law. He never sinned. He was tempted as we are, yet he was without sin. And he, all God, all man, made a perfect, once for all, as the apostle says, once for all sacrifice of himself for our sins.

That is, he died. He died. I don't know how much more closely the man who became, the God who became man, excuse me, God who became man could identify with the man he became. The wages of sin is death.

Jesus died to sin. You know, Paul writes in Galatians 5, 1,. For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. This was God's purpose, to set his people free, to set you free.

To set you free, to make you something else, like from Egypt, that great exodus, that great first picture of the salvation that Jesus Christ would work on the cross. Slaves, nation. Subservient, priests of God.

A disorganized rabble, a nation before God. They were not what they were. They crossed a line. At one point, I believe Israel really believed that they were something different. And that was his purpose, to set his people free from desperate lives that wander in dry land, just hoping to find a strand of purpose.

Freedom from Sin’s Slavery and Dominion

We know that the 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. Mark that word carefully. No longer enslaved to sin.

For one who has died to sin, excuse me, for one who has died has been set free from sin, brethren. This is the message. You're free. You're free from sin. Does that mean you won't sin? No, clearly not.

Too many warnings in the Bible to be wary of the sins that so easily encroach upon us. As the Apostle Peter would say, that our adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

Which means tempt you with sin and actually draw you into that sin, if you would allow it. Ephesians 6, with the armor of God, warns us that sin is a daily, constant reality. And yet, clearly, profoundly, often, the Apostle Paul says just what we have here.

For one who has died, you died to sin. You died with Christ. You died, has been set free from sin. You're free from the terror of the punishment for sin, that was born by Christ Jesus. You're free from the terror of not being able to approach a holy God, so that an animal or a person, any beast even touches the mountain, while God was giving the law to Moses, it must die.

You're free from that fear. Because of Christ Jesus. Because of Him. We boldly approach the throne of grace, and there find help in our time of need. There's a lot of the same thought as we had in verse 5.

United with Christ as He bore our names, as He bore your name with Him in death, and to the cross where He bore our sins, it was so that we'd receive these benefits that He won for His people. So, brothers and sisters, why do we get sin?

Why so many guardrails given to us in the New Testament? The one I always go back to, 1 John 1, 9. If we confess our sins, assuming we always have sins to confess, if we confess our sins, we do always have sins to confess, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

But the question is, if we've died with Christ, we've died to sin, we've been set free from the slavery of sin, all these verses, we could go on and on, just quoting verses like this. They would all say the same thing.

Why do we get sin? You died to sin, you were crucified with our Lord, so that sin would be nothing. You know, it makes me think of Solomon's day, when gold was so common that pure silver was despised.

You know, we have the pure gold of the gospel of Christ, and we go for this common stuff. And in Solomon's day, the silver, they wouldn't even want to touch it. They said, we don't even want silver, we've got gold.

And what are we doing playing around with things of the world? And those temptations, they grab us and pull us in like the vortex in a whirlpool. What are we doing with that? We've got the purest gold of not just the gospel, not just Christ Jesus who died for me, but faith to really believe that, faith to know that you've been made new.

Do you need that line in the sand? Do you need that point where you say, I really can not sin? I really can resist this temptation? Not because I have any strength, not because I have any power, but because God, His purpose in sending His Son, His purpose in His Son dying, His purpose in Jesus Christ, His beloved Son's death, was so that you and I would be set free from the slavery to sin.

Why do we return again and again, preferring its cruel last to Jesus' sweet liberty? You know, I've read that after the Civil War, many of the freed slaves just had no idea what to do. They didn't know what freedom was.

They had lived so long one way, they couldn't envision a life lived differently. I think we're like that. So afraid to let go of the old, because we can't quite believe that the new is true. Like Psalm 126, when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed, they just couldn't believe it.

Will God, by His Spirit, really give me the power to overcome this sin? Even just this one time, let me answer. You are united in Christ's death. You are bound to Him when He, and because of Him, you died to sin.

He died to sin, and because of Him, you died to sin. Its dominion, its mastery, sin's control and sheer dominance over you has come to a definitive end. Now next week, we're going to pick this up again.

That'll be in verse 9 for next week's preaching. And you might say to me, well, but Adam, for example, had everything. He had intimacy with God. He had a cooperative earth. He had a wife who was made for him by the Creator Himself, and he sinned.

So what's to stop me? And I answer, freedom. By your death to sin with Christ, you've been set free from sin. You no longer have to follow its mastery. It's hard to let go of that old man. And sometimes the reason it's hard to let go of him or her is because I just can't believe that the new one is real.

It's just too amazing a story. But it's not a story. It's not a story. It's not a fable. Christ Jesus really did die. And when He died and carried you in Him, and you have been placed there by the Father, and you believe in that because He gave you faith to believe that, you died with Him.

When you died, you were resurrected to something new. Not the ultimate final resurrection when Jesus returns, but in Ephesians 2 it says you've been raised with Christ. You've been resurrected already.

You've been seated with Christ in the heavenlies. We're not. We're here. I'm standing here. You're sitting there. But the promise is so sure, and the foretaste is so powerful that Paul can write of it in Ephesians as if it's already happened.

The body of sin has been brought to nothing like the Egyptians when the sea crashed in on them, that old man who was corrupt through deceitful desires, and you need to put on the new man, the one who's created by God in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Believe, brethren. Believe that God really did remake you and really united you into Christ's death. Believe that the resurrection, verse 5, one day will really happen, and believe that in the meantime, your spirit now remade in the very likeness of God, the image of God restored through Christ Jesus our Lord, is reality now, that you are a living foretaste of what is yet to come.

Augustine on the Buried Former Sins and the Believer’s Responsibility

Augustine wrote here, for that our former sins were buried, came of his gift, but the remaining dead to sin after baptism must be the work of our own earnestness, however much we find God here also giving us large help.

That's not a perfect statement theologically, but it's a really good one. And it does say that God gives us large help, and he also says rightly, it's your responsibility and mine to overcome the sin.

It's your responsibility and mine. Your responsibility and mine to fall back on God when temptations arise. Do you ever look at your sin, and you think something like, what am I to do with you? You simply won't die.

Well, you cannot kill it. Try and try, and you'll only be frustrated like Commodus in the movie, and here's what you can do. Believe that with Jesus you died to sin. Trust that the old self was crucified with him.

Go forth day by day and moment by moment in the freedom he won and in the power of the Holy Spirit, and let that be our guide, and let that be how we step into and believe that that new man really was made for us.

Amen.