Romans 6:11-14

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church iconCoram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

2 views

0 comments

00:03
We are in Romans chapter 6 again, verses 11 -14, starting in verse 11.
00:21
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.
00:28
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions.
00:34
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.
00:51
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace.
01:00
Regarding verse 11, so you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God, and where once we were under the auspices of sin as our master, we are now dead to it, and we must consider ourselves as such.
01:24
We must think of ourselves as alive to God, as the scripture says. We must live and conduct ourselves in that way.
01:35
We're no longer slaves to sin. We no longer must obey it.
01:45
When we sinned before, we did it without hesitation. We just did what we wanted, when we wanted, and then consider the consequences of it.
01:57
Whenever we talked or told a story with friends or co -workers, lies flew out of our mouth just to keep a consistent story or to embellish one to make us look better.
02:08
But now, when we are tempted by sin, we recognize it.
02:15
We can see it. We can see the thing that we are about to do.
02:21
We can see that it's sinful, and we can find that way out that God provides for us.
02:30
1 Corinthians 10 .13 says, No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.
02:39
You have not faced any sin in your life, nor will you face any sin in your life that someone else has not already experienced.
02:52
God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. But with the temptation, he will also provide a way of escape that you may be able to endure it.
03:05
As it says in one of the commentaries that I read in preparation for this, the devil made me do it is not an excuse for a
03:12
Christian. For an unbeliever, but not a Christian.
03:20
Sin no longer controls us, but it wants to.
03:27
So every time we find ourselves in temptation, we must consider ourselves dead to it.
03:36
But consider yourselves alive to God in Christ. We are now enabled to live in such a way that is glorifying to God, where we were not before.
03:50
We should live in such a way. He, in his grace and mercy, has saved us from our slavery to sin and has given us the ability to see and to combat the master that once owned us.
04:11
He gives us value and love and faith. He enables us to live in a way that we can be thankful and live in a way that we can show our thankfulness to him.
04:26
And though our spirits have been made new, our flesh is still in process. But how does one live to God, as the verse says?
04:39
But live to God. A few questions.
04:45
How do you conduct yourself in your life? When you work, when you go to work, when you work, do you work to get the job done, or do you work to do the best job you can for Christ's sake?
05:03
Let's look further at the text. Verse 12 says, Before God's grace saved us from our natural state and his wrath upon us, we did not have the ability to come to him on our own.
05:24
Scripture makes this very clear. A few examples. Ephesians 2, 1 through 3.
05:32
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out our desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
06:01
Colossians 2, verse 13. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,
06:12
God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.
06:20
Hopefully you remember Romans 3. It's been a while. Verses 9 and 10.
06:26
What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all.
06:32
For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written,
06:40
None is righteous, no, not one. John 6, verse 44 and 45.
06:54
Jesus answered them, Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the
07:00
Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
07:06
It is written in the prophets. And they will all be taught by God.
07:13
Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. So now that we've established in Scripture the inability of natural man to even take a single step toward godliness, this being the old man that Paul talked about last week in verse 6.
07:37
That part of us that was ruled by sin is now ruined. It was crucified with Christ.
07:49
But we're still linked to that old dead self because we still have that fight that we struggle with every day.
07:58
That body of sin that Paul describes, it no longer has control or authority over us as it once did.
08:05
However, it does continue to hold on. And not unlike a corpse that is tethered to us that we drag around.
08:20
And we will drag that around until the day that we are glorified.
08:29
But as I said, it no longer has authority over us now that we have been spiritually reborn and our flesh, which includes the mind, is being sanctified.
08:40
We now have the ability to fight it. Not only that, but we desire the things of God, which we did not before.
08:52
We now want to obey. The text for this,
08:59
Ephesians 6, 5 -6, you were bought for the price. Do not become bond servants of men.
09:14
Oh, I'm sorry. It was 1 Corinthians 7, 23. Ephesians 6, 5 -6 says,
09:22
Bond servants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart as you would
09:28
Christ. Not by the way of eye of service as people pleasers, but as bond servants of Christ.
09:35
Doing the will of God from the heart. Now one thing
09:46
I will point out is the lack of the notion of free will in those verses.
10:00
Volition is in Scripture. The option of choice, right?
10:07
But free will, no. R .C. Sproul had this to say about this verse.
10:15
We have to be very careful when we read the New Testament to try to read it with virgin ears.
10:22
We do not want to bring to the text all the baggage of the secular culture around us.
10:31
One of the most destructive ideas we tend to bring is the pagan notion of free will, which holds that every time we have a moral option before us, we have the power to say yes or no.
10:47
That the will is basically in a state of indifference. That idea is as American as apple pie and Chevrolet and baseball, and it is also as heretical as it can be.
11:05
It is not just unbiblical. It is anti -biblical. The notion of freedom, according to will, cannot be found anywhere in sacred
11:18
Scripture. Our will is no more free now than it was before.
11:23
The difference is where our desire was for sin before.
11:31
Now our desire is for Christ. It will continue to be for Him more and more.
11:41
It will grow as the process of sanctification continues until we are called home and given our glorified bodies.
11:49
Once we understand that, we can begin to see the truth as Scripture says it.
11:59
Before we had a terrible master called sin, but now we have a new master,
12:05
Christ, who gave His life for us. So why would you, as Paul says, let the old master, sin, reign over you?
12:16
Sin has no more authority over you than does a tree or a rock. Not anymore.
12:24
You belong to Christ. So view yourself as such and conduct yourself accordingly.
12:36
So 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 of righteousness.
12:55
So now in verse 13, we're getting more specific. We're literally talking about body parts now, the members of our body, hands, feet, eyes, tongues, our minds.
13:16
Now that we are free from that natural state of sin, we can begin to fight the temptation of sin with our whole selves, with our mouths.
13:31
We blaspheme and we praise. James has a lot to say about the tongue, but in James 3, verse 10, he says,
13:43
From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. He goes on to say that if you can tame the tongue, you can tame everything else.
13:59
But regarding our mouths, do we use our mouths or our tongues to glorify God, to talk about Him, to share the gospel, or do we use them to talk about things that turn others away from the gospel?
14:15
We profess Christ to our peers, but does our speech reflect that?
14:24
A question we should regularly ask ourselves is, is what
14:31
I'm saying edifying? Is it glorifying to God?
14:38
Is it edifying to others? Is it glorifying to God? If I'm at work and I constantly profess
14:47
Christ, and I go off and I talk about things that I ought not to talk about, vulgar movies or other things with vulgar language that does not reflect what
15:03
I'm saying, I believe, about Christ, it puts reproach upon the cross.
15:14
Regarding our feet, we can ask very easily, do we walk in righteousness and obey
15:22
God, obey the God that saved us, or do we let our feet be carried along by sin like we did before?
15:32
But really, what are we doing with them? How are they being used as actual tools to glorify
15:40
God? Walking over to the table where our
15:47
Bible is laying, pick it up and read. Walking into movie theater so that we can facilitate our eyes to watch something that we ought not watch.
16:07
Speaking of our eyes, what do we use them for? Watching worldly movies that only try to convince us that the world is right rather than God.
16:22
Looking lustfully at women or men, either on a screen or in person, or to look at the wonderful words that God has given us, the word that He has sustained for thousands of years.
16:52
Do we use our eyes to look at the horrendous amount of sin that the world says is normal, or do we use them to look at the wondrous creation of God?
17:10
How do we use our ears? Do you use them to listen to music or to orations?
17:22
Threw me off there. They glorify God, or do you use them to listen to worldly music, worldly wisdom, or political pundits that try to tell you how to solve problems that we all know can be solved with the gospel?
17:44
May God forbid that you use your ears to listen to a heretical teaching that only serves to make you feel better in the sin in which you walk.
17:58
All these things, all of them, bring us to our minds.
18:06
This is where the temptation of sin starts, in the mind.
18:13
We have talked before about what we fill our minds with, but what about the battle that takes place there?
18:30
Christ elevated several sins to matters of thought rather than flesh. Adultery is committed in the mind.
18:42
Murder is committed in the mind before it ever reaches your hands or your feet.
18:58
The mind is the place where this battle is fought, first and foremost. 2
19:04
Corinthians 10, verses 4 -6 says,
19:09
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
19:20
Verse 5, We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey
19:30
Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete.
19:40
Now, while I could get off on a tangent about spiritual warfare and how these verses show that it is a matter of truth versus falsehood rather than one of fictional power that we do not have to control fictional demons that do not exist that control geographic territories, rather than that,
20:06
I'll just point you to a book or a series that Jim Osmond put on called
20:14
Spiritual Warfare. Some of us have watched it before. Spiritual Warfare, Truth or Territory.
20:22
Take Every Thought Captive to Obey Christ. Philippians 4, verse 8,
20:29
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
20:47
We must fill our minds with these things and give no room for ungodly thoughts.
21:00
We have to not let them creep in. We must renew our minds constantly.
21:06
If I spend a day listening to sermons, to hymns, to scripture being exegeted properly, what time do
21:24
I have to listen to secular music which talks about vulgar things, talks about sin and promotes sin?
21:33
I don't. It is more glorifying to God that I do the first thing rather than the second.
21:43
And in doing that first thing, I am less likely, less likely to be tempted by sin.
21:52
I'm not saying that you won't be, but it is less likely. And answer me this.
22:03
What is more useful, a sharp knife or a dull one? A well -honed tool or a rusted one?
22:20
Filling your mind with daily reading of scripture? Memorization of holy text?
22:29
Theology and hymns and apologetics creates and sharpens your mind into a useful, godly instrument.
22:39
That is the outworking of a saved soul. That is what we now want.
22:47
We want to grow in godliness. When we do these things, every other part, every other member of the body will also follow.
23:06
Rather than present ourselves to sin, Paul says, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.
23:16
Your members to God as instruments for righteousness. We must come before God and give ourselves, as it says in Romans 12, which we will get to in the far -flung future.
23:33
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.
23:48
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
24:07
God's will for this world, for His church, for us individually, is number one, unshakable.
24:17
It is unchangeable. Number two, it is great.
24:28
The means by which He carries out His will, the means or the tools that He uses to accomplish such things as the
24:39
Great Commission, is us. We are
24:47
His tools. We are to present ourselves as such for His use.
25:02
Now, it's not as easy as it sounds, but another question.
25:09
Does the chisel argue with the sculptor or the brush with the painter over whether or not the artist knows what he's doing?
25:20
No. God knows exactly what must be done.
25:30
So rather than fall to temptation and do what we think is correct, let us present ourselves to God as His tools.
25:44
Be grateful that He chose you as a brush or a chisel or a pen or sometimes a hammer and be the greatest hammer or pen that you can possibly be.
26:04
Present yourself ready to be used by God for His purposes because, in fact, He is the
26:10
Master that bought you. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.
26:24
As stated before, we are no longer under the authority of sin. In the same way, we are no longer under the guilt or burden of the law.
26:35
This is what Paul means. The unrelenting uncertainty of our own works. Law, as Paul says, is a mirror.
26:46
Show us that we cannot keep it. To be able to look at ourselves and see ourselves for who we truly are.
26:56
It also serves to point to the fact that Christ did keep it. As we talked about before, this doesn't mean that the moral law does not apply to us anymore.
27:12
It most assuredly does. But the burden of keeping it for our own salvation is gone.
27:26
We now sit under grace and grace alone. Sola gratia.
27:37
This is a fact that must be ever present in our minds and in our hearts.
27:44
The grounding truth that we are saved by grace. We are justified by faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone.
27:59
As it says in Ephesians 2, verses 8 through 10, For by grace you have been saved through faith.
28:08
And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. Not a result of works, so that no man may boast.
28:18
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ for good works, which
28:26
God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So this week, we contemplate.
28:37
Think about how you present yourself as an instrument for God.