08-10-14 Final Freedom Foundations Pt 2

Rom. 6:11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Rom. 6:12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts,

Rom. 6:13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

Rom. 6:14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.

This is the passage we have been studying together for the past several months.

It is a passage in which Paul takes

the key principles upon which

our freedom in Christ is built

and pulls those concepts together

into a single, unified statement.

Throughout this study

we have taken a number of the concepts within this passage

and pulled them out of the passage

and looked at them closely.

Now, as we bring this study to a close,

we are moving through the passage one more time as it was written,

allowing it to present us with a final overview of these principles

and how they relate both to one another,

and to us in our pursuit of true freedom in Christ.

Last week we returned to verse 6:11

and saw once again

the first foundation-block

upon which everything else is built.

We saw Paul calling us to accept the truth

that when we come to Christ in faith,

our God does not just forgive our sins,

but He also recreates us at the deepest level of our being.

Once the reality of this truth

begins to take root in our thinking

a multitude of statements throughout the New Testament

will take on truth,

and life,

and power as never before.

I promise I will not get stuck here again this morning,

and never make it past this verse,

but let me offer just two quick examples of what I mean.

Have you ever wondered about that statement made by our Lord in Matt. 5:48

where He says to His people:

“Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

I’ve heard frustrated Bible teachers

do all sorts of things with that statement,

frantically attempting to explain what it means.

I’ve been told that the word “perfect”

also means “mature”

so the Lord is really just saying

we should be “mature”.

That’s fine until you finish the statement

and discover that we are to be “mature” as God Himself is “mature”.

But when we understand

the recreative work God accomplishes within us when we come to Him,

seeing that He truly does remove from us our heart of rebellion against Him,

and replace it with a heart

that loves Him deeply

and responds to Him perfectly,

when we realize that through Christ

we truly have become perfect and holy in spirit,

Christ’s statement then makes perfect sense.

It was not, and was never intended to be

a call to try harder.

It was a simple prophetic statement

in which our Lord told us

what would take place within us

as a result of His work for us -

...you are to be perfect.

Peter presents the same concept

when he quotes God Himself

from the Old Testament

in 1 Pet. 1:16 where he says,

“You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

When Paul says to us,

Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus...

he is telling us to recall once again

that there is within every Christian

a heart that longs to please God,

a heart that delights in God

and longs to be forever with Him.

And one more distinction before we move on -

he is not talking about the conscience,

that built-in awareness of moral right and wrong.

The conscience can give us an awareness of moral right and wrong,

but it can never give us a love for righteousness.

Feeling guilty for our sin

is not the same thing as hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

The new heart created within us by our God

hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

But wait a minute!

Then maybe I’m not even a Christian!

I mean,

there are clearly times

when what I feel,

and what I think,

and the way I respond

is not righteous

and certainly not the result

of a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

So what?

Does that then mean

that I’m not really a Christian?

I mean, if God truly has created within me

this remarkable new, holy, pure, righteous heart,

then why don’t I act that way?

Why do I still sometimes find within me

these overwhelming pulls toward evil?

Dealing with that question

is where Paul goes next

in this passage in Romans 6.

Having begun where we must begin,

recognizing the truth of our new birth,

and the reality of our new, perfect heart,

he then goes on to address

the great enemy that wars against the leadership of that new heart in our lives.

In the next verse Paul says,

Rom. 6:12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts,

Now, in order for us to understand

what is happening in these two verses

we need to pay very close attention

to the words he uses.

A casual reading of the passage

might lead us to believe

that Paul is simply saying,

“Christians, try not to sin so much.”

But such a statement would seem like foolishness

given the statement he just made in the previous verse.

In verse 11 he tells us to recognize,

to accept the absolute truth

that in Christ we are now dead to sin

and alive to God.

But if we are already now and eternally dead to sin,

then why in the world would he need to go on and call us to not sin any longer?

Now, typically what we do when we read through this passage,

is to separate these two concepts from one another,

rather than keeping them together as God intended.

We read verse 11 telling us to consider ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God,

and the truth is it just doesn’t compute.

That stupid little picture

of an exploding bomb

comes up on our mental computer screen

with the message reading “system error...restart”.

Our existing mental system doesn’t know how to process a message

that tells us we are dead to sin,

so we restart our mental computer,

and when it comes back on

we find our system has comfortably moved on to verses 12 and 13

and we find there statements

we seem to understand,

statements that seem to fit acceptably

into our existing thought framework.

They are statements that seem to be saying

that we should try harder not to sin.

Statements like that we think we understand.

Trying harder to do better is something we understand -

statements that accept the obvious reality of our ongoing battle with sin we understand.

These verses seem to fit with life as we understand it

because unlike verse 11,

these verses openly accept

and acknowledge the reality of an ongoing battle with sin in our lives.

But I want us to look closely

at Paul’s careful wording in these two verses.

I want us to see

where he tells us that battle with sin comes from.

Having just reminded us that we are truly and eternally dead to sin

and alive to God,

he does not then turn around and say,

“But even though you are dead to sin,

I want to encourage you not to sin.”

That would be nonsense.

One who is sinless cannot sin.

But what he does say is this:

Therefore...

and that “therefore” clearly, obviously points us directly back to the statement he has just made,

“Therefore, since the real you,

since the person you have become

at the deepest level of your existence is totally and completely and eternally dead to sin and alive to God,

therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts,

and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

And what does that all mean?

I’ve said this a number of times throughout this current study,

but the obvious reason why

we as Christians have so much trouble

accepting the truth of our really being new creations in Christ

is because we know all too well

that our practical daily living

is anything but perfect.

We still get grumpy.

We still loose our tempers.

We still get frightened.

We still battle lust.

We still run away from our God sometimes

rather than running to Him.

We still fight some of the same battles

with some forms of evil

that dominated our lives

prior to our submission to Christ.

Those of you who are married,

if I were to go around the room this morning

and ask your marriage partner

if you are now perfect in Christ,

the most loving response I think I would get

would be something along the lines of,

“Well, my partner is certainly perfect for me.”

And many of you would tactfully refuse to comment on the grounds that

if you can’t say something nice,

it’s better not to say anything at all.

So why is that?

Why does our God tell us

that we are now dead to sin

when we so obviously still continue to fight with sinful impulses in our lives?

Why, if we have truly become a new Creation in Christ,

is there still so much of the old life

still hanging around us?

We are going to find the answer to that question

in the careful wording used by Paul

in these next two verses.

He says, therefore, since you are now dead to sin and alive to God,

do not let sin reign in your MORTAL BODY...

Now, it is important to notice

that Paul does not say, “Do not sin!”

He says, “do not let sin reign in your MORTAL BODY...”

That phrase “mortal body”

is crucial to any correct understanding

of the nature of the Christian’s ongoing battle with sin.

Do you know what the word “mortal” means?

It means “subject to death”.

It is the opposite of “immortal”.

He makes it clear

that he is talking to us now

not about our eternal personhood,

not about the immortal recreated people we are in Christ,

but rather about the one part of our identity

that is still subject to death -

our physical bodies.

Paul’s wording throughout this entire passage

is carefully designed

in order to make a sharp distinction

between US and OUR BODIES.

This distinction is emphasized again

in his next phrase:

and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin...

And then, just to make certain

we understand the distinction between

the real US

and the physical, mortal BODY in which we live,

he comes back to it one more time

and this time places these two distinct aspects of our being side-by-side

so that we can see the difference.

He says present yourselves (this is the real us, the new recreated, holy, perfect us) to God as those alive from the dead,

and present your members as instruments of righteousness to God...

Those of you who have been exposed to my teaching for a while

know that I explain what Paul is saying here

with the use of 5 little drawings.

The first is suppose to represent

a little baby body.

When we enter this world

God creates for each of us

a physical house in which we will live

during our time on this earth.

Each body comes equipped with

a fully operational

but totally untrained

mind - our personal on-board computer,

and an emotional system

that can be trained in an endless variety of responses

to an endless series of stimuli.

We also have a long-term memory storage system,

and remarkable reasoning abilities,

and so on.

The most accurate way in which to view our bodies

is as the physical house in which our spirit lives while on this earth,

and through which our spirit

is able to communicate with the world around us.

And it is important to note that

although the physical body trains easily, it does not retrain nearly as easy.

But a body is not the only thing we bring into this world.

We also enter this world

with an inner spirit,

an inner control center,

that is in rebellion against God.

The foundation upon which that inner control center operates is simply this:

“I can and will run my life just fine without submission to my Creator.”

Now the result of this union between

our body

and our rebellious inner spirit

is that our entire physical plant,

including our emotional responses,

our reasoning processes,

our basic life attitudes and value systems,

and our growing memory banks

are all established

and trained under the leadership

of that rebellious spirit,

and therefore taught to operate

as though God either isn’t really there,

or doesn’t really care,

or cannot really be trusted.

Result:

= our life BC

Once that training is in place within our mortal bodies,

it becomes the initial response system we bring to every event for the rest of our lives.

I see this in my own life on a daily basis.

I’ve been a Christian now

since the fall of 1966.

That’s more years than most of you have lived.

I have spent a major chunk of my time

since 1966

in learning about my God

through what He tells me in His Word.

And yet still,

when some problem comes into my life,

or some anxiety comes into my life

concerning myself

or someone I love,

my first responses are usually

to look at myself as my only

or certainly my chief resource

in trying to figure out how to fix the problem.

Only when I consciously reason through once again to the truth

of who my God is

and how He relates to me as my Heavenly Father

do I make progress in defeating the fears,

and the anxieties.

OK, but then we come to Christ

and this huge, eternal transformation

takes place within us.

Our old, rebellious inner spirit

is replaced with a new heart,

a heart that loves God

and longs to please Him.

But this new spirit

does not get a brand new body

to train to respond

and feel

and think in conformity with the truth.

Instead it is placed within a body

that has already been totally trained

under the leadership of that now dead rebellious spirit.

Result:

This is exactly what Paul describes in Rom 7:22-23 when he says,

“For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.”

And it is also exactly what Paul is talking about here in Romans 6 when he says that you should not let sin reign in your mortal body,

and that you should not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness...

So in practical terms,

what does this mean in our battle for freedom from sin?

Simply this - the beginning of that freedom

comes from knowing beyond any doubt

that we are now new creations in Christ.

That is what Paul means

when he says, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead...

He says, when we begin facing the battle against sin we do so

not by looking at our sin battles

and then hiding our face in shame from our God,

but rather by looking at the real us,

and this glorious new heart within us

that loves both our God and His way,

and presenting ourselves boldly before Him

as those alive from the dead.

And then,

together with our God,

we turn with Him to the project of this mistrained body of ours,

and allow Him to show us how to bring this body

under the leadership of our new inner spirit.