07-06-14 Free From Sin Pt. 3

Welcome, my friends, to a new day,

and the beginning to another week,

yet another gift from our God.

By His grace

we have before us

another 24 hours,

and perhaps another month or another year

in which to discover in greater measure

the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.

His Spirit still indwells us,

because He has promised

that He will never leave us, never desert us,

and He will continue to express His life through us this day.

We don’t know what lies ahead,

but we know that whatever it is

it will be used by Him for good in our lives.

We have been chosen by our God

to be a part of both His family

and His purposes at this point in history.

We know what that means

only one day at a time.

But we do know He has already made us adequate

as His servants of the New Covenant,

the new agreement between us and our Creator

based not upon our ability to perform for Him,

but rather upon His ability to perform through us

the good works He has already

carefully selected for each of us,

matched perfectly to the life He has designed for each of us.

Several months ago we began a series

dealing with the freedom offered to us

by our Lord Jesus Christ.

We spent much of the first part of this study talking about

the way in which God frees the Christian from the law,

freeing us from a relationship with Him based upon our ability to perform up to a certain standard.

Paul said simply,

Rom. 7:4 Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit for God.

Then we moved on to the second major area of freedom offered to us by our Lord,

freedom from sin.

And we’ve made a little progress in this area

and this morning I want us to drop back into our study where we left off.

We were home-based in a key passage

dealing with our freedom from sin

found in Romans 6:11-14.

I want to read the passage for us once again,

and then we’ll review a little

and move on from there.

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.

We actually began this part of our study

by running ahead to verse 14

where Paul tells us that the key

to breaking the power of sin in our lives

is a correct understanding

of what it means to be under grace

and not under the law.

We have some more work we need to do with that in the future,

but then last time we were in this study

we backed up to verse 11

and spent most of our time talking about what it means to “consider” ourselves to be dead to sin

and alive to God.

In that study we saw that Paul is calling us

to keep staring at the truth,

that is, to keep exposing ourselves to it through His Word,

to keep wrestling with it,

and chewing on it,

and agonizing over it

until we finally begin to see it.

I made the statement the last time we were in this study

that as Christians

we sin because we do not believe

that we are

who God says we are.

We have done a fairly good job in the Christian world

communicating the truth

about God’s offer of forgiveness

on the basis of Christ’s death in our place for our sins.

It’s a concept that redefines love

as we have never known it before,

but it is a concept we can grasp.

God loves me,

and in fact He loves me enough

so that He was willing to offer His own death as payment for my sins.

But when it comes to the concept of the new birth,

God recreating our spirits,

placing new hearts within us,

making us absolutely holy and righteous and eternally pure

at the deepest level of our being,

we just don’t get it.

When Paul says,

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

it sounds like nonsense to us.

When he says,

2 Cor. 5:17 Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come...

we hear it not as a statement of truth

but rather as a goal we should pursue.

And when we hear John saying,

John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name,...

we understand that divine sonship

as being simply a theological position attributed to us,

rather than a living reality.

John comes back to this same idea in his first letter,

only he adds an additional statement to the thought.

He says,

1 John 3:1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; AND SUCH WE ARE.

He’s aiming at that same chronic point of unbelief that causes so much problem

in the lives of all Christians at times.

He is saying, “Christian! We are not just CALLED the children of God,

we truly are -

we are His righteous, holy, pure, eternal offsprings.”

We are not simply forgiven,

we are recreated in the image of God Himself.

And of course, the reason we have so much trouble with this concept

is because we look at ourselves

and see so much about ourselves

that is completely inconsistent with that truth.

If we are honest,

we can offer ourselves a thousand proofs a day

that we are anything but holy,

and righteous,

and pure.

And we left this study the last time

by my saying that

the power of sin can be broken in our lives

only when we begin to believe what our God says about us

even when what we experience

does not always seem to support that truth.

Only when we can look at ourselves

and affirm the truth,

saying to ourselves,

“I am not who I once was.

I am not the tacky little creature

who once spent his life

scrounging in the gutters,

digging through other people’s leftovers,

looking for scraps of love,

and bits of significance,

and acceptance.

I am no longer the helpless emotional orphan I once was,

clinging desperately to my own inadequate abilities to meet my needs

in any way I can.

I am now a holy one of God Himself,

His child,

His priest,

His dwelling place,

His joy and His delight

His eternal holy one.

This sinful behavior -

this bitterness,

this lust,

this self-centeredness,

this obsession with things...

this is now completely inconsistent with my true identity.

It is true that I did once cling to these things,

hoping they would ease my pain,

and give me purpose,

and make me feel important and loved.

But through my Lord Jesus Christ

I have become a new creation.

And sinful behavior is so completely inconsistent with who I really am.”

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

Only when we can at last begin to hear and accept the truth

will the power of sin begin to be broken in our lives.

Show me a Christian who is allowing sin free reign in his or her life,

and I’ll show you a Christian

who has two huge lies

firmly entrenched in their thinking:

#1. They believe their sin is consistent with who they really are -

they believe it fits with their perception of their true identity.

They would maybe say it this way to themselves:

“This is who I am. It is not who I want to be,

it’s certainly not who my God wants me to be,

it may not be who I will be in the future,

but the fact is, it’s who I am right now.”

And #2, they believe that their sin

is necessary in order for their needs to be met.

And the long-term warfare God will be waging on their behalf

is the warfare to dig out and destroy those lies

and replace them with the truth.

But before we go any farther with this study

I need to back up just a couple of steps

and place what I’m saying here

into a little broader perspective.

It is true that God’s long-range warfare against the power of sin in our lives

centers upon His teaching us the truth

about who we truly are in Christ.

But it is also true

that His love for us motivates Him

to use some short-term protective measures in our lives as well.

Relearning how to think about ourselves,

discovering and understanding our true new identity in Christ,

is the essential long-term ingredient in breaking sin’s power in our lives.

But there are also times

when the destructive nature of our sin addictions

makes it necessary for God to discipline us

in ways that help protect us

until our thinking can be conformed to the truth.

Picture yourself as a parent for a minute.

You have a three-year old boy.

He’s playing outside in the yard.

You look out the window,

and to your horror you see him eating dirt.

Now, ten years from now,

when your son has grown and learned much more about himself,

he will have come to understand

that sane,

sensible,

intelligent people

do not eat dirt.

But at age 3 you can’t just let the dirt-eating pass,

knowing that some day your son will know the truth.

If you don’t intervene right now

he may die of some hideous disease

before he ever gets to age 13.

So at age 3 you run out into the yard,

pull the dirt out of his hand,

and out of his mouth,

and tell him firmly, “NO!”,

and if the behavior continues

you discipline him appropriately.

There are times when God does the same for us.

There are times when He arranges

for the consequences of our sinful behavior to be so painful,

so unpleasant,

so costly,

so altogether uncomfortable

that we are strongly motivated to avoid that behavior in the future.

In the long-term He will continue to work

to reshape our thinking

about who we truly are in Christ,

bringing us to the awareness

that such conduct is simply incompatible with who we really are.

But in the short-term

there are times when, for our own good,

He must deal with our sin

at a much more basic level.

And before we go any farther here

I want to interject one other thought

concerning what we are doing here

and why we’re doing it.

It may seem strange to some of you

to see the amount of time and effort

we as a church are investing

in this single topic of the freedom from sin offered to us through Christ.

It may even seem as if we are desperately out of step with the real world.

We now live in a society that, for the most part doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of sin,

and certainly does not view it

as an issue that deserves any major consideration.

Here we are,

living in a world, or at least in a country

that seems to have done very well recently

without any moral accountability whatsoever.

In our relatively recent history political leaders at the highest level get caught

in repeated acts of sexual perversion

and suffer little more than a brief public embarrassment for getting caught.

Our economy has apparently recovered

from financial disasters created by greed-driven men and women

that literally brought the entire world

to the brink of total economic collapse

and now once again we seem to be doing great

and our national affluence is once again the envy of the world.

And then here we are as a church

investing huge quantities of our time

into wrestling with issues

that the world around us would consider to be absurd.

What are we doing here, anyway?

Well, let me see if I can help put it into perspective.

The fundamental issues of life

have not changed since Adam and Eve entered into their rebellion against God at the dawn of creation.

Try to picture Adam at, say eighty years after his rebellion against his Creator.

There he is, living in a physical world

that is not as nice as the one he once knew,

but still it is a world that is to a great degree

unharmed by man’s sin.

I can see him at that point in his life,

with his numerous children,

and grandchildren,

and great grandchildren gathered around him,

standing at the edge of some field he’s just planted,

knowing it will soon bring forth

yet another bountiful harvest.

In his own way,

he too, at that point in his life, is surrounded by comfort,

and affluence,

just as most of our nation is right now.

And yet I am certain that if we could look inside Adam

at that point in his life,

we would not find a sense of peace,

and fulfillment,

and satisfaction with what he has accomplished with his life.

I think when he stops working long enough

to allow his mind to drift,

his mind goes back to what it had been like

so many years ago when

for that brief period of time when he walked with God,

when he knew God’s presence,

and God’s daily reaffirmation of love.

And I think he remembers, too,

what he and Eve once shared together

before their sin entered their lives

and confused and complicated everything.

And I think his mind would also go back to his first two sons,

the one who murdered the other,

one lost to death,

and the other now gone these many years, banished from the family forever.

I think his celebrations,

and his harvests,

and his family reunions,

and his memories of the past,

and his plans for the future

would all be marred by an emptiness,

a hollowness created by his own sin,

just as our national celebration

of our great successes

have an empty, hollow, hurting ring to them.

The issues that drive our lives,

the concerns that keep us up at night,

the points of internal agony

that create such turmoil within us

are most of all the sin issues for which we have no solutions.

It’s those relationships we have damaged

through our anger,

or our selfishness,

or our neglect,

or our unfaithfulness.

And it’s those memories of our own immoral acts,

those memories that keep jabbing into our consciousness

that have the power to torture us.

And it is our sense of shame

and our fear of discovery

and our lack of peace with who we are apart from our God that troubles us so deeply.

Our society may have chosen

to conveniently deny the existence of sin,

and we may even have succeeded

in creating a brief national party time

in which we can temporarily drown out the voices within us,

but in the end even the wildest party

cannot rewrite the fundamental rules of life.

And even those who deny the existence of sin most vehemently

cannot, through their denials,

avoid the personal inner turmoil

their own sins create within their lives.

I talked some time ago

with a sophomore in college

who, like most of her fellow collegians,

has swallowed the basic godless philosophies of our culture hook, line, and sinker.

She would, most likely, deny the whole concept

of sin or moral accountability.

And yet already in her young life

her sins have generated

a string of shattered relationships

and created a level of inner turmoil

that makes it necessary for her to be doing something,

anything every minute she’s awake

in order to avoid the unresolved issues within.

And ultimately every human being must come back to this one fundamental truth -

that the measure of our lives

will never be determined by what we know,

or by what we possess,

or by what we have accomplished,

by rather by what type of people we really are.

When Christ told us that “he who commits sin is the slave of sin”

He was revealing to us

one of the fundamental principles of life.

Those sins become the masters

that, apart from God’s intervention,

will rule our lives to the very end.

And when Christ promised His people

that He would break the power of that sin

in the lives of those who reach out to Him for healing,

it was no small gift He offered us.

When we come to Him,

we usually come hoping for nothing more than His voice of forgiveness.

And that He gives in great abundance.

Rom. 5:1 Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

Rom. 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

But He does not stop there.

In His endless love for us

He also then begins the glorious process of rebuilding our lives through destroying

the master/slave dynamic between us and our sin.

Paul puts it this way:

Rom. 8:29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren;

And in that conforming process,

as He walks with us each step of the way through whatever is necessary

in order to free us

from the sin that once dominated our lives,

at the same time He gives us the only true foundation we can ever know

for abiding peace with ourselves,

and for strong, durable relationships with others.

The issues we are wrestling with right now as a church

are the central issues of our lives,

and the ones that will equip us

to serve whatever purposes He has for us in whatever time He has left for us on this earth.