And probably no text in the Bible more clearly speaks of that new life that we have in Jesus Christ than Romans chapter 6. I invite you to turn there with me as we look tonight at Romans 6 verses 4 through 14. Therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that is, might be rendered inoperative, that we should no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed or has been freed from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Then so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 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. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. The key that God has provided to victory over temptation and sin is the truth that we have studied previously, that in Christ Jesus we died to sin with its power and its reign.
We were identified with the Lord Jesus Christ or united with him so that what happened to Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago happened to us. Whatever happened to Jesus happened to us. He died, we died. He was buried, we were buried. He rose again. We have risen in Christ Jesus. That is the truth. That is the key. But how can one experience in his daily life an increasing victory over sin?
Doctrine is only head knowledge until it begins to affect the routines, the decisions, the thoughts, the words of our everyday life. How do we turn the key to victory? I believe the answer to that lies in three actions that are given in our text. As a saint, one who has been redeemed, who belongs to Jesus Christ, as one who has had a radical difference made in his identity, as a saint, you and I are to take the actions that are before us in our text.
When we do that, we will turn the key and begin to walk in the newness of life which God has gloriously provided for us. Those three actions are these. Number one, know the facts. It has to begin there. You will find the apostle using that word in verse 3, do you not know? And again he says in verse 6, knowing this. And verse 9, knowing that Christ. And so the emphasis is upon knowing. Knowing the facts. It begins there.
The sad thing is that so many of God's people are not aware of the truth that is involved in Romans chapter 6. We have to know the facts of identification before they can become real in our lives. So the first action is to know the facts. Secondly, we must consider them true. Verse 11, consider yourselves to be dead to sin. That word is a word that implies decisive, immediate action. He says take this action, consider it to be true.
And then the third action is that we are to present ourselves to God to be his instruments for righteousness. The third action is to present ourselves to the Lord. Now let's back up and take these one at a time. What are the facts that we are to know? Well, we are to know first of all what happened to Christ. What happened to him? Well, he died. As it says in verse 10, which really is a summary of all that he said so far, at least about Christ, it says he died. He died to sin.
That is with respect to sin. And he did so once and for all. He came into the world without sin. And he came to deal with sin. And at the cross, he came into a temporary relationship with it as he became sin for us. He dealt with sin. He died to it once and for all. And now he is no longer in the realm of sin. He died to sin, however. There was a time when he himself became identified with your sin and mine and he died to sin with respect to it. But he also lives.
And it says that he lives to God that is in relationship to God continuously. His is a never-ending life. He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, as it says back in verse 4, which is another way of saying by the power of the Father. His was not merely a resuscitation, but it was actually resurrection. He was raised in a new form of life, the first of its kind, never seen before in the history of the world.
The form of resurrection life that our Lord has is absolutely unique to him at this point. He is the first fruits, which means that someday all of us who belong to him will be like him. But right now he is totally unique in the resurrection form that he has. He lives. He lives in relationship to God. Verse 9 tells us that he will never die again. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again.
Verse 9 absolutely puts to death, it destroys, it annihilates the teaching that Jesus Christ dies every time the Mass is offered. That is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. That he is offered afresh, that he dies afresh. It's all over again that he offers himself for sins. But the fact of the Word of God is that he died to sin once, and he never will die again. It never will be master over him. Death is no longer master over him as it says there. Those are the facts.
Christ died once and for all with respect to sin. Now he has been raised, raised with a continuous life, raised in relation to God. Death will never again be master over him. Now we need to know those facts. It begins there, but we need to go beyond those facts to understand what happened to you, to me, to we who are saved. What happened to us? What are the facts about us? Well we have talked about the fact that we have a brand new identity. That we are people we were not before. We were saved.
We have a new essential identity because we have been vitally united to Jesus Christ through what he calls here baptism. Last week we discussed the fact that that is not water baptism, but that is the work of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Spirit by which he places us into Jesus Christ. He identifies us with Christ. Notice that he says that this has happened.
For example in verse 3 he says, don't you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death. He doesn't say there that we are going to be baptized into Christ Jesus or even that we should be baptized into Christ Jesus, but we have been. At the moment of our salvation we were baptized into Christ Jesus in the sense that we were united to him in his death, his burial, and his resurrection.
I need to know the results of that to me and you need to know the results for you. The first one is that the old self was therefore crucified as he says in verse 6. Knowing this, that our old self, that is all that we were in Adam, that unregenerate man which was enslaved to sin and destined for eternal ruin and punishment in hell, that old self, the old man, all that we were before, that was crucified with Jesus Christ. It was buried, confirmation of the fact that it died.
What we were before died. It was crucified. It's over. It's over, finished with, we've done with it. The old man is gone. Then who are we? Well, we're a new self. The deepest me, the deepest you as a Christian was brought into being by the miracle of identification with Jesus Christ's resurrection. You are a brand new person in Christ Jesus. In the innermost part of you, in the spirit, there's a brand new self, a brand new identity that you have.
You need to know that because there are certain results that come from this truth. We need to know what happened to Jesus Christ and we need to know what happened to us at the moment we were saved. We, as we were before we were saved, died. Paul says in Galatians 2.20, I was crucified with Christ. The I that was was crucified. But he says, nevertheless, I live. I is a new person. I live. Yet, it's not I, but it's Christ who lives in me, he says.
That's the miracle of the new man, the new nature, if you please, that we are and have. Now because that happened to us, there are certain results that take place. Notice that he says in verse 6, knowing this, our old self, our old man, was crucified with him that, number one, our body of sin might be done away with. That is, that it might be rendered impotent or inert or powerless. What does he mean, though, by the body of sin? I believe that he's talking here about the body dominated by sin.
Some people identify this with Paul's other term that he uses, for example, in Galatians, as the flesh. They would say the flesh is the body of sin. It is the body in which sin tends to tyrannize still. The body in which sin still remains, the body of sin. Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, I think, has a helpful comment when he asks this question. What then does the term the body of sin mean? It means the body, our physical body, of which sin has taken possession.
Here is the vital distinction, as I see it, the distinction between I myself as a personality and my body. Sin still remains and is left in our bodies, not in us, but in our bodies. As persons, as souls, we have already finished with it, but not so the body. This body of sin, this body which sin inhabits and tries to use, this body of sin still remains.
Sin not only remains in our bodies, but if it is not checked, if it is not kept under, it will even reign in our bodies and it will dominate our bodies. We died as what we were and have been raised as new people, new persons with new identities, a new nature. But sin still is in our physical bodies. However, that death and resurrection process we went through made it possible for us to be delivered from that sin that is still in our bodies.
That is what Paul means by our body of sin might be rendered inoperative. But he goes on to say that we should no longer be slaves to sin. We no longer have an obligation to obey the sin that dwells in us. Before we were saved, we had no choice. Sin was our master. We its obedient servants. We had an obligation to obey it. We belonged to sin. We were under sin. But now because of what has radically happened to us, no longer, it says here, need we be slaves to sin.
We have been set free because, as it says in verse 7, he who has died is freed from sin. I want to point out, and we'll probably touch this again later, that sin didn't die. That's why it's still in you, in your body. Sin is still present. It still can produce temptations. Sin can still tyrannize you. Sin did not die, but you did. You died to your old master sin. Whatever obligations you had before that, death, are over. And you have been raised now with a new master.
And the new master is Jesus Christ. No longer is there a continuing obligation to sin as a power within you. You must know that. You must understand that. Until we can somehow write that in the deepest part of us, sin will go on dominating us perpetually. We have to come to the place that we know this fact. No longer do I, no longer do you, no longer do we have an obligation to obey sin, which does still indwell our bodies. That's a second result of our death and resurrection with Christ.
Now a third one is found in verse 8. And that is simply this, that new life is assured for us. Verse 8 seems to look ahead to someday when we will have a resurrection body like Christ in which there will be no sin. And even now we have new life just as we sang a few moments ago in that hymn.
For example, back in verse 4 he says, we have been buried with him through baptism into death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. That's right now, not sometime in the future. The fact that you died to sin and have been raised to God with Jesus Christ makes it possible for you right now to walk in a new quality of life that was impossible before.
A person who is unregenerate, who is outside of Jesus Christ may try to act like Jesus, may sincerely say he's going to practice the presence of Jesus or do what Jesus would do and all of those neat devotional ideas. But the fact is he has no capacity to do that because he's still under obligation to sin. And there is no new quality of life within him to be patterned after Jesus.
When we come to faith in Jesus Christ and are identified with him in death and resurrection, the old is dead, the new has come. We are new creations in Christ Jesus and there is the potential of a new quality of life right now, right now, here in this world. And God wants us to experience that. And that's why Paul is writing these chapters to us.
But as I say in verse 8, he goes on to even look further in the future, beyond this life, and he speaks about the fact that we shall live with him in the sense that in the future we shall be like him completely. And just as he has a body that is fitted for eternity, so you and I will have a body that is immortal, no longer a mortal body, no longer a body that has sin dwelling in it, a body that's able to have sin tyrannize it indeed.
But we will have a body that will have no relationship to sin whatsoever. What a great day that's going to be. That's why Paul concludes chapter 7, he says, who will deliver me from my wretchedness? And he says, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ. He said there is a day coming when we will be entirely delivered, we will have no relationship, no more struggle with sin. It will not come until that day that we receive that new body. Now those are the things that we have to know.
We have to write them in our minds, into our hearts, we have to know what happened to Jesus, we have to know what happened to ourselves because we were united with Jesus in his death and resurrection. Now the second action that we have to take is very simply in verse 11, he says, consider yourselves to be dead to sin and alive to God. He goes beyond knowing it here to considering it to be true. The word really means to calculate this.
An accountant would draw a line here, and that's really what Paul is doing in his mind, he's drawing a line and he's saying now you sum up all of these things, you just add them up. And he says here is the sum total. Calculate this to be true, that in fact you are dead to sin and alive to God. Count on it as a fact, an actual truth that is just as sure, just as real, just as actual as the death and resurrection of Christ himself.
He says count on this to be true, that you are alive to God and dead to the rule and the reign of sin in your life. Notice he doesn't say consider yourselves to be positionally dead to sin, or potentially dead to sin, or that sometime in the future you're going to be dead to sin, but he says consider yourselves to be dead to sin, actually and now.
I'd like to read a couple of paragraphs from another writer whose book I recommend is called The Christian Looks at Himself, and the writer is Anthony Hokema. He says, I am to look upon myself therefore not as partly old man and partly new man, but as a new man in Christ. Does this mean that for the believer the struggle against sin is over? No. The New Testament is full of the language of struggle. The Christian life is called a battle, a race, a wrestling against evil spirits.
We are told to be good Christian soldiers, to fight the good fight of faith, to resist the devil, to take heed lest we fall, and to put on the whole armor of God. Moreover, in this struggle we do not always win. We do not always resist every temptation. On the contrary, we hear New Testament saints confessing that they are far from perfection, that they have not yet attained, that in many things they all stumble.
We hear John saying in his first epistle, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. The point is, however, that when we do fall into sin, we are momentarily living according to the old man or the old way of living, which we have actually repudiated. We are then living contrary to what we really are in Christ. Though we are regenerate, we are living contrary to our regenerate life.
Though we have put on the new man, we are still then living contrary to the new man, as if we were still the old man. But the fact that this does happen, and may indeed happen frequently, does not mean that we must therefore revise our self-image as having to include both old man and new man. For, he says, and this is the most important point, when we slip into an old man way of living, we are living contrary to our true selves. We are denying our true self-image.
Paul does not say in Romans 6-11, consider yourselves to be mostly alive to God and mostly dead to sin. What he says is, consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God. This then must be our Christian self-image. We must consider ourselves to be new men in Christ, who have once and for all turned our backs upon the old way of living called the old man, and who therefore refuse to be identified with it any longer.
As we understand who we are in Jesus Christ, we are to see that in fact we are new men. We have new identities. And we are to consider that to be absolutely true, because it is true. We are to count on that as a fact. That's the second action. It goes beyond knowing the facts to counting it true. Then we are to take a third action. That is the action of presenting ourselves to God, verses 12-14.
He says, therefore, because all that I've said is a fact, therefore, he says, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. The word reign here means to exercise kingly power. Do not let that happen, he says, and the tense of the verb here is present and it's an imperative, which has probably this meaning. Do not continue to let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey its lust. The point is this, that the Romans, to whom he was writing, were living like so many Christians.
They were living contrary to who they were in Jesus Christ. Although they had died to sin, had been raised with new life to walk in newness of life before God, although that was true about them, they were allowing sin to reign as king in their lives. And so he says, don't go on that way. He says, do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness.
He says, don't put the members of your body at the disposal of sin, for sin to use it as instrument, as an instrument. The word instrument here means a weapon. Sin will use the members of your body as a weapon in its fight. You say, what are the members of my body? What does that refer to?
Well, it refers obviously to our tongues, our eyes, our hands, but it goes beyond the physical members of our body to include our abilities, our emotions, our capacity to reason, our imagination, our potential. All of those things are involved here in this idea of the members of our bodies too. He says, don't go on presenting your imagination to sin as a weapon. Don't go on presenting your potential. Don't go on presenting your reasoning powers to sin as a weapon.
The implication being that they, like many of us, were doing that. They were putting themselves at the disposal of sin, and sin was reigning as king in the life of many of these Christians. So Paul says, look, don't you realize what is true about you? You must know that this is true and consider it a fact. And no longer allow sin to reign as king. Don't go on presenting all of the members, your capacities to sin as weapons. But he says, present yourselves to God.
Here the idea is immediately do this. Decisively do this. Take this action now, he says. Present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments or weapons of righteousness to God. One cannot stay neutral in this matter. Either sin will reign as king, and it may if we allow it, and either we will present our members to sin, or we will present ourselves to God.
Paul says later in Romans, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God. A very similar thought. Present all that you are to God. And all of your capacities, all the potential of your life to God. Oh, young people, if only you could see the life before you that God has. Present that to Him, even now by faith, though you don't know what life holds.
Present it to God by faith, and say, oh God, use my life and all of its potential as an instrument of righteousness in this world. Moms and dads, the same way, present yourself to God as an instrument of righteousness because of who you are and what's happened to you because of your identity with Jesus Christ. He states clearly in verse 14, sin shall not be master over you. Literally he says, sin shall not lord it over you. The Greek word for lord is the word kurios.
Here's the verb form of that very word lord. He says, sin shall not be your lord. Why? For you are not under law, but under grace. If we were still under law, then sin would be our lord. Because you see, law cannot deliver us. Law cannot deliver us from sin. It cannot give us freedom from sin. He'll get more into this in chapter 7. Law cannot deliver the sinner from sin, either its guilt or its power. It cannot do that. What can the law do? Just stimulate sin.
If we were under the law, sin would be our lord. But he says we're under grace. We're under grace. Because we are under grace, no longer under law, therefore we have been freed from sin and its lordship. And we have a new lord. When a person comes to faith in Jesus Christ, it is not so that he can be freed from this lord of sin to live the way he wants to. When we come to faith in Jesus Christ, we exchange lords, this lord of sin to the lord Jesus Christ.
Grace frees us from the lordship of sin to live freely under the lordship of Jesus Christ. In our lives. Bishop Hanley Mool has a helpful comment that I'd like to quote to you regarding this. He says, we have received the reconciliation that we may now walk not away from God as if released from a prison, but with God as his children and his son. Because we are justified, we are to be holy, separated from sin, separated to God.
Not as a mere indication that our faith is real and that therefore we are legally safe, but because we were justified for this very purpose that we might be holy. The grapes upon a vine are not merely a living token that the tree is a vine and is alive. They are the product for which the vine exists. It is a thing not to be thought of that the sinner should accept justification and live to himself.
It is a moral contradiction of the very deepest kind and cannot be entertained without betraying an initial error in the man's whole spiritual creed. What he was really saying there was that you and I have been justified by faith in Jesus Christ that we might be sanctified by the power of Jesus Christ. That's why Romans chapters 6, 7, and 8 follows chapters 3, 4, and 5. It's not just the numerical order, it's the order of truth. Justified, sanctified. The one belongs with the other.
I want to ask you to determine in your heart to study and as the Spirit of God gives you understanding to know the facts we've talked about tonight regarding your identity. And as you begin to know those, I want to challenge you then to calculate them, to draw the line and sum them up and appropriate these things to be true. Who is your master tonight? Who is it that you're serving? Are you presenting yourselves to God or to sin? We are someone's servant.
We have been freed from our servitude to sin that we might be the servants of the Savior. Thank God for that. Thank God for the radical change that has been made in you and me that that might be realized in our lives. Know the facts. Consider them to be true. And as an act and step of faith, present yourselves to God in all that you are and he will live righteousness through you. The power of Jesus Christ will flow through you. You will walk in newness of life.
We'll talk some more about this next week. Let's bow together. Father, all of us hunger to move beyond knowing the doctrine to experiencing it in our lives. And so often we're looking for the quick fix. We want the shortcut. We want the ten easy steps. But that's not the way it is. Help us to realize that you give us handles in your word so that we can apply this truth and experience it in our lives, but that it takes time.
There may be some brothers and sisters here who are struggling with discouragement because of long battle with sin. God refresh them tonight. And do a new work of illumination in the heart. May that brother, may that sister know the facts, calculate them to be true, and take a fresh new step of presenting himself, herself to God. Father, I pray that as a result of this truth being preached, being heard and applied, that you will continue that process of sanctification.
That there may be a renewing of our minds, a transforming of our inner man, so that more and more what we really are in the innermost part of us will be seen in our attitudes, our actions, and our words. In Jesus' name, amen.