©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
|
1/2/00
|
Free From Sin Pt. 3
|
Romans 6:11-14
|
1/2/00 Free From Sin Pt. 3
Welcome, my friends, to 2000 A.D.
By the grace of our good God
we have before us
another day,
and perhaps another year
in which to discover in greater
measure
the love of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
His Spirit still indwells us,
and He will continue to express His life through
us.
We do not know what lies ahead,
but we know that whatever it is
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 God and man
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 made a little progress in this area
before the holidays interrupted our study.
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 son,
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 life,
and I'll show you a Christian
who has two huge lies
firmly entrenched in his thinking:
#1. He believes his sin is consistent with who he
really is -
he believes it fits with his perception of his true
identity.
He would maybe say it this way to himself:
"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, he believes that his sin
is necessary in order for his needs to be met.
And the long-term warfare God will be waging on
his 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.
EX. 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.
Our president gets caught
in repeated acts of sexual perversion
and suffers little more than a brief public
embarrassment for getting caught.
Our economy seems to be doing great,
and our national affluence is 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.
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 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 this past week
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 all who come to Him,
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.