©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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2/6/00
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Final Freedom Foundations Pt. 2
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Romans 6:12-13
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2/6/00 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 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,
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.
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 insolate 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?
We spent a morning with this concept
back in October of 1998.
Some of you weren't with us then,
and most of the rest of us
have long since forgotten what we said
more than a year ago.
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 some 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 we should not let
sin reign in your mortal body,
and that we 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.