©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
|
3/19/00
|
Four Things We Do Not Believe
|
Romans 6:11-18
|
3/19/00 Four Things We Don't Believe
We are going to return to our study of Romans
chapter 6 this morning,
but before we do
I have one tiny addition to my comments
about the 12 disciples
from last week out at camp.
If you were out there with us
you will remember I mentioned
that the first of the 12 disciples
to be killed for his faith
following Christ's departure
was James, the brother of John.
A question came up later in the day
about the New Testament Epistle of James and
who wrote it.
It was not written by the disciple James.
It was actually written by one of the sons of
Joseph and Mary.
From a strictly human perspective
he would have been Jesus' half-brother.
He was not a believer,
and not a follower of Jesus until after the
resurrection.
But immediately following the resurrection
he recognized the truth about his older brother,
and became a deeply committed,
loyal disciple of the Lord
for the rest of His life.
In fact, it's interesting to notice
the way in which he chose to describe
his own relationship to Christ
in the opening words of his Epistle.
Rather than identifying himself
as the "brother of Jesus"
he chooses to call himself,
"... a bond-servant of God and of the
Lord Jesus Christ,..."
He wanted no misunderstanding
about the true nature of his relationship with
Christ.
He wanted it clearly understood
that it was not his family ties to Jesus
that gave him the authority to write,
but rather it was his absolute
submission to the Lordship of Christ
that provided him with his authority.
Apparently he was the head
of the Church in Jerusalem for most of his life.
And even though his letter is found
toward the end of the New Testament
as we now have it organized,
chronologically it was the first New Testament
Epistle to be written.
And as long as I'm offering you bits of Bible
Trivia,
there are actually two New Testament books
written by members of Jesus' immediate family.
Jude, who wrote the short letter bearing his name,
was a younger brother of James,
and, of course, also a half-brother of Jesus.
His name was actually Judas,
but he wrote under the name of Jude
perhaps to avoid confusion with the disciple
Judas.
And since I've wandered into this little side-track,
I'll add one more observation by saying
that I consider the submission of Jesus'
half-brothers to Him as Lord
to be among the most fascinating testimonies in
the New Testament.
Those of you who have brothers and sisters
know that there are none
who know us better
than our siblings.
And the fact that, following the resurrection,
Jesus' brothers were willing to submit to Jesus
as their Lord,
and identify themselves with Jesus
in a way that could easily cost them their
lives
is such a powerful testimony to the true nature
of the life of Christ,
not just during His few years of public
ministry,
but throughout His entire life.
And now, with that little addition to last week,
we'll step back into our study
of Romans chapter 6.
It has been a few weeks
since we've been in this passage
so a little review will help.
This entire 6th chapter
and actually the 7th chapter
and part of the 8th chapter as well
were written by Paul
to equip us
with the knowledge we need
concerning our relationship to sin
now that we have come to Christ.
If you look at Paul's introductory statement to this
whole section
found in Romans 6:1-2
we hear him setting the direction
for everything he wants to accomplish in
the next 3 chapters.
He says,
Rom. 6:1 What shall we say then? Are we
to continue in sin so that grace may
increase?
Rom. 6:2 May it never be! How shall we
who died to sin still live in it?
Obviously, Paul is telling us
that he is now turning his attention
to the whole issue of sin.
But even in that opening statement
we realize we are facing some major
communication problems.
Paul's opening statement says,
How shall we who died to sin still live in
it?
And how do we respond to that?
If we are honestly listening
to what Paul is saying
I think we will respond by saying,
"Wait a minute, Paul,
you've got your tenses mixed up!
What you really mean is,
'How shall we who should die to sin still live in
it?'"
From the very beginning
Paul is saying things
we simply do not believe.
He says we have already died to sin.
We say, "No, I haven't died to sin yet,
but I should,
and I'm trying to,
and by the grace of my good God
I am making some progress."
This is not an easy section for us,
but to be honest,
I think it is difficult
not so much because it is intricate or confusing,
but rather because the concepts themselves are
so foreign
to our natural way of thinking
that we simply don't hear them.
So, to help us understand better
what Paul is doing in this section of his writing,
I want to take a little different approach for the
next few weeks.
I want to begin by making a statement
that will give us a foundation
for what we're going to be looking at,
and, of course, I'll take a few minutes
to talk about that statement.
Then I want to share with you
the four major truths
Paul is sharing with us in this section on
sin,
and then talk a little bit about
why it is so hard for us to accept them as
true.
I really do not want this whole thing
to get confusing,
and I know I run the risk of doing that,
so let me just state
as clearly as I know how to
what I see Paul doing in this section of the
book of Romans.
1st of all, he openly acknowledges
what we already know,
that even after coming to Christ
we do continue to fight battles with sin.
Then Paul takes four major changes
that Christ accomplished in our lives
at the time we came to Him
and He reminds us once again of those changes.
And in the process,
his central message to us is this:
the power of sin will be broken in our lives
to the degree that we correctly understand
and accept both the truth and the reality of
those four changes.
You see,
throughout this entire passage
Paul is not telling us what NEEDS to be done
in our lives,
he is telling us what has ALREADY been
done,
changes that have already taken place,
but changes we don't really believe.
In a way, what's happening in this passage
is a little bit like the plot
of that Disney classic Candleshoe.
I know some of you
are a little out of touch with the Disney classics,
so let me refresh your memory.
Candleshoe begins by showing a girl in her mid-teens
who, for all practical purposes,
lives on the streets of some large U.S. city.
She knows very little about her past,
and has been in an endless series of foster homes
throughout her childhood.
She survives by stealing,
and states as her philosophy of life
the belief that the only way to survive
is to get up each morning
with your fists clenched,
and make sure you get in the first punch
of the day.
Then a con man approaches her with a plan to use
her
to masquerade as the long lost granddaughter
of an old lady in England
who may have tremendous wealth hidden
on her estate.
Throughout the entire movie
this teenage street kid
believes she is stealing a place in this
English home
through her cunning, and deceit, and strength
of will.
And at the end of the show
she finds out that she very likely is the true
heiress to this great fortune.
What she needed from the very beginning
was to understand the truth
of her real identity.
She didn't have to trick anyone,
or deceive anyone,
she just had to accept the truth
of who she really was.
I think that is a little bit like
what we see happening
throughout this section of the book of
Romans.
All Paul is doing throughout this section
is reminding us of the truth
of what has already taken place in our lives.
But because we do not believe those truths
we continue to live out our own street kid
lifestyle and mentality
in our relationship with our God.
Now, let me start first
with the statement I promised you.
When we come to God through Christ
God Himself steps into our lives
and, by His sovereign power,
brings about a number of radical,
permanent changes within us.
Now, I know that is probably obvious to many of
you,
but sometimes we become so focused
on what we are doing when we come to
Christ
that we are only vaguely aware
that He is doing anything.
And yet,
the truth is,
the New Testament talks very little about
what we do,
and a great deal about what God does when we
come to Him.
Now, the things we're talking about here
are not things we do for God,
they are things He does within us.
That, of course, is the heart of the distinction
between true faith
and man-made religion.
Man-made religion talks to us
about the great changes
we should make within ourselves for God.
The true message of faith
offered to us through Christ,
the GOOD NEWS,
talks to us about the great changes
our God has already made within us.
The entire New Testament
is filled with statements about these changes
that are accomplished within us by God,
but, if you would like to read just two extended
lists of some of those changes,
you'll enjoy reading Ephesians 1:2-14,
and Romans 5:1-11.
Just listen to the way these passages begin!
The Ephesians passage begins,
Eph. 1:3 ¶ Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed
us with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenly places in Christ...
You see, it's all in the past tense -
...has blessed us...
It's all stuff God has already accomplished in our
lives.
And then the passage goes on to list some of those
blessings we have already been given.
And the Romans passage begins in much the same
way:
Rom. 5:1 Therefore, having been justified
by faith, we have ...
and then it continues on to tell us
what we have already been given
as a result of our union with Christ.
You've heard me refer to this passage enough
so that you may remember what I call it.
This is our list of God's birthday presents to us
on the day we are born into His family.
But my point is simply this:
as we move back into this Romans 6 passage
it will help us to remember that when we come
to God through Christ
God Himself steps into our lives
and, by His sovereign power,
brings about a number of radical,
permanent changes within us.
And then, in this section of the book of Romans,
when Paul goes about educating the Christian
in a proper perspective on sin,
he takes four of those changes
that have already taken place in our
lives,
and reminds us of what they are.
Or, to state it a different way,
the power of sin will be broken in our lives
to the degree we understand
and accept the truth and the reality
of the changes God has already
made in four areas of our lives.
So, what are those four areas of change?
1. The change in our true identity.
2. The change in our relationship to the Moral law
of God.
3. The change in our relationship to sin.
4. The change in our relationship to righteousness.
That is what is going on
in these two and a half chapters of Romans.
Paul is reaffirming our true identity,
our freedom from the law,
the change that has already taken place in
our relationship to sin,
and the change that has already taken
place in our relationship to righteousness.
The reason it is such slow going for us,
and the reason it sometimes feels like we are
wading through wet cement
is because the truths Paul offers
in all four of these areas
contradict everything we have known and accepted
as true
since the day we were born.
And, as we attempt to pull this section together,
what I want us to do
is to take each of these truths
and place them next to the lies we bring
with us into our Christian life,
because I think that process
will enable us to more effectively
break the power of those lies.
Let me read for us once again
part of the passage we have been studying most
recently,
and then we'll look at that first truth one
more time.
This is Romans 6:11-18
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 so that you 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.
Rom. 6:15 ¶ What then? Shall we sin
because we are not under law but under
grace? May it never be!
Rom. 6:16 Do you not know that when you
present yourselves to someone as slaves for
obedience, you are slaves of the one whom
you obey, either of sin resulting in death,
or of obedience resulting in righteousness?
Rom. 6:17 But thanks be to God that
though you were slaves of sin, you became
obedient from the heart to that form of
teaching to which you were committed,
Rom. 6:18 and having been freed from sin,
you became slaves of righteousness.
#1. Now, the first of the 4 truths Paul reminds us
of,
as he prepares us for breaking the power of sin
in our lives,
is one we have invested a lot of time in
throughout much of this study.
Concerning our true identity,
Paul says, consider yourselves to be dead
to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus...
and he says that you have already become
obedient from the heart to that form of
teaching to which you were committed.
He is simply telling us the truth
about one of the changes
God has already accomplished in the lives
of every one of His people.
We are now holy creations of God,
absolutely pure and righteous
at the deepest level of our being.
We, on the other hand,
continue to define our true identity
not on the basis of what God says about us,
but rather on the basis of our daily
performance,
and so we either do not hear
or simply reject what Paul is saying.
In that Candleshoe illustration I mentioned earlier,
throughout most of that movie
the teenage girl continued to view herself as
a thief pulling a con job on an old lady.
She was eating food she believed she had no right
to,
she was living in a mansion she believed she
had no right to,
and everything she did reinforced in her the
lie she brought with her
into that living situation.
She believed she was an orphan
with no resources beyond her own wits and
deceit,
and because she believed that lie
she interpreted everything that happened
in her life on that basis.
When she sat down at the table and ate,
she was telling herself
that she was a skillful thief
successfully stealing what did not legally
belong to her.
The truth was
she was not stealing anything,
and she wasn't even a thief
because she was the granddaughter of the owner,
and the only living legal heir of everything there.
Now, when Paul begins his reeducation process
with us
in building our protection against the power of
sin in our lives,
he begins by addressing
a similar situation in our lives.
With most of us,
when we come to Christ,
the best we can muster within ourselves
is the belief that we are repentant sinners who
have been pardoned
by a compassionate God.
We believe the forgiveness is real,
but we still view ourselves
not as the eternal holy ones of God,
but rather as saved sinners.
Now, with that self-concept entrenched in our
thinking,
we begin to live our Christian lives
believing that our chief calling
is to try to become more like the people
God wants us to be.
In other words, we should try hard to clean up our
act.
And we will tend to view
our relationship with God
as being based upon how effectively
we succeed in that calling.
God has given us a second chance to be better
people.
If we improve our performance
then we expect and anticipate
the acceptance and approval of God.
If something good happens to us,
we will even tend to believe
it is in some way associated
with the progress we're making.
If something bad happens to us,
we will tend to believe
it is because God is displeased with the
progress we're making
and wants us to try harder.
In other words,
because we bring with us into the family of
God
the belief that our standing with God
is in some way tied to our behavior,
we will see proofs of that belief
everywhere we look.
And when Paul begins his attack
against the power of sin in our lives,
he does so by reminding us
of the central truth of our lives in Christ.
In Christ we are not called
to try to become holy for Him,
but rather we have already been made holy by Him.
When we look in the mirror in the morning,
what God wants us to see
is not a sinner being called by God
to try to act a little better
throughout the next 24 hours,
but rather a Saint, a pure, perfect, holy,
righteous one of God,
who is called to live out the next 24 hours
in a way that is consistent
with his true identity.
Next week we'll move on to that second truth.