Free in Christ

WELCOME / TODAY 

Good morning, church. We are continuing our sermon series in Romans. The apostle Paul has been writing to the church in the city of Rome. Paul planned to visit on his way to Spain. He was on a mission to share the good news about Jesus. They knew the story. They believed it. But there was a way that it could help them more as they walk out their life in Christ. Christianity was not just a set of rules and theology. It was and is about a relationship with God. From the Christian to the non-Christian, sin has hindered people from having a relationship with each other. Paul was familiar with the objections, hang-ups, and misunderstandings of his message. One objection was that all his words of grace promoted sin. It wasn’t and doesn’t. Sin was (and is) a big deal and bad news. God wants our hearts and offers help to truly change. 

TEXT 

I am going to have R.C. read for us. If you are able, would you please stand with me in honor of God’s Word? 

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:1–14, ESV) 

PRAYER 

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your Word, it is light and life for us. God, thank you for your grace and for the Holy Spirit at work among us. We need you. Convict us where we need conviction. Empower us, where we need power. And free us where we have been bound. We pray all this in Jesus’s name, amen. You may be seated. 

STRUCTURE & MAIN IDEA

The passage begins with a question. The rest is an explanation, followed by an application and a conclusion. 

1. Question (vs. 1)

2. Explanation (vs. 2–10)

3. Application (vs. 11–13)

4. Conclusion (vs. 14)

The main idea of these fourteen verses was that as Christ died for sin and was raised to life, and we too, in a way, did the same, resulting in freedom and a new direction. If we accept this, we should live it. Let me explain, I mean, let’s let Paul explain. 

VERSE 1 

Turn to verse 1 of Chapter 6. 

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1, ESV).

The question Paul asked was rhetorical. He was not looking for an answer. He was asking an absurd question from Chapter 3, “Why not do evil that good may come?” (Romans 3:8, ESV). How could people seriously ask that or think that? Well, consider when we sin, God forgives. Then the more we sin, the more he forgives. Thus, there is more grace. Does that make sense? If it does, one might justify ungodliness and keep sinning to make God look more gracious. That is crazy-talk. Right? God is looking for a heart change, and actual change should translate into a behavioral one. The difference might not be stark. It might be a baby step. Maybe it is only leaning toward God. However, if there is no outward evidence of a change, one’s profession could be a performance. So Paul asked, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (6:1, ESV). How did he explain his reasoning? 

VERSE 2

1. Question (vs. 1)

2. Explanation (vs. 2–10)

“By no means! (Romans 6:2, ESV). 

Paul answered. And then asked a follow-up question, 

“How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:2, ESV). 

What was the answer? We can’t. We are not going to live in sin, church. Living in sin is not fun, funny, or good. I don’t care what the world says. Unless our conscience is seared and numbed to the pain of doing wrong, we feel guilty and embarrassed when we sin. And that guilt is a kindness from God. It is a blessing. Sin will destroy all that it touches. We can’t live in it. If you have a tinge of guilt because of living in sin, God is tapping on your shoulder to change. He loves us. He loves you. 

VERSE 3

How about another question from Paul? Look at verse 3: 

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3, ESV). 

Paul was writing to believers, and a distinguishing mark for them was the rite of baptism. Baptism wasn’t trendy. It wasn’t what all the cool kids were doing in the youth group. Baptism often resulted in persecution, not promotion, in the early church. Baptism made public what God had done in private. Baptism represented a relationship with Jesus. One of the last things that Jesus said to his followers was this, 

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20, ESV)

Baptism is one of two rituals that God gave the church to remember what Jesus did on the cross for our sins. It is a sign of faith. It doesn’t save a person, but symbolizes change and God’s work. 

DRIVER’S LICENSE

It reminds me of my kids’ driver’s licenses. A driver’s license is not the person, but it tells us about him or her. It has height, eye color, birth date, sex, and state of issue. It is an ID card. Baptism is your ID card. Through it, we identify with Jesus by going down into the water and coming up. We are saying we believe Jesus died for our sins and was buried. We are dead to sin’s power. It is the old way of doing something, like the difference between a combustible and an electric engine. 

VERSE 4

Look at verse 4: 

 “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4, ESV). 

In baptism, we die in a sense to sin’s rule and reign. Jesus paid the ultimate price to forgive everyone who believes. After death, Jesus was raised to life to the glory of the Father. His resurrection demonstrates God’s power to do the impossible and is one more reason to praise him. In the same way and with the same power, he has made us alive spiritually by the work of the Spirit. 

ZOMBIES 

The Bible says that before this work of regeneration, we were all dead in sin. We were walking zombies. But God made us alive and converted us, opening our blind eyes to spiritual truth. Now, we walk like we are brand new people with a second lease on life. Paul wrote elsewhere in the Bible: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17, ESV). In John, we read that we must be born again. And the Holy Spirit gives that new life through faith. The apostle Peter wrote we were born again into a living hope that won’t perish, spoil, or fade. Friends, we have a new identity. The devil, the world, and our flesh want us to put our identity in the wrong place: athletics, education, hometowns, occupations, money, neighborhoods, travel, adventure, cars, and sexuality. Those may be good and true. But they fall short of pinpointing who we now are. By faith, we are spiritually made alive and saved by grace. We are no longer dead enemies of God but living sons and daughters in him. We were bought at a price. He has rescued us that we might walk out of this sanctuary with clothes of righteousness and a future hope.

VERSE 5

Go to verse 5: 

“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5, ESV).

Let me repeat that: 

“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5, ESV).

This is our future hope. Unless you have not been united with Christ. Are you dead to sin, friends? Then, the resurrection hope is yours right now. 

• You will have a body that won’t get sick. 

• You will have a spirit that will never face a second death in hell. 

• You will be incorruptible. That works out to be, 

• No diabetes or heart disease, 

• No stroke or limbs that get broke, 

• No cataracts or heart attacks 

• No glaucoma or carcinoma, 

• No psychosis or osteoporosis, and

• No deafness or arthritis!

Can I get an amen?

VERSE 6

Look at verse 6: 

“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6, ESV). 

Notice that we are not enslaved anymore—sin shackles. But Jesus has set us free from that bondage, brothers and sisters. Freedom is not a do-it-yourself kit. It wasn’t Jesus’s doing through his dying. He was crucified, a violent death. He looks at you with love from a pain two thousand years old. And the point is to free you to relate to God unhindered by sin’s enslavement. 

DEER 

I have been trying to protect my juniper bushes this year from my arch-nemesis, the deer family. We laugh at them, but they ruin our plants. If it were legal to hunt them in a residential neighborhood, we have some ready for you hunters. Anyway, I recently set up some seven-foot-high netting to keep them out. It looks like this. One morning this week, I saw four girls having a light breakfast salad inside my fence. They broke in. I chased them out. My cheap plastic nets were nothing to their agile power. They hopped over and hopped through it. The net was like cheap one-ply toilet paper. In my mind, after I chased them, they looked back at me with their cute, big, black, beautiful eyes and swished their tails, waiting for round two. I can’t stop those deer with a flimsy net. I bring that up to illustrate that sin is so much worse than a cheap Amazon netting. It is like toxic filth you can’t get rid of. It is like the dark mark in Harry Potter. It is a terminal cancer. 

DANGER OF SIN

It doesn’t seem that bad at first. Do you know anyone who gave in to a little sin, only for the problem to metastasize into a full-blown catastrophe? Sin is like that. It begins with a thought, an impulse, a moment. But then it doesn’t end. Desire has a voracious appetite that is never satiated. It might lessen for a second, but it comes back in full force at the worst times. It tastes sweet, but then transforms into a demonic, poisonous monster. The slavery of sin is universal. We all have or still are slaves. Some of you may think, “I am not and never was.” What if that thought is an indication you still are? Perhaps your inability to see the chains of sin is evidence that they still have a grip on you? Could it be that the Holy Spirit is speaking through his Word to arrest you at this time? What if this day God is doing LASIK on your spiritual eyes, and you come away seeing like never before? Friends, the Bible says we were so into sin that we were anti-God, we were flat-lined spiritually speaking, trapped, and fast-bound to a nature whose trajectory is destruction. But that doesn’t have to be or end like that. 

SERVANT OF CHRIS

Paul began his letter to the Romans, by writing that he had become a servant, or slave, to a different master: Christ. Friends, we are either slaves to Christ or slaves to sin. We can only have one master. Paul wrote to a church in Galatia,

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19–20, ESV)

We can walk in the newness of life with a new Lord over our lives. We can orient our days to seek God and his kingdom. How? 

VERSE 7

Look at verse 7: 

“For one who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6:7, ESV). 

If we have died to sin, we are free, friends. Jesus said in John 8. “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32, ESV). Some people think that Christianity is oppressive and restrictive. No, the rules of the Bible are not prudish or archaic. They are liberating and pleasurable. 

VERSE 8

Let’s get back to our passage. Jump to verse 8: 

“Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8, ESV).

We live with Jesus. We are not alone. He is with us. He is at work inside of us. Remember what Jesus told his friends in Matthew. He said, 

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20, ESV)

Jesus is and was with his disciples, and he is with us now. How do we know? The Bible tells us so. 

VERSE 9

Go to verse 9: 

“We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God” (Romans 6:9–10, ESV). 

The basis of our freedom and Jesus’s presence with us is what he has done for us. His death is a historical fact. No history teacher at New Buffalo, River Valley, Michigan State, or Purdue denies that Jesus existed or died. But we Christians take it a step further. We believe he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. He has accomplished what he set out to do. The hard lifting is over. He will never die again. And death has no power over him. Why? Why is that? Jesus died to sin, and he lives to God. He was more than a man. He was the God man who paid the payment necessary to quell God’s anger at us for our sins. This leads us to some application from Paul. We began with a question, Paul explained his answer, and now he is going to hit the application.

VERSE 11 THROUGH 13

Turn to verses 11 through 13: 

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (Romans 6:11–13, ESV)

Paul wrote, “Consider yourself dead to sin.” What does that mean? How can we be dead to sin? It certainly feels like I sin from time to time. I know I sinned this week. Paul expanded on his point. 

• Don’t let sin reign in your body. 

• Don’t obey its passions. 

• Don’t present your body parts as tools to it. 

How this works is pretty clear when it comes to something like premeditated murder, sexual immorality, and stealing, but what if we don’t struggle with those sins? Friends, sin is anything contrary to the will of God. It involves thought, words, and actions. It includes good things we should think, say, and do, but don’t. Remember Romans Chapter 1? Sin included not glorifying God or giving him thanks. Do you give God thanks enough? When was the last time you thanked him? If you are like me, that is one more area in which you fall short. 

APPLICATION 

Let me push pause on Paul. What do we do when we identify sin? We are to confess it. We acknowledge it to God in our hearts. And we renounce it. We can ask God for help in changing. Friends, we walk out our faith alone. When you feel the grip of sin and want to break free, share your struggle with someone of faith. Letting others know your struggles is so freeing. Could you try it out today? We need help in this life. Here is a church family. Include others on your journey. Let’s encourage each other. You are dead to sin. 

SECOND 

Second, we are not just not doing the bad things, but let’s consider ourselves alive to God and a tool of righteousness. Honor God with your thoughts, words, and actions. What would it look like to do that this week? [] You are alive to God. 

THIRD

Third, part of this relates to last week. What have you let rule you? Who is in charge of your agenda and to-do lists? Do you have space and flexibility for God to lead you? Or, is everything planned out so there is no room for the Spirit to speak into your life? If we want God’s help, we need to have a margin in our lives for him to interrupt us. Let’s take a break and consider how God can lead us differently this week than last. []

SUMMARY  

Remember, Paul asked a question, explained himself, made some application, and now for a conclusion: 

“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14, ESV). 

Friends, we don’t want sin to have dominion over us, do we? We want grace to rule our days. But, look at what God said about you who believe: 

“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14, ESV). 

What that means, ultimately, is that if you are a follower of Jesus, grace is a foregone conclusion. Sin will have no absolute dominion over us; grace will instead. That is not a pipe dream; it is a promise. God is our king, not sin. The Bible says, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6, ESV). Rest in that. God’s grace is our new master. Let’s pray.

PRAYER 

Heavenly Father, thank you for your Word. AMEN! We need encouragement. Thank you for dying in our place and rising victorious. We need you. Desperately. Please help us break free from the secret patterns of sin that cling to us and weigh us down. Help us live for you, we pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.

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