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Written by Pastor Darrell Cooper
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Friday, 01 August 2008 14:15 |
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Romans 6:1-11
June 15 - New Gottland Cov.
“Freed From, Not To!”
(Sin/Grace)
Sermon
I am going to need a little help this morning, so Gary, will you come up here for a minute please? (Pause to assure Gary that I really want him to come up on stage) You all need to know that Gary had no idea that I was going to do this this morning. So, he has had absolutely zero advanced warning. And Gary, you need to know that Calvin Carlson told me I could do this to you.
I want you all to imagine that I am not a believer, I am not a Christian, and Gary is. Gary, I want you to talk to me just like you would an actual unbeliever and answer my questions as honestly and clearly as your can, OK?
(Getting into character now) OK, Gary, I understand that you are a follower of Jesus, is that right? (Pause for response) You call yourself a Christian, right? (Pause for response) So that means what, that you believe that when you die you are going to go to Heaven? (Pause for response) So you have a relationship with God right now? (Pause for response)
Wonderful! I have been looking for someone like you. You see, I have been thinking lately about becoming a Christian myself, but I am a little confused about how to go about doing that. Do you think you could answer some of my questions? (Pause for response) Great.
Well, to begin with, I have to tell you that I have done some pretty bad stuff in my life. I am not proud of that and I figure the Big Guy upstairs isn’t too please either. So, I was wondering, how bad is too bad? I mean, how many sins are too many? At what point does God just say, “Hey, you have crossed the line now, buddy. You have gone too far! I am not going to save you now.”? Gary, what is the point of no return? What if I am so far gone that God won’t forgive me? How many sins are just too many? (Pause for response)
What? You mean there are not too many sins? You mean no matter how many times I have sinned and no matter how bad I have been, God will still forgive me? (Pause for response) Are you saying that God would even have forgiven Hitler? (Pause for response)
Wow! That is a pleasant surprise! OK, well what about church attendance? How many times do I need to go to church before God will forgive me for all the bad stuff I’ve done? (Pause for response) None?! What? Really?
OK, well what about money? How much money do I have to give away to charities before God will forgive me for all the bad stuff I’ve done? (Pause for response) None?! Are you sure? Man, this is getting harder and harder to believe!
Well then what about good works? How many little old ladies do I have to help across the street before God will forgive me for the bad things I have done in my past? (Pause for response) None?!! Are you serious? Wait a minute. So you are telling me that there is no sin so bad that God cannot forgive it, and no number of sins too many that God won’t forgive, and it is not about being religious enough to impress God so He will save me, and it is not about giving enough money away so I can buy my salvation and it is not about being good enough to earn my salvation. Is that right? (Pause for response) So are you saying that God’s forgiveness is free? (Pause for response) Are you really telling me that the grace of God is totally free? (Pause for response)
(Breaking out of character now) Gary is exactly right, of course. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are in a sermon series on the book of Romans and in this book Paul says the same thing over and over. He keeps telling us that we do not and cannot earn our salvation. He says that obeying the law is not a prerequisite for salvation. It is not about keeping all the rules. It is not about being really good so God will like us. It is not about working hard so God will reward us. No. Salvation is a free gift of God’s grace. It is totally free. All we can do is receive that gift, and we do that simply by trusting God. We simply trust Him that He is who He claims to be and that He will do what He has promised to do.
If you would like to turn to Romans 5:20b, Paul says something very interesting. He says, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more” In other words, the more sin there is to forgive, the more forgiveness God gives us. So yes, had Hitler sincerely repented of his terrible and many sins, God’s grace would rise even to that level. Where sin increases, grace increases all the more.
Now, some people have been scandalized by this teaching. This doctrine of the grace of God being free has worried and upset many people. In fact, some people kind of resist this doctrine. The reason they do that is they are afraid that it will encourage people to live sinful lifestyles. These well-meaning people tend to think of it this way: For most people, the fear of punishment is their primary motivation for avoiding evil and doing good. So, what happens if we remove that motivation? If God’s grace is totally free, with no strings attached, then if you remove God’s judgment for sin, what motive is left for being good? Won’t this just give people an excuse to live any old way they want to? So, some people resist or even reject the doctrine of the free grace of God because they are concerned that it will give people a license to sin.
Other people rush to embrace this doctrine precisely because they believe it does grant them a license to live a sinful lifestyle. These people tend to reason like this: We sin. When we sin, God’s grace covers and cleanses our sin. If we sin even more, God give us more grace. God’s grace is good. So, if more sin results in more grace, shouldn’t we sin as much as possible in order to provoke as much grace as possible? In fact, if our sin brings about ultimate good, then isn’t our sin ultimately good?
This is the kind of thinking Paul was running into. As he went around preaching the good news that God’s forgiveness was freely available to anyone who would take it, he was accused of taking sin lightly and even giving people permission to live in sin.
Paul responds to this attitude in the first couple of verses of Romans chapter six. He asks and answers his own question. He says, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” That is how the NIV translates it, but it is a much stronger phrase than that. Your translation might say, “Certainly not!”, or “Of course not!”, or “May it never be!”. My favorite translation is, “God forbid!”
Paul is shocked and dismayed that anyone would even ask such a question. He categorically and vehemently rejects such an attitude. Paul indicates that this kind of approach to God is insane. It is crazy for at least a couple of reasons.
The first reason this kind of attitude is crazy is because it hurts us. When we take this kind of approach to God we end up harming ourselves and shipwrecking our lives.
Let me illustrate it this way. Suppose that you have a very good and comprehensive major medical insurance policy. Your insurance coverage is really exceptional. One day you are thinking about your policy and it occurs to you, “If I get a cold, my insurance policy will pay for my doctor visit and cold medication. That is good. But, if I break my arm, my policy will cover the emergency room, the x-rays, etc, which costs a lot more than a prescription for cold medicine. So, that is better. However, if I get cancer, my insurance will cover all of my chemo treatments and radiation treatments and long hospital stays, which would be extremely expensive. So that is better yet. It seems that the worse my health is, the more money and resources I get from my insurance policy. So, if I am going to get the maximum benefit from this policy, perhaps I should create the need for extensive medical care.”
So, you begin to daydream about various scenarios, and you think, “Like, the next time I am out fishing at Kanopolis Lake and a severe lightning storm begins to brew, I think I will just row out to the middle of the lake in order to maximize my chances of getting struck by lightning. That would be a fairly significant medical claim, wouldn’t it?
And I think I will disable the air bag in my car and I won’t wear a seatbelt anymore because if I crash my car at high speeds without restraint or protection it could exponentially increase the seriousness of your injuries. Maybe I will even sustain a serious head injury. That could be very expensive.
And I think I will vacation in Spain this year and participate in the running of the bulls. If I am lucky I will get gored half to death and it will require multiple surgeries, perhaps even facial reconstructive surgery. That sounds very expensive!
And if I am ever wakened in the night to the screeching of my smoke detector, I will simply roll back over and try to go back to sleep, hoping to sustain more serious burns, which would require longer stays in the burn unit, more skin graft surgeries, etc. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
Some of you are looking at me like I have gone completely mad. That is exactly my point! No person in his right mind would ever think this way or do these things. Even if you do have good insurance and there is financial provision for you in the event of a major medical crisis, no one sets out to actually self-inflict terrible injuries. Why not? Because it would hurt us more than help us. Clearly, it is not in our best interest to hurt ourselves, even for the offer of free medical care.
This is one of the reasons Paul says it would be completely crazy to go on living a life of sin after we come to faith in Jesus. It would be insane to say, “Hey, I am just going to go right on sinning and God’s grace will cover it,” because we would hurt ourselves very badly in the process, and probably hurt others as well.
So, the first reason it is crazy to take this kind of approach to God is because it hurts us. The second, and more important reason it is crazy is because it hurts God.
Imagine for a moment that you are a young person and your Father is extraordinarily wealthy. You have just graduated from high school and you are preparing to go to college, which will be your first time to be away from home. Your father loves you very much, so for a graduation gift he buys you your first car. It is a nice used car, perhaps a hybrid so you can actually afford to drive it.
You love your new car. You drive it around town and show it off to all your friends and you proudly arrive on campus in style, very pleased to have your own wheels. That is, until you begin to look around an notice that many of the other students also have cars, and many of them are much nicer vehicles. Some of them are sports cars, many of them are faster, fancier, bigger, and newer. You begin to wish you had a different car.
Then you begin to contemplate what Dad would do if something terrible happened to your car. He would probably buy you a new one, right? So, you decide to force his hand. You drive your car up a mountain road to the edge of a precipice, get out, and just give it a little push over the edge of the cliff. Of course, your new car is smashed into a crumpled heap of metal at the base of the mountain.
How do you think your father will feel if he finds out what you did? How do you think he will feel if he finds out that you took this precious and expensive gift, this expression of his love for you, and deliberately trashed it and then demanded more?
That is perhaps just a taste of how God must feel when we treat Him that way. When we intentionally sin thinking, “It doesn’t matter. My Father will just forgive me anyway.” You see, if we deliberately continue to sin, excusing our lifestyle with pious words about the grace of God abounding, it is like crucifying Jesus all over again. It is like saying, “Hey, thanks a lot Jesus for dying for me and my sins so I can go right on sinning! Here, why don’t you just take another nail so I can tell another lie? Here is another thorn in your head so I can look at internet pornography. Let me jab this spear into your side so I can cheat on my spouse. Let me thrash your back with this whip so I can destroy the reputation of others through gossip and slander. I am just going to nail your feet to the floor so I can go move in with my boyfriend.”
This kind of attitude breaks God’s heart and it offends the will of a holy God. We must always remember, the only reason grace and forgiveness costs us nothing is because it cost God everything! The only reason grace and forgiveness costs us nothing is because it cost God everything!
So, Paul completely rejects the idea that God’s grace gives us permission to go on living in sin. That is an insane way to live because everyone ends up getting hurt. It hurts us and it hurts God.
In the rest of this passage Paul goes on to describe what our relationship with sin should look like. He uses the image of baptism to explain it. Baptism, particularly full-immersion baptism, can be a beautiful picture of what happens to us in salvation. When we push the person under the water, as the water closes in over their head, it is a picture of their death and burial. Then, when they come back up out of the water, as their head crests it is a picture of their resurrection.
Paul says that if we are in Christ, then we have been baptized into Christ. If we have been baptized into Christ, then whatever happened to Jesus happened to us. Jesus died to sin and is now alive to God. This means that we too have now died to sin and are alive to God.
Now, it is important to understand what the Bible means by death. The biblical understanding of death is not extinction, but separation. When Paul says that we died to sin, he does not mean that sin no longer exists, or that it no longer seeks to influence our lives. Of course not. It is, rather, that we have been completely separated from it and need no longer fall prey to it. We have been completely set free from the bondage of sin. Our death and resurrection destroyed sin’s control over us. It separated us from sin and to God.
Paul finishes this passage in verse 11 with a bottom line application. He says “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” The Greek phrase here has the sense of continual action. So, Paul is saying, “Count yourselves, and keep on counting yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Paul uses very strong language to express our separation from sin. He says we died to it. So, it is not just inappropriate to still live in it, but impossible! Death separates! This means that the difference between our lives now in Christ and our lives before Christ should be as stark as the difference between a living person and a corpse. It should be that obvious!
We should consider ourselves dead to sin. In other words, we should remember that sin has absolutely no power or sway over us, and treat it that way. We are no longer slaves to sin. We died to it. In other words, we not only no longer have to live a sinful lifestyle, but we cannot live a sinful lifestyle. One cannot be both dead and alive. We are either dead or we aren’t. If we are dead to sin and alive to Christ, then we cannot go on sinning. If we go on sinning, then we are not alive in Christ. You cannot have it both ways.
Now, I am not saying that as Christians we will never sin again. We will. Even as we seek to know, love, and serve Jesus we will regularly fail Him in various ways. I am not talking about that. I am talking about willful sin. I am saying that if we deliberately and defiantly choose to live a lifestyle of sin and rebellion against God, then we are not in Christ. We cannot be in Him because we cannot be both dead in sin and alive in Christ. We cannot have it both ways. If you want to explore this more deeply please study 1 John 3:4-10. In that passage John makes it clear that we can either serve Jesus or we can serve our own self-interest, but that they are absolutely mutually exclusive.
Let me close with an illustration that I hope will summarize everything I have been trying to say today. Think of our life before Jesus as a deep, deep pit filled with all kinds of deadly, poisonous snakes. There are vipers and asps, cobras and cottonmouths, adders and copperheads, rattlesnakes and black mambas down there. The snakes are sin and the consequences of sin is death. If you live in a pit full of venomous snakes you will not live very long. And this pit is so deep there is no way any of us can ever climb out of that pit by ourselves. We are completely powerless and hopeless.
Then one day Jesus comes into our life. He grabs hold of the mouth of the pit and extends His body down to us, making a kind of human ladder which we can climb up and out to safety. Jesus becomes a ladder for us, but as He dangles there with His feet among the snakes they attack Him and He dies. Jesus sacrifices His life in order to rescue us from certain death.
So, now that we are safely out of the pit, it would be simply insane if we ran around the mouth of the pit rejoicing that Jesus has become a ladder and has therefore made a way for us to climb back down into the pit to play with the snakes! Imagine if we began to celebrate that we no longer have to jump into the pit, now there is a much safer way for us to get back down there to live with the snakes! No! Of course not! Jesus did not die so we could have a way into the pit! He died so we would have a way out of the pit!
By His grace we died to snakes (sin). In other words, His grace separates us from snakes (sin). Paul is saying, “We died to the snake pit. How can we live in it any longer? Why would anyone, once freed from the pit of snakes, choose to go back down and live (and die) there? Someone might point out that the ladder goes both ways. Well, yes, but if we use grace as a ladder to climb back down into sin, then the death of Jesus is turned from a triumph into a travesty. It makes a mockery of the death of Jesus, turning the purpose of His death on its head.
No sane person would view the ladder of Jesus as a way to get into the pit of death, but only as a way out. The grace of Jesus does not set us free to the pit of snakes, but from the pit of snakes. The grace of Jesus does not set us free to sin, but from sin. So, if you are in Christ, then you have been baptized into Christ. This means that what happened to Him happened to you. You are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. We have been set free from the bondage of sin, delivered from the pit of venomous snakes. So, now that we are free, let’s not live in that pit anymore.
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