Romans 6:1-14
Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of God’s word to the book of Romans. We’ll be
reading again from chapter six, verses one through 14, but our
focus will be on verses 12 and 13. So make your way to Romans
chapter six. And before we read God’s word,
let’s ask for his help. Father, we ask that you would
give us eyes that see, ears that hear. Give us hearts that believe
that this is your word and it means something to us as your
children. And we pray that our hands and feet would be willing
and ready to walk from this place, to live for you, by your grace,
for your glory, and for the good of our neighbor. We pray in Jesus’
name. Hear the word of the living God. This is Romans chapter six,
beginning at verse one. 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 bodies to make you obey their
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. Amen. The word of the living
God, you may be seated. Most of you probably don’t remember
your English grammar. You slept through middle school.
And you got to high school and college, and you had to take
a foreign language, and you regretted sleeping through middle school
English grammar. You learned about verbs and nouns,
and you learned about tenses, verb tenses. You learned about
parts of speech and all those sorts of things. But I want to
suggest to you, you actually learned your grammar very early
on. We wanna think about imperatives.
Imperatives are commands. They’re words to you with an
exclamation point behind them. The common one, the common example
we give around here is when your mom opened the back door while
you were outside playing and hollered out the word supper,
she was informing you that supper was ready, but that also meant
get home, get washed, and be at the table. That was an imperative,
that was a command. Some of you know what an imperative
is. In another way, the neighborhood dog shows up at your back door
and you yell, get, right? That’s an imperative, get out
of here, right? You know what imperatives are.
You learn them from your mother. You learn them in your middle
school grammar. You picked them up along the way when you had
to study a foreign language. Imperatives are all over the
New Testament. In fact, there is a pattern in
New Testament theology, particularly in the letters and in the language
of the apostle Paul, when he commands the church, when he
tells the church to do something or live in a certain way, it’s
very often, if not almost always, in the imperative case. It’s a, you must do this. It’s
a, Divine command, it’s a calling, a requirement of your life. But
these imperatives are always preceded by indicatives. That’s another part of the English
language we had to learn along the way. When mom hollered out
the back door, supper, it’s ready, get home, get washed, get to
the table. It was also enforced by an indicative. She had a wooden
spoon. Daddy was coming home, right?
And so indicatives, true things, dad’s coming home, mom has a
wooden spoon, she called, you better obey. Those imperatives
are backed up by something that is true. And so when we come
to Romans chapter six, as we’ve done last week and this week,
we want to think about the imperative commands of verses 12 and 13,
but in light. of the indicatives we considered
last week. If you think back through the
first 11 verses of chapter six of Romans, those indicatives,
those things which are true of the Christian are these. We are
dead to sin. We were baptized into Christ
Jesus’ death. We were buried with him. We were
united with him in his death. Our old self was crucified. Our
body of sin was brought to nothing. We are no longer enslaved to
sin. No, we have died with him and
have been set free. And gloriously, we were united
to him in his resurrection. And so we have been raised to
a newness of life. So the indicatives of Romans
6 are important when we come to the imperatives of Romans
6. You can’t do the imperatives
unless those indicatives are true. You can’t live the Christian
life unless it’s true that you died to sin or were united to
Christ or were buried with him or have a new man, a new nature. Your body of sin was brought
to nothing. And so as we think of the imperatives
of the latter part of chapter six, they must be considered
in light of the indicatives of the early part of this chapter. So today we want to consider
the new life, the new way of living, the new obedience, the
new way for a Christian in its It’s in light of all that has
been done for you in Christ Jesus. And I want us to simply think
of verse 12 and the reality of the Christian life. And then
verse 13, the requirements of the Christian life. And we do
this all keeping in mind. the reason Jesus came into this
world. He came to be the new Adam. He
came to give us the ability to have the new man, the new constitution,
old man, crucified and gone. But he came to give us new life.
Next week we’ll think of his new creation, which we look forward
to, the new heavens and the new earth. But today, the reality
of the new life, the requirements. of the new life. Well, let’s
think first about verse 12. It says, let not therefore sin
reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Now, remember we said you can’t
live the new life unless the indicatives of the new man are
true. And so Paul can’t tell Christians
quit sinning unless you become a new man. He can’t say to you,
live by the spirit. If you’re stuck in your old nature,
if you’re still dead in your sins and trespasses, if you’ve
not been made alive by Christ, it’s not possible for you to
let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, making you
obey its passions. So these, these commands, these
imperatives are only true because of the realities of all that
God in Christ Jesus has done for you. So let not sin therefore
reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. I want us to think just a moment
here about the reality of the new man, living the new life. And the reality is this, we live
in a tension as Christians. It was said during the Protestant
Reformation, we are at the same time just and sinners. We are at the same time justified
before the throne of God, and at the same time sinners in practice. And what does that mean? Well,
we can explain that by the two terms, justification and sanctification. Justification, an act of God’s
free grace, where he pardons all our sin and accepts us as
righteous in his sight, not because of anything that we have done,
but because of the righteousness of Christ. Our little saying
to make it clear, justification is just as if we have never sinned. That’s the pardon. And it’s just
as if we’ve always obeyed. God sees us as he sees his son. But then there’s that sanctification
word. It’s a process. It’s a process where the sinner
who comes to Jesus is enabled more and more to die to sin and
live to righteousness. By God’s word, by God’s spirit,
through daily disciplines, we are able to hate what is evil
and hold fast to that which is good. But our confession tells
us of the Christian life and very clear in plain terms, it
says of sanctification, that the Christian, though justified,
lives a continual, a perpetual and irreconcilable war until
he’s taken home to heaven. We live a battle with the flesh,
our remaining sin. We live in a battle with Satan
who wants to destroy God’s glory. We live in a battle with the
world and all that it offers. And so God, in his wisdom, when
he gave the church his scriptures, he gave us his word to read and
to hear proclaimed, preached and taught to us. He gave us
his word to fortify us against these three enemies, the flesh,
remaining sin, the world and its ways and the devil and his
deceit and desires to destroy. And so we must live a life on
guard. We are at the same time just
and sinners. Our larger catechism has a wonderful
question that I think is helpful for understanding this tension
we live in. It says, what is the difference between justification
and sanctification? In justification, it says our
sin is pardoned. It is put away, not guilty. But in sanctification, our sin
is subdued. I like to think of it this way.
We grew up in a, in a home. Uh, and when I was a younger
child with a wood stove, every, uh, winter, we gathered our,
or every fall, summer, we gathered our wood. Some of you, I know,
know this process. Well, you gather your wood, you
have your first fire on the first cold night. You, you stoke that
thing up, you get it going, you go to bed, you wake up the next
morning and you come down and you open that wood stove and
there’s just gray ashes. But you, you, you take away that
top layer and underneath there’s those red hot coals and all those
red hot coals need to become a, a roaring heart. A house warming
fire again is a little kindling, a little fuel, a little wood.
And dear friends, that is what the Christian life is like. Our
sin is pardoned in our justification. Yes, but our sin is only subdued
in our sanctification. And we have the remnants of that
raging fire of sin in our lives. And if you stoke it, If you feed
it, if you fuel it, it will become a raging fire again. Some of
you have been present in our studies of the Westminster Confession
in various classes, and you know when we have read that chapter
on God’s providence, where it says God, for reasons of his
own wisdom and power and goodness, sometimes leave his children
in sin and temptations for a season. And maybe you’ve known this in
your experience. You struggle with the sin, you hate it, you
don’t want to do it. You go to bed praying for God’s forgiveness
and you wake up the next morning happy to put the logs on the
fire. And you live in that cycle of hating this sin, hating this
wickedness, but you struggle. God in his providence, our confession
says, sometimes leaves his children in these manifold temptations
for several reasons. I can’t remember all the reasons,
but a couple of them are for his glory, for His holy purposes
and ends, to call our attention of our need daily for Christ,
and to show us how wicked original sin is, how awful is our unrighteousness,
how dangerous it is, how filthy it is, how contrary to God’s
holiness it is. And so our Christian living,
the reality of it, yes, we are pardoned, And yes, we are being
sanctified and that sanctification is painful, but we have a sign
on our door in a sense under new management. You know what
it’s like when you see a restaurant that has that sign, you think,
thank goodness they couldn’t get orders right. Their food
was terrible. It comes out cold there. Waiters and waitresses
were full of bad attitudes under new management must mean the
food’s better, the service is better. And so we go, that’s
the sense with us as Christians, you’re under new management.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you
obey its passions. How do we do that? I’m just,
but I’m being sanctified. We’ve got to stay in the word.
We’ve got to let the spirit do his work, not quenching the spirit.
We’ve got to put the world at bay. It offers so many wonderful
and even delightful things, but God’s ways are better. We’ve
got to tell Satan to buzz off. We’re under new management. You’ve
been kicked out of the cockpit, Satan. You no longer are flying
this plane. We’ve got to Be sensitive to
God’s word and his ways. And so it’s a daily struggle.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you
obey its passions. Put yourself in the path of God’s
word, his means of grace, the weekly gathering of the church,
The daily reading of your own copy of God’s word. We podcast
it these days, right? Get good podcasts, listen to
these things, fill your heart and your mind and your soul,
but make it your daily pray. Oh Lord, let me hear your word
and not the voice of the world. Lord, help me to live by following
Christ. Instead of being snookered by
Satan and his deceit, Lord, help me to live by your spirit and
not the flesh. Help me not to feed those red
hot coals under that gray ash and let my passions fill my life
with ungodliness. That’s the reality of the Christian
life. It’s a hard reality. And it’s
a sovereign reality. God has made it this way. We don’t know why, but he has.
And we live as Christians, just, pardoned. We live being sanctified,
our sins subdued, but it’s a lifelong, knocked down, knuckles bruised
battle, if you’re living the Christian life, to live in this
reality. Well, verse 13 tells us what
is required of the new man to live the new life. Do not present
your members to sin as instruments of 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. I know some of you will be thinking
over the coming week, coming weeks of maybe an end of the
year audit and New Year’s resolutions. You know, you want to eat better,
want to get on your treadmill again, go to the Y, you know,
count your calories, maybe spend less at the coffee shop and put
a little in savings or pay off a debt. You know, you got all
these New Year’s resolutions. I want to do my devotions. I
want to be at church more, that kind of thing. Those are, those
are great, good things. But I think you can go a little
deeper. I think you can go a little stronger in the Christian life.
And you can say to yourself, this is not just about 2022.
This is about eternity. Why has God and his wisdom saved
me? Did he save me to have a little
piddly to do list? And they’re helpful, y’all. He
saved you for eternal things, for glorious things, for majestic
things. And so if Jesus Christ and all
the reality, all the indicatives of Romans chapter six are true,
you’ve been crucified with Christ. You are united with him and his
death. You put your sin to death. It
doesn’t reign. It doesn’t live in you. It doesn’t control you
any longer. You’ve made a break with it.
All those indicatives. Why has God done this? He’s done
this for his everlasting glory. And so you ought to see yourself
as a holy instrument in the hands of almighty God. What he’s saying
here when he says, don’t present your members as instruments for
unrighteousness, but present them to God as instruments for
righteousness. You want, you want to say, Lord,
I am, I am a soldier in your army. You have enlisted me. He’s drafted you, right? It’s
the selective service even, right? We’re good Presbyterians. He’s
elected you, his selective service, but he has brought you into his
army and everything you do, every way you live, every word you
speak, every action you take, every service to him and to your
neighbor is to be done in righteousness and not unrighteousness. Yet
we know what we just discussed. We’re at the same time just.
and sinners. And some of our life looks like
we are instruments of unrighteousness. The words we say, the filth we
see, the activities we, we, we, we do. And I know sometimes in
your new year’s stuff, I’m going to, I’m going to give more to
the church. I’m going to put more time into serving the church.
I’m going to, I’m going to, you know, be around the family more.
We get into all of that, but it’s bigger than that. Isn’t
it? Is my life an instrument of righteousness? Or in this audit that we’ll probably
all do, have I been more an instrument for unrighteousness? The King
James version and some of the other more literal translations
don’t use the word instruments. They use the word weapons. Are
you a weapon of unrighteousness? Are you a tool and implement
some versions say for righteousness? You know, Satan still thinks
he’s the dictator of your life. He is still day by day by day
through subtlety and through clear words saying to you, live
this way, not that way. He is tempting you through the
world and its ways to say, you know, that old nature was a whole
lot more fun. This going to church and Sunday
school business, that’s, That’s for the birds. He’s doing exactly
what he did to Eve in the garden, to Adam in the garden, to you
daily. But God’s voice needs to be louder.
Do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. Present yourself to duty before
God as an instrument of righteousness. This is really another way of
saying your conduct ought to be rooted in the reality of those
indicatives. Those indicatives are true. You
died to sin. You died with Christ. You were
raised to a new life. If you’re a new man, then live
the new life. You live with a life of upright conduct. I watch a
certain TV show most days and they get a little rowdy, we’ll
just say. Well, one of my theological heroes who, who died, um, decade
or so ago has a, has a son who, um, it’s his offspring. And he
was on this show the other night and they’re all saying what they
say, loose tongues, loose language, crass language. And he’s on there
being a bright light of righteousness. What a stark contrast that when
he’s the kid of a theologian, he’s the, he’s a, he’s a man
who’s living out his raising. And what a stark contrast. You
know, he could have cracked a few jokes. He could have said a few
funny things using the same words that they do. And it was a real
testimony to me to say, here’s a man who’s probably in his fifties
and he’s holding fast to the words of truth his parents taught
him. He’s holding fast to the words of truth he’s learned in
church. And when in the world, he’s an instrument of righteousness.
How many of us would just kind of go with the flow, bump along,
do those things? But we live in this reality,
the Christian life, justified, sanctified, at the same time
just, same time a sinner. And there is much required of
us. You know, the church in the last, I don’t know how many years,
has really dumbed it down. Jesus just wants you to be sincere.
No, he wants you to be righteous. How else will the world see what
righteousness is like? If Christians say, well, the
Bible, you know, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, but you
know, I want you to think about this. Israel was to be a light
to the nations. God took Abraham out of Ur of
the Chaldeans, out of paganism, and he brought him to the promised
land and he planted him and his family there. And over the years,
he planted a kingdom there. And their job was to live among
pagan nations, Canaanites and Philistines and other nations,
and to live a holy life. with unholy people around them
and to be a light. And that has changed since the
coming of Jesus. We don’t now live in Israel as a nation. We
live as Christians scattered across the earth. And as Israel
was to be a light to the Gentiles, so are we. And this light through
the church has spread across the whole globe. But how will
they see if we live as instruments of unrighteousness? Notice how
he ends this passage, verse 14, sin will have no dominion over
you since you are not under the law, but you are under grace. The world, dear friends, is seeing
the outworking of sin and they’re seeing it on steroids. You know,
you’ve seen the news, you’re with people, but are they seeing
the outworking of grace? That’s the reality of obedience
to the imperatives. but they have to be rooted in
the indicatives. And so is the indicative true of you? Are you
a believer in the Lord Jesus? Have you been baptized into his
death and resurrection so that you may live a life before the
watching world as a bright light shining into the midst of darkness? I pray it so. Let’s look to God
for help. Lord, we thank you for the indicatives
Jesus left the riches of heaven. He came to this earth. He became
one of us. He lived, obeyed, suffered and
died in our place. He rose to everlasting life,
that we might have these realities in our life. So help us to realize
these treasures and to live for you, for your glory, but for
a great witness this Christmas season. We ask for your help
and grace and pray for it in the name of Christ, amen.