Those who are in Christ, died with Christ, and are raised with Him, and so we live a completely new life. That is built upon everything we looked at last week in verse 1 through verse 10. In fact, it's built upon all of Romans so far. Paul has kind of been building up to this application of these doctrinal truths to our lives.
If we just do without understanding, which a lot of people kind of push for nowadays, we don't need doctrine, we don't need theology. We just need to love Jesus and do what He commands. And the challenge is, how do you know what He commands if you don't study His Word, right? How do you know who He is if you don't study His Word? And so doing without understanding often leads people to do the wrong things. Maybe with a good motive, a good heart to honor God, but they truly dishonor God because they don't rightly understand what He's called us to. And on the other hand, understanding without doing really does the same. It leads to bad actions because of often the vehicle, pride, right? Knowledge alone puffs up and people become inflated in their heads without living out the Word, and that's no good either.
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Instead, what we want to do and what we must do is be hearers and knowers and believers and doers of the Word, right? We need all those things. We need our heads informed, our hearts aflame, and our lives conformed to the image of Christ and His Word so that we can live for God's glory.
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Our union in His resurrection. And what that means is, if we die with Christ, we not only have a future hope of a physical resurrection, but remember we said, He's actually talking predominantly about a spiritual resurrection that's already taken place. You were dead in your trespasses and sins, according to Ephesians chapter 2, but now God has raised us up. He's given us life in Jesus. So those who belong to Him have a new life right now.
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That death and rebirth in Christ, Paul teaches us, marks our freedom from slavery to sin. He's at pains to describe in Romans how in our natural state, right? In Adam. John chapter 5, we're born in chains, in bondage to sin. Our wills are inclined to evil always. We choose to do things that match what we want to do. And what we want to do before Christ's work in our hearts is rebel against Him. Try to cast off His rule. Try to say, nobody can tell me what to do. I'm going to live my life on my terms.
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All who were born in Adam were born in slavery to sin. But Christ came to set us free from that bondage so that we can live our new lives, to the glory of God.
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He exhorts those who believe to consider everything He has taught so far about the death and resurrection of Jesus and our union to Him. And then to apply that understanding to ourselves. He goes, I'm teaching you all these doctrinal truths about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, not so that you can just know them, but now you need to understand who you are. You must consider your old sin-bound self to be dead and your new life now to be entirely bound up in Him.
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The things you believe to be true about yourself and about the world and about others greatly impact and guide the way you live, what you do in relation to yourself and others. Now, we all know that human beings are nothing if not consistently inconsistent, right? We're not the same yesterday, today, and forever like God is. In fact, we're prone to all kinds of winds and waves tossing us from one place to the next.
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The Apostle Paul is talking about your identity, and he's saying, you need to consider your new life in Christ. Who you are is not that old person bound up in sin anymore. You're not who you once were, right? Remember last week we read, such were some of you? That's not who you are any longer. Who am I? I am a new creation in Christ. I'm alive because he's given me new life. I am more than a conqueror through him and through his work in my life. And so, I consider myself dead to sin, alive to Christ in God.
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Those who are in Christ have been set free from the power of sin, but what God has declared true about us must be actively lived in our experience. Is it true that if you are justified, you are free from sin? Yes. But what about our actual experience of life? Well, sanctification is that process of God making true in us what he's declared to be true about us, right? You're righteous. Declaratively, you are. You're not guilty because of Christ's perfect sacrifice. But you don't have a righteousness of your own. You're not now perfectly living in obedience to him. And so, he's working that out through our lives. We have to live out what God has said is true of us.
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Paul's warning us that sin must not govern you in thought or in deed because you have been set free from Jesus. He's saying, look, Jesus died and rose again so that you could be freed from the bonds of sin. The last thing you need to do is to be free from the bonds of sin. The last thing you need to do now is let sin come back onto the throne and rule over your heart and lead you to rebel against God.
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A little sin often leads to some more sin, and some more sin often leads to a lot of sin. And then we find people who go, I don't know how this happened. How did I become overwhelmed by this? This pressure, and I feel more drawn to do what's evil and wrong than I feel drawn to honor God and speak to him and obey him. And so the Apostle Paul knows this, and he says, man, if you make an opening for sin in your lives, it's going to seek to conquer you, to dominate you, to press you down. And God has dethroned sin in our hearts through Jesus Christ, so we don't need to take. We don't need to take part in letting sin kind of climb back to that place of authority over us.
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We still live in what the Apostle Paul describes here as mortal bodies. And here's a couple of realities about our lives today. We live in mortal bodies that are tainted by sin, right? It doesn't matter how long you've walked with Jesus, you have in your flesh and your heart and your mind the memory of sin and sinful habits and patterns that sometimes we feel drawn back to. And then add to that, we could compound the problem. We live in a world tainted by sin, right? How far do you have to go to see sin around you? You just stay right in your home. It's going to be there, right? And so somehow, with God's help, we must actively wage war against sin so that it does not find a foothold and a position of authority in our lives.
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John Owen famously said it this way, be killing sin or sin will be killing you. It kind of communicates the act of war, right? It's not as if we can just sit back and go, boy, I hope I don't sin against God today. I mean, the scripture speaks of the defensive weapons he's given us to clothe ourselves in the armor of God and stand firm and resist the devil. It's not as if we're losing the battle because Christ has already won the victory, but he does tell us to fight, to engage. He has made the way open to us and given us the Holy Spirit so that we have power to stand firm and to say, sin, will I refuse? Refuse the reign of sin in my life.
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You must not allow yourself to come into a pattern where just consistently and regularly you're basically just running along with sinful desires, letting them have their way with you and then just hoping it doesn't get worse. Paul says, Don't present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness. What does he mean when he says present your members? Is he zeroing in on specific parts of our body, right? Some kind of look at this and think present your members and you're thinking about the different parts of your body or is he communicating something else? The idea, I think, is still one of totality. He's not giving aside that focus on the whole person, but he's urging it on us in a more practical sense.
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Paul's idea is that our bodies and truly our whole selves are a tool to be used. We don't like that concept, right? Because I'm not just a tool, right? I'm a thinking, living, breathing, choosing human being. Okay. But in one sense, you are a tool to be used in the hands of one of two masters. You can render or present yourself, your body, to one of two masters. If you present yourself as a tool to sin, then don't put yourself out there to do things that are in rebellion against God. Don't be surprised when the result of that is more sin, more sorrow, more pain, more unrighteousness.
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You can't play nice with sin in your life or in the lives of those around you and expect not to have that sin rise up to try and strangle you and take dominion over you again. You must refuse to run. You must refuse to run with sin.
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You have to decide not only once, okay, God, I believe in you, I'm not gonna sin anymore, but you have to decide every day, sometimes many times a day, sometimes much, moment by moment, how you are going to use your life. God keeps putting breath in my lungs. How am I gonna use it? What am I gonna do with it? And you must refuse daily and sometimes hourly and minute by minute to run along with sin.
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I'm preaching that God has rescued us from sin and I'm not gonna go back and play with something that was trying to kill me eternally. And separate me from the God who created me. Instead, I'm gonna not go, oh, how close can I get and not sin? I'm gonna say, how far away can I live my life? How free am I really? Jesus says, completely free. Good, then I'm not even going close.
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If you consistently present yourself to sin, you're going to see the habitual pattern of sin compound to more sin in your life. And he warns us, don't do that. The question for this one is, who will I serve? Where do my loyalties lie? I must refuse to run with sin in my life.
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A lot of failure in the Christian life comes from the idea people have of, all I have to do is try to keep myself away from sin. But actually, that's only half the story, isn't it? You actually, we pull away from sin because Christ set us free from it, and then we give ourselves entirely over to honoring God and pursuing righteousness. If I just try to simply hold a neutral ground, guess where I'm likely to fall? Not to righteousness. People don't find themselves accidentally righteous.
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We bring ourselves, our abilities, our capacities, all that God has created us to be, and we surrender them before God as a tool to be used in whatever way he sees fit. We say, God, my life is yours. You redeemed me from the pit. You rescued me from slavery to sin. You purchased me. You paid the ransom so that I could be set free. I belong to you. You do with my life what you see as best.
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For every one of those big moments where God calls us to yield our whole life to him, and do something drastic and radical, there are a thousand ordinary moments and ordinary days right where God has you right now where he calls you to the same kind of obedience and yieldedness to him. It looks like trusting and surrendering to God if he calls you to go from here to there in a great way, but also if God just wants you to reorder your day in a small way that you go, well, that's kind of inconvenient, God.
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This yielding. This yieldedness we're talking about, I've given my life over to him, is built on a recognition of what God has already accomplished for us. It's not about my strength and me deciding I'm going to be self-disciplined to only do the right thing. He says, present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life. He's calling back again to your union with Christ and your resurrection life and going, hey, look, this thing happened, and so this is the natural outworking of that. He brought us from death to life. We owe our lives to him.
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All that we are, if you belong to Christ, all that you are, your body, your mind, your abilities, your capacities, your strengths, even your weaknesses, we offer all of that to God to willingly serve him and bring glory to his name.
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Whatever you focus effort and energy and attention on gets bigger and stronger and whatever you neglect grows weaker. Or maybe one day somebody brings two dogs to your house and says, I want to give you, these dogs. And you say, okay, great. And they both look a whole lot alike and so you go out to feed them every day, but you don't realize that one of them's eating all the food and the other one's never getting anything. Or maybe you just keep messing up and this is everybody's fear if you have twins, right? I'll always feed the one twice. Well, if you feed one dog and not the other one, what happens? The one dog grows big and strong and the other dog gets weaker and weaker and malnourished and unhealthy. Thank God we can tell the difference, right? We feed both dogs, but you understand the principle. When you put effort, and energy, and attention, when you feed something, you put life into it, that thing grows stronger and more powerful. And when you neglect something and you don't put effort and energy, it grows weaker and weaker. Well, guess what? This is true spiritually of your life.
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If you give yourself over to live for God and righteousness while starving the flesh and refusing to let sin reign, over time you will grow in your conformity to Christ and your obedience to God and your life will reflect that truth. And you will even be able to say I feel less and less of a draw towards that sin because its power has been sapped because I've ignored it and neglected it for all these years.
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God does work supernaturally in our hearts to bring us from death to life, but there's also a very natural outworking of a life of faith. Energy, attention, strength given to growing and righteousness yields a stronger person and someone who is more free from the temptation of sin. And all of this comes, don't forget, by our union with Christ, not by our own strength or commitment to do good. We surrender ourselves to him, Paul says, because God says, God has rescued us from our sin and joined us to Jesus, and as we abide in the vine, right, we are able to bear much fruit.
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Those who are in Christ belong to a new kingdom with a new king. Sin's power has been broken and we're under God's grace. He's not just talking about a slight change here. He's talking about a reality that we've been rescued from one kingdom of darkness and destruction and death and evil, and we've been brought into a new kingdom, a new kingdom of life and love and grace.
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Sin will have no dominion over you. If you are in Christ, you are under grace, not under law. Sin cannot reign over you any longer. Can you choose to sin? Yes. But sin cannot become your master again. Will sin try to climb its way back onto the throne of your heart? Yes. And you can give yourself over to it. But it cannot conquer you in the way it once did because you are forever free because of Christ.
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Our salvation is secure in Jesus Christ, and so is our sanctification. You see, there's none that God will save who He won't also sanctify. There's no one who's just going to go, oh, well, God tried really hard. But you just wouldn't get on board and clean up your act. And so, so sorry. No heaven for you. We've been freed from sin's penalty. We are right now being freed from sin's power in our lives. And we will finally be freed from sin's presence. Jesus' death and resurrection has secured it all. Those are sure and certain realities for us because we belong to a kingdom of grace.
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You don't conquer your sin by constant introspection. By just navel-gazing non-stop and realizing, Oh, I'm so terrible. I'm so miserable. I'm so horrible. I'm never going to make it. You don't overpower sin by heaping up guilt and shame and going, Man, one day I'm going to feel bad enough. I won't do this anymore. We conquer sin by constantly looking at the finished work of Christ. And seeing our resurrection life in Him.
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If you are in Christ Jesus, your old sinful self died with Him and you have been raised to walk in newness of life. So consider your new life. Refuse the reign of sin. Refuse to run in sin. Render yourself to righteousness and consider your new king and the new kingdom you're a part of. And live out. What He's declared to be true about you.
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