What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
2 God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
3 Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?
4 Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:
6 Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.
7 For he that is dead is freed from sin.
8 Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:
9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.
10 For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
11 Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.
We want to continue our study through the book of Romans, as Paul is writing a letter to the Church of Romans which God preserved for us and through Christians down through the ages. This is one of Paul’s letters where he gives a lot of doctrine to help us understand how we’re to live as Christians and what the battle is that we’re in. And this morning we come to chapter 6 of the book of Romans and Paul is going to do what rabbis often did, they ask a question and then they answer it.
And they teach by asking questions. And Paul is going to ask a question that comes on the heel of what we studied last week in chapter 5, where the Apostle Paul was talking about the power that we had to overcome the old Adam and the new Adam, Jesus Christ. And that Christ had come to give us victory over sin.
And He had come to defeat the ability of sin to control us. And now Paul is going to address an issue that he sees often in our lives. And that is even though we intellectually know the fact that Jesus came and He gave us victory over sin, He is the one who redeemed us and purchased us out of darkness into light, the great temptation is to slide and not walk daily with Him.
Paul is addressing the church at Rome and they lived in very difficult times. We think that we’re facing darkness in our nation with what happened in the election and that there are many Muslims that were elected across our nation in some positions of high power. But I want you to understand what the Romans are facing.
The Romans had an emperor who viewed himself as God. And the Roman Empire was saying, OK, we’ll allow other religions to occur as long as you say that Caesar is God. As long as you will pay homage to him first, then we’ll let you do your own thing.
Well, the temptation would be, who’s going to know and who’s going to really care? Well, as the Puritans used to say, even when we are there by ourselves, there’s always an audience of one. Even if no other Christian would know that we had told the Roman authority, yeah, I acknowledge Caesar is God, now leave me alone, God would still know what we had done. Well, some people had gotten the misconstrued idea that because Paul had talked about the fact that when the law came, it revealed sin, where before our conscience revealed it and we all knew that we were sinners, but the law was evident that we had a real problem.
And he said when the law came, grace abounded even greater. And so there were some people that began to have this idea, well, if I sin, then God’s grace will even be greater in my life. And so it doesn’t really matter if I sin as a believer and it doesn’t really matter how much I sin as a believer.
And so this was creeping into the church and Paul is going to address that. And he addresses it by asking a question in verse 1. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein? Know ye not that so many of us were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.
For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall also in the likeness of His resurrection. Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.
Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him. Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more, death hath no more dominion over Him. For in that He died, He died unto sin once, but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.
For in that He died, He died unto sin once, and in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise hearken ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law, but under grace. Let’s just bow in prayer.
Dear Heavenly Father, I pray that you just speak to us through your word this morning. Lord help us to understand what you’ve done for us, and that you’ve given us the power to walk in the newness of life, and that you’ve given us the ability to have dominion over sin, not in our own strength, but in what Jesus has done for us at Calvary. And Lord may we identify with not only His death and that He paid the penalty for our sin, but in His resurrection, and that we identify with the newness of life that is to be ours in Jesus.
That we are new creatures in Christ, transformed by the power of your Spirit and the blood of the Lamb. Lord I pray that you will be with us this morning and speak to us through your word this we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen. Have you ever had the days where you go, I’m just tired.
I’m tired of the battle. I’m tired of trying to live a righteous life. And I look around and it seems like the evil people around me are the ones that are gaining all the victory, and I don’t get the victory.
The Apostle Paul is trying to tell us through these words, God has given us the victory to have dominion over sin. Dominion is a word that in our culture we don’t understand it as much as they would have in Paul’s time. To have dominion over someone would mean that you had absolute power and authority over them to have them do what you wanted them to do.
That’s dominion. And Paul is saying something should have transformed in our lives and changed in our character when we became a believer in Jesus Christ where we no longer yield to the dominion of sin, but now we are under the dominion of God’s grace and the power of God’s redemptive hand. And sin no longer has that power over us.
Sometimes I’ve even had the thought in my mind when I have sinned, well Jesus died and he’s going to forgive me. But that shouldn’t be my thought. The Apostle Paul says when I have thoughts like that what I am doing is saying I’m looking at the grace of God and I’m taking it cheaply.
Because I’m saying well I can live however I want to live and when I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior it doesn’t matter because he’s going to forgive me. He says he will. But Paul says is that to be our attitude as a believer in Christ? As I mentioned he opens this up by saying what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Shall we say well I am going to sin and it doesn’t really matter because God’s grace and then the world will see the depth of God’s grace.
God died, sent his son to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin. Not that we can continue to dabble in it or continue to walk the tightrope of compromise. I remember a number of years ago talking to a man and I was really frustrated with the approach that their particular ministry was doing to evangelism because they were basically saying that people who were not believers were believers for the sake of getting a crowd.
And when I talked to him about it he said well you viewed that I have crossed the line of compromise I view that we’ve snuggled up alongside it but we haven’t crossed it yet. Paul is saying here compromise shouldn’t be in the vocabulary of the believer. Compromising with this world’s rebellious nature should not be there.
And instead he says we have gained the victory. And because we’ve gained the victory compromise is not part of our lives. If you go to politicians one of the reasons you can’t trust politicians is because they’re constantly compromising.
They’ll go to Washington or Ottawa and they’ll say we’re going to do this and this and this and this and then they get there and they don’t do it. And then you found out well we had to we couldn’t do it because we had to trade and we had to compromise in this area and give a little bit here and and we trust that you’ll forgive us for doing that but we’ve got your best interests at heart. It’s not what God says about our walk with him.
He says I’ve got your best interests in heart when I deliver you completely from the power of sin in your life. Now let’s take a look at what he’s saying here and how that occurs. This passage is oftentimes a passage that I’ll use when we’re doing a baptismal service because it speaks of why we as Baptists believe that baptism by immersion is the proper mode of baptism because it more closely identifies with what supposedly occurred in our life is what Paul tells us.
And we’re going to be looking at that this morning. What has occurred in your life? If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ this morning, what has happened in your life that makes you different from what you were before you accepted Christ? He says how shall we in verse 2 that are dead to sin live any longer therein? Now he didn’t notice he didn’t say that we’ll never sin but he said live any longer therein. A lifestyle, a means by which you live your daily life.
The Apostle John tells us that sin is still a real battle that we’re facing in this world as long as we’re going to be here. But part of our life should be confession of sin and repentance of sin and turning to God and he will be faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But he’s also given us the means by which sin does not have to control our life like it once did.
Prior to your becoming a believer in Jesus Christ, you were not being controlled by the Spirit of God but rather you’re being controlled by a number of things. Number one would be Satan’s lies that are in this world system that he’s established and which many of the people that do not know Jesus have bought into. Secondly, your own self-centered sinful nature where you wanted to exalt yourself to the position of God and you wanted to be the one making your decisions for you, not God and in heaven.
And thirdly, to the lusts of your flesh and John tells us that these are the three great things that we war against. The lusts of our flesh, the pride of life in a world system that’s been established by the Prince of the Power of the Air. So Paul is telling us when you became a Christian, something radical happened in your life.
Those three things which were the main influence that led you in doing the things you did and took you to the places you did, developed the attitudes that you possess towards others and yourself as well. That control of those three things has been removed. The dominion of that rebellious nature is gone and he’s going to tell us why.
Let’s take a look at what he says beginning at verse 3. Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. Now what does baptism mean? The word baptism means placed into or placed under. It means be placed into so you become part of.
When you have a baptismal service in our church, we have baptism by immersion. You are baptized, that is placed into the water. You go into the water.
You’re under the water. Paul tells us that you and you became a Christian, a baptism occurred. You were placed into Christ.
You who were once part of this world and its rebellion against God have now been placed into Jesus Christ. You’ve been baptized into his death. And so you have been baptized as Jesus died on the cross.
It’s as if your sins were there with him. You were there and you were the one that caused it. One of the things that’s happened in our culture today is there’s a very strong anti-semitic thing.
There’s a spirit that’s risen up and some of it’s coming into the church. And do you know that some people in the church say, well, the Jews killed Jesus. Well, if you want to get technical, the physical death was actually carried out by the Romans, not the Jews, because they didn’t have the power and authority at that time in history to do it.
Although the Jewish leadership orchestrated the events that led Pontius Pilate to do it. But did the Jews kill Jesus? Do you want to know who killed Jesus? Every one of you sitting out there today. I was there.
I was part of the fact that Jesus went to the cross and died. He who was without sin became sin for me, for you. The Bible tells us that even though the whole world does not accept him, his power is so great that it says that what he did at Calvary on the cross was enough to cover the sins of the whole world, of every man, woman, and child that ever lived.
That is how powerful his death was in covering the sin and rebellion against God. The only problem is we have to accept that gift. We have to identify with that death.
We have to realize and accept the fact that we have become part of that death at Calvary where our sin was placed upon Jesus, that his righteousness could be imputed or placed upon us. So the first thing that Paul tells us is, you need to understand that you identify with the death of Christ and it’s because of your sin that we’re there and identify with that death. And as we identify with that death, therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.
What Paul is saying is that as you identify with the death of Jesus, as you identify with the burial of Jesus, that your old nature is there and it’s been buried with him. And when Jesus rose from the dead, what did he do? He gained victory over death and sin. And he rose and sits at the right hand of the Father, the position of power and authority, the position of victory.
And it says just as we identify with his death because we were the cause of it, likewise we identify with his resurrection and the newness of life and that we are now new creatures. We are no longer under the dominion of sin, the power of sin, the power of death, but we have been set free. We have been set free where we no longer have to fear sin and we no longer have to fear death and we no longer have to obey our sinful natures.
God’s given us the ability to have victory. He goes on and he says, for if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. So why do we possess ideas that Paul has to address this to? Satan is devious and Satan is deceitful.
Satan is a liar and Jesus said he’s a murderer from the beginning. He desires to destroy your effectiveness as a follower of Jesus Christ. He desires to get you to not look at the power of the Son of God in delivering you from your sin and instead be overwhelmed by the circumstances that surround you in the world.
Satan, if he’s willing to tempt Jesus in the desert by misquoting scripture and taking it out of context to try and get Jesus to deny his calling and his purpose, Jesus said he’ll do the same to us. And I want you to know that in and of ourselves we do not have the strength nor the ability to resist Satan without the power of God. And that’s what Paul wants us to understand.
And the power of God is radically identifying with not only the death of what Jesus did for us at the cross, but what happened at the resurrection. If you go to 1st Corinthians chapter 15, the Apostle Paul gives the gospel message in a short brief summary and he emphasizes the resurrection. And then he goes on throughout chapter 15 talking about the power of the resurrection.
And the power of the resurrection, how that the power through the power of the resurrection, not only do we become new creatures in Christ, but we have the ability to gain victory over sin. And that is what he’s saying here. For he that is dead is freed from sin.
So we shouldn’t serve sin because we died on the cross of Christ. And he that’s dead is freed from sin. An example was given one time of somebody said if you go to a funeral and a lot of times you’ll have a showing of the body.
And it’s merely the body, the person is gone, their spirit and their soul or their believers are with the Lord. But people will look and they will say, they look so wonderful. Well, they don’t look wonderful.
They’re dead. And the thing is, one thing that they have that you or I don’t have is that they are not tempted by sin any longer. You could come and if that man had a problem with lust, you could put whatever his lust problem was right in front of him as he lay dead there and nothing would happen.
He’s dead. He’s dead to the sin that may have consumed him before. What Paul is telling us as believers in Jesus Christ, that should be what our life is while we’re living.
In Romans chapter 12, we’re going to get to that later on in our study, but I want to quote that verse because he talks about the fact that we have become a living sacrifice to God. You and I are laying down our lives and we are dead to sin and we come alive to God and we’re a living sacrifice to God and that we’re living to His glory and to bring glory to His name. So Paul tells us our attitude should be one that we’re dead to sin.
Now, are you going to continue to go out and sin if you’re alive unto God? I want you to understand, if you look at men and women who have been used greatly by God, what’s the one thing they have in common? Their desire is to serve Christ. No matter what their occupation, no matter what their situation in life is to serve Christ. Go back and look at Joseph in the Old Testament.
A man who had very, very difficult things happen to him in his life and could have been filled with bitterness and anger towards God. Why are you lying me to have this happen? But instead didn’t. Used every circumstance that God placed him in to do the best he possibly could and really exalt the name of the Lord.
The people around him knew the God that Joseph served. Because of the life that Joseph lived. Even in spite of the circumstances Joseph found himself in.
My natural tendency, when I take my eyes off of Christ, is to become, why is this happening to me? Doesn’t God know I want to serve Him? I share with you an account that I heard of a woman. She loved the Lord and she contracted polio. And she became very disabled.
It was very difficult for her to get around. She needed help wherever she went. And one day the pastor of their church came over to her and said, We’d just as soon if you didn’t come to church.
Because you’re distressing the other people. This lady said, well God can still use me. And this pastor said, well we don’t know how.
This woman had a heart for children. She had a heart for getting kids that were on church, kids to gospel. And so she called her family and said, God’s given me a desire to have a bus ministry for our church for the Sunday school.
And they said, well the church doesn’t have any money for buses and we don’t have any buses. She said, God’s given me that burden. She said, I want you to go and call the bus people and tell them I would like to have a bus and that they will donate this bus for one Sunday to go and pick up children so they can come and hear the gospel.
They ended up taking her over to the bus place and the guy said, well we don’t do things for nothing here. How are you going to pay? She said, well God said He will pay. It ended up they gave one bus for one Sunday and then another Sunday.
And pretty soon there were a number of buses that were given by this bus company free because they saw how God was working in the lives of literally hundreds of kids in this town. By a lady whose pastor had said, God’s done with you. There’s nothing He can do with you.
But she said, I can pray and God has given me a burden to be getting kids to Sunday school and God has told me He will get buses if we but trust Him. She could have been very bitter. She could have gotten angry with God.
But she didn’t. She said, God, in spite of my handicap, I know You’re bigger than my handicap. Paul is telling us that our eyes are to be upon Jesus that we may be like Him.
Heed or yield your members as instruments to unrighteousness unto sin but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. In other words, yield your lives to the Lord and say, Lord, I don’t know how You’re going to use me. Maybe it’s witnessing to people that only I can witness to because they’re the ones that I know.
But yielding yourself to be used by God as instruments of righteousness for His sake and His glory and show that you’re alive to God. You know when you can’t serve God in this world anymore? When you take your last breath. Until then, God can use you in spite of your circumstance, in spite of what’s happening in your life if you but trust in Him and believe in Him and desire to walk in Him and desire not to sin and rebel against Him but say, Lord, use me.
For sin shall not have dominion over you for ye are not under the law but under grace. God’s grace has been given to you and extended to you for a purpose. God desired to redeem you out of darkness into light.
He desired to bring you into fellowship with Him. He desires that you walk with Him. He desires that you grow in understanding of His Word and His character.
The Bible tells us that we’re in the process of being conformed to the very image of Jesus as we walk with Him. And you know the one thing that prevents that conformity from going as quickly as God would have it go is our rebellion and sin. And when we say, well, God will forgive me.
He’ll understand. God doesn’t understand why we would want to sin instead of walk with Him. He says, sin will have no more dominion over you.
That means the power of sin is gone. Does it mean that it might not slip once in a while and fall? No, it doesn’t mean that you would never sin again. But what it does mean is it doesn’t have the power to keep us down.
The one song we sang today, I’m pressing on the upward road. New heights I’m gaining every day. Are you pressing on to be more like Jesus, no matter what your circumstance? Are you desiring to be conformed more to His image every day and to see how He’s going to use you? What if that little boy, when Jesus said, is there anyone that has food? What if that little boy had said, well, this is nothing.
My mom gave me these loaves and these fish, but it’s nothing. I’m looking at thousands of people. But the little boy said, Lord, here’s what I’ve got.
You can use it. The disciples, they didn’t look with eyes of belief. They’re going, well, how’s He going to feed the multitudes with a few loaves and a few fish? Jesus took those loaves and those fish, and by the time that they were done, they fed everybody that was there.
And afterwards, He told the disciples, gather what’s left over together, and they found baskets of fish and bread. Jesus took what was little and made it into much. Do not think that God cannot use you and your circumstance and your place to His glory and His power and enables you to bring glory to His name.
So don’t get caught in the trap of, well, God’s grace is there so I can, I’ll rebel against Him in my attitude this week. Paul says, God forbid, because sin no more has dominion over us. Let’s just close in prayer.
Lord, I pray that you would just help us to understand the radical identification that you and I are to have with your Son, Jesus Christ, that we are to identify with His death and that through that death He gave dominion over sin. And then He rose again from the dead that He could have power over death and sin itself. Lord, you showed us that power.
You’ve spoken to us in our lives and transformed us by that power. Help us to walk in it daily. This we ask in Jesus’ name.
Amen.