Dead to Sin

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning, happy Mother's Day. I am super glad that you are here, that we get to celebrate together, that we get to celebrate Jesus together. Also, every once in a while, it's my job to give you like, cheaters guide to life in our church.

And here's what you need to know. John Michael has an extensive background in the coffee world. So when he tells you it's really good coffee, you need to pay attention to that, okay?

I also understand that some of you are like, and by the way, what is wrong with coffee from Costco? You should go over and find out.

It's all will be made clear for you, but just a small way that we want to honor the moms in our church, we want to honor the women in our church. But we also want to turn our attention to what is a pretty dense passage in Romans chapter 6.

And I have this super clear memory as we come to this text of a day that I discovered what would become a rallying cry for me in my Christian life. I was a young pastor. I was working from home for the afternoon, right?

I was working from home before it was cool, probably frankly, before it was allowed. But I was at home doing some work and I could picture where I was in the basement of the townhouse.

I was living in a little desk in an alcove with a window right over here. And all of a sudden I read a verse of scripture.

And if you've ever had that moment where it just feels like the word of God leaps off of the page and straight into your heart, that was kind of what happened for me in the moment.

And it was the very last verse that John Michael read for us, Romans 6 verse 11. So you two consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

It wasn't the first time I had read that verse, but there was just something about that day, where I was in life that moment, what God was doing in my life, that it truly felt like the Holy Spirit was speaking straight to my heart, that at the same

time God was calling me to something, but also giving me language to express what was rolling around inside of my soul. I knew there was sin in my life that I desperately wanted to die to. I just couldn't quite figure out how to do it.

And I was even less sure, to be honest, of what it would look like to be alive to God, but it definitely sounded like what my soul was longing for. It sounded like what I was aching for in life.

And part of me wants to say, so I memorized it right away, but it was just one of those moments where it was like, wait, no, I already have it.

Particularly the nucleus of the verse, Dead to Sin and Alive to God, Dead to Sin, Alive to God, Dead to Sin, Alive to God. It just became this rallying cry for me in my mid-twenties.

Now, everything in me would love to tell you that I have outgrown my need for the first part of the verse, that I've just nailed the dying-to-sin thing.

And everything would love to tell me, you, that I've totally figured out the Alive to God part, but that just wouldn't be true.

In fairness, my life looks a lot different now than it did then, but I still frequently come back, Dead to Sin, Alive to God, Dead to Sin, Alive to God, Spirit of God, would you help me? Dead to Sin, Alive to God.

It's still a rallying cry for me, and I hope that over the next four weeks, as we work our way through Romans chapter 6, it might become something of a rallying cry for you as well.

This week, all we're going to do is concern ourselves with the first chunk of the verse. So you too, consider yourselves Dead to Sin. It's a nice rallying cry.

It's a good slogan. It would work on a bumper sticker. It would work on a T-shirt, Dead to Sin.

But often we hit this moment where we're inspired by the big picture idea of what God is calling us to, yet we're not exactly sure what it looks like to live the thing out. And that's really what we want to wrestle with today, right?

What's Paul after when he tells us to consider ourselves Dead to Sin? And we're actually going to start by looking at the verb that he translates, that the English translations would render, consider yourselves, right?

And what I want you to see is that what Paul does here is actually a really big deal. This isn't just preamble until we get to the interesting part. This isn't just an exercise in C.

We covered all of the words. This is really, really, really important. Because Paul does not start the conversation by talking about how we see sin.

Paul starts the conversation by talking about how we see ourselves, right? I want you to notice he does not rail against the evil of sin. He doesn't rail against the futility, the misery, the destruction of sin.

He would agree with all of those sentiments. And he says similar or exactly the same thing in other places in Romans and other epistles that he writes.

It's not that Paul would take issue with the evil, futility, misery, and destruction of sin, but that's not where he goes first. He doesn't just blast away at the damage that sin is going to do in our lives.

He says, no, no, what I want to do is talk about how you see yourself.

See, we read this idea of being dead to sin, and we almost assume that, oh, isn't this this beautiful moment where Paul is taking language that's familiar to us and using it 2,000 years ago? Right, because you and I know the phrase, it's dead to me.

You're dead to me, right? Like you have one bad experience at a restaurant, you're like, man, they're dead to me. Right?

School, dead to me. Ex-boyfriend, dead to me. Right?

There's just a lot of dead to me in our life. And what we tend to do is we're like, oh, right, what Paul is saying is sin, you're dead to me too. It's not a bad idea, but that's not what he's saying.

He's not saying sin, you're dead to me. He's saying sin, I'm dead to you. You and I live in a fallen and in a broken world.

You and I live in a physical body that is corrupted by the fall. Sin and temptation will be an ever present reality in our life.

You're not going to be able to get that to go away, but you can change the way you think about yourself in relation to the sin and temptation of the world.

Many of us grew up in churches that had plenty to say about how we saw sin, but almost nothing to say about how we see ourselves. And that's a problem. Because Paul invites us to consider ourselves.

When he does that, he's using one of his favorite Greek verbs. It's the Greek verb logizomai. And there's two things I want you to know about this verb.

Number one, the way he uses it here, it's an imperative. It's a command. So this isn't Paul being like, Hey, here's a different perspective.

Maybe it'll be helpful. Maybe it isn't. Hey, take this.

It might work for you. It's a different way of seeing it.

This is Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God, issuing a command, not just to believers in first century Rome, but issuing a command to those of us in the room that consider ourselves followers of Jesus. He's like, you need to do this.

Now, what does legizimai mean? If you were to go to one of the most common lexicons, it would define it this way. It says, as a result of a calculation, you evaluate, estimate, look upon, or consider.

It's the way you see something in response to a calculation, an evaluation, an estimation. I don't know about you. That's one of those definitions that left me a little frustrated, because I was like, thank you for technically answering the question.

Yet, I still have very little idea what logizomai means. So, let me see if I can help you a little bit. And in terms of doing that, I'm thinking of a friend of mine who works for a boutique firm that assigns a monetary value to intellectual property.

So, it could be like, hey, I have this idea, and I want to sell it to Apple. What do you think it's worth? But more likely, it's like, hey, company A wants to buy some intellectual property from company B.

And company A is like, we think it's worth like $100,000. And company B is like, are you kidding? It's worth like $100 million.

And obviously, they could just fight it out and negotiate. But one of the things they would sometimes do is hire my friend's firm. And they do like all this work and all this stuff, and then they spit out a number.

They're like, here's really what we think it's worth, right? I think that's a fair representation of what she does. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met.

She's explained it to me about five times, and I'm like, okay, I think I got it right now. Monetary value on intellectual property. At the end of the day, if you go through that process with her firm, they spit out a number.

They're like, it's worth $212 million and 13 cents. There you go.

But that number is only meaningful because it's sitting on top of this vast amount of work, this vast amount of calculation, this vast amount of examination of the economy and that particular sector and the industry and the performance of different

companies. Sure, in some ways, I could text you the top line summary, but it's only meaningful because of all the work that goes behind it. Here's what Paul's saying with Lou Gidsime. I want you to dig into the gospel.

I want you to look really carefully at what happened when you became a follower of Jesus, and I want all of that work of understanding the gospel, understanding what it means to be a Christian, how you think of yourself as a Christian.

I want that work to now shape the way you think about yourself as somebody who is dead to sin.

And this is so important, because it's so easy to fall into the trap that says to become a Christian just means that you start going to church, or maybe you start going to a different church.

We can fall into the trap, even when we know better of thinking that being a Christian is just deciding to clean up your life. Or maybe for some of us, becoming a Christian is just starting to learn some new doctrines, right?

Or absorb a strange subculture that seems oddly obsessed with sidehugs and calling everyone brother, right? Just want to thank Brother Dan for leading today, and Sister Lily, man, she killed it over there. That was amazing.

Thank you, brother. Thank you, sister. I just remember being around churches and being like, why does somebody not tell them how weird that is?

Like, it's fine. You can do it. I'm not upset.

You're all from the south. I get it. It's fine.

I'm from New York. Every once in a while, it shows. It's fine.

I'm not like worked up about it, but every once in a while, I was like, oh, the church is a whole new world. I'm going to figure out who this Chris Tomlin guy is and Phil Wickham, because he seems to be part of the Trinity.

And this whole thing is happening here. And I get it. There's like all these things that happen.

But foundationally, what happens when you become a follower of Jesus, is that the old you dies, and a whole new you comes to life eternally. Paul says it this way in Galatians chapter 2. I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live.

Paul's like, hey, the guy that used to kill Christians for a living, he's not around anymore. He's not available. You can't email that guy anymore.

Right? I no longer live. That version of me, gone.

But Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. There's a whole new Paul.

There's a Paul who's going to give his life to building the church that he tried to destroy. The way that Paul explains it in Romans 6 verse 3 and 4, or are you unaware? He's not mocking them.

He's trying to remind them of what should be foundational. Are you unaware? Have you forgotten that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.

It is right to think about Jesus dying in our place on the wood of the cross, paying the price for the sin of the world. It is also right to think of yourself in some way as dying on a cross with Jesus.

Every time we baptize somebody here at this church, we say, I baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, lowered in the image of Christ's death and raised in likeness of his resurrection.

It's why it's so meaningful to us to have you come be immersed in water in a horse trough.

Sure, it's weird, it's awkward, but it's a public announcement that you've decided to follow this Jesus in a life of submission and obedience, and it's this reminder, hey, you're lowered in the image of Christ's death.

That version of you, that version of you died in the moment that you came to faith in Jesus, and we're just going to celebrate that by bringing you underwater, and then you're going to burst right back up to walk in the newness of life.

There's a whole new John that's on the stage. There's a whole new Peter who's walking out of church.

There's a whole new you that's going to go live a life, maybe building the things that you tried to tear down, maybe trying to tear down some of the things you built up.

But either way, you didn't join a social club, you didn't get a new playlist on Spotify, you didn't just subscribe to some new podcasts, you became a new creation. And what Paul's asking is, do you see yourself that way?

Is that how you think about yourself? As somebody who died with Jesus on the cross, who's announced that through the waters of baptism, and now lives a whole new life, right?

That's why baptism matters so much, and it's why how you see yourself matters so much. Right, if you see yourself as somebody past your prime, you're gonna make past your prime decisions.

If you see yourself as somebody who's fundamentally unworthy of love, you're gonna keep dating guys that don't treat you all that well.

If somebody told you you're not that bright, and you see yourself as dumb, you're not gonna try all that hard in school.

How you see yourself matters, and you know this, we know this, in every area of life, yet we seem to forget it when it comes to our walk with Jesus. And you too, consider yourselves dead to sin.

Now, we want to spend the rest of our time talking about what does that death to sin look like, and I want to do it in a way that's faithful to not only what Paul says in Romans chapter 6, which is super clear, but what he's going to say in Romans

chapter 7, and what he's going to say in Romans chapter 8. Romans chapter 6 really can be the rallying cry. And I don't want to take anything away from it. But you gotta live out Romans 6 with a Romans 7 and a Romans 8 kind of expectation.

All right, Romans 6 and 7 invites us into a relationship with God where we are dying ongoing, dying to the power of sin. Here's how Paul says it in Romans 6, verse 6 and 7. For we know that our old self was crucified with him.

So we were just talking about. So that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless. That's super definitive.

This, the power of sin is broken by the cross of Jesus Christ. That's why we were singing about chains of addiction being ripped off of us. So that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is free from sin.

Right? There's the rallying cry. Our old self, crucified.

The power of sin being broken off of our lives. But if we're not careful, we'll set ourselves up for failure because we'll make the assumption that death to the power of sin is a one-time moment. And you and I both know that's not true.

The process of dying to the power of sin takes a lifetime. It's where Paul goes in Romans chapter 7, right? He does this beautiful rallying cry in 6.

And then he reflects on his experience in Romans 7, and he writes things like this, for I do not understand what I am doing because I do not practice what I want to do. But I do what I hate.

For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there's no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. What a wretched man I am.

Who will rescue me from this body of death? There's all kinds of debates in the church that I frankly don't get all that worked up about. If anything, you know, I usually just try to play no-pun intended devil's advocate.

You're like, look, predestination, election, free will. I'm like, yeah, both. You're like, no, it's fine.

I'm like, yeah, we can do it over coffee, but you're buying. Like, it's just not going to get me crazy worked up.

You want to get me worked up, like really pretty intense, try to convince me that Romans 7 represents some kind of flashback to Paul's pre-Christian existence, which is a thought that's alive and well in a lot of pulpits in America.

They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is Paul. This is like three missionary journeys, writes more of the New Testament than anybody else. This is like great hero of the faith.

This is like it's no longer me, but life I live, I live by faith in the son of God. This is Paul. And what he's doing is he's just reflecting back on all those days when he didn't know Jesus.

And it's a load of nonsense. First of all, there's literally no support for that in the text at all. Second of all, flashbacks are not a literary device that are super common in any form of literature in the ancient Near East.

You can see some examples, but it's not common. It's like an approach to the Bible that's more shaped by a Disney cartoon than actual serious study of the Word of God.

And it's super damaging because it holds out this lie that you too should get to a point where you have no experiential familiarity with Romans 7, where you're like, I do remember those days where I would stumble into sin.

I do remember those days where it felt like it was so hard to do the thing I wanted to do. I mean, I remember those days. But man, what a hapless little teenager I was.

Praise God for life in my thirties. I've been delivered from all of that. Right?

It's pastors that want to say, like, no respectable spiritual leader could ever see themselves in Romans chapter 7 or have any familiarity with that. Right? They're the same pastors when it's time for vulnerability.

Their big sin that they love to confess is that they speed. Or that they have pride. That one's cool, too.

Right? I can be a little arrogant, and I speed. And I'm like, yeah, you don't know what I do on the Beltway.

But anyway, different story. We'll do confession of sin over the summer when you're all on vacation. It'll be great.

It's super destructive to compare the reality of your life to the alleged highlight reel of somebody else's life. Which you understand, because you have Instagram, right? Let's just, this is the Mother's Day moment in the sermon, right?

Moms, you know what it's like to compare the reality of your life to the artificial perfection of somebody else's. You just had one of those blow up moments with the toddlers at home where you just lost it and you went full on monster mom.

And you were like, what's wrong with you people? I don't understand it. If you were a puppy, you would have learned by now not to pee on the couch, but you just, like, there you go.

You just, you lose it. You know it's bad. You know it wasn't your finest moment.

You decide to make yourself feel better by looking on Instagram, which is a terrible idea. Because at the top of your feed is that friend. You know the one I'm talking about.

She's there with her hair done, her nails. You have the sneaking suspicion that she brushed her teeth before noon, which you were not able to pull off today. And you just went, Monster Mom, and look at her.

She's there in a park with her two adorable little kids and a blanket and some grapes and a board game. And they're just having fun.

I'm sure the grapes are organic and the kids are well behaved and nobody's cheating at the game and nobody's throwing checkers at each other's head like sometimes happens in our house. I mean, it's just...

And you feel even worse because you're like, what in the world is wrong with me? I should be where she's at. And you can tell yourself, hey, look, that's just the highlight reel of her life.

But when you already feel miserable about yourself, you are so prone to believe the lie that every other mom has it figured out and you're the only one that's struggling.

You're the only one that has moments that you feel like you need to confess to a friend, right? You need to fight back against that in your parenting. You need to fight back against that in your singleness.

You need to fight back against that in your career. And you got to fight back against it in your walk with Jesus, right? We don't want to live in Romans 7, but the process of dying to the power of sin is an ongoing process.

And for some of us, you have got to learn to show yourself some grace. You got to stop being so disappointed in yourself that you're not perfect. God doesn't expect that from you.

It's the whole reason he sent Jesus to die on the cross. Now it is equally possible that we would need to find our, we find ourselves in places where we are complacent in the dying to sin.

Right, in the spiritual life, dying to sin is an active, not a passive process.

Right, so the goal is not to just sit around and assume that this death to sin thing is automatically occurring and I'll just give myself grace in all the ways that it hasn't happened. Oh yes, give yourself the same grace that Jesus gives you.

But you know what else you do? As part of the dying process, dying to sin, dying to the power of sin, also looks a lot like praying against the power of sin.

Jesus was the one that told us to pray, and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. You need to think about your prayer life as the primary place where you go to war against sin in your life.

You already consider yourself dead to it, but wait, it still is around me and I still see it and I still feel Romans 7. So I am praying, not just, hey God, forgive me for what I did last weekend, but you're praying.

No, I need you to lead me not into temptation. I need you to deliver me from evil. I need you to break the power of this thing in my life.

I hate what's happening. I hate the way that every once in a while, I forget who I am and this thing grabs hold of me and I am gonna fight against it because I am dead to it and I hate it and I'm gonna pray that way.

I'm gonna pray like, Lord Jesus, please, please, please. You gotta break this anger off of me. You gotta melt this off of my heart.

Like I'm asking you, would you do that? Would you break this self-centeredness off of me? And you may pray that over and over and over and over again.

But what happens as you devote yourself to a life of prayerfully dying, is the Spirit of God starts to show you various opportunities where you get to flee from sin.

Where you get to do what it says in Romans 13 verse 14, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

It's Paul saying, if you're struggling with what's available to you through your iPhone, go get a flip phone. If you're struggling with what's available to you through your laptop, leave it in the trunk at the end of the day.

If you're struggling to get your spending under control, tear up the credit cards. If there is somebody at work that is a source of temptation for you, don't you dare go to happy hour with them. You need to go straight home.

Make no provision. You're not gonna just sit around on the couch listening to podcasts and get to a point where you're like, oh, look at me, power of sin broken. That's so amazing.

It just happened Tuesday at noon. No. It's part of what Jesus means when he says, take up your cross and follow me.

The Christian life is this invitation to an ongoing active process of dying to who we were, so that we can clear the deck and walk in the newness of life. Now, here's the trick. That dying is a lifetime process.

Dying to the power of sin is a lifetime process. What is a one time moment is dying to the condemnation of sin, which is where Paul goes in Romans chapter 8. It's like he gives you the rallying cry in 6.

He gives you reasonable expectations in 7, and then he's like, okay, now you're ready for the home run in Romans 8.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do since it was weakened by the flesh, God did.

He condemned sin in the flesh by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh as an offering for sin.

So yes, give yourself to the active pursuit of dying, but do it in the freedom that comes from knowing that Jesus has already died for us, that we're already dead to the condemnation of sin.

And that's the heart of the gospel, which so many of us in the room know. Here's the real test though. How do you respond when you sin?

And here's what I'm after specifically. When you are aware of sin in your life, do you find yourself instinctively running to God, or do you find yourself shying away from God?

Because the more that we truly understand that we have already died to the condemnation of sin, the more we will find ourselves wanting to run to God.

This fountain of life and grace and mercy and forgiveness and peace and saying, God, I really messed up. It's been a really hard weekend. I desperately want to be with you.

I need to be with my Father in heaven. This is where I would, where else would I go? Or do we find ourselves being like, man, I'm messed up.

God's got to be super ticked at me. I need to keep my distance from Him. And I need to fix some things up.

And I need to get some things right. And I need to prepare a little speech for Him.

And I need to, you know, make sure when I come back to church, I come ready to give and serve and sing and listen and just give my best for Jesus in the hopes that He's going to welcome me back. Into some kind of fellowship with Him.

And that's just not the gospel. All right, we can so often pay lip service to being gospel-centered people, yet in our sin, we run from God.

Which is the sure sign that sure, maybe the gospel is starting to make sense in our head, but it hasn't yet grabbed hold of our hearts. Right, we're all born hiders by nature. All right, Adam and Eve sin, what do they do?

They go hide in the garden. You're like, well, who taught them to do that? Nobody.

In the same way that parents, none of you ever taught your kids how to hide sin, right? Yet they all seem to be pretty adept at it. Sometimes, embarrassingly so, right?

Like we can have something happen in our house, in our basement, where the three kids are playing, and I hear what is the sure sound of fireplace tools sliding across the room and what sounds oddly like a bookshelf collapsing and what sounds oddly

like the stifled cries of an eight-year-old. So Laura and I do what all parents do. Hey, what's going on down there, guys? And they say, come on, let your inner child out.

Here, you're going to, I'll be the parent, you be the kids. Hey, what's going on down there? You got it.

See, you're not the only one, buddy. I love you. We all do it.

We're like, nothing. You're like, no, something is going on. But we just want to see, can we get away with it?

I need to run. And there's so many times that we're looking back at God and we're like, nothing to see here. Nothing going on.

Definitely no reason for you to check my visa bill. We're good. Nothing.

And God's like, seriously? Really? Because I made the Grand Canyon.

Just saying. You want nothing. Okay.

Nothing is your answer. That's fine. Nothing.

You don't have to do that. Your father in heaven loves you so much that he sent his only begotten son to die in your place, so that you could die with him to all the things that are crushing the life out of you. It's an ongoing process.

I get it. But there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. There is no place for guilt or shame or isolation or secrecy in your life, because that will lock you in sin like nothing else.

You can open yourself up to a father who loves you. You can open yourself up to a community who's here to love you with that same love. Right?

I'm after a couple of things today. I'm after how you see yourself. I'm after some of us showing ourselves grace in the dying process.

I'm after others of us getting actively involved in the dying process. But at the end of the day, I want to remind us that Christ has died for us. And that because of that, we've died to the condemnation of sin.

Now having said all that, the best defense is still a good offense, right? Which is why you got to come back for the next couple of weeks when we're going to talk about what does it look like to be alive to God.

Because that's where the real money is. But for today, Father in Heaven, thank you that you love us. Thank you that you're for us.

Thank you for the beauty of what Jesus did on our behalf. Thank you that we can see ourselves as new creations. Lord, would you help each one of us in this process of dying to sin? The things that we have lost to this week, would you help us to fight with your strength and your power in the week to come? Pray in Jesus' name.