I would like to follow along as I read. We're in Romans 6 today, and we'll be looking at verses 5 through 11. In Romans 3 and 4, Paul thoroughly taught about the doctrine of justification. And in chapter 6, he begins to focus on another important doctrine, and that is the doctrine of sanctification. That's why we read those catechism question and answers to help us get a better handle on these things. But now beginning in Romans 6, verse 5, we read, for if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection. Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with. That we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is the word of the living God. It is holy, inspired, inerrant. It is life-giving, and it is the word of God. May we give heed to it. Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for this portion of Holy Scripture. May you write these truths indelibly upon our hearts. May, Lord, we leave this place truly changed by the power of the Holy Spirit working through this word. In Jesus' name, amen. In his old age, when he could no longer see or read, John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, heard someone recite 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and verse 10, which says, by the grace of God, I am what I am. And he was silent for a short time. And then he said to those who were gathered, I think it was in a home, and he said, I'm not what I ought to be, how I'm perfect and deficient. I'm not what I wish to be. I abhor evil, and I would cleave to what is good. I'm not what I hope to be. Soon I shall put off mortality, and with mortality, all sin and imperfection. Though I'm not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say I am not what I once was, a slave to sin and Satan. I can heartily say with the Apostle, by the grace of God, I am what I am. And certainly John Newton understood what Romans 6 is saying, that our old man was crucified with Christ, that the body of sin be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. As Newton said, I'm not what I once was. He was a slave to sin, but no longer. And if you know Jesus Christ by faith, then you too can say that I am not what I once was. I'm no longer a slave to sin. I'm dead to sin and now alive to God. Now keep in mind that the whole of chapter six began with a question in verse one. And that question is, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? And of course, he answers that question, certainly not. So as I said, he was explaining the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and now he's moving on to the sanctification of the believer. The sanctification is the renewal of our lives in the image of Christ. So if you claim to be a believer in Jesus, then you cannot, you ought not, you cannot continue to live a life dominated by sin any longer. As Paul said in chapter 6 verse 2, how shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? So we know that we have been saved by grace through faith. It's not of ourselves, it's not of works. This is how God saves us. But we also know that if we have been saved by grace as a total gift of God, that we also begin to live holy lives. We also, our lives change. And so the very first step in this process of sanctification is to become aware of who we are in Jesus Christ, aware of our union in Christ, our position in him. And last week we saw that in the first four verses of chapter 6 that we've died to sin's rule, that we were baptized by the Spirit into Christ, and that we've been raised with Christ into newness of life. So continuing now on the same theme, Paul says in verse 5, if we've been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection. Now if you read that verse in isolation from the context, you might think he's talking about the actual physical resurrection, the bodily resurrection on the last day. But he's really speaking about what's taking place here and now, not what will take place by and by, if you will. He is saying that since we're united to Christ, we're identified with him in his death and his resurrection, and that has implications for the way we live. We're dead to sin's reign. We're alive to God. We are both dead and alive. And so he says, we're united together. in the likeness of his death. And some, I think the King James says, planted together or other translations. Calvin's translation of this verse said, we're engrafted into Christ. And I think that's a wonderful picture because it fits with what John chapter 15 is teaching where Jesus says that we are grafted into the vine. He's the vine, we are the branches. And so what happens when a plant is grafted, a piece of one plant is grafted into another? Well it bond forms and the host plant provides life to that branch that's grafted in to a vine or to a tree. And so we are grafted into Christ. There's a living union. His life enters into us. And he is our life. And so this graft is made by the hand of God, who is the holy and heavenly gardener, if you will. And the science of grafting is very interesting. I won't go into depth about that, but if an apple tree is grafted to a pear tree, it can still produce apples. It normally does do that. But when we are grafted into Christ, we don't produce our natural fruit, we begin to produce fruit for God, the fruit of righteousness, the fruit of the Spirit. Verse 6 says, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with them, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. So here we see this concept, this statement about the old man. What is the old man? There's some confusion about this. He says our old man was crucified with him. Some people have been trying to crucify the old man and kill him all the days of their life, but Paul says he's already dead. He's already been crucified. The old man was crucified. That's a once and for all thing. The old man's been crucified. The old man has died. It's not a slow, drawn-out process. Now, there are some things that are slow and gradual and drawn out in the Christian life. That is what sanctification is. It's a process. But here, he says the old man is dead. He's buried. He's gone. He no longer is there. So if you look at your life as a Christian, You're not both an old man and a new man at the same time. You do not have an old man and a new man dwelling in you at the same time. You were the old man, but now you're a new man in Christ. You were an old person, now you're the new person in Christ. So what is the old man? The old man is the person you were before conversion that was dominated by sin, that was in Adam under the reign of sin. And so you used to be that person in Adam, but when you were born again, when you believed in Christ, you became a new person, a new creation in Christ Jesus. And that's what Paul meant in Galatians 2 verse 20, when he said, I have been crucified with Christ and I live yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me. So the old I, the old man, the old, Adamic nature no longer lives now Christ lives in me, and I'm a new person altogether So and yet here's the thing we know that even though the old man is crucified we are We know that doesn't mean that sin has been entirely eradicated from our lives. That's not until heaven, okay? We would love to be in heaven right now if we could. We would love to have heaven on earth, but we can't. We have to wait for that. Even though sin can't be eradicated from our lives, we understand this, that knowing that our old man has been crucified, that changes everything for us. It's that the body of sin might be done away with. And yes, that is a gradual process. And to be done away with means to be rendered ineffective, rendered inoperative. So what is the body of sin that he's talking about here? Here he actually is talking about the literal body, your human body that you have. And as it has been programmed and conditioned by sin. So the Bible says, again, if you're in Christ, you're a new creation, you're a new person. But the body doesn't know that, in essence. You know that by faith, and you know it in your mind. But your body, the body is not evil in and of itself. That's a gnostic heresy. The body is created by God, but it has been programmed by sin. to satisfy its desires in ways that are contrary to the law of God. And because of the sinful nature with which we have been born, we develop sinful patterns. And so, here's the thing, if you're in Christ, then it's possible that new patterns, that those patterns can be broken, the old ones, and the new patterns can be developed place. We put off and we put on that which is to be part of the new man. And so in this process the body of sin is rendered ineffective. It's rendered inoperative. And verse 6 says the ultimate purpose of all this is that we should no longer be slaves of sin. Before a believer is converted to Jesus Christ, he or she is a slave to sin. We can only do what our master, sin, tells us to do. A slave doesn't have freedom. And so, before conversion, as a slave to sin, our mind is a slave to sin. Our bodies are slaves to sin. Our emotions are enslaved to sin. The heart, the tongue, the will is enslaved to sin. And we won't go into the doctrine of free will, but if the will is a slave to sin, it's not free. And that's what our will is before the Lord acts upon our hearts to change us. Jesus said in John 8 and 36, if the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. And so by the grace of God, he has set us free. The will and everything else about us is no longer a slave of sin. And that means you and I should not be serving our old master anymore. And yet we know the tendency is to want to do that very thing. And so, you know, we live as Christians sometimes as if we were still enslaved, but we're not. The truth is we are not. So Paul's point is that because you're not a slave of sin anymore, you do not have to obey sin. there's no excuse for you to sin. And you don't have to sin anymore. I'm not saying you can become perfect, please understand that. But verse seven goes on, it says, for he who has died has been freed from sin. So the Christian cannot say this when dealing with sin, when dealing with a habit, or dealing with some issue, The Christian cannot say, I can't help myself. I'm a slave to that sin. Because you're not. You can help yourself by the grace of God. And though you may give in to a particular sin at a particular time, you're not a slave to any sin. And the only reason that you're yielding to that sin is because you chose to do so. You didn't have to. You could have chosen by the grace of God not to do so. So as a Christian now, you actually do have free will. You can choose good or evil. You do not have to give in to temptation. If you call on the Lord and you rely on his resources at any given time and moment, you have what you need to resist temptation. So you're not a slave to sin. So why? Why do we go on choosing to sin then? If it's a choice, why do we choose sin instead of obedience? If we think that we're unable to change or that we can't help, then we're believing a lie. And so, again, this is where the renewal of the mind is so important. Laying the foundation of understanding who you are in Christ. not what you were in Adam, but who you are in Christ. And so, you've been set free from sin's dominion, you're in Christ, you can change, you can overcome sin, because you have died to it. And there's, again, there's a purpose in this. I want to read from the Heidelberg Catechism, question 43 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks this question. What further benefit do we receive from the sacrifice and death of Christ on the cross, other than the forgiveness of sins? And the answer is that by his power, our old man is with him, crucified, slain, and buried, so that the evil lust of the flesh may no more reign in us, but that we may offer ourselves unto him a sacrifice of thanksgiving. And so there's a great summary there of what God in Christ does for us. The old man's crucified, dead, and buried. The lusts of the flesh do not reign in us anymore so that we might offer unto him a sacrifice of thanksgiving. I think of the people of Israel when they were in Egypt, they were slaves. And Moses says, let my people go, that they may go and offer a sacrifice of praise, of worship, of thanksgiving in the wilderness. You see, God and eventually they were set free and they did that very thing. And that's a picture of Jesus setting us free from our sins. And the purpose is not merely negative, you know, God, Too often, as Christians, we think only in negative terms. If I can only stop sinning, if I can only stop doing this, if I can only not do that. Well, yes, we need to stop sinning, but in order to start living for God, living for His praise. Verse 9, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. See, what Paul is doing is saying, look, Jesus, when he died, he didn't stay dead. He rose from the dead. Death no longer has dominion over him. He will never die. His body is in heaven, but he will never die again. Jesus was not merely resuscitated, he was resurrected, and there's a difference. You remember Lazarus, his friend, who was dead and in the grave, and he brought him back to life. Well, Lazarus, sadly, had to die again. But Jesus, when he was resurrected from the grave, it was to never die again. The power of death has no power whatsoever over him. So similarly, if you have been raised with Christ, not only died, but now you've been raised with Christ, you cannot ever go back to that condition of being dead in sin anymore. Once and for all, you've been delivered from sin's dominion. You don't dwell in that arena anymore. You're not under that dominion, I should say. Verse 10, for the death that he died, he died to sin once and for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. So Christ died to sin once and for all because he died for sin, for our sins, once and for all. Remember what he said on the cross. He said, it is finished. It's finished. The work of salvation, of paying the penalty for our sins was finished, but his work in dealing with our sins was also finished. And so he has nothing to do with sin anymore. And when you were converted to Jesus, you ceased. being the slave of sin. So that relationship to sin that you used to have is no longer. You've died to sin once and for all. So the second half of verse 10 says of Jesus, the life he lives, he lives to God. Now, of course, on earth he lives for God. He lived unto the Lord. But what he means now is that he's living in the presence of his father in heaven, not in the realm of sin and death. There is no sin in heaven. So likewise, Paul says, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So here's the concluding verse in this passage today. And it is a call to action. It is a call for us to do something. And Martyn Lloyd-Jones says that this is literally the first word of exhortation in the epistle to the Romans, which is interesting because what he's been doing is been telling us, first of all, about what happened and why we're sinners and all about sin, but then about what God has done in Jesus Christ for us. He's been teaching us doctrine, truths for us to believe, but now, finally, He gives us an imperative. All these other things were more or less indicative. This is an imperative telling us to do something. And what is that? Well, it's a rather simple thing, but it's something that is very, very important because it's foundational for everything else in living a Christian life, and that is to reckon yourselves indeed to be dead to sin and a life to God through Jesus Christ. To reckon yourself, to count it, to consider it as being true, as being a reality. So he's been explaining these truths about our identity in Jesus Christ and now he calls on us to lay hold of this doctrine, to realize it and begin to apply it in our lives, and the first point of application is to reckon it to be so. Now, as Christians, let's be honest, we still feel the pull of sin through our bodies and through the world, and we might be tempted to think that nothing has really changed, that we're still alive to sin. And yet, and the devil is going to come around and he's going to say these things and these are things that are actually not true for us anymore. They're lies. And so we must not give in to these lies. We must count on the reality that we're dead to sin and alive to God. Believe it by faith, reckon it to be so. Consider yourself to be what you in fact are in Jesus Christ. You say, Mark, you're kind of repeating yourself. Yes, because this is something that's really important for us to grasp. You may not feel Or you may not see that you are dead to sin in the life to come. Whether you reckon it to be so or not doesn't change the fact. But if you doubt that you are dead to sin, if you say, I don't know that I accept that. Well, here's what you can do to put it to the test. Begin to live as if it were true. What if you lived your life? You began to live as if what Paul is saying is true, and it is true. To live as if I am dead to sin, what would that do? for your life. To live as if you were alive to God, and how to do this is to go to God daily and to draw in His grace through the Word and through prayer, coming to worship. Then you'll begin to see and verify in your experience the reality of what Paul is saying. You'll begin to live it out, and you will prove the truth of Romans 6 by actually growing in holiness, growing in sanctification. I want to just say a brief word about faith in this process. So it takes faith to reckon yourself to be dead to sin because you don't necessarily feel it and you don't necessarily, you know, experience it. But it is something to be believed to be true. But sanctification like justification both require faith. It's easy to see how faith is involved and necessary to be justified. We hear that Jesus died and that he rose again to pay the penalty of our sins and that if we believe in him by faith, trusting in what he did for us, then he will accept us, he will forgive us and accept us as righteous in his sight. Well, that's all taken by faith. You know, justification is a fact that we must reckon by faith. Justification is not something you can feel. Now the new birth is going to be felt. But justification itself is a matter of a legal record in heaven. It's not something that you feel. You consider it to be done. and that the record of your sins has been blotted out and that your name is written in the book of life. Now the question is, before we close, is have you put your faith in Jesus Christ? Do you believe in him for justification? And if not, then you need to turn to him today and receive him. You need to put your faith in him as the one who died and rose again, that he will forgive your sins and accept you apart from any works that you've ever done, accept you in His sight and bring you to heaven one day. And if you have trusted in the Lord to save you and justify you, now begins, that very moment, begins the process of justification. And so you need to trust in Him to sanctify you. Because I've talked to people who have said, well, I could never, I'm not gonna, come to Jesus. I'm not going to receive Jesus because I know that I'll never be able to live up to what He wants me to do and to be. But here, you see, we have to trust that He will. When you believe in Jesus Christ to save you from your sins, you also are believing in Him to sanctify you. No matter how you feel, by faith, reckon that you're dead to sin and alive to God. That's the first step. to a holy life. Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? No, certainly not. How can we? We're no longer alive to sin. We're dead to it. We're now alive to God. So live in light of the reality. Become what you really are in Christ. You know, I think that as Christians, we settle. We settle for too much sin in our lives. And sometimes we look at the grace of God and we say, oh no, he's going to forgive me, so I don't worry about it too much. And we talked about that last week, and that's wrong. We settle for too much sin and too little obedience and faithfulness in our lives. Well, it's a battle. We know that. And it's difficult. And we're often weakened by various factors. We're entrenched in our habits. If we don't expect to make much headway against sin, we surely won't. We'll be defeated before we even start. If you settle for a little bit of spiritual growth, a little bit of growth in grace and holiness, then that's all you're going to get. But if you count yourself as being dead to sin and alive to God, you will begin to grow in grace, grow in the likeness of Jesus. Francis Schaeffer said that when we grasp the simplicity and truth of what Paul is saying in Romans 6, it's like the breaking of chains in our Christian life. Well, because it is the breaking of chains. It's not like it. It is the breaking of chains. So shake off those chains. They've been broken. You don't need to carry them around anymore. Begin to live the new life that he has given you, that he has called you, to live. Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for this portion of your word. Help us to think, to meditate on it, and then to put it into practice in our lives. Father, I pray that wherever each person is in this room, you know, you know the heart, you know where we are. Lord, first of all, I pray that you would grant faith. an increase of faith, grant faith where there is no faith, so that that person may put their trust in Jesus. And for those who do know Jesus, increase our faith and give us that grace to reckon the truths that we've just heard about to be so, and to live each day of our lives, each moment of our lives in light of their reality. In Jesus' name, amen. Our closing hymn of consecration, number 164, the first four stanzas, O for a thousand tongues to sing. O for a thousand tongues to sing Thy great Redeemer's praise, The glories of my God and King, The triumphs of His grace, My gracious Master and my God, Consistently to proclaim, To spread through all the earth the rock, The honors of thy name. Jesus, the name that churns our fears, that pits our sorrows, sees His music in the sinner's ears, His life and health and peace. He breaks the power of reigning sin, He sets the prisoner free. Now may the God of all grace who has called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.