because of our sin, and the passage that we looked at last Sunday evening, having to deal with our union with Adam, followed by, through faith, our union with Christ, and the difference that those unions make, and emphasizing and stressing, as Paul has been doing, that salvation is by grace, through the work of Christ, by faith, and not by works. We begin with verse 1, and the question that he begins with, he's now beginning to respond to potential objections, not just to potential objections, but objections that he was actually facing in his preaching ministry, and objections that we've heard resounding through church history, which is, if you tell people that they're saved by faith, through grace, apart from works, then they're not going to do anything. So he's responding to that here. So here's what he has to say. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death. that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. 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 to 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, also, you. Reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. May God bless the reading of his word. So last week we looked at the importance of being united with Christ, being in Christ, being in union with Christ. And we saw as we were comparing, how the scripture itself compares and contrasts the relationship of union with Christ to our relationship of union that we had at birth with Adam. We looked first at some similarities between these two unions and we saw that one of these similarities was that the actions and the standing and the sentence of each man becomes reckoned as the actions and the standing and the sentence of all those who are in union with each man. As we said last week, like the victory or loss of a sports team becomes the victory or loss of that team's fans who contributed nothing to it. Thus far the similarities, the differences that we looked at, the great, the blessed between these two unions is what we receive as a result of each one. While in Adam what was credited to us are his sin, his guilt, and his sentence of death, what is credited to us who are in union with Christ are his obedience, and his innocence, his righteousness, and his eternal life. that He earned through that, and which is given to us all by His gracious gift, not by our works. And so we see why it's so important to be united with Christ. Now this evening I do want to take a little bit of a deeper look at what this union involves, but not just for your education, but hopefully for your encouragement as well. So what is involved? with union with Christ. What does this mean? Well, we've already seen in one sense with the standing and the sentence and the actions that it means that Christ's actions, standing, sentence become ours. More generally, Christ's experiences as a man become the experiences of those who have been united to him. Now, there are two of Christ's experiences in particular that receive the bulk of the focus from Scripture. There are others as well. But let me read again these couple of verses from Romans 6, and let me see if you guys can hear what these two aspects. Paul is speaking about being united to Christ in two important respects. Listen again, this is verses 3 through 5. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death. in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His." Well, you could hear them both emphasized at the end there, especially. Scripture emphasizes that our union with Christ means union with Him, among other things, in His resurrection, but also in His death. Now, just quickly, we notice Paul's language here that he's using about baptism. What's this about? It's baptism and union. How do those two connect? Well, here, Scripture, and in other places, Scripture connects our union with Christ, with our baptism into Christ. And not because the water of baptism has magical powers that creates a spiritual reality, but because baptism represents the most visible, the most identifiable point at which we are brought into this formal relationship with Christ. It's our standard to say baptism signifies and seals our union with Christ. And particularly, as Paul emphasizes in this passage, our union with Him in His resurrection, But again, before that, union with Him in His death. He rose. We're united to Him. We are counted as having risen. He died. We are counted as having died. Now, the first of these, I think, is somewhat easier to understand and to appreciate. Perhaps it's easy to see why we would want to be united with Christ in His resurrection, but why would we want desire, be pleased to find out that we have been united with Christ in His death. Where is the good news in that? Being united with someone in their death really doesn't sound on the face of it like that great of a thing. So what does it mean that believers are united with Christ in His death? This is the particular question we'll be looking at this evening. Now, to begin to answer that question, I think it will be helpful, I hope it will be helpful if I use another analogy. So last week we were comparing our union with Christ and Adam to a sporting event. This week, something I'm a little more familiar with, a board game. Are you ready? Okay, an illustration of a board game. Okay, so imagine Imagine if you can, sort of your typical, especially your, not like Settlers of Catan, we were talking about earlier today with somebody, not anything that complicated, but you're simple, you roll the dice, you've got a space, you move a piece, and you try to get to the end, okay? Just a very simple board game. You travel across a board toward one final goal, one space at a time, and imagine at the end of this board on this game, at the end of the trail, there are two possible endpoints. The one is death, And the other is life, death and life as you're moving down the board. Now the rules of this game are very simple, on the face of it at least. Each piece moves down the board with rolls of dice and lands on a different space. Now, what each space represents in this board game is one of God's commands. Now, if a player is able to obey each command that he lands on as he's moving toward life, then when he gets to the journey at the end of the board, he moves his piece into the life section of the board and he wins. He wins the game. The other rule is this, if the player is unable to obey any of the commands, even one during his trip down the board, and it doesn't matter how many others he obeys as he goes along the way, when he gets to the end, he does not pass go, he does not collect $200, he goes into death and he loses the game. It's a simple enough game, right? So in this game, the law of God makes up the path to life. Simple. Keep the commands, live. Win the game. Break them, even one, and die. At which point for you, and this is important, at which point for you the game is over. This represents the way things were set up in that first arrangement that God made with Adam. Adam, here's life, here's my law, keep my law, live. Break my law, die. Now, what happens as we play this game of life? What does scripture say happens as we start down this path? What happens when we land on our very first space? Well, setting the analogy aside for just a moment, we discover the scripture presents this as a big problem for us. Listen to what Paul says. This is Romans 7 now, jumping a chapter ahead of where we began. He says this. Here's my experience going down this game board. I land on the first one, I find a command of God. Here's what he says. For I would not have known what it is to covet. If the law had not said, you shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, Paul says, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me, for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it, killed me. What Paul says is that when we, waking up to our human life and moving through the life that God has given us, what happens when we encounter the law is that the law produces sin, and sin produces death. So, How well are we going to be able to play this game? How well are the rules going to work for us? Not well at all. Why? Because the game is flawed? No. Because the pieces are flawed. As Paul has explained earlier, Romans 7, 5, he says, For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work and our members to bear fruit for death. And as he says later in Romans 7. But I see in my members another war, another law, waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. See, if you look a little deeper into the rules of this game, when we start this game, Our pieces are united with Adam. We are on team Adam as we move down this line. And in addition to the guilt that we receive as a result of that union, we also get a nature that's corrupt. A nature that simply responds to the law of God with more sin. The way Paul describes it here, the commandments themselves provoke us to break them even further. Now Paul doesn't go into a lot of detail here as to how this phenomenon works, about why the law produces this response in us. But I think there's at least one aspect of it with which we can probably somewhat easily identify. Perhaps you've had this experience. Sometimes the only reason something sinful is attractive to us is because we know we're not supposed to do it. We were talking about Augustine earlier today. Well, Augustine talks about one of his young experiences where he and his buddies stole all the pears off of a tree. And he says they weren't even ripe, they weren't even tasty, they weren't even worth anything, He says, what we delighted in was the fact that they weren't ours. It was just fun to do something we knew we weren't supposed to do. And if we're honest, sometimes we know that it's purely the sinfulness of something that gives it that tang, that makes us want to do it. We are seriously messed up in Adam. But there's another dimension to this, I think. Another way, perhaps, in which the law does this, produces sin in fallen humans. And that is, as long as we are interacting with the law of God as a way of gaining eternal life, We are submitting ourselves continually to repeated failure after failure after failure. And the law is what points those failures out. The law makes us aware of our shortcomings. Shortcomings which can only lead to despair and to giving up and ultimately to a who even cares sort of attitude that plunges us more deeply and deeply into sin, so that the result is, as Paul describes, we become subject to the power of sin. Sin becomes a master and we become its slaves. So for whatever reason or set of reasons, because of our corruption, because of our fallenness, as our peace is moved down the board of the game, with each command of God that we encounter, the path takes us closer and closer not to life, but to death, deeper and deeper and deeper in death. And then a number of ways that. It's our relationship to the law that produces sin, the whole setup of the rules of the game make it hopeless. For us, and again, not because the game is flawed. But because we are because we are severely, severely flawed. So where does our union with Christ come into this? Well, back to our analogy. Christ himself decided to play this game with us. He took on our humanity. He took on our duty to obey this law. He took on the rules of this game of life. Born under the law. Jesus, again, as we talked about this morning, he was God. He did not have to come into the world and submit himself to the rules for man, but he did. Something else he did voluntarily. I will be born under the law, the Son of God said, and I will play this game. Well, what happened when Christ rolled the dice and moved his piece down the board. Well, he rolled forward and he landed on each command and he kept every one of them and he did so flawlessly. How? Well, because he was not subject to the same corruption that we were. He showed by his perfect life that the game's not flawed. He got to the end of the board. He stood on the verge of the final destination. That last move either into life or to death. Having clearly fulfilled all of the rules along the way. But here's something astounding. Having completely satisfied the rules of the game. Having achieved everything necessary to move into life. What did he do? He moved his peace into death. He died. Voluntarily. For you. All right. So how does this help you? How does this help us? Well, smaller print rules of the game. As Aslan once said, the even deeper magic. This piece, the other pieces of the board are given the opportunity to be united with Him. Our union with Christ. And all of those who are in union and connection with Him on the board, What happens to these? Well, a number of things. First of all, his death takes the place and satisfies the requirement of death for all the other pieces united to him. His perfect score counts for them. They have had the goal of achieving life by the law fulfilled for them by another. And when they reach the end, they can go into life at the end of the play of their game. Again, all these achievements, the successful completion of the law, all of this counts for the pieces on his team. But the other good news is that not only does his score count for them, so does his last move into death. Okay, again, can't see why we'd want that. Why do we want that? Why do we want to be united with him in that step as well? Well, because of something that we said happened to the piece that moves into death at the end of the game. I just mentioned in passing before, but what I said was that for that player, the game, it's over. It's ended. Okay, still struggling to feel really good about this? What does this mean then? Well, what it means is that the former setup, the former system of rules no longer applies to him anymore. He stepped into death. When Christ ended His play with death, He was no longer subject to the rules that got Him there. He had died. Game was over. Rules were done. And the same thing is true of all of those who are united to Him. Listen, Paul says this, Romans chapter 7 verse 1. Do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? Verse four. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ. For those united to Christ, the same result obtains. The whole system, the whole rule of how the game is played, that rule is thrown out. This is no longer the way that we achieve eternal life. What's the effect of all of this for all the pieces still on the board? What does this mean for us? Well, as we just said, our moving into the life spot at the end of the game no longer depends on how we, as individual pieces, fulfill the commandments of God. because the end of the game has been applied to us as well. Why do we want the death? Because that means for us, as it means for Christ, that the whole process, the whole rule, the whole means of achieving life, that system, that game is over. That's what it means that in Christ's death we have died to the law. But it means something more as well. Because here we are, still on the board. Here we are, still moving forward. Here we are, still encountering the commands of God as we move through our lives. God still commands us not to covet. We're still making the trip toward the end. but we're doing so with a hugely important difference. While the commands themselves are still there on the board, they are no longer the way for us to achieve life. Christ has already done that for us. We're no longer encountering these commands as if our life depended upon our keeping them. It doesn't any longer. That's just not how it works under the new set of rules. We are, Paul says, dead to that system of things. And what is the effect of that? Death. Death to the rules of the game also means death to the power of sin to produce more sin in us. Death to the power of the law to turn us into worse and worse and worse sinners. We read it in Romans 6. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. And then Paul says this, for one who has died, which gloriously we have learned now that that's us, has been set free from sin. And then jumping ahead a bit, Romans 6.10, for the death that Christ died, he died to sin once for all. So our death to the law means that the law doesn't have any longer the power to keep us in this bondage to sin. The spiritual effect of this is that we are now enabled enabled to follow these same commandments, which once meant death for us, we are now able to follow them, follow them in freedom. Why in freedom? Because our life no longer depends on it. And we are freed from that fear and that despair that comes with trying to earn this ourselves. We're freed from the power of sin because, Paul says, we're dead to it. This is what the scriptures mean when they speak of our union with Christ in His death, being our death to the law, again, as a way of achieving life, and also our death to sin, that is, the power of sin, the power of the law, rather, to produce sin in us. This is how union with Christ, and particularly and specifically union in His death, this is why it's a good thing. This is why we want to be united with Christ, not only in his resurrection, which just sounds good, but also in his death, which is also good. Okay, so what do we do with this now? Do we add this to our collected points of theology? Yeah, one more thing for me to know. Well, whenever scripture speaks of this reality, it's not presenting it just as an interesting point of theology. Usually, Paul is, as we see here, using it as the basis for an encouragement towards some particular action or attitude. Paul here, and in other places where he talks about this, is not just explaining something, he's calling us to something. Hear what he says in Colossians 2, verse 20, again. If with Christ you died, to the elemental spirits of the world? Why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch? Referring to things that are all to perish as they are used according to human precepts and teachings. Paul is saying, stop thinking that this is how things work. It is how it worked in Adam. It's not how it works in Christ. Stop, he says, stop playing the game by the old rules. Stop striving to earn your life by the keeping of the commands of God. You're no longer working in order to gain life. Stop acting, Paul says, as if your life is dependent upon your performance. Life is given to each one of us because of our faith in Christ. And Paul says over and over and over again, it's given to you as a gift and that's how you have to receive it. But on the other hand, Paul also says, again as we've seen in 611 of Romans, so you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So now that the rules have changed, now that the removal of the law as the path to life has also taken away the power of sin, so he says count yourself as dead to the law and as a result, You have to think about yourself as also dead to sin. And you have to do more than just counting and thinking and reckoning and considering. He says, act. He says, stop sinning. You don't have to anymore. Instead of living for sin now, the scriptures say, your death, that is the death that's credited to you because of your union with the death of Christ, means you're now free and you're free to live for other purposes. And he tells us what those are. 1 Peter 2, 24, Peter says, he himself, Christ, bore our sins in his body on the tree. Why? That we might die to sin and live to righteousness. Paul in 2 Corinthians 5, for the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died and he died for all Why? That those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who for their sake died and was raised. The encouragement from this truth of our union with Christ in His death is start living for Christ. Galatians 2, 19, Paul again, for through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." So, why do we want to have died? Why do we want to have died with Christ? Why do we want to have been united with Him, not just in His life, but also in His death? Because it is in union with Christ in His death that we die to the whole law as a system of keeping the commands in order to obtain eternal life. And it's in union with Christ's death that we are freed from the power of sin and are actually enabled to keep the good and perfect commands of God to our own great blessing. This is what union with Christ in His death calls you to do. Understand yourselves through His death. to be free from the power of sin and then move from that understanding and turn from it, turn to righteousness, live for Christ. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would help us to to truly understand what has happened to us as we have placed our faith in Christ, as we have been united to Him. And again, not just so that we can know more theology, which is important, but so Father that we can pattern our lives according to this truth, as you continually call us to do, as you tell us about it in the Word. We pray, Father, that as we face our daily struggles and as we encounter situation after situation after situation that calls us to obey you rather than man, or to obey you rather than to pursue and fulfill our own fleshly desires, we pray that you would let us feel the freedom that we have. Let us feel the life that we now have. Let us feel, Father, the gift that we have now been given, that ability to not be subject to the power of sin as a slave driver. to serve you instead, Father, the service that brings not death but fruit, fruit unto eternal life. Help us in this way, we pray in Christ's name, amen. Thank you, Lord. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and make your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful. He also will do it. Amen.