If you're in Romans right now, we'll start in verse 1. We're going to be dealing with verse 5 and 6 today, but we'll start in verse 1 and read down to the logical end of this subsection here into verse 7. So verse 1, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it? do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore, we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection. Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin." Let's pray. Father, I pray to You this morning, Lord. I thank You for Your Word that You have given us. I thank You that You have given Your children Your Spirit who leads us into all truth and helps us to understand these things, Lord. Yet as we go for the young saint and the old saint, Lord, things for us to learn, depths of the Scripture yet to dive into, Lord. All of us have just a present understanding of things, and You can grow that. You can give us new insights and new helps, and I pray You would do so today, Lord. Let our minds be conformed and renewed and transformed by Your Word, that we would reflect more the image of Christ. I pray You'd make these things clear to myself, Lord, and clear those here that You would help Father, all those that are here to derive something of benefit from this. Lord, I thank You for this Word. I just pray that You guard us from any errors, guard us from any misunderstandings. Help these things to be clear and right and true and helpful. Lord, I know these verses many wrestle with. Lord, I know I have in the past. I know there are many who take these things and can go astray with them. And I pray You just keep us on your path of truth, walking in your light. In Jesus' name, Amen. So, we looked at verse 3 and 4 last week, and we really dealt primarily with what it means to be baptized into Christ Jesus to be immersed. We saw that the word baptize is not actually translated from the Greek into an English word. It's just transliterated. Baptizo. The same idea because they don't quite know or aren't quite sure what it should mean in every instance, so they just leave it how it is in the original. Often our ideas of baptism are always tied to the water ceremony that we perform for a believer. But yet the word, as we saw, is used in many different instances that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual Believer's Baptism Sermon. It means to be dipped into, put into Christ Jesus, immersed into Him. And how that's a reality for all of us. Every Christian, everyone who is a believer, you're taken out of Adam and you're put into Christ. You're in a new realm. You're under a new master. You're no longer under the law, but you're under grace, as it says in verse 14. Sin shall not be master over you. Why? You're not under law, but under grace. You're in a different realm. You've been taken out of Adam and put into Christ. And that's the center thrust of what we've been getting at here in the last half of Romans 5, dealing with the parallels between Adam in Christ and then leading into this here, asking the question, well, okay, we're in Christ, we believe in Him, we're justified by faith alone. Jesus did it all. He has saved us. Nothing we do contributes towards that or takes away from that. So why don't we just continue in sin? That grace may increase. That's the objection he was dealing with. And now, this is what we're answering. And it's answered by this reality that if you're a Christian, everything has changed. You're not just someone who's justified, but everything about him has stayed the same. You are taken out of the realm and the power and the kingdom of Satan and death and taken out from under the law and taken out from being in the flesh and now being put in Christ under His reign, His power, and His authority. And we are united with Him. We are in His death. We saw that. Verse 4, we're buried with Him through baptism into death. So that also as Christ was raised from the dead, we would walk in newness of life. Here we see that hint of the things that are coming in the rest of Romans 6, and then Romans 7, and Romans 8. Now in verse 5, we kind of see a restatement of this here. It says, "...if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection." Now, I don't know why it keeps bumping around over here. Am I knocking this thing? There you go. Can you guys still hear me? Ok. Sorry, I move around a little bit too much. So, we see a restatement here in verse 5 of what we saw before. Here is the Christian. We have become united with Him. With who? With Christ. In what? In the likeness of His death. And also, we shall be in the likeness of His resurrection. Now, it's important here We're in the likeness of His death and resurrection. What happened to Christ is totally unique to Him. He became a man like us, but just like it says in Romans 8, God was pleased to send His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. He was not sent in sinful flesh. He was sent in flesh, but it was not sinful. So there's a difference there. We are in the likeness of His death. What happened to Christ is not the same thing that happens to us. But we are in His death and we benefit from that death. And in His death, we die too to Adam. We die too to the old man who we were before. And now we are in the likeness of His resurrection. I want you to look at this here. We're not going to spend much time in verse 5, but I want us to look at this one word. If we have become united with Him. You know what that word united means? Does anyone have a King James Bible over here? Always someone still in the congregation. Gladys says, God, she's our only one anymore. Anyone have a KJV anywhere? No? Wow. We need BJ back here. Okay, so this word in the Greek, you probably mispronounced it here, it's sumphutos. It means that root planted together. In the King James it says, for we become planted together with him. The idea is united, but it actually has kind of an organic, horticultural sense. That you're planted together with Him. It means planted together, grown together, united. It gives the sense that this isn't just some casual coming alongside. This is something. We're taken out of where we were before. Now we are like the Romans 11 sense. We're grafted into Christ. What happens when something's planted together, it's grafted in? Where does it get its life from? Not in itself. It gets its life from the thing that it's planted together with, that it's connected into with. We are in that relational sense with Christ. We are not just coming alongside Him. Oh, well, now He's my buddy, He's my Savior. We are totally put into Christ, planted together with Him. growing together with Him. We rely upon Him. We're dependent on Him. Our life is derived from Him. We see this reality. You guys, I don't want to spend much time in this, but John 15, what does Jesus say about the vine and the branches? It's the same kind of idea that what's happening to the disciples there is a union with Christ that's different than before. It's not like the the rabbi-disciple relationship that they were initially thinking this was going to be. This is something more intimate. This is something more more spiritual. Jesus says, abide in Me and I in you. What's He saying? You're in Me, I'm in you. As the branch can't bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I'm the vine, you're the branches. He abides in Me and I in him. He bears much fruit. For apart from Me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he's thrown away as a branch and dries up. They gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned. So again, what's Jesus talking about here? He's not saying, well, if you really want to be a good Christian, then you abide in Me. But if you're just kind of a wishy-washy, lukewarm Christian, you're still a Christian, but you'll just dry up and you're not going to have any fruit. No, this is life and death, heaven and hell. If you're not in Him, what happens? You shrivel up, you dry up, you're thrown away into the fire. That imagery in the Scripture is always used. always used by Jesus in terms of a judgment. Matthew 7, the tree that doesn't bear good fruit, what happens to it? Cut down and thrown into the fire. This is a judgmental censure. If we are in Christ, we are by necessity abiding in Him. And if we are abiding in Him, what happens? You've got to remember from last week, Romans 7, what does it say? Verse 6, Therefore, my brethren, we also are made to die to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God." So what does our union with Christ, being planted together with Christ, result in? It says here, you die to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined, united, planted together with. It's a different word, but it's the same sense we see here. With who? With Jesus. For what reason? That we would bear fruit. That we would bring forth fruit to God. What's Jesus talking about in John 15? The same thing. I'm divine. You're the branches. If you're in Me, what's going to happen? Fruit's going to come out of these things. That's the reality there in verse 5 in Romans 6. That if we become planted together with Him in the likeness of His death, we will be that way in the likeness of His resurrection, with newness of life. If you are a Christian, you by necessity are a branch that's in the vine. You must abide with Him. You will abide with Him. What happens is we abide in Him. Fruit comes forth in these things. And that's more of the experiential outward manifestation of the inward reality. We're going to be looking at that more as we go down here in Romans 6. But I want us to look at these two truths here in Romans 6, verse 5 as well. We're planted together with them in what? Two things. The likeness of His death and the likeness of His resurrection. The likeness of His death and the likeness of His resurrection. What does that mean? What did we look at before? A lot of this right now in verse 5 is kind of just review and restatement of things going into what I primarily want to deal with in verse 6 here. But this we saw is a positional, objective reality. And I say, well, what is that? It sounds real esoteric and not very helpful there. But what does it mean? What does it mean? This has happened to us. This happens in salvation. It happens at first and at once. It's not ongoing. Our old self was crucified with him. We have become united with him. We shall be in the likeness of his resurrection. Up here earlier, we saw in verse 4, we have been buried with him. These things happen. At the point of conversion, this happened. This is not talking about ongoing sanctification. It's not talking about some higher Christian life that you can attain. Finally, my old man is dead and buried. I'm crucified with Christ. And now I can just go on and live the higher life. It's not talking about that. This is an objective, positional reality that is true for every Christian. If you're in Christ, you are dead. Your old man is dead. Your old self is dead. You are dead to the law. You are dead to who you were in Adam. You are now alive to God through Christ. You are right with God through Christ, and now you have entered into this new realm. This is positional in a very real sense. We're not united with Adam in these things, but we're united with Christ. Here He came, born under the Law, born as a man. He fulfilled the Law. He fought against all temptations in a body of flesh and He prevailed. Remember, He didn't have a glorified body at the time. He had a body like ours. It wasn't sinful flesh, but He came in the likeness of sinful flesh. He suffered and endured the same temptations. He fought against the same things we fight against. And yet, He prevailed where all men before Him had failed. He succeeded in the realm where Adam failed. He defeated death on the cross. He rose again from the grave with new life that's not lived in the realm of Adam, but the realm of God. And in Christ, we are in this death and life in a new realm. And this is a reality at the very beginning for everybody, for every Christian. It's a new position from before, but I want you to remember this here. I want you to remember this. It's not just some out-there positional thing of, oh, well, ok, now I know I'm not in Adam, I'm in Christ. That doesn't affect us at all. What does it mean? Our position has changed, but that affects everything about us. The change of our position from being in Adam to in Christ, it's something that we don't necessarily feel or experience the moment it happens there. It's that conversion. Things change. But the outcome of that affects every aspect of our life. It's not merely or only positional. Because we have a new position, we now will have new actions and a changed life. That's the whole point here of Romans 6, answering the question, why don't we just continue in sin so grace may increase? We're in this new position. We're in Christ. We're justified before God. He's done it all for us. We're totally righteous before Him. Why don't we just go on and sin? If you take a merely positional sin, there are people who do that. They say, oh, this is talking about our position before God. You can't answer the way Paul answers. You have no answer for that. If this is only a change of standing before God, and this is not affecting every aspect of our life in terms of what we would call regeneration, If it's merely talking about, well, we're just justified before God and this doesn't have anything to do with the change of our life, that this position doesn't affect us in that way. We can't answer the way Paul answered, but how does he answer, well, how shall we who died to sin still live in it? The change of position before God affects our relationship with sin, affects our relationship with God, affects everything in us. This is the fruit that comes from the root. The root changes. We're no longer rooted in Adam. We're no longer rooted in the flesh. Now we're in Christ. Now we're in the Spirit. We're in this new realm. We're in this new place. And the root from that brings forth from this position before God. Everything we're going to see here, start in Romans 6-11 where we get the first real exhortation to do something in the Christian life. Onwards down through 7 and 8 and so on. All these glorious things. It might sound like I'm repeating myself from last week, but I'm doing that because it's important that we get this. We have to understand the base and the root. We are different. And that affects everything that we're going to be talking about the rest of this day and the rest of our time here in Romans. That we have a changed position. God saves us. It's just like He told Paul here. I didn't have this one written down. I don't have my red letter Bible here either. It's where he's before Felix there. He's testifying. I'm sorry, before Festus, I believe. No, try the third one here. Before Agrippa, Acts 26, verse 18. God says, I'm going to send you to the Gentiles. Why? To open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God. That they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me. What is His charge to Paul? This is the beginning of Paul's mission. What is Paul doing here? in the book of Romans. He's writing to the church at Rome telling them, I'm going to preach the Gospel to you. And this is the Gospel committed to me by the Spirit of God through the charge of Christ on the road to Damascus, what He told me to do. Now what did God say would happen? He's going to send Paul to people and He's going to open their eyes so they would turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God. What is a dominion? It's a rule. It's a kingdom. It's a place. They're in that realm of darkness, in the dominion of Satan. They're in Adam, in the flesh. And what is going to happen when the Gospel is preached? It's not they stay there, but all of a sudden, all their sins are forgiven and they're okay. That's the majority of Gospel preaching in America today. Ask Jesus into your heart. Pray this prayer. Do this, this and this. Try to keep the Ten Commandments. Whatever thing they tell the people there. But stay where you are. God doesn't want to ruin your fun. There's not really a big change that's going to happen. You can be a carnal Christian, that whole idea that comes up there. We know this here. But again, this is important to understand this point, because if we get this, it takes care of all those other things. We won't approach the Gospel in this way of, well, you can just stay where you are under the dominion of Satan, but still be right with God. That's impossible. When God justifies a person, when God saves a person, He takes them out. They're not under the dominion of Satan anymore. They're under the dominion of God. He takes them out. They're not in darkness anymore. You don't have a guy roaming the streets saying, yeah, I'm still addicted to heroin, but I prayed. and ask Jesus to save me. I pray every day He'd forgive me, but He's totally walking in darkness. And somewhere along the way, these people have been to churches. These are people we know and have spoken to. They've been to churches and told them it's all okay because you said this or you prayed this or you trust in this. You're justified, but sorry, you're still under the dominion of Satan and still in the darkness. That's not gospel. That's not salvation. When God saves a person, they come out of that. They come out of being under the dominion of Satan into the dominion of God. Now, what does that look like? We don't want to misunderstand that and go a perfectionist route by reacting against the licentious route or lawless route, however you want to call it, of the other way there. And it really comes down to a lot of what we see in verse 6. in verse 7. We're going to deal with verse 6 today. A lot of the question is, what happens to our old man? Who's the old man? The old self? What is he? Who is he? And what happens to him when the Lord saves us? That's an important question. That's something many people, even godly people, have disagreed upon. And in my opinion, some have gone very wrong and astray in regards to this very question. And often, it's these very verses that time and again people will turn back to and not understand it in the context of everything we've been speaking about, being united with Christ, being joined with Him. That's why I meant to go a lot quicker through Romans 6, but as I started digging into it, I realized that I didn't even understand it how I felt I should understand it to share. and that we have to lay this foundation. Once we lay this foundation, it's like when we built my house. It took us four months to lay the foundation. Very little progress. But once we had that thing on, the walls and the roof and everything just flew right up. It still took a lot of work. But it went way quicker. Why? Because now we had a foundation and we could build upon something. We need to have a foundational understanding of this. And why do I say that? Verse 6, Paul says, knowing this, Now, he's right into Rome. He's never seen these people before as far as we know. Some of them may have been there on the day of Pentecost and heard Peter because we know there were some from Rome that were there who heard and were converted. Paul himself has never spoken to them, but they know this. He's referring to something they already would know. He says, knowing this. Well, what's he going to say? the thing he's about to say here, he knows this is something that's essential and basic to the Gospel and an understanding of our relationship with God that has changed and our relationship to sin that has changed. This is a basic, essential foundation that we need to know. Once we have this understood, it's going to help guard us from many errors in one way or the other. From the errors of lawlessness of an unrealistic perfectionism over there. And so, again, I go back to the question here. Who is the old man? Where is he? What happens to the old man? Let's look at this here. "...knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him in order that our body of sin might be done away with so that we would no longer be slaves to sin." So that verse here, or that word here, our old self, I think probably ESV, what does it say, old man? Does it say old self? It says old man. That word in the Greek for self is just anthropos. You guys know anthropology? Study of that? Anyone been to college or in high school, they might do that. It's just the study of man. Anthropology. Anthropos just, it means man. In some ways it means like humankind. It's a more all-encompassing word. It's the entirety, if you would, of the person. And this old man, this old person, what happened? Was crucified with Him. Where is the old man? He's dead. He's gone. It was done. This, again, just reading others who have commented on these verses and understand Greek better and have dove into it, this Word was crucified. is in the Greek tense where it happened. It's done in the past. The same exact thing that we saw earlier in verse 3 and 4 of how we have been buried with Him through baptism into death. This happened once for all. It's not happening. It's not ongoing. In the same way, the old man is not being crucified. He's not going to be crucified. He was crucified. He's dead. some might say that the old man is equal to our sinful flesh. And here we see our sinful flesh being crucified. I've understood it that way before at times, that it means that the old man is on the cross being crucified, our flesh is on the cross being crucified, and that we're dying every day to sin and we're getting less and less. And this picture of crucifixion here, this is a wrong way to understand it, but I understood it this way for quite some time. that the old man is on the cross being crucified, and yet a lot of people will say this. Oh, look, he's crucified. Crucifixion is a long, slow, painful death. That's what's happening to our flesh now that we're in Christ. Who we were before is just slowly dying up there. Our flesh is just dying up there, and eventually it's going to be done away with. You know what the problem is with that? It sounds nice, but it's wrong. Do you know why? Because it says our old man... It doesn't say our old man was crucified. If it said that, I could understand that being a valid interpretation. If it just said it was crucified, or even if you get rid of that Greek tense and it doesn't mean it was a definite thing, if you just said, well, it is being crucified, okay, I can understand that, but it doesn't say that. Look at what it says here. Our old man was crucified with Him, with Christ. That's important. What happened when Christ was crucified? Is He still on the cross? Was it some long thing that went on forever? No. It was over and done. He died. When Christ was crucified, it was unto death. When it says our old man was crucified with Him, if it was with Christ, it's dead. It's gone. That old man is dead and gone. Christ, when He died on the cross, He died. He was crucified and His crucifixion isn't going on to this day. Now, Catholics might say, oh, look, He's still there on the cross. There's a weird theological justification for that, that in the Mass, they're crucifying Him every time they offer the sacrifice. But the Bible makes it very clear. Christ died once for all for the sins of His people on the cross. And He died. So if our old man was crucified with Him, whatever this old man is, it's gone. It's dead. It's not dying. It's not in the process. Now, there's truth that tells us in Galatians, those who are in Christ have crucified the flesh. But that's a different thing than what we're seeing here. That's a different thing than what we're seeing here. Two reasons for that. One, this here, the old self was crucified with him. Paul is not telling us to do something. And he's not telling us this is something we have done. This is something God did. Our old self was crucified with Him. This happened by what God did, that conversion. The verse in Galatians 6 tells us that if anyone is in Christ, He has crucified the flesh. That's telling us to do something. If you're in Christ, you have done this. There's a reality to that, and that deals more with sanctification and experiential reality that comes from our position in Christ, and we'll look at that later on in Romans 6 here, but it's something different. The second reason why it's something different is it's a totally different word. Flesh and old self are different words. They mean different things in the Scripture here. Now, I want to clear one thing up as well here, and this is helpful for us, that the old man was crucified. He is dead. We don't have two natures present in us. There's a common understanding in evangelicalism, probably a lot of Southern Baptists too, I think I've heard it in those circles, where they say something like this, okay, you've got the old man, and now you've got the new man in you. But they've still got the old man and the new man, and they're fighting against each other. And some use the analogy, they're like junkyard dogs, and they're fighting against each other. Whichever one you feed more is the one You guys heard that in churches before? I've heard that before. And that's a misunderstanding of what is going on in the Christian life. What is that saying? That the old man wasn't really crucified. He didn't really die. He's still there. And he's fighting against this new man in there. Now you've just got to feed the new man, let the old man die, and then the new man's going to win and prevail. Now that's, I think, an attempt by people to understand how a Christian can still struggle and wrestle with sin, because that is a reality. We're going to see why that is. But theologically, it's unhelpful and it's unclear and it's not accurate to what we see here in this verse and other verses. The old man is dead. He was crucified with Christ. He's gone. Whatever this old man is, he's not in you anymore. He's not fighting like a junkyard dog against the new man. He is dead. So what is the old man then? careful in understanding this, because we can easily go astray on these things here. But like I said a couple of minutes ago, it's not the same thing as the flesh. It's not. What do I mean by that? These are different words in the Greek, different usages. Man here, again, is anthropos. It's like the entirety of man. It's all of who you are. The old man, the old person, the old you in every sense, in every totality of it. The flesh is used in the Scriptures in a more distinctive way. It's this. It's this body of flesh, this body of sin. We know it's distinct as well because if you look at this verse here, we have two things being talked about. First, the old man was crucified with Him. Why? in order that our body of sin might be done away with." So think of that here. The old man, the entirety, died for what purpose? In order that the body of sin might be done away with. If these meant the same thing, it would be illogical. If it meant the old man was crucified with him in order that the old man might be done away with, that wouldn't make any sense. Paul's not illogical in that. The body here, that word, I know I don't like throwing a lot of Greek out there. I don't even speak Greek. I can look it up though and understand some basics on it. But it's helpful in this sense we're trying to distinctively define things. That word body is just soma. You guys maybe heard that in medical terms or so on. Soma is just like a body, like a soma of corn. Your whole body is a soma, you have a somatic a thing that happens in you, or psychosomatic. People use that as a term that you're mentally affecting your body, your soma. But it's referring to this physical, fleshly you. The body of sin. This body of sin might be done away with. So what's he saying? The old man, the entirety of us, who we were in Adam, is crucified. For what end? That the body of sin might be done away with. And I'm going to explain what done away with means, because we don't want to misunderstand that either. But I just want to labor the point here that these are distinctive things. The old man is not the same in the Scripture as our flesh. So what is the old man? What is the old man? It's the old man we were in Adam. It's who we were in Adam. It's the entirety, the anthropos, the man that we were. Everything we were in Adam before we were in Christ was different. It's a different realm. It was a different us. It was a different person. It's how we were in Adam when he was our head, and how we are in Christ now that he is our head is the difference between the old man and the new man. The old man is the man in Adam. all that we were in the flesh, under the law, under the reign of sin, in the darkness, under the power and dominion of Satan. Our entire being, everything about us was in Adam in the flesh that was this old man. We were alive to sin and dead to God. dead in our sins and trespasses, and we did nothing to do with God. Our very nature, everything about us was totally corrupted, fallen, depraved, wicked, and it was entirely in the realm of flesh. Like it says in Romans 8, those that are in the flesh cannot please God. There was no spiritual life in us whatsoever. There was nothing good in us whatsoever. No spiritual life in us whatsoever. We were the old man and Adam. and in Adam, our entirety, was affected and in that realm. The new man is the one that we are in Christ. Things have changed. But one thing hasn't changed. I'll tell you what that is in a minute here. John Murray, he says, The old man is the unregenerate man. The new man is the regenerate man created in Christ Jesus unto good works. It is no more feasible to call the believer a new man and an old man than it is to call him a regenerate man and an unregenerate. Think about that. That's who the new man is. You're now regenerate. You're born again by the Spirit of God. You're a new creation in Christ. If you were born again, what happens when your child is born? They didn't exist before. There's a new person there. Now, it would be something if they died and then they were born again. That's kind of the picture we have here. Who we were before dies, and now we are born again into Christ. That's what we're looking at here. that this new man is the regenerate man, the man in Christ that we are now, a new position in Christ that affects everything in our life, that affects the entirety, the whole anthropos, the whole man that we are, or woman that we are. I'm going to use it in a general term here. It affects everything about us. We have a new relationship to God, a new relationship to sin, a new relationship to the law. We're now under grace and not under the reign of sin and Satan's power and the new man. So that's what we see here. The old man is the old man in Adam. And what happens to that old man in Adam? He's dead. He's crucified. He's gone. He is no more. Now, some take these verses and they say, ok, the old man's dead, the body of sin is done away, we aren't slaves of sin, so we shouldn't struggle with sin if we're a Christian. Sin isn't something that masters us, so we can possibly not even have sin and be totally perfect in this life. Right? People that don't go into the air of carnal Christianity, they run far the other way and what do they do? They go towards sinless perfectionism. This is a wrong understanding. We know, both from Scripture and experience, we still fight with sin. We still fight with temptation. But I'll tell you this, if you're a Christian, your fight with sin is different than it was before. Because now it's a fight. You weren't fighting before. You were friends with it. You liked it. The only fight you had was fighting against God so you could have more sin, because that's what you wanted. Now there's a fight and a struggle. And that's the thing that has not changed in the new man. The old man in Adam, totally lost. No life in him whatsoever. The new man in Christ, we are a new creation. the Spirit within us. We have a new nature within us. We were born again. There was nothing there before. There was no spiritual life. Now we are born from above by the Spirit of God. And as it says in Romans 8, those who are in the flesh can't be God, but you are in the Spirit. You're somewhere you weren't before. But you're still, in a real sense, the same place you were before. And what is that? You're in this body. You're in this body of sin. You're in this flesh. We're the new man in the same old body. Now, this is where some people can go astray. You guys have heard of the Gnostics, right? The Gnostics. Maybe you have a Bible commentary or something. You'll read some of the intros and say, oh, Paul was writing against the Gnostics earlier, like Colossians and so on. Well, I'm not going to go into that often a waste of time to study even Nazism. It's really weird and confusing and a lot of other things. But the thing they were known for essentially was stating that all created matter. Everything that was created was inherently evil. Your flesh was evil. This world was evil. Everything material was evil. So they would be known as fasting all the time, beating their body, doing things that, if you know the term ascetic, like asceticism, like the monks were out there starving themselves, being in cold chambers, just to beat their body down because they thought it was inherently evil. They had this dichotomy between spirit and flesh. the spiritual realm and the creative realm, and they basically said anything in the creative realm is evil. We're not saying that. I'm not saying that. That's not what the Scripture is saying here. When I say the new man is still in the same old body, that's where our problems come from. What I mean is, we're in flesh that was originally created good, with good purposes, good desires, that was going the right direction, that the things this flesh, this body desired to do were good and right to do. But when it fell, when Adam fell, and we inherited this curse, and we're in fallen, unredeemed flesh, Our body goes astray. It desires to be lazy when it should be working. It desires things that it shouldn't desire. At times, it shouldn't desire. We desire to do things that might be good things, but they're at the wrong time or with the wrong person or at the wrong amount. The fallen flesh goes astray to excess, misuse and disobedience. I want you to note here, this body of sin, the soma, it means the entirety of the flesh here. So it's not just, oh, my hand is doing something wrong or my belly is doing something wrong. It's your mind too. You had a mind before you were a Christian, right? I hope you did. You still had an intellect before that. A lot of you were very intelligent people even before you were Christians. That didn't change. You still have the same mind you had before. You still have the same body you had before. You were still a person. And so there's not some distinction, you know, your body's here like a horse that you're just riding and it has its own mind of its own. No, this is the entirety. Our body includes our mind, our thoughts, our emotions, all these things. You had emotions before you were saved, I'd hope. Some people might have been so numb that they didn't. But we have those things. And what was wrong with those things? What was wrong with them? The core of it was driven by the old man. What has changed? The only thing that has changed is the core in the center. Before, the old man is totally in tune with the fallen nature of our flesh. Whatever your mind wants to do, yeah, let's go do that. There's no conscience there. There's no tinge there. They may be overly religious. The old man is driving these things. The old nature there hates God and loves sin and desires to do these things. What has changed now? Now we have a new nature and a new man that's in us. The flesh is still the same. The mind is still the same. The emotions are still the same at the point you're converted. But what begins to happen? Now these things are being rightly guided. Now these things are being subdued and brought into submission. Our mind, Romans tells us, is being transformed. We're being transformed by the renewing of our mind. We're now putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, as it says in Romans 8. We're doing things now in the new man that we never did before in the old man. We have a new nature. We're now in the spiritual realm. 1 Corinthians 9.27. What does Paul say? How do we know that for a Christian The idea of the body, of the flesh, being this unredeemed aspect of us that's still prone to sin and excess and abuse is scriptural. 1 Corinthians 9.27, what does Paul say? That I discipline my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified. Paul had to discipline and keep and check his body, make it his slave instead of being a slave to it. What's he saying? Here's his body. Here's his mind, his emotions, his desires, his flesh, what it wants to do. But yet, he has a new man, a new nature, a new heart, new desires that sometimes, like we see in Galatians there, the flesh lusts against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh. There's a conflict, a contrast, a fight that goes on. But what does Paul say? Where I am now, my position in Christ as a new man, I'm making my body my slave. I'm disciplining it. I'm putting it into subjection. I'm not going to be a slave to it. What are you before you're in Christ? You're a slave to your body. You're a slave to your lusts, your desires. You have no control, no power over those things. You might have a little bit of control just to keep yourself out of trouble. But by and large, before you became a Christian, if you tried to stop sin, what would happen? You might stop for a month or two, a little while, but you get jerked back into it, or you just go on and do something else that your flesh wanted to do. You had no power over sin because it had power over you. You had no power over your body. It had power over you. You were living totally in the realm of flesh. And Paul says, I'm going to discipline my body, make it my slave. Before Paul was a slave to sin and in the flesh, he did what he wanted to do. Again, Romans 8.13. Just turn over there while we're in Romans. It says, "...for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die. But if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live." So here Paul makes a distinction. The deeds of the body. He doesn't say, if you're putting to death the deeds of the old man. That's important. The old man's dead, but the body is still alive. The flesh is still alive. who we are in this world. Before we are redeemed in our body and have a glorified body and all these things put behind us, we still have the deeds of the body that need to be put to death by the only One who can do that, the Spirit of God. We're in a new realm here. Romans 8.23, he's saying, not only this, but also we ourselves having the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves grown within ourselves waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. He doesn't say the redemption of our old man. He says the redemption of our body. He doesn't say we're waiting eagerly for the new nature, for a new heart. No, that's already happened. The minute you're converted, the minute you're saved, eternal life begins for you. You have the Spirit of God in you. You are now in the Spirit, in the realm of Christ. You are in Him. You have eternal life that begins. What will die is our body. What will be raised again is our body. That will be raised again in a glorified body. We see that in 1 Corinthians 15. I don't necessarily need to turn there. Just in general, we see that. It's sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there's also a spiritual body. 1 Corinthians 15 Only in that day will we finally be free from all temptation, from all sin, from all ability and propensity to sin, and not until that day comes. You see how understanding this rightly keeps you from perfectionism? If you think the old man is your flesh, that it's dead and done, and you don't have to worry about sin anymore. If you sin in your life as a Christian, or you're struggling with sin, what do you do? You doubt your salvation. You think, well, how can I be a Christian? I'm struggling with this thing here. No, that's the very reason you know you're a Christian. Because now there's a new man that struggles against this unredeemed body of flesh that you're in. That should give you encouragement. The fact that you're wrestling against it and fighting against it. If you weren't, well, then you should be worried. Then you should be concerned. I'm justified, so I can just sin it up. Well, that's not the right attitude there. But if you're struggling against sin, if you're fighting against it, then the next thing I have to say especially is for you. Because what does it say? Our old self, our old man was crucified with Him. Why? In order that, so for the purpose that, our body of sin might be done away with. Here's the body of sin. This is the unredeemed flesh. This is the body we are waiting for like Paul and groaning for the redemption of our body, for the final freedom from all the sin and temptation we wrestle with, from the struggle daily of having to discipline our body and make it our slave, of the struggle daily of taking up our cross and crucifying our flesh and following Christ. We will finally be freed from that in that final day. And that's that body of sin. Well, what does it mean that it might be done away with? Does that mean, oh, ok, our old man's dead, so now this body of sin is done away with. We don't have to worry about sin anymore. Some people understand it that way. And they'll drive themselves to insanity because they're pursuing something that doesn't exist. They're pursuing a reality that is not for us this side of eternity. Certainly there is victory over sin. That's the whole rest of Romans 6. It's how we now, being in the Spirit, being in Christ with a new nature, we can finally master these things. We can finally put to death the deeds of the body. We can finally fight against sin and actually win, not through us, but through the Spirit of God. But what does it mean that our body of sin might be done away with? It doesn't mean It's eradicated. But it means it's stripped of its power source. What was the power source? What was the source of power for the body of sin? It was the old man. Here's the old man totally in control. Your flesh just wants to do this, do that. Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's go do it. That man's gone. He doesn't have the approval anymore. There's a new man in there, new nature, new desire. He's saying, no, hold on. We're not doing that. I'm in control. Come on back over here. That word in the Greek, again, I don't think I've said this much Greek in a sermon before, but it's helpful. That word in the Greek, done away with, you might look in your margins there, it also might say made powerless. Some of you guys, it might even translate that in the ESV. That word in Thayer's here, kathargo, means to render idle, unemployed, inactive, inoperative, to deprive of its strength, to make barren, to cause a person or thing to have no further efficiency, to deprive of force, influence, or power." That's what it means. That our body of sin might be rendered idle, unemployed, inoperative, that it might be deprived of its strength, deprived of its force, influence, or power. That's the reality of the Christian life. That's what Paul's saying when he says, I'm going to make my body my slave. It doesn't have that power anymore. The flesh doesn't have power anymore. It's no longer under the law. It's no longer under the reign of sin. We can now, through the Spirit of God, live the Christian life. We may have, even when we were lost, seen some things in our life we wanted to get rid of. We couldn't do that. You couldn't clean yourself up. That's the pit many people get trapped in. How many people meet on the streets, oh, well, I want to be pleasing to God. I just got to get off drugs or stop sleeping around or whatever. Then once I clean my life up, then I can come to God. They're trying to do it on their own strength. They'll always be a slave spinning around in this endless cycle over here. Now that we are in Christ, The old man is crucified in order that to the end of that, this body of sin might be rendered powerless. This should give us a better idea. The death of the old man, who we were in Adam, that old man fueled the lust of the flesh. It carelessly indulged in all of them. It wanted it. It sought after it. It desired it and gave into the flesh when possible. It even sought out opportunity to maximize the passing pleasures of sin. It would plan out opportunities to sin and people to sin with. That old man is no longer there. The best friend of your fallen body of flesh, your unredeemed flesh here, is dead and it no longer has a sympathizer to feed it. Think of that. Its closest ally is gone and dead. The old man, the old nature, who you were in Adam, is gone and dead. It doesn't have a friend anymore. Now it has an enemy. Now there is an enemy in a sense to it. overplay the dichotomy. There's still you. There's still your body, your mind, your emotions. But you can kind of see that. Now there's a new tenant in the apartment there. Now there's a new landlord. And he doesn't want to go for those things. He says this is over. The root of sin, the old man we were when we hated God, loved sin, sought to do what we pleased, is gone. And if it's not gone, if the old man's still alive and well, you're not a Christian. The Christian life, If the Christian life for a person is essentially that you aren't doing all the sinful things you wish you could be doing, and you're doing all the boring, tedious Christian things that you don't want to be doing, that's a good indication the old man is still there, that the old desires are still there, the old nature is still there. But if that has flipped, if there's a new reality, if the old man is dead, and now You don't want to do those sins anymore. That's not your desire. It might be a temptation to do those things, but your core desire is, I want to follow Christ. I hate these things that drag me down. I hate these things that defile me. I want to put them away. Even if you're fighting against them, wrestling against them, struggling against them, be encouraged. That's the Christian life there. The Christian life is not perfection. The Christian life is now, there's no longer an ally for your flesh. There's no longer the old man, the old nature, justifying, excusing, and trying to find ways to allow your flesh just to indulge in its pleasures. Now there's a battle going on. A subduing going on. Charles later gives an analogy of this. Kind of an answer to the question. You might see this and say, well, ok. How come it takes so long? How come at the time of conversion there, It seems like everything should change. How come if this is for the purpose that our body of sin might be done away with, that it might be rendered powerless and ineffective, how come I'm still struggling with these things? I'm still wrestling with these things? He gives an analogy here that might be useful for us. Let's say you've got a big field. There's a giant oak tree out there. And you drive by it every day on your day to work there. And you see this tree over there, it's just got leaves and everything. Let's say some guy comes along with a chainsaw, cuts it right down the core, right through the middle, totally cut off, and then somehow manages to anchor it back down on top of the stump where it was before. You're still driving by that thing. It looks the same like it did yesterday, but there's a crucial change now. What's happened? That which was feeding that tree has been cut off. That which was its source of strength and power is no more. That tree, inevitably, is going to wither and die. You drive by it after weeks, you see leaves falling off. After a month, branches start going off. Eventually, this whole thing is withering and dying. Why? Because the source of its life has been cut off. That's what happens with this body of flesh. Its source of life was the old man in Adam, the old nature that we had. In Christ now, We're not feeding this flesh. It doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have an ally. It doesn't have a source of strength and power to draw from. That's what that means. That the body of sin might be rendered powerless. That this body of sin might have its life source cut off. And what's going to happen in the Christian life as you go on, inevitably, those sins are going to wither away because they're not being fed like they were before. Anyone out here who's a horticulturist, you can't reattach that tree. Once that thing is severed, you can't just go back there and try to graft it back on. It's done for. It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time before that thing is going to die. That's how it is in the Christian life. So, the end of it is so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. The end of the verse here in verse 6. The body of sin might be done away with, rendered powerless, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. That's God's purpose in saving us there and bringing us into this new life, this new realm, so that we wouldn't be a slave to sin anymore. We would be a slave to Him. You have that contrast. Romans 6, verse 20, "...for when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness." Then verse 22, "...but now you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God. You derive your benefit resulting in sanctification and the outcome of eternal life." God frees us from slavery to sin to now serve Him. That's His purpose. We are created in Christ Jesus, the regenerate man, created in Christ Jesus unto new works. A Christian may sin, but a Christian is not and should not. be a slave to sin. Is not... I mean in a positional sense of reality here. You are not a slave to sin. If you are a Christian, this is true for you. You are no longer a slave to sin. Sin shall not be your master. For you're not under law, but under grace. Sin is not your man. It just isn't. If you're a Christian, it is not. Not should not be, but it just is not. That's not the realm you're in. I say, should not, because many of us still have a slave mentality. What is Paul's purpose here? He is telling them things that they should know, that he expects them to know, but he's also reminding them of these things and telling them, realize who you are. What's his purpose here? What does he say? What's his purpose here? He says down here, verse 11, consider yourselves to be dead to sin. It's already a reality. He's saying consider it, reckon it, realize it. What does he say elsewhere? Ephesians 4, 20-24. He talks about the old man and the new man here. Ephesians 4, verse 20, But you did not learn Christ in this way. If indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him just as truth is in Jesus, that reference to your former, manner of life, you lay aside the old self which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new self which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth." What is he telling them? In reference to your former manner of life, lay aside the old self. That's not you anymore. If you're a Christian, the way you lived before, the things you did before, your nature, your desires, those things before, if you're a Christian, That's not you anymore. Lay that aside. Notice, nowhere does Paul tell them to crucify the old self. That's already happened and been done. It's dead. But he does say lay it aside. He does say don't walk in that anymore. That's not you. He's telling them here in Romans 6, consider yourselves to be dead to sin. He's not saying make yourselves dead to sin. He's not saying, well, this is the last time. Go crucify yourself to sin. No, that already happened. He's laying the groundwork here, and then he's telling them, look, realize this. This is the reality. Your greatest help in sanctification and going on to be more like Christ is just realizing who you are in Christ, realizing this position, this reality, that you're dead to sin anymore. The devil will come and tell you, oh, I'm still your master. You've still got to listen to me. Your flesh will rise up and say, oh, you can't live without this. You've always done this. You want this. You can't live without it. Our position now in Christ is to say, you know what? No. I'm dead to sin. I'm dead to you. You don't have power over me. I'm in Christ now. I've been raised from the dead. I'm alive to God. I'm going to put off the old self and put on the new self. That's what Paul is saying. There's many other Scriptures like this where the exhortation to holiness of life and godliness of life is basically telling the church, realize what's already happened and walk in that reality. That's what we need to do. That's why truth matters. That's why doctrine is important. That's why understanding the Scriptures helps us to see these things. So, Paul said in verse 6, knowing this. Do you know and realize this reality? Can Paul come and say to you, knowing this, and you say, well, I don't know this. I've never heard this before. And study this. Realize this truth that's here. And walk in it. Knowing this. Knowing this. Paul's assuming they know this. Do you know this in your own life? If you're a Christian, do you realize your old man is dead and gone? And you're a new man. 2 Corinthians 5.17, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things pass away. Behold, new things have come. Do you realize that the power of this body of sin is cut off? It's rendered ineffective, powerless, in that you now, by the Spirit of God, can fight against sin, subdue it in your life, have victory over it. There will be fight to the day you die, but there must be a fight, there should be a fight, there will be a fight, and there is victory in Christ in these things. Why? Because your old man is dead. His body of sin is weakened, rendered ineffective and powerless. And like Paul, we're to discipline our bodies and make it our slave. to serve us so we can serve God. Now, is this being preached in churches? Is this being preached in our church? Is this being preached by our people? Are we proclaiming this truth? When we find people out there, maybe they're a Christian, or maybe they're, like a lot of people, a false-professing Christian, and they're going the way of perfectionism, or they're going the way of carnal Christianity, are we pointing them back to this? We can say, look, knowing this, Come on, don't you know this? Your old self was crucified with Him. That old man is dead and gone. He's not still alive trying to take over power there, trying to reign. He's dead and gone. If you're in Christ, you're different now. You're a new creation. There must be a change. But yet, there is still a fight. Are we declaring this? Are we helping instruct people on this? This is a foundational understanding for the Christian life. guard us from many errors and excesses. And if we realize this, and we are rejoicing in this, because again, this is not something... Until verse 11, we don't get to anything that God tells us to do through Paul here. Verse 11 he tells us. The first thing he tells us to do is realize the things I've been telling you are true and walk in that reality. That's the first thing he tells us to do. But before that, he's telling us the things God has done for us through Christ. Do you glory in that? Do you look at that and say, wow, look what God did. My old man is crucified on the cross with Him. That's glorious. I couldn't do that. You couldn't do that. No one could do that. But God did that for us through Christ. We should glory in that. That's power. Not our power, but His power. Do we glory in that and thank God for that and rejoice in that and what He has done for us to free us from being a slave to sin so now we can be a slave to God and follow Him. That's worthy of praise and honor. I'll leave us there. Let's pray. Father, I do pray to You. I thank You for these things. I thank You for Your Word to us. I pray, Lord, that it would be a help to those here, to myself, help us to understand these things clearly, Lord, to not go astray to the left or to the right in the Scriptures, but to dive headfirst into these depths of truth and glory and just rejoice in You and rejoice in them and what You have done for us through Christ the Lord. It's worthy of our praise from today until all eternity. We thank You for it in Jesus' name. Amen.