I want to invite you to turn with me in your Bibles this evening to Romans chapter two this afternoon. I guess it's not evening yet. Romans chapter 2, excuse me, Romans chapter 6. And we're going, I'm just going to read this evening, I was tempted to read more than this, but I think that we'll just read verses 1 and 2. In a certain manner of speaking, this is an introduction to the first 14 verses of the of the sixth chapter of Romans, but it is so much more than that, and it's absolutely vital truth that we need for living for God and being sanctified. And I want to read verses one and two and then have a word of prayer. It says, 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? Let's pray. Dear Father, we're asking for you to give us hearts and minds that receive the word, that receive what you are teaching us. Certainly significant interpretation dependent upon your spirit is necessary for us to appreciate what is meant here and in the verses that follow. And so we're asking for the illuminating work of your spirit upon your word in our minds and hearts, in Jesus' name, amen. So there's little doubt in my mind that Romans 6, 7, and 8 is the primary passage of scripture in the Bible on the living of the Christian life. Now, that doesn't mean it's the only passage. Almost all of Paul's epistles and even the gospels and the general epistles and so forth that we have in the New Testament all address the subject of sanctification of the Christian life, some of them in a less formal way. And then the Old Testament is full of illustrative material and teaching in Psalms and other places about the Christian life. I mean, look at Joshua 1 verse 8 and everything that centers around that. You have teaching that relates to the Christian life and to the doctrine of sanctification. But this particular passage is the most important passage. and it is necessary that we understand what is being taught here and all the other verses and chapters that relate to sanctification will fit into this chapter, in these chapters, I should say, to give us the proper picture of the doctrine of sanctification. So we saw the sinfulness of man in the early chapters of Romans, and then we saw in chapters four and five especially, but the end of chapter three, the doctrine of justification. in which we are declared righteous by God, in which we gain and receive salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And there's a lot of information that's there about justification. And our tendency, because we come from a reformed tradition, is to emphasize justification. And I'm not going to downplay that. I did that myself. We need to know what justification is and how God declares us. or what it means when he declares us righteous and what impact that has upon us. But I'm going to say that sanctification is equally important. It's just as equally important. We can't just say, okay, we're saved, we've been declared righteous, and then just kind of flounder around as it were. in this world. We need to know how to live the Christian life. We need to be made more and more like unto the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, what I'm going to say is that the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapter need to be taken just as carefully and methodically as we took chapters three, four, and five. And we want to really get a handle on what is being taught to us at this point. What I want to do in this message is I want to draw out of verse two, and it really includes more than verse two, but I want to draw the phrase out found here in verse two where it says, we who died to sin. I want to specifically spend this message on the phrase died to sin. And I believe that if we get an understanding of this, and let me just say this by way of information. I think from my earliest Christian experience, I desired to know what this meant because God had given me a sense that this was critical to the living of the Christian life. Yet most of the books that I read and the things that I heard led me in the wrong direction for understanding what it means to be dead to sin. And so I'm convinced beyond any doubt whatsoever that this is in many ways the key I don't like to use that word, but, cause there's a lot of other things that are involved, but this is one of the most vital truths that we need to understand correctly. If we're going to live a life that is pleasing and honoring to God. If we don't understand this properly, we might, we may actually be saved. And many are, we may. live a pretty good Christian life, but I would say that without the proper understanding of this, the living of the life of Jesus Christ as a Christian is not going to be as full and as it should be if we understand this properly. And I'm not gonna answer everything about it in this one message, but I wanna give you the essence of it. And then as we look at other verses in this chapter, it will be built up even more so. But know this at the very beginning, dead to sin or having died to sin, we have died to sin, is the dominant thought of the first 14 verses. So let me begin, first of all, with the importance of this phrase. I've kind of emphasized that already, but I want to emphasize the importance of as it relates to the teaching, how it comes about at this juncture. So if we look at chapter five in verse 20, it says, moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound, but where sin abounded, grace abounded much more. So that as grace, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. And then immediately after that, chapter six, verse one says, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Now, the importance of this phrase, we died to sin, is connected with the fact that Paul has preached free grace, that God saves purely and totally by his grace, and that there's no works required to be either be saved or to be kept saved. It's a free gift from God. And that justification is the judicial act whereby when we trust Christ Jesus, our Lord as Savior, we trust him, that he declares us righteous. Justification by? faith through Christ and through justification is by Christ through faith and through and by the grace of God. And so we see him declaring that and then understanding that there were people who rejected that. and who questioned it. Many of these were probably Jewish people thinking of themselves as being still under the Mosaic law as a covenant of works. Or it might even be moralistic Gentiles and people who realize, okay, if you tell people that they're saved purely and completely by the grace of God, this is going to lead to anarchy. This is going to lead to people living in sin then. And Paul says, so what do we say to that? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid, or certainly not. Under no circumstances are we saying by this justification by faith, that you are free to live in sin. So he's answering the charge of what's called antinomianism, which is just a big word that means against the law. Paul's not against the law. But when you hear justification by faith, you think at first, maybe, that he is against the law. And many have misunderstood this matter. Because basically, even in our own culture today, with all the sin and evil and false religions and rejection of true Christianity, religion basically tells us, if you want to go to heaven, do the best you can. That's what religion says. Of any sort, of any kind, from anywhere, it basically says you need to do good work, you need to be a good person. If you do these things to the best of your ability, with sincerity, then you will be saved. Or hope that you can be saved. But the gospel tells us just the opposite. The gospel says, believe in Christ and you will be saved. Doesn't say believe in Christ and do the best you can. It says, believe in Christ and you will be saved. That's the essence of the gospel. And so Paul is facing this charge that is, this charge has probably come up in every people group of the world where the gospel is going to be preached through the ages. So we need to see how he is going to answer this. In many ways, this could be the most important verse in my estimation for living the Christian life. Now, Paul repeats the idea of we died to sin. He repeats this idea in almost every verse through verse eight. And then in verses 11 through 14, he makes application of it by saying, reckon yourselves to be dead to sin. And reckon yourselves is an additional statement related to you're dead to sin. And then he's saying, okay, since you are dead, now you understand what it means to be dead to sin. Then also reckon yourselves to be dead. And then he gives further application in verses 15 through 23. using the imagery of slavery, slavery to sin, slavery to righteousness in those verses to help us understand further exactly what he's communicating. So the idea of death to sin, I can say confidently is the main point of this chapter. To understand Dead to sin is essential then to how we're going to live the Christian life and how it is we are enabled to live the Christian life. So that is the importance of this phrase, we died to sin. Secondly, I want to show you a couple of insights into the phrase, we died to sin. I think there are two insights in this passage, in this phrase here where it says, we who died to sin. And the first insight is that there is an emphatic use of the word we here. So when it says, we who died to sin, some special emphasis in the original language is associated with the use of this pronoun we. So Dr. James Boyce, who I've been really dependent upon in my understanding of the sixth chapter of Romans, along with Martin Luther Jones and Dr. John Murray, those three in particular, Boyce on this particular phrase, dead to sin, is extremely helpful in what he shows is that in the Greek language, the pronoun subjects of verbs are included in the verbal endings as a general rule, unless It's unless the author wants to put emphasis on the pronoun and then he will add the pronoun besides the ending that is found there. And that's exactly what Paul does here in this particular case. He wants to put emphasis upon we. And so we might ask ourselves, why does he want to emphasize we died to sin? Because he is talking to a specific group. Paul is doing this in order to contrast those who are not in Christ with those who are in Christ. Or those who are still in Adam as opposed to those who are no longer in Adam but are now in the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who are in Christ, they are from the previous chapter 5 verses 12 through 21, all that teaching that's there, the we refers to those in Jesus Christ and not in Adam. So this is also what makes the question in verse 1 unthinkable to Paul. Look at the question again. Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Paul considers even the thought of this question to be absurd, to be completely unacceptable and unthinkable. How could anybody, I mean, look at all the verses that he describes sin and sinfulness. and all the adverse effects of sin and the detriment that it brings to the world and to civilizations. And then he talks about Christ and his atonement and justification and salvation. And now there are these people that are saying, well, then, you know, wow, that just means we can live in sin, I guess. And he's like, what are you thinking about? You're not listening to what's being said. So he's emphasizing, we are in Christ. Now this is the critical, this is the absolute important point for us to note as we consider this insight, the we. We are not in Adam, we are in Christ. And that's Paul's emphasis here. And as those who are in Christ, we died to sin. And as far as we're gonna go with that at this point, there's a second insight that is given to us here also, and that's found in the word we died to sin, the word died. It is an aorist tense in the Greek language, and an aorist basically means a single action which has taken place and has been completed in the past. A single action taken place in the past and has been completed. It's completed action in the past. And we just basically in English, it's past tense. Now, Aris may be a little more profound than simple past tense, but for our purposes here, all we need to see is that, and this is so vitally important because most Bible readers do not read this as we died, past tense, to sin. They read this in other ways. And we've got to overcome that. We've got to see carefully what is said and what it means. So, We must keep both of these insights that I have just noted to you in mind as we proceed through this chapter, not just in this message, but as we proceed in this chapter, the sixth chapter. So we have seen the importance of the phrase and the insights into the phrase, we died to sin. That brings us thirdly to the incorrect views of the phrase, we died to sin. Dr. James Boyce, in his commentary, presents us with five views which I would like to share with you. I think Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his sermon on this, gives six incorrect views. I think two of them were just divided there, sort of. But I want to communicate these five incorrect views. Now, I don't often do this. But you know, this is a teaching tool. It's a very important teaching tool. If we fail to see what the incorrect views are, we're more likely to slip into one of them. These incorrect views, let me say very clearly, are held by some good Bible teachers and good Christians. Okay, I'm not saying that these are apostates or anything of that nature, but I want you to see that there are some incorrect views here. And what happens is we take an incorrect view of what this means is down the road it leads to practices that are inconsistent with the teachings of Holy Scripture. Each of these incorrect views adversely affect basically the biblical understanding of how we're supposed to live the Christian life. And I think that these incorrect views will help us to see the correct view more properly, in a very beneficial way for the living of the Christian life. So the first incorrect view, I would say it this way. We died to sin means we are not responsive to sin. This is the first incorrect view. They take it to mean we're not responsive to sin. So the idea behind this view is that if something is dead, it does not respond to stimuli. When temptation comes, what these people that hold this view say is, the true believer will not respond to this sin. He's dead to sin, so he's not gonna respond to it. It's not going to affect him. He's not gonna be drawn into it. Actually, one man wrote, a dead man cannot sin. And you are dead, he said, so you don't sin anymore. Now, let's be honest. Those who hold such a view are dishonest. They're grossly dishonest. There's nobody that doesn't sin. Briar and I met a guy in Stanton once who said he hadn't sinned for, I forget how many years. But we told him we didn't think it was true and we quoted in First John where it says, if you say that you have no sin, you deceive yourself, the truth's not in you. This phrase, we died to sin, does not mean that we are dead to sin in the way that these people are expressing this. And we can refute this view of verse 2, in verses 12 and 13, where just in the same paragraph, Paul says, therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. Well, he should have said, well, you're dead, you won't sin. You don't sin, you certainly won't. No, he doesn't do that though. Verse 13, and do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. And Romans 7 really emphasizes this. I'm just gonna pick out verse 19 of Romans 7, where it says, for the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. That's sufficient to disprove this first incorrect view. Second incorrect view. Some say we died to sin means we should die to sin. We should die to it. Now this view says that the key to the Christian life is to have an experience in which you die to sin and crucify the old man. And this has been called deeper life and higher life and a host of other kind of descriptive phrases. And basically those who hold this view primarily emphasize an experience. If you have this really special experience, you're a super Christian. Everybody else is just really poor. They're probably carnal Christians. You're a super Christian. You've had this experience and you're going to be, you know, really faithful in living for God. This is the view pretty much that I was taught growing up. as a teenager and a young person. And it's the view that is espoused in lots of books that were especially published in the 70s and 80s on the Christian life. The fact that we should not sin is true, okay? It's a true statement. We should not sin. But this view is incorrect because Paul is describing something that is already true of Christians. We died to sin. He's not asking us in verse 2 to do anything. Third incorrect view. Say we died to sin means we are dying to sin little by little. This view says that you should grow in holiness and by growing in holiness and in your relationship with God, you will sin less and less as time goes by. But that interpretation has then changed the words of the verse from have died or we who died to sin to we who are dying to sin. But it doesn't say we who are dying to sin. It's past tense, we who died to sin. The fourth incorrect view is that we died to sin means we cannot continue in sin. because we have renounced it, okay? See, a little shade of difference there. We've died to it because we renounced it, as opposed to progressively, you know, being changed by it, being changed bit by bit. Rather, we renounced sin, and so that means that we renounced it, but this view, While it recognizes the aorist tense, the past tense, as something that we did in the past, it identifies it as a thing that we do. Or maybe some of them would say, well, this is what you did when you got saved. You renounced sin at that moment. Now, coming to Christ as Savior really does include a renunciation of sin. Because we repent, and repentance of sinfulness is a renunciation of sin. And so, to renounce sin, they would say, and to continue in sin is a contradiction, so you're gonna renounce it, and that's how it's all gonna kind of work out for you, and they see the renouncing of it as being the key factor. So, What's wrong with this view? Well, it says that dying to sin is something that we ourselves do. But clearly what Paul is teaching here is that to be dead to sin is something that has been done to you. Not something that you do, but something that is done to us, all right? So the fifth incorrect view of this is that we died to sin, some say means we have died to sin's guilt. We've died to the guilt of sin. And this view is basically saying that dead to sin is the same as justification. Now, to some degree, that's actually true. As we get into this in more depth, we're going to see that sanctification and justification have to be understood separately. But there is a connection between true sanctification and justification. And part of that connection is you will not be sanctified until you're first justified. But it's not that the sanctification makes you justified, it's that God has justified you by faith and therefore is working to sanctify you. To a point, this fifth incorrect view has a little bit more truth to it than the others, but it doesn't go far enough because Those who hold this view, they're failing to really answer the practical question that's associated with verse one. Paul's not saying you've been justified by faith, you're saved, and also, oh, should you continue in sin? Well, no, you're justified. That's not his answer to the question, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? He believes in justification. He's taught it thoroughly and completely, but they're mixing up information here. So having seen then these five incorrect views of the phrase, we died to sin, let me note that there is an element of truth to all five of these. There's an element of truth in each of these. We should renounce sin. We should grow in the grace and knowledge of God. When we were saved, sin's guilt was removed in the gospel. Paul will talk about that when we get to the eighth chapter in more detail. But the fact that each of these is found somewhere in the Bible and that is true in some fashion or the other is not the proper interpretation of the phrase, we died to sin. That brings me last of all this afternoon to the inescapable teaching of the phrase, we died to sin. The inescapable true position of what this means. And I'm gonna quote Dr. Boyce here because he says it really well. The secret to sanctification is not our present experience or emotions, and I might add feelings of any kind, however meaningful or intense, he says, but rather something that has already happened to us. And that's the key right there. It's taking into the emphasis of we as those who are in Christ, the emphasis of the eros tense, past tense, we died, past tense, to sin. And so this doesn't have to do with your feelings. Whoops, sorry, Steve. Doesn't have to do with your feelings. It doesn't have to do with your experience. You know, there are days when sometimes we don't feel saved. And there are days when we might feel like we're under bondage to sin. We might feel like we're under the covenant of works rather than under the covenant of grace. And this is part of the reason I believe without a doubt that God established one day in seven for us to come together to worship because we need to be reminded consistently and regularly of these great gospel truths so that we are appropriating what God has for us in his word and can then live for him. So, we're in Adam, and God, by His grace, took us, we were in Adam, God, by His grace, took us out of Adam, and He put us in Christ, or the other language that Paul uses in Colossians. We were in the kingdom of darkness, and God translated us out of that kingdom into the kingdom of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is because of what has happened to us that we are no longer to continue in sin. Are you following me? It's because of the grace of God to us that we are not to continue in sin. But we have all, if we're saved, died to sin. Something amazing happened to you if you are a Christian. When we believed the gospel, God caused us in his, just as he declared us to be righteous, he caused us to be dead to sin and raised up to newness of life in Jesus Christ. Your old self died and your new self was raised up. You are in union with Jesus Christ. through faith in him and God's judicial pronouncement. And that is the result of union with Christ. Now we're going to see some of them in union with Christ becomes a second major point that is established by Paul here. But we have to begin with we died to sin. And we have to know that, believe that. We have to preach it to ourselves just like we preach other truths to ourselves, remind ourselves, Andy, you're dead to sin. You are alive to God. You are in union with Jesus Christ. This is how we live the Christian life. So since you died to sin, crystal clear, There's no debate about what Paul wrote. We died to sin. And dear father, we want to give praise and thanks to you. It's not something that we did to ourselves. It is something that you did for us. and in us for the glory and honor of Jesus Christ and for our sanctification and Christ-likeness. For we pray this in his name. Amen.