Romans 6
Faith: Approaching the NT Book of Romans • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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We are Called to Experience New Life In Christ
We are Called to Experience New Life In Christ
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
To say that we have new life in Christ is to say that we belong to God.
In Christ we are bound to God.
He has authority over us
He is also the One who directs and keeps and wills in our lives.
We are given access to new life, renewed life in Christ.
The ability to start again
The ability to experience mercy
To know freedom
We have to come to understand that our old life is worth trading for. That we are trading up. We are offered something much more and better than we could have expected.
Like we paint ourselves into the edge of a room, nowhere to go, but then find that there is a door out.
Hiking three sisters in Oregon.
Raining all day. All day. Hiked all day in the cold and rain. Constant. Finally had to stop. We dug down and found some dry ground and started a fire. That fired burned all afternoon. And we just stood by it to stay warm.
There was so much fog we knew we were on the right trail but had no real idea what part of the trail.
Went to sleep and woke up the next morning, the fog and rain had broke. And we got out of our tents and saw this. The day before there was no mountain. Then, as soon as the fog broke, there was a mountain.
From our perspective, the mountain appeared. But realistically, it was there all along, just covered in the rain and fog.
That’s what we are going to talk about today. We are given new life in Christ. But often we find it hidden in the rain and fog of the old life. Christ gives us new life, renews us in Him. But we have to allow for the clouds and the fog to break.
The Need for New Life
The Need for New Life
For the next couple chapters Paul goes on this dialectic rant. It’s kind of like the atari game, pong. A ball hits the racket on one side, bouncing it to the other side. And the ball goes back and forth, back and forth.
This is the idea in Romans 6.
We hear about new life in Christ
We hear about the old life in the self.
They are played against each other.
Because Paul wants us to consider both of them.
What is the new life in Christ like?
What is the old life in the self like?
We are to consider this in the first verse in Romans 6. If we look at the final verse we see freedom and belonging to God, we see a meaningful and eternal life.
But as we go back to the start of the chapter we see a consideration between grace and sin.
Should we use sin to explore the idea of more grace?
If we sin, doesn’t that display the grace of God even more?
Paul gives us the answer right away but I’m glad he asked it. He did because there were people who were promoting the idea that sin shows more grace so we should sin more.
That seems like a win win.
Sin can be fun
We sin to show God’s grace.
Everyone’s a winner.
Except for sin can’t bring about grace because grace is already completely given.
Sin doesn’t reveal grace.
We don’t reveal grace
- We reveal the need for it.
- It’s like saying since we are hungry shouldn’t we consider our hunger so that food may abound?
Food doesn’t show up just because we are hungry. Food shows up because it’s produced. We need food because we are hungry.
Grace reveals grace. God is the purveyor of grace. We have a need and that need doesn’t produce more grace it just shows us how needy we are for it.
If something is really that good then you won’t need to backlight it with its negative.
Nyack hot bagels. We go a couple times a year. The best we’ve ever had. Real New York bagels. We go out of our way. We don’t experience them because we are hungry. We experience them because they re just that great. Grace is good on its own. It’s worth going out of your way for.
New life in Christ is worthwhile on it’s own. We see our need for it in the sin we live in, but that sin is like hunger. It doesn’t produce it’s own food, it just shows us what we need to do.
We need to find new life.
Paul says we have tried to find life in sin
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.
But he asks what kind of fruit were you receiving?
When we put ourselves before others.
Definition of sin, doing what’s best for you regardless of what it costs others, how does that work out in the long run?
There is no long term fruit in those scenarios.
We will keep running out.
We need a better option.
The Experience of New Life
The Experience of New Life
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.
We trade an old life with a new life.
If we enter into His death, we will be united with Him in His resurrection.
If we are able to enter into His life we experience Him, but we have to be able to let go of our life in His death.
This back and forth is incredible news but also a challenge
Be watchful about what we give our lives to.
We have to recognize that this trade, old to new life, is just that.
What we bring to the table, what we give our lives to, is not able to generate new life.
This is the image of baptism.
This shows us the picture of what it means to follow into death and new life.
We will be doing a baptism in May.
Baptism is a picture for the believer of their life in Christ. They are placed into the water as a picture of death. But then they are brought up immediately from the water as a picture of new life.
If you haven’t been baptized and would like to, please fill out a next step card and we would love to baptize you.
But that is the image we use to understand new life.
And we need new life because, even as good as old life is, we can’t generate new life ourselves.
- Because we do the work to grow and get Better. There is a posture we take. And that is good. To grow to want to get better is good. But we still can only do so much. We hit barriers of our own limitations. And these limitations are gifts. Because they show us our need for Christ.
It shows us, when we do hit these limitations, that we have to find Christ to do a new work in us.
- Christ has to do a work in us. New life is not just the result of us trying harder. IT is the result of the revealed Christ through His sacrifice, brining new life. We face new life in Christ by facing death in the attempts in ourselves to bring new life. We die to self and live through Christ. We find out that there is another life that is possible.
- Grace through new life isn’t just about doing less bad things, it is about allowing Christ to do a work in you. That work is life. And when life takes over there is no need for dead things.
We were given new life. Like if we were living in Siberia and were suddenly dropped off in Hawaii. Everything is new and Better/. We still have to adjust to new life. Sometimes we are so used to the old life that we go back to doing old life things. But those things don’t have to control us.
People getting out of prison and having a hard time adjusting to freedom. Freedom is better but the adjustment is hard.
If we have been made new in Christ then we don’t have to live at the beck and call of everything that we have used to make life.
We can pay attention to the call that has been given to us in Christ.
- Paul calls it the fruit that leads to sanctification.
- As we move through this book, Paul will take all of this and begin to apply it to how we deal with our relationships.
- To how we live in our world.
Our embracing the free gift of God allows us to live through the perspective of that gift.
To be free not only to not sin under His power
But in that freedom to not allow the dominion of sin around us to form us.
This is our hope, this is our reality.
Our new life is given to us to live differently.
That the things that have formed and shaped us no longer have to.
That the love of Christ is our great demand. Our great call. Our great obedience.
We are beholden to that life and that call then.
That is the good news is we then have the support and divine life we need
the peace we need
The strength we need
What does that look like?
We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
New life is knowing that death has no dominion
The things that have had strength over us don’t need to.
We are under a different law.
Grace not sin
Our role is to trust that grace in Christ is bigger than the sin of the world.
News story. Satellite constellations. Astronomers are worried that the stars will be blocked out visually by the 1000 satellites orbiting earth. We will see them over the stars. This presents a problem as more and more satellites are being shot into space.
Can you imagine looking up into the night sky and instead of seeing stars, bright burning balls of flame larger than our sun, you instead see a bunch of satellites? What would it look like for satellites to block our view of the stars?
That is the trade off between the old and new life.
Both are there. But we have to choose what to live in.
Our position in Him is that of newness and renewal.
Maybe you’ve never experienced that before, maybe you need the new life that Christ is offering.
Maybe you have been living in the new life Christ has offered but the old life, as we will see, keeps slipping in. You keep mistaking satelites for stars. Allow Christ to bring renewal. Ask Him for that.