Stop Managing Sin. Start Killing it. // Romans 6:1-14

Last weekend was Easter, and we had an incredible Easter. It started for us on Wednesday night at Wake Forest University. Then we had a Thursday night service, Saturday night service, Sunday services. In fact, we had 11 services across three campuses with just under 7,000 people in attendance. It was exciting, yes. (crowd applauding) But I love all the little stories. I was talking to a guy and he said, I invited a friend to church, and he was gonna come last minute, and I told him, well, you better come early. He said, well, I'm just gonna come right before the service. He goes, can you save me a seat? He says, I can save you a seat, but I can't save you a parking spot. Okay, that's the truth, right? I had another lady, she was right down here at our Patterson campus, and she said, a group came in, it was already crowded, it was kind of trying to find seats, and a group came in, and she said, how many seats do you need? And she said, 16. She's like, three here, two here, one. You know what I mean, good and good. So guys, it was incredible, we saw people, what was exciting to me is not so much the numbers, but the stories with the numbers.

People saying that there one came for the first time, people saying that there one came to Christ, seeing people respond for eternal life, seeing people come forward to have the abundant life, it was incredible, okay? And in fact, I've got another exciting announcement for today, because I told you that we had, you know, 11 services across three campuses. Well, today we launched our Butner campus. Are you guys excited? (audience applauds) Men of Butner, okay? My name is Pastor Kyle, and I look forward to getting to know you, and you getting to know me, I know we're just meeting for the first time, but welcome to the Two Cities family. (audience applauds) You guys better be there. Listen, men of Butner, okay? We are eager to get to know you, you are not an afterthought for us, you are not a project and we are so excited. We're sending a team, they're already with you right now, and we are excited to bring the help and the hope and the healing of the gospel only found in Jesus Christ. And I know right now, you probably feel like, man, I don't have a ton of freedom. I don't have the freedoms that maybe I had before I was in Butner.

Well, I hope that by the power of the gospel, you will experience spiritual freedom, forgiveness of sins and a life with Christ. We are excited for you men, and I wanna pray and then I want you to join us as we continue our study in the book of Romans. We'll be in it all year, let's pray. Would I pray for the men of Butner? Lord, that the gospel would bear so much fruit in Butner? Lord, we thank you for all of the partnerships that made this possible. We thank you for God behind bars, we thank you for the administration at Butner Prison and how gracious and generous they have been to us, Lord. And we come to Butner the way Jesus Christ came, we came to serve and not to be serve, Lord. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, is change possible, right? Can people change? Do people change? I mean, this is a question that everybody asks, right? Can anyone really change? Or maybe you heard the phrase before, you know, you can't teach in old dog new tricks. In fact, change is so hard for us. Change is so hard for you that you'd rather somebody else do it, right? In fact, you want change, but you want your wife to change or your husband to change, or your kids to change, or your boss to change, your employees to change.

Change is so difficult, think about this, change is so unbelievably difficult, personal change, that we would rather somebody else do it. Well, if my wife will change or if my husband will change, well, then maybe my marriage will change, and maybe everything can change without me changing, 'cause changing is so hard. In fact, the world tries to get people to change, right? Let me tell you some of the common ways that we think change happens. Some people think change happens through discipline, and by the way, there's some truth in all this. In other words, this is the train harder, try harder. This is like, if I got up here and I said, hey, the reason you're still in the same place you were last year is all of the hard things that you're avoiding. And you're probably like, he's right. There is some truth to that. Other people say, no, here's how you change. You just need counseling and therapy. We're not against counseling, we're not against therapy, okay? But the whole idea there is if somehow if I knew my Myers-Briggs and I knew my Enneagram, and I also knew my disk test, and I knew my strength finder, and I knew what animal I was, and I knew what color I was, right? If I knew all of that, then I could be a different person, 'cause I would be more self-aware. Sometimes it just makes you a more selfish, self-aware,

center with high self-esteem. That's what it does, often does. Okay? Other people think it's medication. That's it, and we're not anti-medication, okay? Pray and take a pill. Do both, if you're okay, okay? We live in both. But we live in a heavily, heavily, heavily medicated culture, right? And you can, for those of us who still Instead of Netflix or something like that, okay? You cannot watch TV without a commercial about some pharmaceutical company trying to sell you some drug that's gonna change your life, and then they hope you don't listen to the end where it may cause death, right? You know, like warnings at the end. Other people think, you know, it's a new environment. That's what I need. That's what you need, right? You don't need to change. You just need a new environment. That'll change you. It's like, well, Adam and Eve, we're in a perfect environment, and they sinned grievously. And then others think, well, no, I need community. I need relationships. I need friends. I need peers.

I need mentors. Listen, any of that and all of that can be helpful. But if you'll turn to Romans 6, Paul's gonna finally talk about how do we actually change, which is the question that you're all asking, right? How do I not look at that? How do I quit gambling, right? How do I not drink too much? How do I stop being so anxious about the future? How do I stop yelling at my husband? How do I forgive my dad? People are asking this question all the time, all the time. And believe it or not, Paul hasn't answered it yet. So if you're new, we're in Romans for a year. And Paul has talked a lot about justification being freed from the penalty of sin. And he's talked some about glorification that one day we'll be free from the presence of sin. He hasn't talked at all about sanctification being free from the power and pollution of sin. See, in Romans so far, and the first three chapters are like discouraging and they're depressing. And he's like, you're guilty and you're guilty. And I don't care if you're religious and I don't care if you're not religious and I don't care if you're unrighteous or you're self-righteous. Everybody's guilty.

That was the first three chapters. And then he's like, the grace of God has appeared in the person and work of Jesus Christ and you can be forgiven and set free and righteous before God because of what Jesus did in his life, death, and resurrection. You're like, this is amazing. And he's like, in fact, when you die, you're gonna go to heaven, you're gonna be able to stand before God all because of what Jesus did. You're like, this is amazing. This changes my eternity. The only problem is, what do I do with the life I have left? How do I actually grow in holiness? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. This is such a, we're gonna spend the next, at least four weeks talking about, so you don't wanna miss this, okay? About how do we grow as Christians? How do we love God more? How do we hate sin more? How do we care more about lost people? How do we become, here's the thing. How do you become the godliest version of yourself? How do you live your life the way Jesus would live his life if he were you? How do you become practically and progressively the holiest version of yourself? Or as the Puritans used to say,

how do you simply grow in godliness? We're gonna look at the first 13 verses today of Romans 6 and begin to answer that question, okay? And basically, you're gonna need to have, this is kind of a deep, it's a deep sermon, at least I think it's deep, okay? It's a deep sermon. I'm gonna define a lot of things for us, but it's gonna be very practical at the end, but we have to understand some things first, okay? So the first thing you have to understand, there's three things you have to understand. You have to understand how grace, the first thing is this, you have to understand how grace and sin work together. I'll show you this. So in Romans 6, verse one, Paul says this, what shall we say then? So if you've been following along, Paul likes to ask and answer a lot of questions, but he hasn't done that for like two chapters. He's back now to asking questions. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? So just so you know, if you understand the gospel, if you understand everything I said last week, that you can't out-sin the grace of God, that you can't out-run the grace of God. If you understand things like the thief on the cross, everyone loves the thief on the cross.

If you know that story, that man, deathbed conversion at the end of his life, like a guy who was crucified and did terrible things as life can look at Jesus and ask for forgiveness and Jesus will forgive him. When you start asking those questions, then you start saying like, well, why? If God's gonna forgive me of every dumb, sinful, stupid thing I've ever done, then why not just do it anyway? Everybody asks that question. It's like, why be good if God's gonna be gracious? In fact, here's how I can prove that you've done this. Christian, have you ever thought about sinning? Decided to sin, but you weren't too worried about sinning because you knew as soon as you were done sinning, you were just gonna ask God for forgiveness. It's like, well, then why should I even not sin? If on the other side, can I have the best of both worlds? Why don't I just get to go to heaven when I die but live however I want here? Well, this is what Paul's trying to answer. And he's saying, guys, listen, grace, don't take grace for granted. And if you're truly forgiven of sin, you're gonna wanna be freed from sin 'cause real Christians don't just wanna be forgiven of their sin, everybody wants to be forgiven of their sin. Real Christians who have the Spirit of God in them, In fact, Paul says, when he asked this question,

are we to continue in sin that grace may have happened? Look, he says, "Bino means, may it never be." It's like the strongest negative he could say, he goes, "Bino means, look at this. "How can we who died to sin still live in it?" So we need to talk about being dead to sin and not living in it. So here's what's happened. For the last, whatever it's been, three and a half months. I've tried, maybe not done the best job, but I've tried to make the gospel center and say, "Listen, Jesus Christ died for you." I try to say it like 10 different ways. "He died instead of you, he died in your place." I mean, this is so central to Christianity that every person that you see getting baptized today, we tried to simplify this. We don't know how to simplify it anymore than four words, okay? So every shirt's gonna say, "Jesus in my place." That's the gospel. That means that Jesus Christ died for me, died instead of me, died as my substitute. What we also need to realize is that when Jesus died for us, when we trust in him, we died to sin. Now, what does it mean to die to sin? Because as soon as you talk about this, you gotta go, "Well, if you read the rest of scripture, "Roman seven, we'll get there in a couple of weeks," and you understand human experience

and you know church history, you realize that just when someone becomes a Christian, they don't just stop sinning. I mean, that would be amazing. What would be amazing is we became a Christian and somehow we got a spiritual lobotomy. And we couldn't remember anything from the past and we were living a completely new life and nothing from the past affected us and we were completely free from all sin. It's like, guys, you're still going to experience temptation. Jesus, by the way, experienced temptation. And we don't believe in what's called perfectionism. We don't believe that you're gonna be able to live a perfectly sinless life. The hope is that you would sin less, but you're not gonna be sinless in this life. So what does it mean to die to sin? It means that you've had, if you are a Christian, I wanna tell you, basically part of what I'm doing is telling Christians from the Bible, what happened to them when they became Christians? 'Cause sometimes you have to have that conversation, mom and dad, how is I born, right? And it's the way when you're like eight years old, there's the way you think you were born, then your parents tell you how you're really born, and you go, "Oh, that's a little different I thought." I'm gonna tell you what happened to you, 'cause you might think, oh, I prayed to receive Jesus

in my heart, that was nice. I wanna tell you what actually happened to you. The Bible says you died to sin. Here's what that means. We don't do a good job with this, so when, let me try to explain this. When a person becomes a Christian, they get a new relationship with Jesus, okay? So everybody has a relationship with Jesus if they don't, if you didn't know that. Like Jesus is Lord of, you've never met anybody in your whole life who Jesus wasn't their Lord, whether or not they recognize it or not. When you become a Christian, Jesus becomes your savior. Well, that's good to know. But what we don't, we tell people that. What we don't tell people is actually, when you become a Christian, you don't just get a new relationship with Jesus. That's awesome. You also get a new relationship with sin. Sin is no longer your master. Sin, Paul will say this in verse 14, we'll look at it next week. Sin no longer has dominion over you. And Paul says, "Therefore, don't live in sin." Now, what does it mean to live in sin? So sometimes we have to define things by their opposite, okay? So if we died to sin,

that means that we're not living in sin. Here's what living in sin means. This is what non-Christians do. Living in sin means sinning is where I find my life. Nobody sins out of duty or obligation. Everybody sins because they think that's where they're gonna find life. Here's what it also means to live in sin. It means to live in unrepentant habitual sin, to live in patterns of sin. By the way, this is what, let me give you a phrase that people are scared of, but it's not really a scary phrase. It's the phrase church discipline. Church discipline is just basically how the church protects itself against the spread of sin, among other things, and it's witness to the world. Well, how do you know what sin you should talk to another person about? So say you see Betty and you think she did something sinful. Should you confront Betty? Well, first check your heart. Are you mad at Betty? Was it you? Did you see it wrong? So here's what you confront. You confront patterns of unrepentant sin. I always recommend seeing something three times. 'Cause it's very hard for someone to say,

you saw it wrong three different times. The Bible says we cannot live in unrepentant patterns of sin. In fact, Paul goes, guys, this was what your whole baptism was about, which is interesting 'cause I didn't even plan this, okay? This makes me look better than I am, but we're talking about baptism on a baptism Sunday. Paul's like, guys, you're forgetting about this. He says, do you not know that all of us have been baptized excuse me, have been baptized into Christ, were baptized into his death in order, about his new death. We were buried there for 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. So Paul goes, we're supposed to walk in newness of life, not live in sin. Okay, here's what we do. Let me give us, let me give, if you're new, you came to Easter, you came back, you know, you didn't grow up in church, you don't know all the Christianies, let me give you a favorite Christianies of Christians. I'm struggling with sin, right? That's what people like to say. I'm struggling with it. Like they're, you know, it was late and I was tired and I struggled with it.

It was a hard week, I struggled with this sin in my life. Now listen, do Christians struggle with sin? Yes, we'll see this in Romans 7. But we talk about struggling with sin differently than the Bible does. We talk about, when we say, most times when a Christian in America says they're struggling with sin, here's what they mean. I'm struggling emotionally with it. I'm struggling because now I have to tell somebody that I did it. I'm struggling 'cause I feel guilty and I feel ashamed. They, Christians struggle emotionally with their sin, we don't do what the Bible says, we're supposed to struggle against our sin. So let me ask you these two questions. Here's the litmus, are you walking in newness of life or are you living in sin? Here's one of the questions. Are you tolerating sin in your life? The Bible will see this tells us that we're to put sin to death. Often what we're trying to do is like do PR management and marketing with our sin? And trade in big sins for little sins that are easier to hide or let me ask you this question. And I don't mean to beat you up, I wanna build you up. But are you making any progress in your Christian faith? If you wanna be a spiritual leader, I don't mean a community group leader.

I mean, that's great if you wanna do it. I just mean like in general, I'd like to be a spiritual leader. I'd like to be a good husband, a good mom. I'd like to lead others, I'd like to disciple others. Here's like one helpful thing that you could ask yourself. Have I ever put any sin to death in my entire life? Is there any sin that I could say? Yeah, when I was 18 or when I was 22, I struggled with that. But I have, I am walking in a serious measure of freedom in this area of my life. Are you making progress in your Bible knowledge? Are you making progress in your love for lost people? Are you making progress in your heart for God? This is what he's saying. And he says, look at verse three. He says, let me just read it. Verse three says this, do you not know? And then he tells us these realities. Now, here's what he does not say. He doesn't say this, do you not feel? Unfortunately, this is what we swim in. So this is just what we have to talk about. We live in a therapeutic age. So what's about to happen in the next 26 minutes is I'm gonna be dealing with some of you, all of you to some extent, but some of you a lot, okay? And in different sins in your life and things you need to do and areas you need to repent and realities you need to embrace.

And it's very hard to talk to people about these things. So what you'll probably start doing is talk about your feelings to yourself. I'm gonna tell you in a little bit that you're dead to sin already kind of did. And you'll say, well, I don't feel that way. We're gonna talk about how you're united to Christ and I don't feel that way. And we're gonna talk about how the old part of you died and we're gonna say, I don't feel that way. Well, listen, your feelings are great and we need feelings and feelings are a huge part of the Christian faith. But the Bible does not tell you to first feel these things. It tells you to know these things. As you know and embrace them by the grace of God, the feelings will follow. So what Paul does in verses three through five, I read this to you. He mentions baptism three different times, okay? The word baptize literally means, this is what the Greek, the original language means. It means to dip, it means to immerse, or it means literally to dunk, okay? So this is why we practice at our church, what we call believers baptism, which is baptism after conversion, after becoming a Christian, by immersion. Now you'll see certain churches and I think they're wrong

and I think it's unhelpful and they'll practice infant baptism. But even the Greek Orthodox churches, go look this up, the Greek Orthodox churches, they baptize babies by immersion. They dunk them three different times, okay? Now this is what's interesting. The word baptize, I told you it means to dunk, it means to dip, it means to immerse, okay? You, on a baptism Sunday, somebody invited you, you know, you're the soccer coach, you're the aunt, you know, you're the uncle, you're the grandpa, you're the dad, we're all glad you're here. And if you didn't grow up in church, you're like, baptism is the strangest thing ever. Because didn't all of us sometime like after puberty, we were like, no one will ever dunk me again, right? You're like, my brother, my cousin, every time I got in the pool, he dunked me. And like one of your life goals was, I will never be dunked again. And if I do, it will not be on camera in front of a lot of people with everyone screaming. And that's basically what we're gonna do to that, okay? So here's what, let me explain baptism, okay? 'Cause Paul goes, it's a picture. By the way, Paul says, and Jesus says the same thing, baptism is the way you mark the most significant moment in your life. So if you think about it, this is what we're human.

So we have to, humans have to mark significant moments. So what happens when somebody gets engaged, right? There's like their friends hanging in the bushes, taking pictures, right? We have to mark the moment. What happens, like some of you, you do your gender reveal parties, right? We have to, we have to mark the moment. The wedding ceremony, of course, is marking the moment. A funeral is marking the moment of someone's passing and grieving their life or grieving their loss and celebrating their life. A graduation ceremony is marking the moment to transition the graduation, the well done of education. Jesus says we're supposed to mark the moment. Now here's what happens. Think about it this way. A baptism Sunday is both a funeral and a birthday party at the same time. Because what happens in baptism is you go underneath the water, okay? Now what happens if we decide not to bring you back up from the water? You die. That's kind of the picture of it. See, what's interesting is in the Old Testament, water was judgment. Now we've got these big cruise ships and we have weather patterns. We can watch meteorologists

and we're not as scared of the ocean and the sea as all of our ancestors were for all of human history. Water is chaos, water is death. Water is, you don't know what's underneath it. Water is Noah's flood, Jonah's thrown over. The Red Sea swallows the Egyptians. Water was a sign of judgment. So to go under the water is to go underneath the judgment of God, to say I died with Christ and to rise a new person, there's cleansing. That's what water also does. In fact, it's interesting. If you go to old Christian sites and you excavate the old baptismals, it's a little strange when you go to them because you're like, wait a second, all of these baptismals from like the third and fourth century, they all look like coffins. They're like caskets in the ground. And in fact, a lot of them, they spend a lot of money on this. You would walk in one's flight of steps and you'd walk out, maybe built into the ground, another flight of steps. It was this idea that I came in one person and I'm walking out a different person. By the way, if you're here and you, or you're one of our campuses and you've never been baptized, and you know you need to get baptized

and you're like, oh man, but it's baptism Sunday. Now we don't do instantaneous baptisms here. Certain churches are dead. But we do come, we do this. We do this, this is our version of instantaneous baptism. If you're in this service at one of our campuses and you need to get baptized, we would like to baptize you tonight at the five o'clock service. And we would love to talk, grab a staff first or grab pastor afterwards because this is a significant moment in your life where you say to the world and to the church what Jesus did 2000 years ago, now defines my life and it's changed everything about me. In fact, look what He says. In verses six, in verses, I'm sorry, verses seven or verses five, I'm sorry, it says this. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like the His. Okay, baptism is the way we visibly demonstrate, this is, I told you it's a lot of theology. Our union with Christ, okay? Our union with Christ, it may say, it sounds to modern Americans, it sounds mystical, it sounds mysterious, it's taught everywhere in the Bible, in the New Testament. It's probably the most, some would say it's the most taught doctrine in the New Testament,

we just don't notice it 'cause it says in Christ, with Christ, I mean Paul is always using these phrases. What it means is that when you put your faith in Jesus Christ, when you transfer trust to Him, there is a real union now between you and Jesus in which his biography and his benefits become your biography and your benefits. So that every, somehow on the mind and heart of God, That's your biography on judgment day. And all of the benefits, freedom from sin, forgiveness of sin, victory over Satan, sin and death, personal righteousness, adoption into God's family, all of those are given you here. The best, really the only picture we have left of this today is marriage. So marriage is a union of one man, one woman across one lifetime. Well think about it this way. So I'll kind of take everybody's, you know, every hallmark movie is the same by the way, right? We all know that. Okay. So I'm going to take like, doesn't matter, this is every hallmark movie and I'll show you how it points to you and you with Christ. So what happens in every hallmark movie? There's a rich guy from out of state, right, normally like from Europe who ends up in a small town in Nebraska and we're like, oh, right. You've seen this movie. Okay. I'm making it up. And he's like super wealthy and who knows he, you know, he made a lot of money or he's from some rich family or who knows what and, you know, 10 minutes into the movie, he's like out of diner and the waitress is, you know, she's really pretty, but she's working

part-time and she can't make it and, you know, and whatever and she spills the coffee and all that, you know, and the relationship begins, right? And part of the movie is that she doesn't know who he is and she doesn't know all that he has and blah, blah, blah. And 90 minutes later, they fall in love and they get married. Okay. That's every hallmark movie I've ever seen. Now here's what you understand. That poor waitress, the moment she gets married is in union with that rich guy and all that he earned is now hers for free. That's the gospel. That when we're united with Christ, all of his benefits freely come to us, which is why look at verses 6 through 10, he says this, "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." Look at verse 6. This is the key verse we're going to camp out on. We know that our old self, who is that? We'll talk about that, was crucified with him in order that the body of sin, I guess that must be something different than our old self because they're contrasted, might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. So I told you the first thing is you have to understand grace and sin, how they work together. The second thing is you have to understand the old self and the body of sin. So what is the old self? So your translation may say the old man, something like, I call my dad the old man. Okay. This is something different, okay? Your old self is not a part of you if you're a Christian. If you're a Christian, this is important to understand. The old self is not a part of you.

The old self is the old you. And what it's saying is when you placed your faith in Jesus Christ, this is but the dramatic we forget this, okay, because modern Americans are not a supernatural people. There is a supernatural, dramatic nature to conversion in which when you trust in Jesus Christ, you died the sin and your old self died. In other words, Paul's going, listen, the old you, the old self, we couldn't build upon it. We had to bury it. It was not something that could be renovated. Something completely new needed to be resurrected. Now you may say, well, I don't feel like the old self is dead. Here's what happens. Okay. This is, and I'm going to explain all this, but here's what happens. This will help you understand your Christian life. When you become a Christian, you get a new soul, but you're in an old body. It's the old self is dead, okay? But what happened is you moved in, someone knew moved into an old apartment. Think about it this way. The old self was the old tenant. He's gone. Okay. He died, but you moved into his house or his apartment or his condo and it kind of still smells like him, right? His pictures are on the wall, right? The stain from the carpet is still there, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And you're still getting his mail occasionally. Like he doesn't, he died a while ago, but I'm still getting his mail. The old self, think about it this way, two good illustrations for this. One's very famous, been used, I'll use it as well, is think about the Emancipation Proclamation.

So the Emancipation Proclamation, okay, history 101, is when Abraham Lincoln, okay, reads in declares that slavery has ended and the slaves are now free. Now imagine that's, that's a reality, okay? That's a truth. That's a legal right that's been demonstrated. But how do you think a 35 year old man, black man, in Mississippi who has been a slave his whole life feels when he hears that. What about if he's at the grocery store and he sees his old master? Even though the master no longer has any legal authority over him, he might still fear him. That's how it's like sin no longer has any, we'll get into this, has no mastery over us, but we still often give it power. We need to have the perspective that Saint Augustine had. So Saint Augustine, he was a very promiscuous young man, then he comes to faith in Christ. This is a long time ago. It was like 1600 years ago, but he's a very famous Christian. Look at some of them. Saint Augustine or some call him Saint Augustine. Well, he was very promiscuous. And I love this story because it's so great. After he's been a Christian for several years, one of his mistresses sees him and tries to flirt with him. True story. She sees him, she tries to flirt with him and he doesn't respond like he used to respond. So she thinks he doesn't recognize her. So she goes up to him and says, Augustine, do you not remember? It is I because I remember, but it is no longer I. He had a profound internal transformation where he realized he was a completely new person. But the problem is the old self is dead, but we have this body of sin. Okay, now we need to talk about the body. Now, by the way, the body is a good thing. Creation, God creates the body. Genesis one and two, incarnation, Jesus takes on a body that's in the Gospels resurrection. Jesus is raised with a new body. We will be raised with body. So the body is a good thing, but inhabited by sin and unwanted intruder that we don't have to let him, but we often do. Now, what's interesting is in our society, as I think about it, we have three wrong views of the body. Okay, the first view of the body is hedonism. Okay, this is on the college campus. This is, this is everything on Instagram, basically, it says the body is a playground. And my five senses are meant to be explored and experienced with as much instant and cheap pleasure as possible. That's hedonism. The Bible rejects hedonism, although God does, give us a body to enjoy. We'll talk about that. Then there's stoicism, right? Jordan Peterson, if you know who that is, is

basically a stoic. Okay. And the whole idea is like the body is something that I must live in with all of its suffering and all of its struggles. And I should learn how to master and have dominion over my body. And then there's Gnosticism. And Gnosticism says, hedonism says the body's amazing, you know, stoicism says you got to deal with the body. Gnosticism says I can't wait to get read of this body. And even though you might think Gnosticism, who believes in Gnosticism anymore, the entire transgender movement is a Gnostic movement. Isn't it amazing when 2000 year old theology shows up in the news? The idea that I need to change my body so that I can escape my body is a Gnostic idea. Now, here's the thing about your body. Your body is a good thing, but sin, the body of sin means the body sin wants to control. So your body, here's the truth. The longer I love stories of like 45 year old person coming to faith in Christ, I love it. And I love those people because they're so passionate about the gospel. And they have such a clear, I wasn't a Christian, I was a Christian, I live my adult life, not as a Christian, I'm now living my adult life as a Christian. But here's what I also, I'm not speaking this over everybody who came to Christ later in life, but often they have lots of struggles because they had a long time for decades or more where their body engaged in sin. And though their soul has been made new, their body does not forget. What sin wants to do, it wants to twist and pervert the good desires of your body to pursue them wrongly. So it wants to take hunger and turn it into gluttony. It wants to take the desire to work and turn it into workaholism. It wants to take sexual desire and turn it into lust. It wants to take the desire to provide and turn it into greed. And so Paul says, this is where we have to fight, which leads to what he says next. Look here. He says in verse 7, "For one who has died," he keeps repeating the same things, so we don't forget this. "For one who has died has been set free from sin." Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. Look, and here's the verse 10 is a pattern. It's what happened to Christ, it's now what happens to you. Notice, past tense one time. Past tense one time. Once for all. But the life he lives, present tense continually, he lives to God.

So he basically says, here's how it works for Jesus. He died one time, a long time ago, to sin, and now he continually lives to God. And it goes, that's how it works with you. When you became a Christian, you died one time in the past to sin. There was a decisive break. You have a new relationship with God. Now you need to live, not to sin. Not live in sin, but live to God. Which leads to the third thing. So we have to understand the difference in the old self and the body of sin, grace and sin. And finally, what God does and what you need to do. So in verses 11 through 13, which is what we end with. Paul gets as practical as he's ever gotten in his letter so far. Here's what he says. Look at verse 11. He says, so you also must. In light of everything we just talked about, body of sin, grace, old self, all this. Union with Christ, all that's true, baptism. So you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Now listen, both are important. You can't just be dead to sin and not alive to God because if you are just dead to sin, you are going to be miserable. And if I could just speak to some of you,

some of you, you are dead to sin, but you're not alive to God. So your Christianity is about what you don't do and it's boring. Some of you, your Christianity is boring, it's boring to your kids. It's very boring to your kids. It's unattractive to your coworkers and to your neighbors. Do not, I mean, we do need to tell, airbag, okay, parentheses. We do need to tell our kids that there's a bunch of things that they should not do, but you do not want to raise your kids so that the way they define their Christianity is all of the things they can't do. We can't drink, smoke, or chew, or hang with girls who do, okay? But so many day we were, all right, yeah, our household, we don't listen to that music and we don't go to that dance and we don't go to that school. You know, we don't watch that movie. We don't say those words, it's like, okay, okay. Well, what do we do? 'Cause now my whole life's about all, it's like actually what we do is we do a ton of good works. And the adventure of our life is obeying Jesus Christ and taking the gospel to tons of different people and seeing lives and legacies transformed. This family is way more defined by what we do

than what we don't do. In fact, all the things that we don't do, we don't do them because they get in way of all of the great things God wants to do in and through and beyond us. So he says, you have to be dead to sin, what you have to be alive to God. Well, how do you do that? Look at verse 12, I love this. Remember, Paul talked about the body of sin and he talked about the old self, he had the third thing. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, okay? What is your mortal body? It's what you're sitting in right now, it's your earth suit that you're wearing, okay? It's your hormone-driven, sleep-deprived, vitamin D deficient, seed oil-filled body, okay? That's the only body you got, okay? And some of you, it's aging quickly, okay? It's hard. And so he's saying that's, in other words, people wanna get like this, women are actually more like this. Women especially, Christian women especially, since Eve, they wanna get super spiritual about everything. What does Eve do in the garden? She blames Satan. We can't just get super spiritual. We can't just say there's a demon in a devil under every rock.

We need to take personal responsibility for living our Christian faith out in the only place we can live it out, which is in our body. And what it's saying is that your body, it says, don't let sin therefore reign in your mortal body to obey its passions. So sin always comes with an emotional appeal to you, just so you know this. You do know this, but I'm articulating it. So sin is, it'll try to make a rational argument, but at its heart, it will be emotional. It will come, sin will come with a personality. Sin will come with an argument. Sin will come with an agenda. Sin will come with a reward system. It comes with all of that. That's why if right now we'll pick a silly illustration. If right now you were like, you know what? I feel convicted. My body, the body of sin has taken over and turned my desire into hunger just in the gluttony. And I eat too much and I particularly eat too much at night and I eat too much chips and carbs late at night. And you just committed to the Lord right now, you're not gonna do that. Maybe you make it the first time, but what starts happening? It's the weirdest thing ever. You will talk to you about why you need to not listen to you. It is like the strangest thing that you've ever experienced.

This is what Sin does. It comes with a sub-personality inside of you, and it will tell you that you need to listen to it, that it's where life is and that you'll have a better life if you do it. Well, Paul goes, we can't do this. In fact, Paul says, OK, I went from the old self, he's dead, the body of Sin, that Sin trying to use your body, the mortal body. And I think Paul goes, I'm not getting specific enough. Christianity is granular. It's at the baseline level. It's very specific. Here's how Paul ends. Look at verse 12. He says this. Do not present your members to Sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present your members to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. So he moves from your entire mortal body to your members. By the way, the word instrument is actually a war term in the original language, meaning weapons. So what he's saying is you can break down your entire body into individual members. And that's actually where you're-- if you want your Christianity to get real, you start going, what am I doing with my thumb? Am I doom-scrolling?

Is that what I'm doing with the members of my body? What am I doing with my eyes? Well, let me get rid-- like, ask yourself, what do I do a member audit? Wouldn't that be interesting? And you can delete the file and burn the paper, but do a member audit. Like, what do I do with my eyes? How am I using them? Am I using them to notice good things and encourage other people? Am I using them to be grateful to God for all that I see in the beauty of the creation? Or am I doing what the Bible says I shouldn't do, which is have haughty eyes, which is eyes that are constantly critical and judgmental of other people so I feel better about me? Because there's no easier way to feel better about me than by putting other people down. What are we doing with our feet? What are we doing with our ears? What are we listening to? Paul, here's the thing. What if this is so practical, but I think it could work? What if every morning, just try this for a week, what if every morning when you woke up, okay? The first thing you did was you said, I'm gonna do what the Bible says. I'm gonna present myself to God. It might feel a little silly to you.

It might feel a little formal to you. You might lay in bed. You might kneel behind your bed. You might go sit in a chair. You might go on a walk and you might just go. All right, Lord, I wanna use my hands to serve you and to serve other people today, Lord. I don't wanna do evil things with these hands. Lord, thank you, Lord, thank you for this tongue, Lord. Thank you for a mouth. And I realize there's a great stewardship and I'd like to use that member of my body to bless and encourage other people and not to gossip and slander and spread lies. In fact, guys, what are we doing, by the way, at the end of every service in a minute, like I do each week, I'm gonna call you to the altar across all of our campuses. And some of you have never come, okay, and that's fine, but I wanna give you a theological reason for it, 'cause we've talked a lot about response culture and I've not given you enough Bible verses. Here's a Bible verse, present yourself to God. And there's just something, we all know this, there's just something that happens in my soul when my body does something. So part of what we try to do each week is we try to just create some space for you to respond. And you may just come forward, okay, just to recommit your entire body to the Lord.

Say, Lord, this is the battleground, right? This is the battleground where I'm gonna fight the faith. I'm gonna fight for belief in God in this body. You may wanna come forward and you don't need to tell anyone it is, you just may wanna come forward. And you just wanna, you may wanna commit one part of your body to go, God, if I'm completely honest, this part of my body has not been committed to you and today's the day to change that. Also, I wanna give you two other things that I just want you to think about. And we'll pray and we'll close and we'll respond. The first is, if you're gonna fight sin, you're gonna get to the root of the body of sin. And here's the thing, you have to ask this question. This will really help you if you can get this. If you're struggling with a besetting consistent sin in your life, ask yourself this question, what is the lie under the sin that I'm believing? If you're anxious, you can't just tell yourself, don't be anxious, don't be anxious. Okay, brain, don't be anxious. You have to go, why am I believing that God's not in control? What has happened in my heart that I don't believe that God cares about me? If you're struggling with stinginess, God, what has happened in my heart that I believe God that you're not gonna take care of me? I believe that somehow I have to take care of myself.

And to be truly human is to engage every sexual desire that you have. We've got to decide, we've got to figure out what are the lies underneath it. He'll tell you the second thing and then we'll pray. I, I want you to try this this week. I want you to try this today because today you're going to be tempted. Okay. And whenever we view temptation, we get scared of temptation. And part of that's right. Cause Jesus said, do not, or pray, do not, Lord, do not leave me in the temptation. But you're going to be tempted. Okay. So here's what I want you to know. When you're tempted today, it's an opportunity to do the right thing. That is so powerful to get that temptation. Do not view temptation as this is my chance to do the wrong thing. Say, you know what? I've been looking for an opportunity to honor God. Here it is. I've been looking for an opportunity to grow in grace and Godliness. It's right in front of me. I've been looking for an opportunity to be assured of my own salvation and God's work in my life. It's right here. I've been looking for an opportunity to privately honor God when no one else would see it. This is my opportunity. What would it look like if everyone in here decided to use their members for righteousness instead of unrighteousness? Let's pray for that. Or there's a lot of theology in here. I pray across all of our campuses, Lord, that you would set people free from sin, that we would put sin to death, because as we will see next week, we are not under the law, but we are under grace, God. And I pray across all of our campuses, Lord, whether it's in this moment, whether it's tonight before we go to bed or tomorrow morning, whether we would live lives or we present our bodies to you. We ask this in Jesus name.

Amen. You can stand. You can sing and come forward. You can sing and sing. You can sing and sing. You can sing and sing. You can sing and sing. You can sing and sing. [BLANK_AUDIO]