Dear Church family,
Baptism Sunday was such a special service. It always is because the Gospel is on display in a special way! It was my joy to be a part of the process with you. Even though the symbol of baptism by way of going under the water and back up again is such a simple picture, I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to grasp the full supernatural reality of our lives being united with Jesus in His death and resurrection. But God help us all in plumbing the depths of what only God can do for us and has done for us!
Yesterday we looked at how baptism (our union with Jesus) provides us with a battle weapon against sinning. Romans 6 is written with that aim as v12 admits that we still have “passions” to do what’s wrong that exists alongside of the fact that our old sinful self has indeed died with Christ as we’ve been baptized (dipped, synched & burried) into His death for our sins. So you can you see the tension/battle that exists between what has happened to us in Christ but how we experience the opposite. For instance, our old sinful self has been buried with Jesus, truly! Our sin is powerless (6:1-10). But we still feel like sin is alive as we experience the intense desire to sin in many different forms and cave into it at times (v12). I tried to explain this reality like feeling roadkill. Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s alive! Just because we feel sin does not mean that it’s alive in us. Perhaps it’s even like the stench of our old sinful dead corpse in Christ that we feel, but it’s not alive. God never tells us to consider that we’re alive to sin in Romans 6. He tells us to consider that we’re dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. However, too often, we consider that we’re alive to sin and sinners just because we sin. As Christians, nothing could be further from the truth because even when you sin, your life is in Christ, your sin is dead and your life is alive in Christ!
When we sin, it would be accurate to say that we’re playing with an old artifact called sin. Our sinful self, crucified with Jesus and killed 2000 years ago, is now an artifact. And we still feel the artifact imprint of our old man. So when we feel like sinning, we’re feeling the imprint of sin’s artifact in us, and when we decide to sin, we’re playing with that old artifact that died 2000 years ago. We may hit people over the head with our sinful artifact, including ourselves, and seriously hurt them and hurt ourselves, being culpable to our choice, but it does not erase the fact that what we just decided to do was play with our old dead self. We don’t resurrect our old sinful self when we sin, but we often feel that way! Yet we could never do that (praise the Lord!)! Therefore, Romans 6 tells us that when we sin, we’re simply living inconsistent with who we truly are in Christ. It does not change, though, the fact that we died as sinners with Christ and rose with Christ who will never die again! (vv8-10). In fact, sinning doesn’t change our victory over sin. We’re just turning on our team when we sin.
The fascinating part of Paul’s strategy for helping Christians like you and me successfully sport our victory over sin is that he addresses our mental responsibility in order to showcase our victory over sin. He’s telling us, (1) know who you are in Christ—baptized into His death & resurrection (vv1-10), (2) believe it to be true of you(v11), and (3) decide to live in light of your true identity in Christ (vv12-14).
The whole of Paul’s appeal to us could be summarized by saying, “don’t be tricked into acting like somebody you are not! And that’s what you do when you sin!”
I would like to add one final thing that I didn’t get to mention in yesterday’s sermon. When it comes to battling sin, our reality of baptism into Christ is not meant to be a cold mechanical dunk into Jesus for the sake of moral benefits. Our union with Jesus–our old sinful self being baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection–is meant to be a warm embrace, an intimate reality.
Even though God wants us to know the fact that we’ve been united to Jesus into His death and we have His life in us, it’s not like God did this as a welder Who bonded two pieces of metal together, one called Jesus and one called you.
No, when you’re told that you’ve “died with Christ” and that you are “alive to God in Christ Jesus,” think about the spiritual intimacy of that. Think about how close you would be to somebody if you died with them and survived to the other side! Think about how close you would be to somebody if united to them (perhaps think about marriage—the two become one!–Romans 7:1-4).
