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Scripture Reading
Please turn in your Bibles with me to Romans chapter 6. Romans chapter 6. If you're using the pew Bibles you'll find that on page 1003. This morning the sermon will come from specifically verses 12 through 14. But once again, it's important that as we work slowly through the book of Romans, we read a little bit more around it to get some context. So we'll read verses 5 through 14. Romans chapter 6, beginning at verse 5. Hear now God's perfect word.
For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, Certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.
For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all. The life that he lives, he lives to God.
Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin. but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you. For you are not under law, but under grace.
Prayer for Illumination
That ends this portion of the reading of God's word. Let's pray. Father, you have given us your word. We pray that it might be a beacon of hope shining us back to you. Lord, we pray that you would please, by your spirit, use these words to turn our hearts and our feet to you, to serve you with joy. Lord, I could preach up here until I'm blue in the face, but no heart will be changed, no life will be turned unless your spirit attends to the reading and the preaching of your word. So Father, we pray that you would please Apply Your Word in the preaching of it. Guide my sinful lips. Help me, Lord, to speak truth to Your people from Your Word, and I pray that they may be Bereans. Not just accepting these things by blind, implicit faith, but Lord, I pray that they might go to Your Word and find out whether these things are so. Lord, please be with us. In Jesus' name, amen.
Sermon
There's a thing that happens when you join the military. Before you ever go to boot camp or anything, you actually have to go to this place called MEPS. So you can say, OK, I'm going to go to the recruiter and I'm going to join. But just because you want to join the military doesn't mean that you automatically get to join the military. But what they say is, OK, you're going to come into the office.
And we're going to pile a whole bunch of you in the van. And we're going to drive to wherever the central processing station is. It's called MEPS. And we are going to evaluate you for all sorts of medical stuff. And it's going to be really embarrassing. They're going to look over your body, height, weight, everything. And then you're going to get either the green light or the red light, whether you can enlist.
But after you pass the medical portion, there's this fun part that happened, at least for the Navy. You got to go and pick out your job. So you were greenlighted, you were healthy, and you were ready to go to work. You didn't sign the enlistment paper yet, but they were going to figure out what type of job were you qualified for. So you took this test, and they figured out, OK, here's your aptitude. For people like me, OK, you're not so smart, but you know how to turn a wrench. We'll put you in engineering. And so, but you got excited, like, here's this list of jobs, like, yeah, I'm excited, and I wanna do that one.
And now, I know some guys who are, weren't Navy, they chose lesser branches, that's fine, and they were really excited to, like, they got to go to war, and they got to choose their jobs, and I was like, all right. And you would see the excitement on these, especially their Marines' faces, who were right next door, like, they knew they were going to combat infantry. There's this excitement as you walked into this room, and it was all these different branches. It wasn't like the Navy guys over here, and the Army guys, and the Air Force. We all went into one room, and we stood in front of the flag, and we had our oath of enlistment, and there was an excitement. There was a new phase of life. It was gonna be hard, but we were ready. Are you ready for the new life that you have in Christ?
I can't sit here and promise you if you come to Jesus, if you rest in Jesus, if you're engrafted into Jesus, your life is going to be peachy king. I just love you too much to not lie to you like that. I can't tell you that if you come to Jesus here, your marriage is going to be perfect, your job is going to be perfect, your wallet is going to be filled, your harvest is always going to be great, you're never going to have any problems with your kids. I can't promise you that. Because that's not what the scriptures promise. What I can promise you is that you'll have a new king that you can serve with joy. A king who's not a slave driver, but who cares for you and loves you.
And so I hope when you walk out of the doors today, my goal is that you walk out and you think, I am so privileged that I get to serve my God. I am so privileged to live and serve in God's kingdom. And so how are we going to get there? First, we're going to look at the truth that I am under grace and not law. Secondly, I am not a slave to sin. And lastly, I get the privilege, I get the privilege of living to God. And so first, I am under grace, not law.
We're going to look at verse 14 to start. And I know that might seem a little bit weird to start with verse 14 instead of verse 12, but there's a reason for it and that's because we're really stretching things out and looking at it really closely. And if we don't start with verse 14 where the truth is there, we will mess up how we understand. So it's almost like Paul tells us, gives us a grace in verse 14. And we need to understand that grace. to be able to live in verse 12 and 13. So, I am under grace, not law. Verse 14, for sin shall not have dominion over you. For you are not under law, but under grace.
I wrestled with this out of all three of these verses as I was wrestling this week. Verse 14 gave me the most pause, because it gave me the most scratch on my head questions. And then I was very helpful. I thought, okay, I'm done reading all these commentators from the 1900s and early 2000s. I'm going to go read somebody old. So I picked up Calvin's commentary on this. It's so helpful. He wrote that verse 14 is a consolation from God so we don't despair as we fight in holiness. What we're going to get to in verses 12 and 13 is that you have a real fight against sin in your life.
You don't serve sin anymore. You serve God and you're going to struggle. But if we don't understand who we're serving and the type of kingdom we're serving, you're going to get beat down. You're going to end up with a type of legalism that will make a profession of Jesus, but will leave you just hollow. Sin shall not have dominion over you. Why? For you are no longer under law, but under grace. Make no doubt about it, you are called to fight sin. Sin doesn't rule over you, it's not your king anymore.
We put to death the lust of our own hearts, yet, yet we are fighting with mortal wounds. Maybe some of you guys have watched these types of war movies before. I always get a kick out of this one, when especially young guys first show up on the battlefield, right, they're clean-shaven and their baby face, they're excited to go to war, but then by the end of the movie, it's like the last battle of the movie, and those same guys, those same people who started the movie, man, they got scars and limps and bloody bandages. They don't smile too much anymore, and they just look like they're just weather-worn. That's how we're fighting our battles.
There are some of you in here that have been fighting against sin and the dominion of sin for a long time. Don't be surprised when you're fighting with a limp. When there are aches and pains as you're just going to war and it's just hard. It's just hard.
Paul is saying here, is that we are in this war and we know that sin is no longer our king. It doesn't have dominion over us. But Calvin writes, yet their works, even as we fight and we battle, our works are not tested by the strictness of the rule of law. God does not judge us in our fight for sanctification by the rule of law.
Calvin goes on saying, God remitting their impurity does kindly and mercifully accept them. Law here is being used in a very broad and expansive way. Remember, as we've been going through Romans chapter 4, 5, and 6, there's two kingdoms. The kingdom of grace in Jesus Christ, and the kingdom of law, sin, and death. And in the kingdom of Christ, as you serve in the new Adam, it's not one that's beating you down. It's not one that's saying, if you don't give absolute perfect obedience right away, first time, absolutely, right now, God's going to strike you dead, Christian.
Thank the Lord that's not the case. You know it in your life. I know it in my life. We mess up. And yet God doesn't turn his back on us. If we've been united to Christ, the Father knows your weaknesses. Your King knows your frailties and your infirmities. The Lord knows where your wounds are and where your limp is.
And he doesn't look at your servants and go, perfect or imperfect. Just get rid of them. No, he deals graciously with us. God knows that you are striving for Christ and yet you will never be perfect. And he deals with you yet in grace. God's acceptance of you is never because of the condition of your perfect works. God accepted you because of Jesus's perfect works. God redeemed your enslaved soul out of the dominion of death to joyfully serve him in his kingdom of grace.
And I'm pushing this really hard at the beginning because we're going to continue to work through Romans chapter 6, which is heavy on sanctification, heavy on do. But I need to encourage you, your doing must not be disconnected from what Jesus has done. You must not lose sight of the grace that God has shown you in Jesus.
If you do, your fight for sanctification will end up in legalism or being disheartened. God is not standing over you, Christian, with a whip demanding absolute perfect obedience right now, right away. The law of works, in the largest sense, is the taskmaster that will steal all of your joy out of sanctification. We talked about it last week, right? Why would you want to be like Jesus? Because you love Jesus. We get this privilege of living in God's kingdom. This grace of living our lives in Christ. So don't start with Jesus and end with some slave master beating you down with a law.
Now this is just a side note. This has been a fun one for me to learn. As a father, and this is me being really vulnerable up here, I may be surprised my kids aren't perfect. But it's been really a blessing for me to meditate on these types of truths. I just rejoice in God's kindness towards me, even in my stupidity, and my ignorance, and my disobedience at times, and my doing okay, and then 10 minutes later I'm not doing okay. And yet the Lord's still being gracious with me. I think fathers can learn a lot about the graciousness that we can extend even to our own children.
And I wanna say this specifically, because I'm speaking here as a cultural moment in our country where there's a rise of this machoism and manosphere that I'm seeing these guys who are like, if you just, Lean down harder on your family. Probably not gonna give you the best results. I'm not saying there's not rule in the family. I'm not saying there's not order. But we must look like Christ. Because we do not live under the dominion of the law, but under Greece. So now, maybe this is the point that somebody says, oh, Brian's an antinomian. Brian's against the law. Brian thinks we could just do all sorts of lawlessness.
Okay, so let's go back to verse 12. I am not a slave to sin. I am not a slave to sin, verse 12. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey its lusts. Do not let sin reign. This is, this idea of reigning, this idea that there is a king. In Greek it's very, this idea of reign is tied, so king is vasileos, this is vasileo, right? Do not let sin be your king. Do not let sin rule over you, lord over you, reign over you. You're not under the dominion of sin. So whose dominion are you under? Who's your king? King Jesus.
This is where I'm going to encourage you and I get to tell you the best news ever. You get to be a redeemed rebel. You get to tell sin, go chew rocks. I'm not a slave to you. I don't have to obey you. I don't have to give in to the lustful passions of my flesh. Now, this is an interesting word that the New King James translates here when it says, do not let sin reign in your mortal, your dying body, your body that bears the wounds of sin.
Because you're going to die, the wages of sin is death. For the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. You're going to die, your mortal body, your flesh. Someday, all of us, unless Jesus comes back, we're going to be buried in the grave next door. You are not a slave to your flesh. You live in your flesh. It's a real part of you. You're not a slave. You're not a slave to sin in your mortal body.
So what are these? Lusts. That you should obey its lusts. This is plural. The whole idea here of lusts is epitomeis. And this is the idea of a passionate desire. Now that's not always bad, right? In 1 Peter it says that the angels passionately desired to look into the truths of the gospel that we know now, but they didn't know back then. But what is being used here, these passionate desires, are inordinate desires. So maybe your inordinate desires are longings, cravings, hungerings.
But here's the tricky thing about that. We have slippery soles. Sometimes we like things that are good, but we like them too much. Or we like things that are in and of themselves okay, and yet we twist them to sinful and selfish ends. And so how do you know if a desire is sinful or not? How do you know when you've taken something too far? How do you know when you have transgressed a line? Brethren and sisters, this is why we started with reading Psalm 19, 7 through 14.
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. It's sweeter than honey, yea, better than the honeycomb. It's more desirable than gold, yea, more than much fine gold. Moreover, by it is your servant warned. We get to God's word, and God's word helps us realize, ah, that area is a no-go. That area is going to bring God. It's going to transgress His law. It's not going to bring God glory. And if it's going to do that, it's not going to be good for me or others either.
So what's your standard? I hope your standard is going to God's word and not just your feelings. We live in a culture where what is sinful, what is okay or not okay, what's moral or immoral is largely based upon one, well, is it something you desire? And two, is it really hurting anybody else? That's basically American morality. That's not the morality of the scriptures. There are degrees of desire in sin. When it says that you should not obey in its lust, the sinful lust.
I gotta say, a few of you at church meal last week said, oh man, don't let pastors see me get a second helping. Because I've been talking a lot about gluttony and self-control. I had to remind that person, like, hey, no, you know what? There's a time for feasting. The scriptures rejoice in feasting, right? The question is, are you eating so much that you're going to throw up? Have you given up all self-control? Or is this what you're doing all the time?
I don't think it's wrong to have a bowl of ice cream. Maybe even put some chocolate on it. But if you got diabetes and your eating of your ice cream is literally killing you, probably not a good idea. And you're maybe desiring, so you keep eating and you keep eating and you keep eating the things you shouldn't eat and you're slowly killing yourself.
Now we're in a whole different area. Gluttony is a twisting of a desire and that passion, that want, that longing becomes a lord. It's the same thing with alcohol. We go through the scriptures, I'm just giving you guys a few examples here, right? We go through the scriptures and we find that there are times where, let wine make merry your heart. And yet there's a clear prohibition against drunkenness and the warnings against it, right? Drunkenness and brawling, they go together.
And so when do you cross that line between I'm in self-control and I can enjoy this beer, this cup of wine, and when am I becoming a drunkard? What's your goal in drinking the wine? Is it to bring glory to God? Is it to rejoice in God's good gifts? Or is it to self-medicate, to soothe something deeper inside of you? Or because you want to decrease your inhibition? Or you want to fit in with friends? Why are you drinking? And we can go on. We can talk about this even with sexual relationships. Your body in and of itself isn't sinful. God made you. He made your parts. He made your functions.
And yet how we go back to Romans chapter 1 and we see all sorts of ways in which these passions and desires turned into lustful things that were inordinate, This is why Jesus talked about, it's not just the physical act of committing adultery, but Jesus said, if you look at a woman lustfully with your eyes, the same word here, you have already committed adultery in your heart. See, it's the desire itself that's sinful.
God has given you your wife, your husband, your spouse. They're the person, the object of your desire. It doesn't mean that you can't see another person and say, wow, God made that person beautiful. But if you start undressing them with your eyes or coveting that, oh, you wish that your wife looked that way, or you wish your husband looked that, whatever, right?
You start going that direction, now you're in inordinate desires. Or even in your own marriage, you stop having your relationships with your spouse to be something that's uniting you, but instead just something that's self-pleasurable or controlling. You're in a different area. So what is Paul getting at here?
Do not let sin reign in your mortal body. No. Don't let it. That's a command. In the Greek, the grammar is imperative. You get a choice here. We talked about this before, there's different states of man and we're in the state of mankind right now. If you're in Christ, you can sin or you can choose not to sin. Who are you going to serve? Jesus or sin? Why were the people in Romans chapter 1 judged? Irreverence and unrighteousness. Verse 18 says that. Romans 121 says they were given over to their passions and desires because they would not glorify God nor give thanks to God. Why would you fight sin?
Because you love God more. Why would you not go back for that second, third helping? Because you're thankful for the body that God gave you. Why would you not use your mouth to slander people? Because you reverence God, who judges even idle words that come out of our mouths.
If your life is marked by desiring God, a reverence for God, a desire to glorify God and be thankful to God, if that was your life, if your life was marked by that type of thankfulness and reverence and gratefulness to God, how would it transform you? I want to propose to you that it would transform everything in your life. Because when you eat your food, you're able to be thankful. And being thankful for the food that God's given you right on your plate makes it a little bit easier to fight covetousness.
One of my favorite stories, I've told it before, and I'll say it probably a million other times, is the Chinese lady during the communist revolution put her in prison, she got one bowl of rice a day, and she would line up that bowl of rice along the table, grain by grain, and for every grain, she would thank God for one thing in her life as she ate that grain of rice. Sin don't have dominion over someone like that. You get to obey. So who has your ear? Who's directing your heart? What is navigating the path of your life? What governs your heart and your affections?
And this is where I want to leave us in verse 13 with our last point. I get the privilege of living to God. I get the privilege of living to God. Look with me at verse 13. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, But present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God." Members is just saying parts of your body. Your whole body is meant to be used for God as instruments. Now this is an interesting idea here, right? Because I'm going to translate this a little bit different. Look with me at verse 13. I'm going to change this a little bit. Not change what the Greek says, but what the English is translating here.
And do not present your body parts, all of them, as tools of warfare. The word there is oplah. It's literally instruments of warfare. Your body, your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your hands, your whole person is meant to serve someone. Will it be you, sin, or God? The king enlists soldiers to fight in war and uses their bodies and talents for the king's own agenda. Are you using your body, your talents, your gifts, your hands, your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your strength, your mind for the king's glory? Who are you serving?
What side are you fighting for? In a battle, this is just common sense, right? In a battle, both armies are using their bodies. Both sets of soldiers are going at it. But the point is, what's going on? At the root issue is, They're using their bodies, they're using their minds, they're using their skills, they're using their instruments of warfare for one purpose or another. Either they want their king and his agenda to rule, or the other king and their agenda to rule. The same way with us in our spiritual life. So what ends are you using your body for? Is it because you get to serve the king of kings? Or because sin still has dominion over you? I'll be very clear.
Christian, the scriptures have said this multiple times in Romans chapter 6, and I get the blessing of saying it to you again. You are not a slave to sin, Christian. You can do righteousness. If you have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus, if your life is hidden in Jesus, if you have been united to Him in His death and in His resurrection, if your life is hidden in Christ, you can walk the way of your King. You died to the tyrannical rule of sin and death, and you were alive to righteousness. You were declared righteous. That was your justification. You were given Jesus's righteousness. That was his imputation. And now you get to live your life following after the righteous path of Jesus. So, how will you live your life?
There's this weird thing that happens. I'm not sure if they do this in the Marines or the Army or Air Force. I don't know. I only know the Navy. But in the Navy, every morning, I think it was like 0600 or 0700, whatever it was, whenever we had to show up for work most days.
We didn't just, it wasn't just like, oh, you show up and you clock in. You had mustard. You actually had to show up, the entire division, we had to show up, and we had all of our, we had our officers and we had our chiefs and all the enlisted guys, and those who were in front of us, those who were higher ranking, had to inspect us.
Did we have our tools ready for the day? Did we have our uniform? Did we have our protective equipment? Did we know our assignments? What was going to happen that day? We had to present ourselves to our commanding officers for here's what's going on today.
Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin. Do not present your body parts as instruments of warfare to God to use for sin. So is your mind, is your mind engaged, ready for the warfare ahead of you? Are you ready to think God's thoughts after Him? Are you ready to take every thought captive under the obedience of Christ, desiring to serve Him in how you think?
Now I'm not just talking about thinking like religiously. I'm not saying this is as simplistic as, are you willing to pick up your Bible and do your Bible reading plan? Now I'm going to encourage you to do a Bible reading plan. But what I'm saying is, as you're farming, as you're banking, as you're engineering, as you're listening to entertainment, as you're watching TV, as you're doing everything, is God's word what's informing you.
Are you using your mind for God's glory? Autonomous thinking, chasing our desires, is what we're called, or is what we're not called to do, but instead we are called to have our minds under the lordship of King Jesus. Okay, well maybe that's a little bit too woo-hoo for you.
Okay, how are you using your mouth? Paul will say elsewhere in the book of Ephesians, let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth but only that which is good for necessary edification that you might impart grace to the hearer. What's in your mouth? How do you use your tongue?
Are you lighten wildfires you can never put out because you love morsels of gossip? Because you want to just rip people apart with your words and tear them down? You worthless good-for-nothing Or are you using your words to build people up, to impart grace? Is your mouth being used as a source of life and hope and encouragement? Or because you just want to let them have it?
Are you going to use your mouth for lying or will you put that away and put on truth-telling? Thank God you're not a servant to the desires of your tongue. But your tongue can be used to build others up. You get to serve in God's army, even using your mouth for his glory. What about your hands? Are you using your hands for God's glory?
It is one of these amazing things. I like watching, it's like the Wild West lately of international justice, vigilante justice on these scammers online. If you've never watched some of these YouTube videos, they're really funny sometimes, where they, there's this one channel I like watching, I think Devin introduced me to this guy where like, He'll find these scammers who have these really elaborate schemes to steal people's money and personal information and he'll use their tools to actually hack into their computers and then he'll find all their personal information and like delete all these files that they have that they're trying to steal from people and then we'll put a virus on their computer that just completely fries the computer. I'm not saying that's a great idea. I'm not justifying that But as I've watched these kind of videos, I've thought before, like, man, these guys are really smart. Like, they know how networking works. They know how to get into people's computers. They know how website design works. They know how to make a website look exactly like the website that is a legitimate one. If they just used their little fingertips and their brains for God's glory, rather than stealing from people, it would be remarkable. How do you use your hands? How do you use your time? How do you use your talents?
You get to use them, not for sin, but for God's glory. Not to steal and to kill, but to bless and impart life. Man, this is awesome. We get to love God because he has loved us. And then we get the privilege of not just being like, oh, you were loved and now you're put on a shelf, but actively used for his kingdom and for his glory. So as a dearly beloved, redeemed child of God, justified and united to Jesus, you get to present your bodies to God for His service. Will you, the question is, will you hear God's commands, not as law, law, law, but as I get to serve my King and walk in the way of life? Will you obey the orders of King Jesus? The orders that always lead to blessing and grace.
Or will you follow the taskmaster of sin who always has a bait and switch? By the way, that's just a way of sin. Sin will promise you all sorts of things, but it will take you farther than you ever wanted and lead you into consequences so far that you never anticipated. Delude you to think that you can get away with it. until your family's ripped apart, you suffer the financial wreck, or your soul lives in shame trying to hide this sin for years and decades.
You get to obey King Jesus, and he's a gracious king. Will you be devoted to God's cause? That is what your blessing is, being united to the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Well, you get to serve God with your whole person, body and soul devoted to Him.
God did not save you so you can remain living as a slave to sin. God did not redeem you from sin and death just to have you live in sin more. God did not have you baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus so you can live your life full of death and sin.
So my question is, as you walk out the doors today, who will you serve? And I hope that this isn't just a rah-rah sermon. Like yeah, you can do it in yourself enough, I'm saying no. No, you're gonna have battle wounds, and it's gonna be hard, but you have a gracious God who will provide you strength. You have a Redeemer you can serve with joy. So brothers and sisters, you are not a slave to sin, but you are not under law, but under grace. So present your bodies as instruments of righteousness.
Closing Prayer
Let's pray. God, we thank you that you are so kind and good to us. Lord, you know that we struggle with sin. God, please, convict us of sin. Show us where we're going wrong. correct our paths, teach us, Lord, rebuke us and train us. Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit might give your people strength and joy, joy, Lord, that can never be taken away. As they think of their life hidden in the second Adam, living in Christ, Lord, I pray that you would encourage them. Lord, I know even this week may have been a hard week for some of your people. Lord, whether it's pain or tiredness or anger or sorrow or fear, Lord, your people struggling week in and week out.
Father, I pray that you would encourage them this morning. That you would give them a new strength that they might not grow weary or faint. Lord, lift them up. Show them the paths of righteousness and let them walk in it. Lord, I pray for this for my own soul too. May you receive all the glory. May you, Lord, turn our hearts to yourself. Thank you. Thank you that we get to serve you. What a gracious and awesome God, worthy of praise and all service. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.