The last two broadcasts we have been looking at some of our positions in Christ that we normally would not gravitate toward: we are the prisoners of the Lord, and we are the slaves of the Lord. Yet, I hope that as we explained those, we saw the glory of being a slave of Christ and a prisoner of Christ and all the benefits that are involved with that.
Today we balance that out with a happier theme: we are freed from sin. We are going to look at Romans today and look at what that means.
Romans 6:1 says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be? How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” He tells us here that we have die to sin and been set free from sin and as we think about that, that is a hard thing to swallow, isn’t it? You and I know that we battle with sin. Sin has not ceased to be an issue in our lives. We struggle with it every day. Sometimes outwardly with things we say or do, sometimes inwardly with our attitudes and thoughts. We know the truth of sin. If we don’t recognize the sinfulness in our lives and our gravitation toward sin, then there is something delusional about us. We know we are sinners, and we know we deal with that. When we come to the Scriptures that tell us we are dead to sin, we want to understand what that really means to us.
It says in Romans 6:5, “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection.” So, we have died with Christ who has died for us. Just as Christ died for us, He also resurrected from the dead. If we are in Christ, there is a sense in which we have died with Christ to sin and we have been resurrected to a newness of life.
Romans 6:6 continues, “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” He is saying that because we have died with Christ to sin, sin is no longer our master. Sin no longer is the one that calls the shots in our lives. Sin no longer has dibs on us. We are out from under its mastery. We are out from under its power and its dominance. We now serve a new master. It is very important that we see that. It does not mean that we are free from the temptations of sin. It does not mean that we will not sin in the future, it does mean that we no longer have to sin as we once did. We are no longer under the mastery of sin . . .
