James, will you be able to help
with the Lord's table when the time comes? Okay. I asked Scott
before the service, but I forgot to ask you. Would you open your Bibles to
the sixth chapter of Romans? Before we read, we'll seek the
Lord. God our Father, holy is your
name. As our brother read for us, how
majestic is your name in all the earth. We rejoice that we
serve a God who is God over all, not confined to a locality, but you are the God who made
the universe, all of it. You are the God who decreed everything
that shall happen in this universe. You are the God of our creation,
the God of our redemption. We have no need to serve competing
gods, trying to gain favor by mollifying multiple gods in some
way or another. But there's one God, and therefore
there's only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. As we open your book, we ask
your blessing that we not satisfy ourselves with mere intellectual
curiosity. but that as you speak to us,
our hearts would be open not only to the words, but to the
message. And it's in the name of Christ
we pray it. Amen. Let us begin by reading the last
verse. Verse 23, Romans 6, verse 23.
For the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal
life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Now this verse of scripture has
a meaning and an application all by itself. If this was the
only scripture ever written, there's a wealth of information
in it. It can stand on its own. You
can take it away from its context. You can declare its truth to
people, show them the application of it, and it will be good. But as with all the scriptures,
when it is viewed within its context, it gains even more meaning,
richer meaning. Now, I've known this verse of
scripture probably since I was eight or nine years old. The
churches I was involved with as a child were heavy on Bible
memorization, and my mother had an in-home Bible club for kids,
and the organization that promoted those gatherings, there was Bible
verses to memorize. So I remember, I mean, I've heard
the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Yet, here I am, some 60 years
after I first learned it, and I can still find more in it to
rejoice in than when I first heard it. Now, to get its context, we've
got to go all the way back to chapter 5, verse 20. Chapter
5, verse 20. Actually, Romans is one of those
books, it's a little bit hard to just start somewhere. Because
for most of the book of Romans, it is just a logical progression
from one thing to another. No matter where you start, you
might say, but it'd be best if we would go back to here. But
I think this, if we go back to chapter five, verse 20, we'll
get a good sense of the full meaning of Romans 6, 23. It says the law was added. The
law was added to what? The promise. promise made to
Abraham, which even Abraham understood really didn't involve real estate
in the Middle East, because he looked for a city that had foundations
whose builder and maker was God. He understood the spiritual significance
of that promise. But the law was added so that
the trespass might increase. And so some, probably between
400 and 500 years after God made promise to Abraham, he met with
the descendants of Abraham on Mount Sinai, and he entered into
covenant with that nation according to what is normally called the
law in the scriptures. It involved the Ten Commandments,
it involved the ceremonial laws for worship, and it involved
the civil law that ruled how they would conduct their society. This was added to the promise. It was not part of the promise.
It was not made part of the promise. It was attached to it. And Galatians
tells us why. It says that the law was given
as a schoolmaster. The Greek word, we get our word
pedagogue from that. But it didn't necessarily mean
just someone who taught kids their ABCs and their one and
one is two and that kind of thing. It was someone put in charge
of a child to see to his upbringing. He was a guardian. He was to see to it they got
fed, see to it they got instructed, all of that. You might say similar
to a nanny. Now, of course, we're thinking
here in terms of wealthier homes who could afford such a thing.
But it said it was that schoolmaster, and it was the schoolmaster over
the house of Israel. And it says it was a schoolmaster,
and many translations say to lead us to Christ, and people
conclude from that that we must first go out and preach the law
to people until they're convinced they're sinners, and then we
can preach the gospel to them. But the word lead is not there. It's the law was a pedagogue,
a caretaker unto Christ. It was a system put in place
to care for the Jewish nation. Why? Because the promise had
been made to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their descendant,
their seed, the seed of promise. would reign forever. And Paul
tells us that seed is Christ. So the law was put as a guardian
over the Jews until such time as Christ should come, because
that lineage had to be preserved until the seed came. Now once
the seed arrives, The whole purpose of that lineage from Abraham
all the way to Christ had been fulfilled. And therefore, the law that had
been given to protect those generations was no longer needed. Its purpose
had been accomplished. But the law was added, and here's
the interesting thing about when you add law, and this is true
in every context. the trespass increases. Now,
it increases in two ways. First of all, because we are
rebels at heart, as soon as someone tells us not to do something,
that's exactly what we want to do. Isn't it? You know, there's lots of land
around here that I've never walked on. You let somebody put a no
trespassing sign on that. You know what I want to do? Trespass. What do you mean to tell me I
can't walk on that? It won't hurt nothing. And the law had
that effect. The law is of the flesh. That's
why Paul calls it the carnal or fleshly commandment. And being
of the flesh, nothing of spiritual good comes from it. You can restrict people. You can cage them in with law.
But one thing you cannot do with law is make them not want to
break the law. I go down the road. It says 55
miles an hour. Well, I know policemen generally
give you 10. So you set your cruise control
for what? 64. You know, give yourself a
little boundary there. But am I setting it at that because
that's the speed I want to go? I set it there because I know I'll
get in trouble if I don't. And seeing that speed limit sign,
I may have been perfectly satisfied. Stroll along, maybe I was enjoying
the ride. And I see speed limit 55, well, I'll show you. That's
the nature of us. But there's another way in which
the trespasses increases with the coming of the law. It's just
like, well, I spent a couple of years of my life in Charleston,
South Carolina. And they have these kind of roaches,
about that long, called palmetto bugs. Well, we would leave the
house in the evening to go to church. When we came back, it
was dark. We'd walk in. We didn't see any
palmetto bugs. And someone turned on the light,
and they're everywhere. And of course, we'd go around trying to stomp
them, you know, get rid of as many of them as we can. Well, turning
on that light did not change the number of palmetto bugs.
It just revealed them. and the light of the law, and
it has a light, but it has a light that exposes sin. Therefore, some who think they're
doing fairly well, discover they're not doing any good at all, because
the light came on. But then Paul goes on to say,
but where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that
just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through
righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord. So the law is added that the
transgression might increase. The law is added to show us what
we are both by revealing the sinfulness of what we do and
also by the very fact that law by its very nature stirs up within
us a desire to break the law. And then this wonderful thing
where sin abounded, grace super abounded. Now you think on that
for a moment. Think about how much sin you
have. There is more grace than there
is sin. The child of God has a lot of
sin. It grieves him. He's got a history
of sin from before God saved him, and he's got a history of
sin afterward. and it's grievous. Not only is
it grievous, because we're still in the flesh, so to speak, that
is, we still got it. You know, flesh is a part of
what we are as a whole being, and the flesh still doesn't believe,
the flesh still operates according to the principles of the law,
do this and live, don't do it and die. Consequently, when we
fail, Those legal fears will rise up again. And Paul's answer
to this is, yes, sin abounds. And that's a horrible thing.
We don't ever want to have a light view of sin. Grace doesn't laugh
off sin. Grace doesn't say, well, I'm
a sinner. What do you expect? No, that's not what grace does. Grace. seize the huge mountain
of sin, and grace grows larger to cover
it all. And child of God, you may be
disturbed about your sin. Good, you should be. Just be
grieved about it. It should break your heart that
you could sin against the God who redeemed you. But know this,
Great as your sin is, His grace is even greater. And that means there's a lot
of grace. Brother-in-law went hunting with
some of his friends one time and one of them was afraid to
go out there because he was afraid of snakes. And they tried to
comfort him by saying, look, the snakes are more afraid of
you than you are of them." And he was a stutterer, and he said,
well, that's some pretty scared snakes. That's some pretty great grace,
if it's greater than my sin. But this brings up a question.
Paul anticipates the question someone will raise. What shall
we say then? Shall we go on sinning that grace
may increase? By no means. by no means. We died to sin. How can we live
in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of
us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His
death? We were therefore buried with
Him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ
was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so too
we may live a new life. Now, this is not primarily instruction on baptism. It begins with an assumption
about baptism. It begins with the assumption
that the ceremony of baptism is a outward symbol of the death,
burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Consequently, when those believers
were baptized, when they were immersed in the water and brought
up, what was being demonstrated or symbolized is that when Christ
died, they were in Him, they died with Him, and as assuredly
as they died with Him, they'll raise with Him. In fact, so far
as heaven's concerned, the deed is done. Heaven's just waiting for time
to catch up. We died with Him. We live with
Him. Paul says we're seated with Him
in the heavenly places. You say, well, this doesn't look
like the heavenly places to me. Well, like I said, we're just
catching up with what is already true in eternity. Anyway, his point here is if we truly
died to sin, Why would we want to live in it any longer? He says, if we have been united,
verse 5, with Him like this in His death, we will certainly
also be united with Him in His resurrection. For we know that
our old self was crucified with Him, so that the body of sin
may be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to
sin, because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. In order to understand what Paul,
the argument that Paul is making here, you have to understand
when he talks of sin, he's, at this point, he's not talking
about the concept of sin. He's not talking about the act
of sin. He has personified sin as a master
over slaves. And so at this point, you could
actually capitalize the word sin, and you begin to understand
what kind of argument he's making. There is this master called sin,
and everyone comes into this world as a slave owned by that
master. And in truth, it doesn't matter
what they do. They are still a slave to that
master. But one way for a slave to get
free is to die. It says, because anyone who has
died has been freed from sin. Now that word translated freed
is actually the word almost everywhere else, maybe everywhere else,
is translated justified. But the idea is if you are declared
righteous, and that's what the word justify means, to declare
someone righteous or not guilty, If you are declared not guilty,
then you are free from the authority that sin has over people. Now keep in mind, there's a difference
between authority and power. But we come into this world and
sin has authority over us. It has authority to bring us
into bondage. It has authority to kill us. But if we've died, the authority
of sin is broken. Now, if we died with Christ,
and one thing I like about the Greek language, the word translated
if just means on the condition that. It's not like Paul is putting
a question mark on whether or not we died with Christ. So it
could be, now, since we died with Christ, we believe we shall
also live with him. If it's true that you died with
Christ, here is something that is equally true. You will live
with Him. Now, there are people who believe
that Jesus Christ died for everybody. Well, if that's true, then everybody's
going to live with Him. Because it says, if we died with
Christ, we shall live with Him. The only reason we come to the
conclusion that Jesus Christ didn't die for everybody is because
not everybody is going to live with Him. But everybody that died with
Him will live with Him. And you know, I love that. Because
that means me living is not based on anything I did. It's based
entirely on something Christ did. If we died in Him, We live in
Him. Our old self was crucified so
that the body of sin might be done away with. That authority
of sin, that authority to kill, the bond between us, between
every believer and sin, the bond of authority, the chain of authority
has been broken. Verse 9, that since Christ was
raised from the dead, he cannot die again. Death no longer has
mastery over him. The death he died, he died to
sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. Now, where it says there death has
no mastery, the word means lordship. authority again. Back to the
word for authority. Death has no authority over him.
He died under sin once. Now you say, well, didn't Lazarus
die under sin once? Not completely. Yes, his body died. But he did
not die in that sense that our Lord Jesus Christ died so that
he could say it is finished. In other words, death is finished. Hell is forever because the people
suffering there never finish death. Christ did. And in as much as he died under
the authority of sin, Remember, he was born under law and the
moment that our sins were laid on him, he came under the authority
of sin and sin has the authority to kill every sinner. And Christ died and he did the
whole job of dying. It is perfected, it is accomplished,
it is finished. All those words are translations
of the word that he uttered at that point. And because he really, really
died, death no longer has authority
over him. Now there are two triplets, two
sets of triplets, law, sin, death. Where you find any of them, you'll
find the other two. They go together. Another triplet,
grace, righteousness, life. You find any one of them, you'll
find the other two. They are all part of the, the
three are all part of the same system. And so when it talks
about death no longer has mastery, that's because sin no longer
has mastery. That's because the law no longer
has the mastery or authority. Christ was born under the law,
but he was not raised again under the law. In the same way, verse 11, count
yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Now,
that word translated count. In theological circles, they
would translate it impute. If you just take apart the word,
it simply means to say upon. And so if you impute righteousness
to someone, and the Scriptures talk about that we have an imputed
righteousness, it just means God says you're righteous. And so here it says, count yourselves
dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ. Consider yourselves
to be that. Now we realize that sin still
has power over us, doesn't it? Remember I said there's a difference
between authority and power. But if we are dead to sin, law,
sin, and death no longer has authority over us. Has some power, but no authority. Give you an example of what I
mean. You're walking down the street. At night, suddenly somebody comes
up behind you and you feel a gun in your back. He says, give me
all your money. Does that man have authority
to take your money? No. But he has the power, doesn't
he? He has the power to get you to
reach in your hip pocket or your purse or wherever it is you keep
your money and give it all to him. And then there are people
in this world who have authority but no power. Actually, you could use that
same scene. The man who's being robbed has
the authority to keep his money, doesn't have the power. Now sin, capital S, sin, Master
sin, he has no authority over the child of God, but boy, does
he exert a lot of power. Because we're still dragging
this fleshly body around, and as Paul said concerning this
body, in my flesh dwells no good thing. So he goes on to say, don't let
sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its evil desires.
Do not offer the parts of your body to sin as instruments of
wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who
have been brought from death to life, and offer the parts
of your body to Him as instruments for righteousness. For sin shall
not be your master, because you are not under law." Now, once
again, deep in that mind, he's talking about authority. this
point he says now sin doesn't have authority over you therefore
don't let him reign don't let him sit on the throne don't let
him sit on the throne of your conscience and through your conscience
consciousness of your sin bring you into bondage And don't let him sit on the
throne so that you end up offering various parts of your body in
service to him. For sin shall not be your master. Again, that's the word commonly
translated, Lord, and it signifies authority. Sin shall not be your
master. Now, this is a statement of fact. He says, sin will not have authority
over you because you're not under law, but under grace. Now, if
you're under law, sin has authority over you. If you're under grace, sin doesn't
have authority. May have a lot of power, but
no authority. What then? Shall we sin because
we're not under law, but under grace? by no means. Now remember, and
this kind of shows that Paul's not talking about how we experience
the power of sin within us, he's talking in legal terms about
authority. Because he says, Shall we sin
because we are not under law? That is, shall we transgress?
Shall we do things that God says we shouldn't do because we're
under grace and therefore being under grace, sin doesn't have
authority over us. It can't do anything to us. It
can't kill us. It doesn't have the authority
to. He says, by no means. And notice
here he says, don't you know that when you offer yourselves
to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one you
obey. Now, there are those who were slaves
legally, that is according to law, but if you'd watched them,
they hated their master. They never offered themselves. The master's whip may have forced
them to do things. And while on paper, they were
the property and slave of the master in their hearts. They were not slaves. Why? They
weren't yielding. They weren't saying, this is
okay. It was the power of the master that could overwhelm them. And sin has power with us, but
believers don't yield. Believers don't say, at least
not for any significant time, otherwise God will correct them.
Let sin, that grace may abound. Hey, it doesn't matter how much
I sin, the blood of Jesus Christ is going to forgive it all. So
I may as well give full vent to my flesh, enjoy what I want
in the flesh while I'm here, knowing that when I go to heaven,
I'll have no sin. If that's your attitude, friends,
you have offered yourself to sin, to freely serve sin as a
slave. And sin is your master, which
means you're under law. And if you're under law, you're
doomed. Now, we all sin. Every believer sins. But they do not sin joyfully. I don't mean they don't enjoy
it. We wouldn't do it if we didn't enjoy it. It always brings within
them a sense of guilt, and not just some kind of legal guilt,
the kind of guilt that comes from knowing you have been displeasing
to the one who's been so good to you. Me and a couple of the preachers
were talking one time, and they were talking about all the rebellious
things they did when they were teenagers. If you'd have known
me, now, I'm not pretending like I was a really righteous guy,
but, because there are plenty of things going on up here, you
know. But I didn't do much that people call sin. You know, and
so while they were talking about, you know, when they were teenagers,
they'd go out and get drunk, or they did some drugs, or they
chased around, or whatever it was. You know, I'm sitting there
listening to them, And they asked, well, what about you? I said,
pretty much I stayed out of trouble. They said, why? I said, I could
not stand the thought of disappointing my parents. I was confident that
if I did anything wrong, they would find out. And that look
of disappointment, I couldn't bear it. That's how a believer
feels about sin. He doesn't resist it because
he's afraid he'll go to hell if he does it. That's not what
keeps him back. It's the knowledge that his sin
is an offense to his father. And he knows his father won't
find out, so to speak, you know. And he knows he must face his
father. Not to be punished, maybe disciplined,
but not punished. But oh, trying to speak of it in human
terms, the disappointment. He said, verse 17, but thanks
be to God, though you used to be slaves to sin, that is you
willingly served master sin. He says, I lost my place here. Yeah, but thanks be to God, though
you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the
form of teaching to which you were entrusted. Now, here's that
word obey. The word in Greek combines a word meaning
to hear. In fact, we get our word acoustic
from it. And then puts the word hyper,
in front of it. So hyper-hearing. And the sense
is yes, you followed that word. You did what that word said.
But it's not the sense of obedience as when we talk about obedience
to the law. You know, here's this set of
rules. I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that, I'm going
to do that. What is the form of teaching to which we
were entrusted. Now notice this. He doesn't say
the form of teaching that was entrusted to us. He says we were
entrusted to this form of teaching. What's he talking about? The
gospel is what he's talking about. Not the Old Covenant, the New
Covenant. Not the this, do, and live. Rather, it's done. Live. And what is it to hyper-hear
that? You know how it is when you're
kids, you tell them something, you know, and they go the opposite
direction, and you say, well, didn't you listen to me? Didn't
you hear what I said? We hyperheard. Not only did we hear it with
the hearing of the ears, but by the grace of God, we heard
the gospel with the hearing of the heart. And what did we do? Well, what does the gospel tell
us to do? Trust God. Call on his name. Look unto me and be saved all
the ends of the earth for I am God and there is no other. What's
obedience to that? Look to him. It's not as though they're saying,
okay, now we got new covenant law and you all are obeying that.
No. Obedience to the gospel is simply
believing God. It's entering His rest, ceasing
from your own labors to gain blessings from God. That's what
obedience to God is. Well, due to time, we need to
skip right down to verse 23. In this context, I hope that
I can You can understand what I'm trying to get at. The wages
of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus, our Lord. Most people take that to be the
wages or the consequences of sinning is death, but the gift
of God is eternal life. Well, that's absolutely true.
The consequences of sinning is death. The soul that sins, it
will die. But that's not the point Paul
is making. Remember, capitalize the word
sin. There are three things contrasted
here. Wages and gifts. Sin and God. Life and death. Now we understand the contrast
of life and death. We understand the contrast of
wages and gifts. What we need to get a hold of
when he contrasts sin with God, he's not talking about sin as
a concept or an action. He's talking about sin as a master,
as one with authority. Now, the biggest point I want
to make says the wages of sin is death. And if you are a slave
to sin, and everybody outside of Christ is a slave, legally
bound to sin. And if you are a slave to sin,
you'll earn wages, and the wages you earn will be death. Sin has authority over everyone
who is not under grace, under God, under Christ. And they are serving sin and
earning those wages no matter what they're doing. Now, Paul said he was a murderer
and a blasphemer. Yet he also said, concerning
that righteousness, which is of the law, I was blameless. Was he serving God? And all those
years as a Pharisee, was he serving God? No, he was serving master
sin. It didn't matter that his outward
form was, you know, in obedience to the law. How can you tell whether you
are serving sin or serving God? And here's the distinction. Get
hold of this. If you're earning wages, you're
serving sin. If you're receiving gifts, you're
serving God. You see that distinction? There are people that claim that
they believe grace. They'll even claim they believe
sovereign grace. But if you could see inside their
hearts, you would see they are working, trying to gain a blessing
by something they're doing. And if you're working, earning
wages, your master is sin. It doesn't matter what you're
doing. It doesn't matter whether you're
moral or immoral, you're still just serving sin. You're under
sin's authority, and when sin is ready, when sin thinks it's
appropriate, Master, sin will kill you. But, if by God-given faith, you are
simply receiving that which is freely given to us by God, You are under the authority of
grace. You will not die. Because sin doesn't have authority
over you. You say, well, wait, everybody
dies. Oh, this body, yeah. You won't die. You'll not taste death. Because sin is what brings death,
master sin. And you're not under his jurisdiction.
He troubles you. His voice is a familiar voice.
You're prone to obeying because you spent so much time doing
what his voice said. But no matter How many times
he may trick you, trip you up, and you fall headlong into a
mess of sin. Know this, he's not your master. He can't, he's not allowed to
do anything to you. You're under grace. And grace is just receiving. Now, all that sounds wonderful. I say it sounds wonderful, what
I think I said sounds wonderful. Oh, but it's so hard to believe,
isn't it? That really, my blessedness in the presence
of God is not determined in the least by what I have done or
what I've managed to avoid doing. It's entirely, as one of my friends
said, it's based entirely on the doing and the dying of the
Savior. And even though I commit many
sins, and even though the voice of Master Sin has a powerful
effect on me, He no longer has authority over me. And when the judgment comes,
Sin can stand there and say all he wants in accusation of me. The blood of Christ, God's Son,
has cleansed me from all iniquity, and they'll never be able to
make a charge against me stick. Therefore, sin will not have
the authority to say, guilty, off to hell with that one. One quick illustration and I'll
be done with this. You know that different countries
have different laws. For example, we know in those
Middle Eastern countries, some of them anyway, women can't go
out unchaperoned. And it has to be a male close
relative. And if They are caught unchaperoned
or with a man other than a close relative. They're in a lot of
trouble. Now imagine that a judge from
one of those countries came over here. You ladies, you know, you're
going about your day-to-day business alone or with a male friend someone
that's not your husband or a close relative, and that judge comes
up to you and says, you're under arrest. What would you say to him? What
do you mean I'm under arrest? You broke the law. Well, what
law did I break? Well, you're out here in public
with a man other than your close relative. And you'd say, so? Well, over there in Saudi Arabia,
that's against the law. And you say, yeah, over there
in Saudi Arabia, but you'll notice I'm not in Saudi Arabia. You
have no authority over me. You can't arrest me. You're not
permitted to punish me. And friends, we were born under
the jurisdiction of the law But we've been taken out of that
jurisdiction. We don't find fault with the law. We're not arguing
with it. We just don't live there anymore. That law, the law of
sin and death, Paul called it, that law doesn't have authority
over us. It cannot condemn us because
we died with Christ and we're free. Scott, you and James, come help
us with the Lord's table.