Death & Burial

Today's kind of a transition day, so get the questions out. We've talked, we've spent some time through the last few classes in Romans 5 and what is commonly known as the doctrine of the two men. Now the hardest question for today is who are the two men?

Who are they? Adam and Christ. Why are they so important? Why are these two men the most important two men in history? Because they represent us before God. They're representative men. They're federal heads. They're the heads of races of human beings.

And you don't normally think of Christ being the head of a race, but he is, and we'll talk more about that as we go forward. We spent almost the whole part up to this time talking about the first representative man who's Adam. and all the wonderfulness he brings to the table. Sin, weakness, condemnation, death, all of those kind of really cool things. And now, we've begun in the last few weeks to talk about this other man, who is the Lord Jesus Christ, and what he brings to the table.

Why do you think these two men are really critical in our understanding? Why do you think that there would even be such an approach or an understanding of, gee, there's actually two separate human beings that are heads of separate human races. Why is that so important?

I mean, couldn't God just say, well, all you guys from Adam, I forgive you, it's okay, never mind. And, you know, I sent my son and he died on the cross. I'm satisfied about your sins now, so you're okay. If you believe. Why do you have to go through all of this thing about the two men? Why another man? What do you think?

Because the first man is condemned? The first man is condemned. The first man is not acceptable to God. And so it's one thing to be someone who has committed a sin or two, or twelve, or a million. It's another thing to be that kind of a man who has a propensity to sin. He leans towards sinning all the time.

You know, we always think about Adam and those that are from Adam as people who live in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and sometimes they're good, and sometimes they're evil. And the times that they're good is somehow commendable, right? Is there ever a time that a man and Adam, or us functioning out of the old man, that we don't sin?

Do you understand what I mean by the question? I mean, do you just sort of, well, I'm functioning in the flesh, and for the last 15 minutes I haven't really committed any sins. Is that a true statement? What do you think? How many think it is? Cowards. How many think it isn't? Yeah, it's not. Adam sins 24-7, continually. Why?

Because he's not a man of faith. If you're pretty settled in your mind about the fact that the two men are necessary from God's perspective, and they're valuable. The new man is valuable. So now what we're going to talk about is, well, God has got to get us somehow out of Adam and into Christ. Right? Isn't that got to happen? No?

We always, as young believers, think about, well, I'm me, and God has come and saved me. And it's all about me. and salvation and my faith and that kind of thing, until you grow a little bit and realize, you know, I'd kind of like to get rid of me. You know, the Old Testament saying, we found the enemy within the camp and guess who it is? It's me. I'm the problem. So, I'm a sinner in Adam and I have no chance of being acceptable to God as a sinner.

Is there such a thing as a saved sinner today? No, there isn't. You're either in Christ or you're not. If you're in Christ positionally, you're not a sinner anymore, right? Positionally. You may still function as though you're not in Christ and commit sins, but your position never changes.

What we're going to talk about this week and then the next few weeks we're going to ratchet back and try to show that this is not something that God sort of came up with at the end of the day. This is something that God had in mind even when the Lord Jesus was here. How God got us out of Adam and into Christ. You see that?

Does that sound important? I think it's important for two reasons. One, the very fact of it. But the second biggest thing from our perspective is that we're believers, which means we're to live by faith. That's a really good thing to believe. Understand that? The fact that God took you out of Adam and put you in Christ is a really good thing to focus your faith on. The beginning of the understanding of this starts in Romans chapter 6. And we're just going to do a couple of verses today. And it starts with a question, which is a great question. We ended up last time, actually, we didn't quite get it all done.

But we ended up last time talking about, in verse 21, of chapter 5, that as sin, the sin nature, sin itself, reigned unto death, everybody's familiar with that scenario, even so, might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. So we've talked quite a bit about the fact that death is a reigning principle. The whole entire world lives in this principle of death separated from God. But God has come with a new principle that we're to live in, and it's called grace.

And the best way to describe it, I think, is those of you who are at least a little bit computer savvy recognize that, well, you can do it today, but you used to not be able to run a Mac on an IBM or an IBM on Mac software, right? Because they're operating systems. They're different. Well, let's say, and I don't want to offend any Mac users, let's say Mac is the reigning principle of sin unto death.

And God desires to have the Windows program be the operating system we function under. We'll call that grace. He's got to get us out of that environment and into grace. And grace is to be a reigning principle. It is to be the environment that we as believers live in, function in, all the time. Give me a quick definition of grace.

Those guys who come on Tuesday should have it down. It's unmerited favor. The definition we're using on Tuesday, which is a good one, is that it's the unmerited and unlimited blessings from God based on the totally adequate work of Christ. So grace is totally unmerited, it's totally unlimited, and it's based solely on what Christ did. That's the reigning principle. And I'm sorry to inform you that you don't get to contribute anything there at all. All you get to do is use it, live in it, and take it. That's it. By thanking God for it.

Now, the sin nature would look at Romans 5.21 and think, ah, this is pretty cool.

If God has brought in the principle of grace, and grace superabounds over sinning, then is it logical to assume that the more I sin, the more grace is going to abound? Isn't that a logical conclusion? From the natural mind, it would make sense, because grace is a superabounding principle.

So the question in 6.1 is, What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin? Reason, so that grace may abound. Right? Now that kind of gives you guys that want to live under grace a backdoor, doesn't it? I mean, can't you sin and think, well, you know, grace is abounding. I'm in pretty good shape. I'm accepted of the Lord. So it doesn't matter if I sin or not. What do you think? Does it matter if you sin? How many think it does? Why? Why does it matter? Breaks fellowship with the Lord. In terms of...

The first question I asked was, what does continue in sin mean? Let's go that direction. What does continue in sin mean? Continue making sin your modus operandi? Okay. In terms of the purposes of this class, let's define it this way. It means that are we to keep on living in our identification and under the control of the old sin nature? Is that how we're to live? That's really what the question is. If grace is to abound, am I to keep on living my life by demonstrating that I'm identified with Adam, the old sin nature, and that I am totally controlled by the sin nature.

Let's see how honest you are. How many of you think that when you're abiding in the flesh that sin controls you, it's not the other way around? How many think that? Come on. I've got one, two, three honest people. So, I mean, it's natural for us to think that we control sin. Is it not? that if we pray hard enough, confess now and then, appeal to the Lord that sin will be controlled in my life. Don't you think that way? No? Do you really think that sin controls you? If you're walking in the flesh, you're a slave to sin. The big lie is that you're not. Here's sin walking you around like a puppet, convincing you you're free. What a lie.

And I can stop doing this any time I want. It isn't so bad. But the principle here is, man has a propensity to sin and Adam, and it's slavery. So the question is, should I continue to live in that slavery where it controls me? And you would say, well, no, I don't want to live there. But here's another big fear, I think.

Aren't you kind of afraid that if I live under pure grace, all the controls over me are going to go away? Boy, is it quiet today. Don't you ever think about grace that way? Boy, if I'm going to live under this principle of grace, then there are going to be no rules. There's going to be nothing for me to sort of gauge my progress with, and there's going to be no restrictions on my behavior. Isn't that kind of a scary proposition? No? You think that's pretty cool? Aren't you afraid that chaos will reign?

I can't get anybody to respond. Either you didn't study or I'm hitting home. I think we really are afraid of such freedom, because we know ourselves too well. We'd rather be under rules for holy living, things that we can get along with, and things that we can say, well, I'm doing okay. And this grace thing, where it's unlimited blessings and unmerited blessings towards me, and I'm to live in that all the time, is a very scary proposition. I'll tell you this.

There is no greater motivator than grace. We all think that law is motivational. There's nothing that motivates you like grace. Because you think about it, if you're in an environment where God himself is blessing you overwhelmingly and unmeritedly, over and over and over and over, full on all the time, how do you respond to something like that? Would that not motivate you? How do you respond to grace? How do you respond to it? Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Yes.

Everybody hear the question? You think there's a problem in recognizing what grace is in the first place? Because we're all born into law. It's a great question. What do you think? I mean, don't we raise our kids under the law system? You know, obey me or I'll take your cell phone away from you.

Yeah, I mean we live, and why? Because the Adamic man, the old man, lives under law principle. And he's condemned because of that, but that's the principle he lives under. It's very interesting to me, to watch over my lifespan, to watch cities, counties, states, and the federal government, how they control the chaos of humanity.

Every time there's a problem, what do they do? They enact a new law, thinking that their whole faith is in a law system. You see that? If everybody's driving too fast and we're having too many car accidents, we're going to implement a law and bring the speed limit down.

If somebody cheats, I know in the business I'm in, the real estate business, I've been in it 35 years. When I first started, you could buy or sell a house and go to a closing and walk away and you've signed seven documents. You know how many you signed today? 107. That's right. Because every time somebody cheats, every time somebody breaks the law, what do they do?

They add a piece of paper. And they enact a new regulation, rule or law. So when someone comes to you, the Word of God and the Spirit comes to you and says, there's this whole new thing called grace, You're thinking, what is that? I mean, I hear it. If you come from Catholicism like I did, you know what they did? They're very savvy. They took grace and they categorized it and cataloged it.

They have sanctifying grace and purifying grace and saving grace and I don't know. So it's like going into a gas station or a grace station and getting unleaded. I'm going to get unleaded grace today because I need it. You know, and tomorrow maybe super-analytic is going to be a tougher day. That kind of thing. And so that's what they've done. They've made a commodity out of it. But grace isn't a commodity. Grace is a system that we live in. So, continuing in sin, an answer to this question is, should we live in this operating system of sin and death? so that grace might continue to abound? That's the question. And the answer is? Verse 2. The answer is, no way.

It's translated, it can never be, or just the word no, but the construction here is like, it's not that it's not going to happen, it's just a total irrational view. It would be like let me give you a positive example. It would be like saying, well, if the if the Denver Broncos lose all the rest of their games, are they going to go to the Super Bowl? What would you say?

They've got no chance. That's never going to happen. That's the same answer here. Should we live in sin that grace may abound? No way. It makes no sense for that to happen at all. It's not logical, either rationally logical or spiritually logical. It makes no sense at all.

Alright with that? such a one as we who have died to sin, how shall we any longer live in it?" Now, the rationale is this, and this is the first time that we've been told by the Word of God that we have died to sin. And so the answer is, verse 2, how shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer in it? This is a characterization of how the Christian lives. as one who died, the Christian is to regard his relationship as being severed to sin.

You all got up this morning and you left your home and you came down here, right? Which means right this very minute, you're dead to your house. Because you're not there, right? You're separated from it. Let's say that your sin nature has only existed in your house. You're all separated from your sin natures because you're here. Well, the issue here is, is that, okay, if you've been separated, if you're dead to your sin nature, if you're separated from it, how can you any longer live in it?

Do you see the logic? Hal Malloy, today, you could say of Hal Malloy, because Hal's home with his Lord, he's not coming to Sunday school. Why not? Because he's been separated. Same thing with you and me when it comes to the sin nature. From God's perspective and positionally, we have been just as far separated from that sin nature as Hal Malloy is from this room.

You buy that? You buy it? Is it true? Is it really true? I think you have to answer the question, is it really true? And if you do buy it and you do believe it, guess what you get? The benefits. Benefits are good. So my question number four is, why is living any longer in sin just not the norm for the believer? Why is it? Why isn't it the norm for the believer? That's exactly right.

Maybe another example is you get married, right? Well, you're married now. You don't live like you're not. Or if you're not married, you don't live like you do. If you've been separated from Adam and you're now united to Christ, you can see the logic here. Why would I want to live in Adam?

I'm separated from him now. See? I'm separated from all of those wonderful things about him that we talked about over the last five weeks. Hopefully he became unappealing enough that you wouldn't want to go back there. Maybe you could say it this way. Those who died in New York City, shall they be walking the streets of New York City? No. No, I mean, it's eminently logical. So, in that sense, then you can answer my next question.

Who controls the sin nature in the believer? Vern Peterman. Who controls the sin nature in the believer? Do you control it? Who controls it then? If you don't, then who does? Pope Pius XII? The 12th Iman? Who controls this in nature? Hard question, isn't it? Who do you think controls it? Make a stab at it. God controls it, doesn't he? Doesn't God control the sin nature? How does He do it? He does it by the Spirit. But what are the mechanics in how He controls it? How does He do it?

That's the whole reason. There's a spiritual or scriptural truth that we're learning here. God's ability to control the sin nature in the believer is based on Romans 6 truth. That's how He does it. So that's kind of a weird question because it's like he's controlling and manipulating it.

That's not the point. The point is that if you've been separated from it by your position in Christ, there's no need to mess with it anymore. So it's not controlled, you understand? What God did was to separate us from it and thereby leave the control of it in the grave and the work of the Spirit and applying the cross of Christ to our life. That's how he does it. It's identification. That's how he does it.

So, do you have the freedom to plead with God about the tendency to sin? The tendency to sin within us is a very strong thing, right? No? So if we don't have any control over this incredibly powerful thing within us called the sin nature, is it proper Christian conduct to go to God and plead with him about this issue? Oh, please, Lord, deliver me from sin.

Oh, please. What do you think? Just to let you know it's a trick question. What do you think? We've already been delivered from it. See, here's the thing. It doesn't suit a believer. It doesn't become the believer to live in sin any longer. It isn't part of what he is. The sinning for the believer is unnatural, unspiritual. It's nuts. In Christian environments, they ought to take every time a Christian sins and put them away, because it isn't part of what he's about. Pretty radical stuff, huh? I think this is one of the key things in re-identification too, because the difference between the answer to the question, we need to believe, not they.

And I think the they-mean part is from me. the old nature or the old man trying to fix him up. The begging is please fix me up, please do all this. It's more indicative of your succumbing to the old nature and trying to fix him up. The work to believe. I think a lot of people now begging, please fix this, please fix up the old man, please make me a better, please, and that's indicative of the spiritual growth of where they're at in their identification in Christ and when you're begging.

We've been delivered and it's just incumbent upon us to believe and that's where again I think falling into that grace pool, that's a very uncomfortable thing because our natural man wants to do something to fix it up. Where all we have to do is believe in what Christ has done and what he has accomplished and where we are positioned. And that is the big fulcrum that I think most believers have a hard time. Just because we've been separated from the sin nature positionally doesn't mean that the sin nature isn't trying to influence us, has lost any of its power, has lost any of its ability to persuade us or to tempt us. And the problem is that we view this temptation, this attempt by the sin nature to lure us back as sin itself, and it's not. It's not. The issue is, who am I, where am I, and what do I have? Isn't that right? Who am I? I'm a believer. Where am I as a believer? I'm in Christ only. What do I have in that?

Freedom. So, and this is way down the line, Romans 6 is a very practical expose from God about the mechanics that He used and implemented to do the one thing for us that we couldn't do for ourselves. And that is to free us from the power of sin. Practically, conditionally, walking around day by day. Now think about this. Let's say you're a non-believer.

Someone comes to you and says, you know, you've been working really hard. all of your life, however long that is, to try to be pleasing to God so that when you die, you could maybe have done enough good stuff so you can get into heaven. And someone says to you, well, why don't you forget all of that? And the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, came to the earth, became a man. He died a death on the cross to pay for all of your sins. And if you believe that, God will save you for all eternity. You say, boy, that's pretty tough. Okay, I do. I believe it.

So you're cruising along as a Christian, and you're doing fine, you think, and, you know, a few bumps here and there, and then somebody comes along and says, oh, by the way, did you know that you died on that cross too? That you died 2,000 years ago, that you were crucified, and that you died unto all of the entire sin environment in Christ. you have to be thinking, what? That's crazy. Does that make any sense? I'm here, right now, I wasn't even alive then.

But the word of God says, how did you get separated from sin? You had to be on that cross with Christ. So what you find is that these incredible positional truths that God lays out to us, A lot of them make no logical sense at all. How much logic is included in the fact that 2,000 years ago everybody in this room was on that cross? I don't remember that. I don't remember being there. But the Word of God says, yeah, you were there. So how does God want you to respond? Okay, I believe you. You say it's so, it's so.

And then I buy that part of my Christian walk, but then the power of the sin nature comes and starts to push on me, and I begin to wonder in my mind, well, if I'm dead to that, how come it's... When the music stopped, how come my feet are still moving? How come I'm still thinking that I should be doing something else? It's because the sin nature doesn't die. Does it? What's death mean?

Separation. So who got separated from what? You got separated from the sin nature. You're the one that died. It didn't. It's still alive and well and healthy and living in Denver. Inside you. The issue is, if you're dead to sin, why should you respond to it any longer? That's the logic. The answer is, I shouldn't. I shouldn't. So what God has done now is provided positionally deliverance from sin and the possibility of and the probability of the deliverance from the power of sin actually in your life.

You don't have to respond. So where does that put us in terms of dependence? If you want to be free from sin, those of you who do want to be free from sin, where does that put you dependent-wise? Are you not absolutely and totally dependent on God, alone, for deliverance by the work of the Spirit? Absolutely. Good place to be. Dependence is a good thing. I know it doesn't say that in the Constitution, but it is a good thing. So, thus, the necessity to sin is broken. You don't have to respond.

You're free to move now in a whole new plane. One of the issues here is that the only way to get you and I free from Adam and all that goes with Adam is through death. Once that death takes place, guess what you get to be? You get to be free. Free to what? Freedom comes in two packages. Freedom from and freedom to. The first freedom from is all that I was in Adam. The freedom to is to abide in Christ. I can't abide in Christ unless I'm free from Adam.

I can't do it. Do you see that? Because you can't live in the middle. You're either or. So God makes provision so that we are free from all that we were in Adam, our whole identity in Adam, for what reason? So that we might be free to walk with the Lord, to abide in Him by faith. So, if you look, let's go to verse 3.

Know ye not. And this know ye not is a very interesting phrase. It means you should know. You should understand this. This is common spiritual understanding and knowledge for every believer. As many of us that were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. So the question is, what does baptism mean? It doesn't mean to take a spiritual shower. What does it mean? be placed into and never to be taken out.

And for you Greek geeks, it's an indicative aorist passive. Aorist tense means that it's happened, it's fact. Passive voice means what? All the action was done to you. You didn't do any of it. You received it all. An indicative mood means it's reality. This is right. This is what's really going on.

It means to be placed into, never to be taken out. Is the Apostle Paul talking about water baptism here? In other words, you don't get into Christ unless you go upstairs and fill up the tub and you get to jump in. What's he mean? Now, better question. Who effectuates this placing into, never to be taken out? Who does that? The Holy Spirit. God does.

Now watch, this is a very interesting point, I think. And I think this is the next question. At what point do you and I get baptized or placed into Christ? In terms of the, if you go a timeline with Christ's life on the earth, he's born, he lives, you know, three and a half years of ministry.

He, you know, gets arrested. He's in the guard in Gethsemane. He gets arrested. He undergoes a trial. He's convicted. He's convicted whether he's not guilty or not. He goes to Pilate. He gets scourged, hung on the cross. He dies. He's buried. Three days later he rises again, and some 40 days later he ascends into heaven. Now in that timeline, when you get baptized into Christ, when do you go in? We diverge. When do you go in? His death. His death.

Why that? Why then? Why not before then or after that? Why then? When Christ was on the cross and he dies, again, death means separation. What's he separating from? God. And why? Why is he being separated from God the Father? Because he became sin. That's right. What God did is he took Everybody's sin nature in this room, on that cross, and he identified Christ with those sin natures, yours and mine. That's when the baptism took place. That's when you got united to Christ. That's a really important point. Why is that the really important time? What do you think? Or is it even an important time? Sure. If you go in earlier, what good does it do you? What if you miss that part and go in later?

You can't be resurrected without dying. Christ died unto sin. Your sin and my sin. So that at the point of identification with Him is at the point in which He dies. And you know what? Your sin nature and mine is the reason why. Maybe put it this way. The Lord Jesus is on the cross. Here's your sin nature. He's identified with it, right?

At that point is when he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why did he do it then? Because now he is the personification of sin itself. And God can't look on sin, so the Father turns away from him. First time. And so he cries out and he dies. And when he dies, what does he separate from? What's this? Sin nature. Who's this? Christ. And where are you? Here or here? Here. So where's your sin nature?

You're separated from it because you're in Christ. Now, the problem that we've got, that we both have, is the fact that within us, we still have the sin nature floating around and it's active, but we're in Christ. Maybe the best way to say it is, a non-believer is in the flesh and the flesh is in him, right? A believer is in Christ, but the flesh is still in him. Do you see the difference?

So if this transaction took place, and it did, then that's the answer to why you shouldn't sin anymore. Because you were placed or baptized into Christ at the point of His death. Now, I have to tell you, that until the power of sin is an issue in your life, this isn't all that important to you. This is no big deal.

But with every believer, sin gets to be a big deal pretty quickly. Because you recognize, as born-again believers, even if you don't understand the identification truths, you get this new life. And this new life has a taste for the things of God. The believer wants to be pleasing to his father, but he finds this other little thing going on inside of him that's really powerful called the sin nature.

Well, God didn't just leave you to struggle with that. You know, He did pay the penalty for all of your sins, and grace does abound, but He took care of you and your relationship to sin. You see that? By separating you, by baptizing you and I into Christ at the point in which He dies, at the point in which He's separated from sin.

That's a cool thing to know, isn't it? Do you see within that environment the potential of not sinning ever again? Is it there? Is the potential for the believer not to sin wrapped up in those truths? Because the answer is, should we continue to live in sin that grace may abound? The answer is, no way. Why? Because he who has died to sin, why should he live any longer in it?

I have to tell you, when I began to see those truths, that was the thing that really excited me was the fact that, wow, here in God's Word is information that potentially means that I'm going to sin initially less and maybe not have to sin at all. Isn't that cool? I mean, it's really cool.

When you think about it, because what has God done? He's separated me from the propensity to sin, from the power of the sin nature. It isn't going anywhere, but I'm separated from it. So, what does it mean now, and we should all know, what does it mean By being in Christ, what events in Christ's life does a believer now get to partake of? What do you think? By the way, this word in is a primary preposition denoting a fixed position. Can't change it. And it's a fixed position in place, time, or state, and in relationship to anything else. So what does it mean in terms of...

Now we've got this really interesting timeline going. Back to the timeline of Christ, right? Did He begin to exist at the time that the Spirit impregnated Mary? How long has he existed? From eternity past. Alright. Now, when does your history in Adam, how far back does it go? Back to Adam. Well, if God takes you out of Adam and puts you in Christ, how far back does your history go? How far? All the way back to eternity. Right? Now, I think most Christians view themselves as, once they're saved, that from this point forward, they get all that Christ gets, and all that He is. They get to go to heaven.

But they seldom think about, well, not only do I go forward, but now my history has changed. I'm no longer from Adam. His history isn't my history anymore. I have a whole new history. And the whole new history is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself from eternity. And Courtney and I have had this discussion several times. So the verse that says that God knew you in Christ before the foundations of eternity, how could he do that? That's out. What's your history? Your history is now all the way. God has known you in Christ from eternity because you're now in the eternal man.

See that? It's kind of cool. How about going forward? If you get baptized into Christ's death, how about the steps forward? So now you're identified with Christ. He's the representative man. Whatever happens to him is going to happen to you. Whatever's true of him is now true of you.

So what was the next thing? He got buried. What's the verse say? What's the next verse say? And I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit. The word bury is we were buried together with him. And why do you have a burial? Why do we do this thing called the burial? It's the last act of Adam, right? You don't bury live people, only the dead ones. So, not only did we die with Christ, we were buried with Him. Now what's the next step?

He's resurrected. Where are you? And then He ascends into Heaven. Where are you? Seated at the right hand of the Father. Where are you? His history is your history. Do you see that? So, now, once you kind of have those facts in your mind, and you kind of get that understanding fairly squared away, and you begin to view yourself as being in Christ only, then how do you find out about yourself? Study Christ. Because that's what He is, is what you are. Do you see that? You don't need to study Adam. You don't need to study your history in Adam. You don't need to go to shrink. A psychologist is a person who's trained to study the sin nature.

Why would you want to do that? If I've been separated from, you know, it's a waste of money for you because you're never going to make him any different than the way he is. Conversely, if you spend your time studying the Lord Jesus Christ and His Word, what are you studying? You're studying about who you are, too. Because there isn't anything other than His deity that's true of Him that isn't true of you.

Some of that is sometimes hard to... because He's so glorious, but you know what? As we start to study John 17 the next couple of weeks, you're going to find out that All of these things that the Lord Jesus, before he died, said to the Father, would you do all this for me? Which included all of you. It's really neat that way. And resurrection.

Now when Christ rose from the dead, we've mentioned this before, did he just come back to the same old life just like our pal Lazarus did? Boy, Lazarus has got to be the most depressed guy ever. Christ raised him from the dead, he's thinking, I got to do this again? What's the difference between Lazarus and the Lord Jesus Christ? And he was resurrected into oldness. Same old environment. What about the Lord Jesus Christ? What does his resurrection represent?

New creation. New creation. Now, if you look around your environment here, you don't see new creation. Do you? New creation exists only in us. But Christ is a new creation. And you and I were resurrected because we were identified with Him in His death. We now are resurrected in Him. We are now members or first fruit of an entirely new creation. What's the operating principle of the new creation? Grace. It's how it functions. It's the way it functions.

So we now are resurrected in Christ, living in an environment called grace. How do we live there? As long as we're here on this planet, how do we abide in that? What's the one thing we do that allows us to function in that resurrection, that newness of life?

Yeah, you live by faith. But you have to know what to believe. If you don't know that you were crucified, buried and resurrected with Christ, you think you're going to enjoy the benefits of that? You can't. Because God doesn't work based on ignorance.

God works based on informing us as to who we are and what's happened. And it's simple. He extends this incredible grace towards us by including us in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. And what does He ask us to do? Say thank you by believing Him. We can do the one thing you can't take any credit for. By the way, what did you do to contribute to this whole transaction? Huh? Was that a contribution? No, you didn't do anything, did you? It's all of grace, isn't it? The whole thing is grace.

If we had any contribution at all, it was we came to the table with sin and weakness. That was it. Everything else that's true of us in terms of identification is all of grace, the whole thing. And so faith would have to be the implement in which we appropriate that grace because it's the one thing we do that we don't get credit for. It's non-meritorious. OK, so one last question. You don't have to answer it from an identification standpoint. Does the baptism of water have any spiritual effect on a person? No, it's a spiritual transaction.

OK, next week we'll go and spend time in John 17. And the reason we're going there, as I said before, the reason we're going to go there is so that we can get a look at Christ anticipating the transaction of the cross, actually talks to the Father about it before He goes to the cross. And he enumerates, actually, the things that we've talked about this morning. So let's close.

Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace. How we thank you for this plan in which you took us out of Adam, and all that we were in Adam, and placed us in your dear Son, so that we might, from now on, grow in the knowledge and grace of him. We thank you. We pray in his precious name. Amen.