Christ Life in You Rom 6:1011

Well, good morning. OK, so let's see here. Yeah, this is a great section. We're going back over. We've been teaching Romans for several years now. Actually, I don't know, three years, however long it's been. So this is back. This is time two through these verses. So here we go again.

So today, we're going to look at Romans 6.11. This will be the first Sunday. I'm actually going to do a second Sunday on it as well. I haven't quite decided all I'm going to do for next Sunday, but today is going to be kind of going through the verse in detail. But I want to not make it too laborious. So the believer's reckoning. So as a precursor to that, let's think about this.

Let's think about a person's attributes. What defines a person, right? His birthplace, his parents, his lineage, all that define who he is, whether he's male or female. God has male or female. Some question that to their detriment, unfortunately. So, let's think about some attributes. you could be Canadian, you could be American, even though we should say USA, we shouldn't say American, because Canadians are Americans, too, North Americans. It's funny, in South America, they would say Norte, in Spanish, they would say Norte Americano, so I realized, oh, wait a minute, American is more than just our continent, but the USA kind of takes over everything, right? So, Canadians, Americans, we could be of English extraction, Irish, we could be male or female.

So these attributes describe a person, right? Well, the wonderful news is that we, as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have attributes, or we have qualities, that describe us. And you could say, yeah, I know some of those, Roger. I know I've been born again. I can be called a born-again Christian. I can be called this or that. But the ones I want to focus on today are talked about in Romans 6, verses 1 through 10. I want to talk about those attributes. Not as well-known, not as well-believed, not as well-understood. So let's start with those.

So all believers, every single one, from the smallest believer, if he's three years old or whatever, to 90 years old, no matter how mature he is, no matter what his state, if he's trusted Christ as his Savior, he has these attributes. And they're the most amazing attributes you could ever imagine. And actually, if the Bible didn't tell us, if Paul didn't delineate those, we wouldn't have a clue about these. It's only by God's Word that we know about these attributes.

So here we go. We died to sin. This is all from Romans 6, 1-10. We died to sin. Died to the sin nature. We have been placed into, instead of baptized, placed into Christ's death, into his burial, into his resurrection. When Christ died, we died. When Christ was buried, we were buried. When Christ was resurrected, we were resurrected.

I would venture to say, you walk out the door here, find the first Christian on the street, if you could find one, and you tell him about this, he'll probably scratch his head and say, I never thought about that. Where's that in the Bible? Sorry to say, very sad to say, they don't understand this incredible relationship that the believer has with the Savior, that He was with Him. He participated with Him spiritually on the cross. Our brother Verne would say, the cross was crowded. You think about that. All believers for all time spiritually were on the cross with Christ. Pretty amazing. Okay, let's continue on.

We have Christ's life. We were separated from our old man, our old nature. Our body of sin was taken offline. Last week we talked about the little idea of taking things offline. You take your cell phone offline, you take these things offline. That wonderful being separated from our sin nature, taken offline from it. We are free. We are free from our sin nature, and it's slavery.

So there's the attributes, there's the qualities of all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. that's going to be key. Okay that's going to be key to the idea of reckoning. That's going to be foundational to what we reckon on. Okay, so let's go on. So here we have. We have Mister reckoning here. And you know, and what you start looking at the word reckoning which we're going to look at just a second here. You're going to see it it's it's an accounting term talk about accounting. So that's why I found this little picture online.

So What if I don't reckon? What if I don't know it, understand it, don't believe it? What happens? Do I cease being a Christian? What am I to reckon upon? And I put the cross on here because that's what we reckon upon, answering the question ahead of time. So those are some questions hopefully we'll answer today. that. Okay, so let's get into let's start off with. The background us or definition.

The word reckon in the original language. It's look look it's a man who gets a mine. Classically it meant to count. To reckon to calculate to compute. To set to one's account. Very much you the papyri. Logits may. This of mine was used in the papyri as a business term little background I had not really thought through what were the papyri and those are I they were typically scrolls sometimes, but they're documents, these are Greek documents that had the Greek language. So what scholars have done, they said, well, how was the New Testament Greek used in the common language so we can understand better how to understand Scripture? So in the papyri, we had this statement. let my revenues, it was in Greek, not in English, let my revenues be placed on deposit at the storehouse, reckoning the wine to him, to some person, at 16 drachmas. And it went on, I didn't, it was a whole bunch of more people, he reckoned this, he reckoned that, so he accounted some of his possessions to this person, that person, so they were accounted to him.

So that's part of the idea of reckoning. So let's carry on here. So let's look at an example verse here. Galatians 3.6, and we covered this in our class, I don't know, maybe earlier in the year sometime.

Even so, Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. So in this verse, Abraham believed God, and his act of faith was placed to his account in the value as righteousness. I'll just say that again. Weiss is going to give several iterations of this phrase. So, Abraham believed God, and his act of faith was placed to his account in the value as righteousness.

Or, you could say, was placed on deposit for him and evaluated as righteousness, or computed as to its value, and there was placed to his account as righteousness. So the idea is that reckoning is taking something and putting it to your account, and it becomes, it's yours, you possess it, you own it, and it was accounted to you based upon, in this case, Abraham's faith. So let's carry on here. So I think to help here, let's do a comparison here.

And initially I didn't try to do this, and I thought, boy, if I could compare Galatians 3.6 with Romans 6.11, there are different usages, but I think it's going to help us here to compare those two verses and how reckoning is used. So here we go. So here again is our verse. Even so, Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

Then Galatians 6.11 says, even so, consider or reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. So we're gonna look first at the similarities. How are these verses similar, and how are these verses different? Okay, similarities. In both verses, if you look carefully, in both verses, they're based upon the faith of the believer. The faith of the believer is involved in both verses, or you could say, belief in what God has revealed. So the faith of the believer is in view, and that's similar to both verses, but there are differences.

The differences are, in Galatians 3.6, we see there's a singular focus. Abraham's faith in what God has said. He believed God. That was a singular focus.

In 6.11, there's a dual focus. were to focus on two facts. We're dead to sin and alive to God. So our reckoning is based on two facts, whereas in the other case, it was based on believing. Okay, another comparison here.

In Galatians 6.3, God is doing the reckoning, right? He's reckoning to Abraham's account righteousness by his faith. In our case, for the believer, The believer is doing the reckoning based upon God's word.

The believer is saying, God has said this about me. I have this attribute, back to our original chart, I have this quality about me that says I'm dead to sin and alive to God. I'm gonna believe that. I'm gonna put my faith and trust in what he has said.

So that's a comparison there. So hopefully that's helpful. So let's carry on here. So a few more considerations here. So the same word will get to my same definition approximately. You know, reckon, of course, is a King James translation. So I wouldn't, you know, if that word bothers you, some people are bothered by that word. They don't like the word. You know, consider is actually the translation, the numerical standard, but I've kind of gotten used to reckoning, so I'm gonna use that most of the time. Okay, we'll just carry off from that.

Okay, so there's three facts about it. It's a verb. Every verb in the New Testament has tense, mood, and voice. So it's present tense, continuous action. This is to be the continuous action of believer, and this is not to be a hardship. we are continuously counting upon our Savior.

And you could talk about the other words that are used in terms of this. You know, we talk about walking with the Lord, abiding with the Lord, trusting the Lord. You know, at its core, reckoning is an act of faith. It's your place in your faith and what God has done for you.

It's in the imperative mood, so it's God's will. This isn't some offhanded idea that God has. He's committed to this. This is his will for you. He desires that you do this, and you're to perform it. And so he springs it across, looking at those three aspects.

He says, you be constantly counting upon the fact that you died to sin and are alive to God in Christ Jesus. To reckon sometimes to a person means to count something as true of someone. So these things are true of us, and that's one of the Maybe the hardest things, to see the spiritual thing that happened to us on the cross with Christ, we're to remember that and count that in our daily lives.

We're to remember that. That's what God desires. So I like this kind of approach, and this is actually from, who is this from? This is from Merriman and Malloy. The idea of putting it down as true, or putting it down as so, or putting it down as a fact.

I can remember talking with our brother Hal over the years, and he would talk to himself sometimes. You know, we all talk to ourselves, right? And he would say, you know, Roger, sometimes I'm tempted to do something, and you know what I do, Roger? I say, you know, I could do that, but you know, I'm dead to that. Christ died for that. I don't need to go there. I don't need to respond.

Many times it's... I'm not sure about you, but my biggest struggle is verbally, right? You respond to your family, to your kids, to other people in the body here and outside the body, and your mouth gets you in trouble most of the time. That's one of the toughest things. So you usually say things before you think.

So this is where the reckoning comes into play. That's where it meets the road. And the last point here is that it's an accounting term, as I pointed out before. Okay, so let's carry on. We have a few more pictures here. Hopefully you like these pictures. Somebody said they liked the pictures from last week. Hopefully I'm going to try to carry on here. So let's build up a picture here.

Not a timeline, but a series of things. In the Book of Romans, if you look carefully, I didn't put down the other part of it here. In the Book of Romans, starting in 1.1 through 6.1, actually end of 5.9, you're going to have what we call there's a number of positional trues and you don't see a tremendous number positional trues in there. But there are maybe a half dozen, maybe a dozen. And we're going to talk about those shortly.

Those are presented, and then we see, we get to Romans 6, 1 through 10, and we have these trues about us, the identification trues. and then we're going to come to Romans 6.11. So we're going to march through that path. So let's talk about these positional truths.

So I like my little picture. This came actually from, I think, Donald Gray Barnhouse had this original picture. And Hal modified it, and I modified it a little bit. But anyway, positional truths can be thought of as something that's true of us. of us as who we are, but that may not be our condition, right?

And one of the ones I like to think about is we're seated or standing with Christ in the heavenlies. We're looking down. Set your mind on things above. We're seated with him in the heavenlies. And there's a whole bunch of these wonderful truths about us. So, okay, so let's start here. Can we help you, sir? Have a seat. Okay, well, we're teaching God's Word right now. All right, I'll carry on. Okay, so, let's start with the positional truths. So, Hal identified about maybe six or seven of these.

The first one is, justified by God's grace through faith, free from the law. And there are actually verses behind each one of these. If you want, I'll give them to you if you ask me. Third one is, redeemed by Christ's blood and death, The fourth one is circumcised in the heart. Next, peace with God. Access and standing in His grace. God's love gushed out in their hearts. Next one, the Holy Spirit given to us, indwelling us. We're reconciled to God. And then lastly, super abounding grace where sin abounds all the more.

So in the first from chapter one, Romans 1-1 through the end of chapter five, these are some of the wonderful positional truths. So that's kind of the start of our reckoning. That's kind of the launching pad, if you will. Then we move over to the identification truths. And those truths are about what happened to us on the cross with Christ. As I mentioned before, we were identified with Him on the cross, and here we've had this listed before, we'll just repeat them again. Here we go. We died to sin, we died to the sin nature. We have been baptized or placed into Christ's death. When Christ died, we died. When Christ was buried, we were buried. When Christ was resurrected, we were resurrected. We have Christ's life. We were separated from our old man. Our body of sin was taken offline. We are free from our sin nature. We need not be slaves to sin anymore. So we start out in the Book of Romans, way back when.

You march through, you see these wonderful positional truths. Then we get to chapter 6. Now we see these wonderful truths about us and our Savior. and we're going to take a short. Back up just a second, I'm going to redefine positional and identification truths just shortly, and then we'll move on to 6.11. So here we go. So let's talk about positional truths.

These truths are presented in Romans 1.1 through 5.21.

And you could call these birth trues, and the reason you call that is because they are true of every believer the moment he plates his faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. So they're true of him at his birth. He's been born again, right? These trues are true of him, so they're called birth trues. Another name for positional trues.

They're to be the focus. Their focus is on who we are in Christ, our position. These truths are foundational to our identification. If we're gonna be trusting and walking in what God has done for us, we have to know that, we have to understand that, we have to believe that.

Okay, so you can call these positional truth birth truths, and then we go to identification truths, and you can actually rename these. People have done that. Actually, Miles Stanford uses these terms, and other people have used, Hal Malloy used these terms as well. So the truths presented in 6.1-10 are called growth truths, identification truths, spiritual truths that is dependent upon us reckoning upon these truths. And you know what's kind of amazing here is if you don't really understand about counting upon these truths, you can't really grow. So our brother Hal says, no reckoning, no spiritual growth.

And actually, maybe it's a little bit milder term. He says, your Christian life is going to be mediocre. It's not going to be what it could be. You're going to be missing out. You're not going to see that you have been freed. You've been freed from that. nature. You don't have to sin. You don't have to respond. You can walk and abide in Christ. You don't have to go there.

And we're going to see that as we go on here. Okay, so now let's look at the picture. We're building our timeline or our picture through Romans. So we have positional truths. seated with Christ in the heavenlies. We have these identification truths being identified with Christ on the cross.

So now we come to, I'm going to stop at Romans 6.13, and I'm going to call these truths here, the application of the truths. We're going to apply these truths, these positional truths, to ourselves. We're going to put it in shoe leather, if you will. We're going to make it real as we walk down the streets of this world.

So here we go, back to our verse. Our verse is 611, says, "'Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.'" That's our 611. That's the verse that tells us we're to be counting upon those two wonderful facts. So here's some statements about the importance of that verse. And this is by our brother Hal.

Notice the date. that we're going to continue that teaching over 30 years ago he made he this these are this is taught 30 years ago here Holly Hills. So things haven't changed and that's one of the cool things what why is it so wonderful the miles is joining us is because we're of like mind we spent 5 years with miles getting to know him his his family and we're on the same page so we're going to carry on what was has been Okay, so here we go.

Romans 6.11 is foundational for spiritual growth.

No Romans 6.11 in our life, no growth. Pretty hard statements.

All spiritual growth is based upon Romans 6.11.

Maybe you don't appreciate that right now, but hopefully in time you will. to be honest, I have not examined all the are all that all the tax through all the I'm going to In the entire book of Romans, Romans 6, 11, it's the first command, the first time God has asked you to do anything.

He has told you for the first five chapters, He's given you information after information after information. He's told you about where you are, how to come to faith in Him, but He hasn't asked you to do anything. He hasn't said, well, get off your feet and do something. He hasn't said one word about that. Here's the first time He's going to tell you to do something. He's going to just kind of repeat 1.1 through 6.10, Paul lays down the positional identification truths, and the command now is, make this your practice, put this into practice.

You have these wonderful truths, what are you to do about them? They just lay on the shelf, they're nice to hear about, they make my heart warm, I'm warmed that I was on the cross with Christ, that warms my heart. Well, no, it's to be more than that. The key to growth is reckoning upon the identification truths.

All right, so after all that, we're finally going to get to the verse. I'm going to give you three flavors of the verse. Okay, here we go. Romans 6-11. I just adjusted this verse slightly to make a point. So this is NASB revised a little bit. Even so, consider or reckon yourselves to be dead indeed. I added indeed because that's going to be important. And that's actually in the original text. It's in the King James, but not in the New American Standard. But alive to God in Christ Jesus.

And the reason I wanted to have the indeed in the but is because we're going to see one of these situations where our brother that's what we're going to see on the other hand. Brian white brought we're going to see one of these men death or on one hand and on the other hand. So we have these 2 cool charts he provided for us and Mike use the charts on this hand is this truth on the other hand is this truth. The kind emphasize the importance of the truth. This is true and this is of this verse. Thus also, as for you, constantly be taking into account the fact that you are those who are dead with respect to sin, the sin nature, and indeed those who are living ones with reference to God in Christ Jesus.

And now, the most amazing thing that I found, I'm going through information that we have on the computer, which is wonderful, and I come across You know, his translation, he calls his translation an expanded translation. He's taken the original Greek language and he's tried to emphasize certain words and tenses and that kind of stuff. Well, he has a paraphrase of this verse. Not only does he have an expanded translation, he paraphrases this verse. Whoa! Okay, and it's all about understanding, right? We're looking, we're trying to understand the Greek text. How do we understand that? We look at it and look at it.

So here's his paraphrase of this verse. And it points out some cool things. So this is Weiss's paraphrase. Thus also, as for you, constantly be taking into account the fact that you are those who have had the power of sin broken. Isn't that wonderful? We've had the power of sin broken. We're disconnected. And those who have had the divine nature implanted.

And that's, boy, this has helped me a lot, because when you think about living ones with reference to Christ Jesus, that doesn't quite, I don't quite get the idea. I say, well, but wait a minute. How can I have a relationship with the God who made me if I'm not, as our brother Mike would say, if I'm not on the same wavelength? I can't, and this is astounding, human beings cannot communicate with God until they become like God. And I'm not saying they're little gods walking around. They have to have a nature like His. So He implants with us the divine nature. We have the very life of Christ. So that's three verses worth of 611. Okay, so let's get into it here. So before we get to 611, I want to go back to 610. Let's look at 6.10 in block diagram form. And before you get to 6.10, you have to go to 6.9c. And our brother in Sunday school was pointing out, in the text, we have all these connectives. One verse is connected to the next verse, is connected to the next verse, next verse. All these connectives that guide us through the text.

So I go back to 9c, and I say, death no longer has master over him. That's Christ. Death no longer has master over him, for or because The death that Christ died, he died, he died to the sin nature once for all, but in contrast to that, the life that he lives, he lives to God. So we're gonna see a little bit more of that shortly. So a couple things, this verse presents the contrast between Christ's death and the resurrection life, his resurrection life, and our resurrection life too, we'll see. This verse is a precursor to how the believer is to conduct his life. Okay, so now we're finally ready to get into 611. Here we go. Even so, consider yourselves. Okay, even so. A little tiny little phrase.

And if you look carefully, he's saying, you know back in 610 when it talked about Christ living and dying and knowing the Lord, knowing his Father? In the same manner, he's saying, in the same manner, in the same manner as Christ in verse 10. So on your handout, we're down here to this part where it says, even so consider yourselves worth that point.

So we got through that much of it. Okay, so from this point, so here's some things that you can say about this. So Christ died under the sin nature and you died with him. it was done once for all, Christ is living to God, and since he's living to God, and we're in Christ, we're living to God. Okay, so that's kind of that even so part. So then we go into the part where it says, you know what I mean.

The dual truth about wrecking yourselves and before we exactly get to that I want to just look a little bit and just some statements about you can see you consider yourselves are wrecking yourselves. you reckon you're wrecking yourself or you're counting upon yourselves. You're like the accountant in that picture you're And as far as yourself is concerned, that's kind of an interesting word, because it talks about the fact that this is something that you're doing, you're saying, in myself, because Christ died on the cross for me, this is what is true of me, and so you're counting upon this as true of yourselves. There was a chart I had about that, but it's going to be too hard to do it. So now let's come to this graphic, which I'm going to try to reproduce in my hand.

You're going to like this. Okay. So imagine there's writing on my hand. may be hard. 26 minutes. Okay, well, there's no hope, right? Okay, this has actually never happened before. No, not exactly. Hasn't been this bad. Okay, so here we start out. So what we're going to see here, it says in the verse we have, Okay, we're down here where it says the dual truths about reckoning yourselves. Okay, on the one hand, on this hand right here, you're dead to sin. And what that means is you've been separated from your sin nature. I have it in that hand. The Greek has this one hand, then the other hand.

But on the other hand, you're alive to God in Christ Jesus. As we learned, you have his very life. that being alive to God has the idea that you have His very life. You can communicate with God because you have like, can communicate with like. You have Christ's very like, so you can be in constant communication with Christ.

So that's on the one hand this, on the other hand that, okay? Then, so let's talk about some of the things that on the one hand that you're dead to sin, separated from the sin nature. So you can say this about yourselves. Okay, you can say the following and that first on on the one hand.

You're dead or separated from your sin nature. So you have reckoned that you are permanently separated. So we reckon that we are permanently separated from our sin nature. And you know that And the way you think about that is, if God has declared, that picture I showed you last week where you had be taken offline, if He has separated you, if He says you're separated from your sin nature, then you believe what He said.

You're not questioning what He said. You believe that it's true of yourselves. Okay? And here's a good thing. You're not reckoning. And Mike, when he teaches his class on this, you're not reckoning. The sin nature is not dead. It's still alive and kicking, right? So you're not reckoning. You're not saying, well, I want that sin nature to be dead. No, you're not doing that. You're saying, I'm dead in relationship to my sin nature. It's been severed. I've been cut. I've been cut loose from that sin nature. So you're believing the facts about what's happened to you.

You're not wishing. You're not saying, oh, I wish I was free from that sin nature that always causes me to say things I don't want to say. It always causes me to be sharp with my wife or do this and that. It causes me to lie sometimes when I think I have to because I can't make it unless I tell a white lie. No, you say, no, that's true of me, and I believe because you said it.

So that's on the one hand. Then on the other hand, And you're missing out on these really beautiful graphics I spent time on. Anyway, it's OK. And Bonnie, help me. We've got them all nice and pretty. I'm trying to make you feel guilty, right? All right. So here we go. On the other hand, so the other hand has this.

I'm alive to God, and we've received the very life of Christ. So we can say these things about ourselves. We can say we're the living ones with respect to God, Our life is only in Christ Jesus, and Galatians 2.20b says, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So we are to reckon we are permanently alive to God in Christ Jesus. That's our true position. That's who we are. It's our true position in Christ. And let's just backtrack for a second.

I had a few more things to think about on this hand first. This hand says, I'm separated from my sin nature. And here's some of the things that Brother Weiss kind of shared. He said, Paul is exhorting us to live a life in accordance with the Word of God. So the Word of God says it, we're to believe it. We shouldn't take into account the fact, we should take into account the fact that we are separated, are dead from our sin nature. And he has like three statements. He says we are disengaged from the evil nature. The evil nature has no power anymore over us, and it has this term, we are scot-free, kind of an old term, we are scot-free from the sin nature.

We can say a point-blank no to it. We don't have to, we can say, no, I'm not going to go there. And that comes back to my brother Hal when he would talk about that. You know, you don't have to go there. I'm dead to sin. In talking to yourself, I don't have to respond. I have a choice. Sometimes things are going so fast, your mouth is moving so fast, you don't have time to stop and think. But if you have time, stop and think. That's why I recommend that. I don't do that many times, but I should.

Okay, so a couple more points here. Okay, and on the other hand, we're alive to God in Christ Jesus. We have his very life, so we can say these things about ourselves. The divine nature, we have the very life of Christ within us. The result is that that nature gives us both the desire and the opportunity to regulate our lives. Okay, so, and lastly, I have my summary chart. that. Final thoughts. So imagine final thoughts across the top. It's in a few times before. Okay. The same nature. Those still lie. This is from a shake chaffer was very chaffer. The same nature.

Those still live and active has been judged by our death and judgment that no longer, we never, you know, these truths, we can't experience these truths that we saw in Romans 1 through 10, 6, 10, 1 through 10. We don't experience those, we just believe those. And then he goes on to say, the believer's part is to reckon or count upon these facts. To reckon is to count upon what is true of one's complete identification with Christ, in His crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. We thank you for our time today in your Word, Father. We thank you for this wonderful truth about our being identified with you on the cross, Lord, and your desire that we simply believe that and trust you and walk on those truths, Lord, day by day, moment by moment, not as a burden, not that it's a burdenous thing, but it's a joyous thing, a joyous thing that we remember that you cared for us so much, you took us to the cross, and we died with you, and you set us free from the nature that brings us down, that causes us to sin, and now we have your very life, and we're to walk in that life. We thank you so much for that. We ask it in your son's name, amen.