Christ Life in Us. Rom. 6:1-12 Do Not Let Sin Reign

Well, thank you so much, Bob and Kim, for sharing that song. That is one of my favorite songs. Streams of mercy never ceasing. What an awesome, awesome thought. Jesus sought me when a stranger. That's where I was. I wasn't seeking him. He sought me when a stranger. Wandering from, wandering far, far away from him, lost and ungodly, dead in sin. And he rescued me.

And what a beautiful, beautiful thought. And really, what an awesome Thanksgiving song, you know, to thank the Lord for that, for what he has done. There's a clicker back here. And thank you, Mike, for sharing those verses here this morning, just as you're reading through them. I was like, man, there's stuff jumping out at me in the text that I haven't even hardly considered, you know, preparing this message this past week. And it's so rich, so much there.

This passage, you know, when I came here the first time about two and a half years ago, summer of 2023. I was we're right in between chapter 5, 6 of Romans as kind I got to do this transition kind of introduction. And when it came back last summer. We were in between I think when Brian was here last, I listened to his message and he was joking about, you know, being eternally in the book of Romans at Holly Hills.

And it may seem like that, you know. But we can't overstate the importance and the significance of these words here in this portion of scripture. And so, you know, Mike and Roger, and they even asked my opinion, you know, should we go back you know, revisit these chapters here in the middle of Romans.

And we thought, you know, we really should before we move on from Romans. You know, it may be a little while before we're back in the Book of Romans as we go on to other books in the future. But we need to cover this ground one more time before we move on. You know, we can understand all kinds of things from Scripture, but if we miss the teaching of these chapters, we will miss it in terms of the Christian life. We'll be completely off track.

Nowhere else is the Christian life explained so clearly and so fully as here in Romans 6. I really believe that what Romans is, is Paul's basic message to establish Christians in the faith, to establish local churches. As he traveled around the Roman world and planted churches, and established these new churches, these new believers. This, I believe, is the message that he preached.

Because it's so clearly and systematically laid out, right? In chapters one through four, Paul explains man's sin problem, the way that ungodly sinners can be justified before God. And then he begins chapter five, therefore, having been justified. Sorry for the Canadian accent. Having been justified. by faith, and from there on, Paul is giving instructions for the Christian life. So he's assuming, now that he's talking to born-again justified believers, and now he's beginning to talk about, you know, what next? And so, beginning at that point, Paul lays out the fundamentals of the Christian life from here to the end of of chapter 8.

And so, you know, Mike and Roger and I totally agree with them that these chapters are so important that we should go back over them and cover them. And we wanted to make this pass through these chapters, not a reduplication of what we did, you know, a couple of years ago, but we wanted this to be a very, very practical look at what this all means for your day-to-day as a Christian. And we want to be really, really clear on that, that this is very practical information that we're dealing with.

What we find in these verses right here is the victorious Christian life, as some of these older, you know, you'll read that in writings from the, you know, over the last century or so, the victorious Christian life. What is that? Do we know anything about that? That sounds too good to be true.

And yet that's exactly what Paul is explaining here right in these passages, the victorious Christian life. And if we don't understand what Paul's teaching here, then we really don't understand the Christian life. And yet the things in these verses, they can elude us for years. We can find these things very, very challenging, right?

I was crucified with Christ. What does that mean? What does it mean to be dead to sin but alive to God? What does it mean to be under grace and not under law? These things seem impossible to us. And it's not because God is trying to make this difficult, not at all.

These things are very simple, very simple truth statements. But we have such a hard time grasping them. We have such a hard time understanding. And it's really the exact same thing that happens with an unbeliever when they're faced with the truth of the gospel, the truth of Christ's death on the cross for them. It doesn't make sense.

It's a very, very simple truth statement. You can tell, you can share the gospel in one sentence. Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, so that if you would believe in him, you will have eternal life. That's it. I mean, we can flesh that all out in great detail, but that is the gospel message. And yet people hear that, and, there we go, finally got that thing right.

People hear that and they don't get it. It doesn't make sense. Why? Not because the message doesn't make sense, but because they are spiritually blind. And in 1 Corinthians 2.14, Paul says, but a natural man, that's referring to an unbeliever, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. So the difficulty is not with the truth itself, right? Very simple, clear statement. The problem is with our spiritual blindness. And just as the Holy Spirit has to open the eyes of the unbeliever to understand and to recognize the truth of the gospel, we need to have our eyes open as believers to the truths that we are dealing with here in Romans 6.

In Ephesians 1.18, Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians that the eyes of their hearts may be enlightened. This is speaking to believers, right? And he prays that the eyes of their heart may be enlightened. Why? So that you will know what is the hope of his calling and what is the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.

Paul knows that you and I as Christians, we need to have our eyes opened to the reality of what it means to be joined to Christ, what it means to be in union with him. to have participated in his death so that we might participate in his resurrection life, and everything that that means. Did you notice there in, as Mike was reading in Romans 6 verse 4, where it says, therefore we have been buried, I'm reading from the NASB, therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death so that. Don't read over that too quickly.

There's a purpose in the fact that God has joined you to Jesus in his death, in his crucifixion death. It's so that as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. The goal, the purpose, the aim is the life. Not just to be dead to sin, but to have life, this newness of life in Christ Jesus.

And we, you know, we can hear those words and this message of our identification with Christ and our participation in his death and resurrection. You could hear that a thousand times. And if you've been in Holly Hills, as long as most of you have, you probably have heard that at least a thousand times.

And yet, that identification truth isn't of any benefit to you as a theory or just simply as a doctrine. We have to accept the reality of it by faith. We can't count or reckon on it unless we've been brought to the point of conviction of the truth of it. It's only as we reckon on the truth of these things that they have any real value to us.

And that requires that the Lord bring us to that point where we are prepared to accept by faith these truths and what they mean. So as we get into this, we need to pray that the Lord will be doing that in each one of our lives this morning. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have revealed these truths in your word. You've given us your word so that we might know you. And Lord, that is an awesome, awesome thing. You've not given us our word so that we can Strive to be better. You've not given us your words that we can just enjoy eternity living and experiencing things.

Lord, you want us to know you. You want us to know you very personally and intimately. And everything that you're doing, everything that you've done in revealing your word, and everything that you've done and are doing in our lives and our personal circumstances, Lord, is all about coming to know you more. And you want us to know the things freely given to us by grace.

And so, Lord, I pray that this morning as we spend some time in these verses, that you would be not only allowing us to see the truth statements that are presented, but that you would be working in our hearts to open our eyes, our spiritually blind eyes, to the reality of it so that we not only see the truth of it, but we get it. We grab hold of it by faith. We count it to be true. We reckon these things to be true. And Lord, that's a work that only you can do. And so we pray, Lord, that that's what you would do. And we trust you with that. Amen.

Open your Bibles if you don't have it open still to Romans 6 there, where Mike was reading. And we will have the text on the screen in a moment, but I want you to have your Bible open with me this morning and be tracking along. Mike and Roger have been teaching us through chapter six.

Paul's been laying down these critical truths about our identification with Christ. And in the last couple of weeks, Roger has been teaching us about the importance of reckoning or counting or considering the reality of our identification with Christ. And now we come to two very important verses this morning. we're going to begin to see what reckoning looks like in shoe leather. Roger mentioned that last week.

And what we have here in the text, these words, do not let sin reign, and your translation may vary a little bit, but what we have there is a big red stop sign in the text. So let's just reread verses 12 and 13, because that's our text for this morning. It says, therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. Now, if you're a King James or other translations, you have the word yield there, present or yield. And we're gonna be talking about that this morning.

But the words that the NASB has translated at the beginning, do not let sin reign, in the Greek, mean stop doing something that you're already doing. And in fact, you see that in the NASB, the way they rendered verse 13, and do not go on presenting. Same tense there in both cases. They could have rendered that at the beginning of verse 12, therefore do not continue letting sin reign.

So this is assumed to be something that you as a believer are doing. And this is something that you are to stop. This is what you've been doing, now stop it. And these are active imperatives. So that means you stop doing this now. Now, I hope, and if you've been around here any length of time, I hope that that begins to cause some alarm bells to ring in the back of your mind. Because what I just said there, and that is a correct interpretation of the Greek grammar, that opens up these verses to some terribly legal forms of interpretation. And that's the way these verses are usually taught.

Stop letting sin reign, period, let's go home. And, you know, get busy at that. A lot of people take verses 12 and 13 as a transition to something that we must do by the power of the will. With God's help, of course. You know, it usually sounds like this. As a believer, you have been given a new set of desires and God's power to help you overcome sin. I've heard that message a million times in one form or another, but what's the problem with that?

If we could overcome the dominating power of sin through an act of the will, then there was no need for you to be crucified with Christ. It makes no difference whether you claim the power of the Holy Spirit's involvement in this or not. If you and I could have victory over sin apart from the crucifixion of the cross, then that was completely unnecessary, which would mean that God didn't know what He was doing. When He identified you with Christ and He identified you with Him in His death, There was no purpose to that. That kind of teaching makes identification with Christ in his death unnecessary and even foolish.

So when Paul gives us this imperative command to stop letting sin reign, we have to take it in context. We absolutely have to. Because what Paul is going to tell us in chapter 7 completely destroys any thought of you and I being able to overcome the power of sin through some act of the will. Paul experienced Romans 7 as a Christian. This is not an unbeliever speaking, this is a born-again Christian who has the Holy Spirit indwelling him, and he has this new set of desires. Here what he says in verse 18 of chapter 7, he says, but the doing of the good is not. We can't just stop letting sin reign by an act of the will. That's the legal interpretation of this text. It's not grace.

Victory over sin has to be by means of our death with Christ. And that's grace because your new reality as a Christian, your co-crucifixion with Christ, was something done for you and something that became real of you the moment you put your faith in Jesus Christ. Not because you earned it or deserved it or worked for it in any way. By grace, God has crucified us with Christ and raised us with him And that is the only possible means of victory that you and I can have.

So how should we take these verses? Well, first of all, the paragraph break that you probably have in your text before verse 12 is not inspired. Paragraph breaks, chapter breaks are not inspired. Those are translators' decisions based on their interpretation. But when we separate verses 12 and 13 from verse 11, we begin to disconnect that thought from what just followed in verse 11. And I don't think that Paul is telling us something that we must do in addition to reckoning. Paul is expanding on this doctrine of reckoning. In other words, this is what reckoning does.

When you reckon yourself dead to sin, the sin nature is automatically cut off from reigning in you. Similarly, when you reckon yourself alive to God, you are automatically presenting or yielding your members to God as instruments of righteousness. The Christian life is not lived by my willpower, but by faith. That's how we obey this imperative, not by works, but by faith.

That's how the fact of our identification gets worked out in practical experience. Doctrine only has practical ramifications when we believe it, when we accept it by faith. It's useless or fruitless sitting on the shelf as a doctrine. We have to accept the truth by faith. We have to count on it. And that's when the fruit of it becomes reality.

It's a fact that the sin nature has no right to dominate you anymore as a believer. That is a fact. But it doesn't become a part of your practical experience until you are reckoning or counting on it by faith. So you refuse the domination of sin by counting on the fact that you're already dead to it.

And likewise, it's a fact that we belong to God for His use. That's already reality for you as a Christian. But again, there's no practical outworking of this unless we're counting on it by faith. So you present your members or yield your members to God as instruments by reckoning on the fact that you already belong to Him. You don't belong to him because you present yourself. You present yourself because you already do. And so reckoning is a faith or dependence thing, simply resting in what God has already done.

Now, if this is the only thing that you take home with you today, I would be thrilled. If this is all you get out of today's message, that'd be wonderful. We're gonna unpack more from these verses, but we have to have it firmly settled in our minds that this is not about what you and I can do through the power of our will. This is about what has been accomplished already as a fact, and what happens when we count on it, when we reckon it to be true, when we have faith in the facts. Okay, so with all this in mind, we're just gonna ask some questions of these verses, and we're just gonna, again, we're not going through as deep a dive in the grammar and all this stuff that we often do. This is practical application, so we're gonna ask some questions of the text here. So, question number one. And this is on your handout, so feel free to kind of get the answers up there. You can copy them down, whatever works for you.

Who is Paul talking to here? Is he talking to believers or unbelievers? Who is it that has this problem of sin reigning? Okay. Now, This should be very clear to us. The simple answer to this is that the entire letter of Romans is speaking specifically to believers. That was established at the very beginning of chapter one. Beloved of God, saints, Paul is speaking to believers. And as we said at the beginning of chapter five, he says, therefore, having been justified by faith, and he goes on from there. So this is all addressed to you as a justified, born-again believer.

Now we know that unbelievers are dominated by the sin nature. That's all they have, right? As an unbeliever, you are dominated by the sin nature. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But Paul is saying that as a believer, It's possible for you to be allowing the sin nature to reign in your life. Paul wouldn't have to write these verses unless that was true. There'd be no need for this if it wasn't possible for you to be allowing the sin nature to reign. So please do not listen to anyone who tells you that Christians do not have a sin nature. That error will completely cut you off from the only way of victory that God has provided. Ironically, that teaching leads to total enslavement to the sin nature.

Why? Think about that. Why would that be? That teaching that you have no sin nature leads to enslavement to the sin nature. It's actually really logical, right? If you don't believe that you have a sin nature, can you reckon yourself dead to it? No. So you've automatically refused God's solution, the solution that he's provided, okay? So Paul is speaking to you and I as believers who have this problem of a sin nature that seeks to reign and rule and have dominion over you. very, very important to understanding these verses. So what does it mean for sin to reign in our mortal bodies?

Now sin here is the sin nature. Throughout Romans 6, I mean, you can get it interlinear. In my Bible, everywhere the word sin shows up there, I put a little T beside it for the definite article. This is the sin nature. And so that's what we're talking about. When we talk about sin reigning here, this is the sin nature.

And the word reign means to reign as king. Now, I understand that that's a completely foreign concept to an American, to have someone reign as king, right? A king reigns, and I'm being a little, I'm teasing. But I mean, that's what liberty is all about, right? We've thrown off the tyranny of the king and his empire. But a king reigns as sovereign. That means he has full control. He has uncontested power.

We could say, no, even in Canada, by the way, that's not true. I mean, he technically could. He could technically, you know, veto anything that Parliament decides to put through. Has it ever exercised? No. But the idea with the king is that he has ultimate uncontested power.

Here's an interesting thought, because in America we're very glad to not be under the king because that had a lot of problems, but is there anything wrong with a king having total control? Your first gut instinct will be to say yes, because we've seen the problems that it causes, but the true answer is it depends. Because we know that Jesus will reign as king over the entire earth one day. Is that bad? No. Why not?

Because he's perfectly righteous. And so a king who is perfectly righteous is no problem whatsoever. We would love to have a perfectly righteous king ruling America, would we not? We're not talking about earthly kings here in this context. We're just kind of getting the idea of what it means to reign, right?

Paul is using this as a picture of what's going on inside of us. And God created living things in such a way that our nature is expressed outwardly. So our nature reigns as king, as this absolute sovereign monarch over everything that we do. Now, as unbelievers, there's only one nature, right? The sin nature. And it reigns as absolute sovereign over every single thought, word, and deed. As believers in Christ Jesus, there are two natures vying for that throne, so to speak. And by the way, when we talk about the sin nature reigning in our mortal bodies, this isn't just limited to our physical bodies. It's not just our body parts, though it includes that.

The word here is soma. and it refers to an organized whole or a system. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul uses the same word soma for a seed that you plant in the ground, and then he refers to it for the plant that grows up out of the ground, and he says the seed has a body, soma, the plant has a different body, or soma.

Then he talks about the sun, moon, and stars. as bodies. We use that term in modern English, right? We talk about heavenly bodies. And then he talks about also our natural body that we now have, and he contrasts that with this spiritual body that we will have.

The thing that all of these have in common is that they are a unit. They're a functional whole. So mortal body refers to more than just our physical body parts. This is the organized whole that makes up you. The material and immaterial aspects. This is your heart and mind as well as your body. We could say this is all your faculties as a human being. And it's through all of these things that the nature expresses itself. That's the way God designed it to work. There's an inward and outward expression of the nature that's behind it, ruling or reigning.

The problem is that the nature of this mortal body, this soma, is the sinful nature that we were born with in Adam. The sin nature is welded to this mortal body. I think how Maloy used to say that, it's welded. And that sin nature is totally opposed to God, totally anti-God, totally against him. Always seeking to glorify self rather than God. That's what the sin nature is at heart. When the sin nature is allowed to reign as king, self is elevated above God.

This was our conversation this morning at Sunday school. Self is enthroned, right? And that is expressed in every aspect of our being, our soma. It's not just the externals, but it's in our heart, it's in our mind. What begins in our heart and our mind, it grows into our emotions and it works out in our words and actions. So that's doctrinal truths that we just laid out there, but what does that actually look like when sin reigns? It's great to know about this and know that the natures, we have a sin nature, we have this new nature, they're vying for control or dominion or, you know, seeking to express themselves through our moral body. But what does that actually look like in our day-to-day lives? Because we want this to be practical. We have to get a view of this. We have to get a picture of this to understand really what we're talking about.

We often make the mistake of thinking that sin reigning looks immoral. And that's a really big mistake. Most sin happens in the heart where nobody else sees it, for one thing. Most sin happens without us even realizing it, actually. It's so natural, we don't even think of it as sin. For instance, Two weeks ago, this has become a great illustration, Roger's already used this, when a mysterious stranger walked in here and made his way up to the front and looked like he was ready to confront Roger.

No show of hands here, okay, but how many of you were a little anxious about that? That was only natural, right? But what is anxiety, okay? Is it not a failure to trust the Lord? Saying in our hearts that God can't be trusted with this, isn't that sin?

It is. Now, what if he had been dangerous? Let's just say, poor John, we're getting a lot of mileage out of John. What if he had been dangerous? Then we would have had a good reason to be anxious, right? Or no? Is there ever a good reason not to trust the Lord?

Philippians 4.6, be anxious for nothing. Now, let me turn the tables here for a moment, because how many of you heard afterwards that others were anxious about all this, and you thought to yourselves, well, I guess they're just not as spiritually mature as I am. I wasn't worried.

What is that? What is that in your heart? That's pride, which is, in my estimation, a far uglier sin than anxiety, okay? But doesn't that shed some light on just how easy it is to let sin reign? We do it all the time, every day. To think, two weeks ago, right here in this place, sin was raining in the hearts of believers, okay? The sin nature is powerful. It'll take whatever it can get its hands on in our hearts and our minds, and it'll use it as an outlet. That's how easy it is to let sin rain. We never think of sin as sin when we commit it. We think of it as the correct response in the given circumstances.

Proverbs 21.2 says, every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart. In her book, Life on the Highest Plain, Ruth Paxson said this.

I didn't put it on the slide, so you'll just have to listen carefully. She's talking about this very issue, and she says, but I can almost hear someone rise up in defense of the flesh and say, but is it not natural to resent wrong? To dislike some people? To crave certain things? To stand up for your own rights? Yes.

It is natural, and that is just why it is sinful. That is just what the flesh is. It is our natural life, including all we call highest and best, as well as all we deem weak and worthless. What God asks us to do is take the cross-section of the flesh we have made and condemn it all, to believe in its utter impotence to do good and in its mighty power to do evil. That's the thing that we're dealing with. That's what it looks like for sin to reign. And we all are subject to that and fall prey to that a lot more than we realize. And the Lord will continue to reveal that to us.

You don't have to panic about the fact that this is going on or has gone on. The Lord makes this clear to you in time. And it's not for the purpose of throwing, laying a guilt trip on you. I didn't intend to do that when I talked about it. John because probably all of us were caught in that in one way or another. The Lord shows this to us and opens our eyes to the reality of this and of the sin nature reigning and just how often it is so that we come to recognize our need for his solution. He's gracious. He's not a guilt tripper. He wants to show you what he's provided for this. That's what these verses are all about.

So what does it mean to obey its lust? Now in the English It's difficult to tell if these are the lusts of the sin nature or the lusts of the body. And again, we're not doing the deep dive Greek here, but the Greek is very clear. This is most definitely the lusts of the body.

But do not automatically think of sexual lust. If you just let your mind just put it into that narrow box, you've just totally missed the meaning of this passage, okay? The word simply means strong desires. And again, I don't think that physical body is, that this is just limited to physical body.

This is the whole man in view here. So what are the most deeply seated desires of man? as just to give you a hint, they all start with the word self, okay? We've got, we've got self-will, we've got self-centeredness, we've got self-love. By the way, these things are glorified and promoted all over the web and all over our culture today. self-pity, self-defense, self-sufficiency, self-exaltation, self-preservation, self-righteousness, and on and on and on we could go. All of this could really be summed up as self-worship. Everything in my universe revolves around me. And that's really what obeying the lusts of the body means. We need to understand it in that wide view. When everything revolves around me, you are seeking to satisfy the lusts of the body.

And we're doing this all the time without even realizing it, right? So don't think of sin just as immorality, okay? Some of the most refined and cultured people in the world are the worst offenders, okay? Not to, I mean, I'm probably, yeah. We're all, we're all in the same boat, right?

And that's what Paul is saying is to be cut off. It has to be stopped. And that will never happen through anything short of the crucifixion death. Why not? Because you can't change the sin nature. the sin nature that's doing all this and expressing itself on all of this self-will and self-centeredness and on and on, you can't change that nature. That's the definition of a nature. You can't change a nature. It wouldn't be the same nature if you changed it, and we can't be done. We have no power to do that.

So much Christian teaching revolves around the improvement of the old man. I hear that kind of expression, a changed life, or those kinds of expressions all the time. Spiritual growth is usually viewed as some sort of a gradual process of change where we make gradual incremental improvements on self-improvements, over a long period of time until someday we become a better Christian or whatever. But you will never change this in nature. That's why the cross is so necessary. We had to be cut off. from the power of the sin nature through death.

Spiritual growth happens as we count on the fact that we've been cut off from the power of the old nature, and that we now have a new life in Christ. That's reckoning. So there is a gradual process, but it's a process of coming to count on what has already been fully accomplished in Christ. So there's gradual growth in that. But there's, it's not a gradual changing of the old man. I knew, I had to look at Nick because I knew he'd be, I used the word process in that last paragraph so many times, and Nick loves it.

Now, we're gonna handle all of verse 13 here with a few questions. And there's a lot in verse 13. But verse 13 puts this whole matter of reckoning into terms of presenting or yielding ourselves as instruments, either to God or to the sin nature. And notice in the first half of the verse that Paul talks about presenting the members of your body, and in the second half he contrasts that with presenting yourselves. So again, it's just what we said. This is more than just your physical body. This is everything that makes up you. Okay, presenting your body is presenting yourself. Now, we have to make a very important clarification of that, okay?

So what are we presenting? Because I just said it's about presenting yourself, yes, but is this the old Adamic man or the new creation man? Are we presenting ourselves as in Adam or are we presenting ourselves to God as new creations in Christ Jesus?

What does it say right in the middle of verse 13? Present yourselves to God as what? As those alive from the dead. And it doesn't say, present yourselves to God as if you're alive from the dead. We present ourselves to God as those who are alive from the dead, new creations in Christ Jesus. If Christ Jesus is alive from the dead, then so are we. And we are to present ourselves to God as such.

So we're either presenting ourselves as instruments of the sin nature, or we're presenting ourselves as new creations, as instruments to God, and we're either submitting ourselves to be used for evil or for righteousness. Now, what does it mean to be an instrument of unrighteousness or an instrument of righteousness? The word here, hoplon, is instruments, tools, but how many of your translations say weapons? Somebody have weapons there?

That is likely a better interpretation of the Greek. Everywhere else this word is used in the New Testament in this form, it clearly refers to weapons. So Paul is calling to mind a military conflict. We have two diametrically opposed adversaries. And our mortal bodies, our soma, can be weaponized by either one. Kind of an interesting picture.

We can either be the weapons of the sin nature or we can be the weapons of God. So we have either the sin nature harnessing you and all your faculties to produce the fruit of unrighteousness leading to death, or we have the Lord using you as an instrument for his own righteousness. It can go either way. The same instrument, your mortal body, your human faculties being used as the vessel of unrighteousness or of righteousness.

And in the following verses, Paul, he's gonna shift this analogy to speak of us as slaves. If you've read on a little further, all of a sudden this weapons or instruments He begins to talk about it as being slaves, either to the sin nature or slaves of God. We're either going to serve the sin nature or we're going to serve the Lord.

Don't think too long about Bob Dylan there. But we don't want to force fit a works mentality into this. When Paul talks about being a slave in these following verses, it's not the idea of you accomplishing work for God. The idea is that you are at the complete disposal of the Master, just like a tool or a weapon in the hand of the one who wields it.

That's why Paul is couching all of this in the concept of reigning as king. We can either have the sin nature reigning over us, putting us to work for it, or we can have grace reigning. And we can have the Lord putting us to use as instruments of His righteousness. And every Christian will be in one state or the other at any given moment, at the complete disposal of the reigning power.

So what's our part in this? Remember, as we said at the beginning, these are imperative commands. that means there's something we have to do. So how do we obey? Now we come back to where we started, right? How do we do this? How do we present ourselves? You know, at the beginning we talked about how do we stop letting sin reign, and now we have the same question here. How do we present ourselves?

And again, if this is something that we could do simply because we have this new desire, then there was no need for our co-crucifixion and co-resurrection. We don't stop letting sin reign because of any desire or ability that we have. The power of sin in our lives is broken only by the death of the cross that we shared in. And likewise, we don't present ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness because we have anything to offer.

We present ourselves as those who share in Jesus' resurrection life. So the presenting that Paul is talking about is simply another way of expressing the reckoning of verse 11. Reckoning is a faith thing. It's about accepting the facts that we've been presented with in the Word.

So this isn't about resisting sin. This is about counting on the fact that on the cross, I died, once for all, to the power of sin. I see myself crucified with Christ, and I can say, I am dead to the whole principle of sin. I don't have to respond to the sin nature today, or tomorrow, or ever again. Not because of anything in me, but because of the death of the cross.

And in the same way, presenting myself to God or yielding myself to God is not a commitment to serve Him. You ever been in a commitment service or something like that? That's the idea that I have something to offer the Lord, some way that I can help Him out. And that misses the point. We aren't doing God any favors when we present ourselves to Him.

We're just recognizing the fact that we already belong to Him. The Lord has separated us from the last Adam through the death of the cross, and He's created us anew. Did I say that right? Separated us from the first Adam through the death of the cross and created us anew in the last Adam, Jesus Christ. And so we present ourselves to the Lord because we are His. It's not about what we can do for Him. It's about what He desires to do through us. We present ourselves to Him to allow Him to produce His life through us.

That's what this is all about. So why this imperative? Why these commands? Why are we to reckon? What is God seeking to accomplish through this? What's His purpose? Because whenever we look at verses like this, and we see that this is about being delivered from sin, and this is about living a righteous life, we automatically gravitate in our minds to thinking that, well, God wants this because he's gonna be more pleased with me on the basis of how I live. The more I can reckon, and the more I can say no to sin or stop letting sin reign, and the more I can present myself to God as an instrument of righteousness, the more pleased God is going to be with me. That's the way we naturally gravitate to thinking, and that's not it.

That's a law principle. The grace principle is that we already have God's perfect favor. We can't increase that or decrease that in any way. We have to start there. So we come to verse like this, our mind doesn't begin to think, well, okay, if I can do this a little more consistently or a little more regularly, God's gonna be more pleased with me. No, we can't change that.

Why? Because our acceptance is not in us, our acceptance is in His Son. And He's already perfectly satisfied with His Son. You're not gonna change that. So if that's the case, then why the imperative command here? Why does God even tell us this? What's His purpose in it? He has a purpose, doesn't He? Why do we reckon on these things? Why do we present ourselves to Him by faith? Why does it matter?

It's designed to accomplish one thing. One thing alone. The Father's goal. What is the Father's goal? for you, in you, okay, is to glorify the risen Lord Jesus Christ. And that is an amazing thing. That is an amazing privilege. The Lord wants to put the life of Jesus Christ on display through you and I. That's his goal, that's his purpose. The privilege of getting to be involved in that, just to get to be a vessel of that life, is an amazing privilege. And the hungry heart from yesterday put this whole, we could have had this whole message, we could have been out of here a long time ago. Okay, because one paragraph, he said very, this is G.W., I think Watson or something like that.

Very little abiding growth and fruit can be known by the believer until he accepts the fact of identification as Romans 6, 1 through 10, accepts the fact of identification and to it responds by an attitude of faith, that's Romans 6.11, we count on it, we reckon on that, thus yielding himself, notice how he said that, the reckoning of verse 11 is the yielding of verses 12 and 13, thus yielding himself to the Holy Spirit, and this is the point, for the life of the Lord Jesus to be manifested in and through him. That's it. He summed up everything from verse one to the end of verse 13 in that paragraph. We accept the fact of our identification with Christ in his death and resurrection. We respond to it by an attitude of faith. We reckon on it.

And by doing that, we yield ourselves to the Lord in order that the life of the Lord Jesus would be manifested through us. And Paul is inviting us into this privilege here. He's telling us that as we reckon on these things, We are cutting off the power of the sin nature, whose sole purpose is to glorify self, and we're presenting ourselves as instruments through which the Lord will display the life of His Son, Jesus Christ. And it has to be by grace like this. If there was somehow something of ourselves in it, then we would have some of the glory. But the Father has designed it this way so that our part is just to count on Him, just to believe Him. just to agree with Him about what He's done, and just to be the instruments through which He glorifies Jesus.

It's an awesome privilege, and oh, that we would appreciate that, and that we would accept that, so that Jesus would be glorified. Heavenly Father, I thank you for your Word, and I thank you for the awesome privilege that it is to be joined to your Son, Jesus Christ, to share in his crucifixion death and his resurrection life, and to be able to rest in that truth, to count on that reality. also that Jesus would be seen and that he would come to be known and recognized by others, all for his glory. I just thank you, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen.