Identification Truths, Romans 6:1-10 - Part 2
Romans 6:1-10 · Mike Doyle · Jul 19, 2015
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Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926510152773

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. So, last week we started through Romans 6, and we got through about four verses, I think. And so, I'm going to ask you to do today what I asked you to do last week, which is open up your Bibles. Turn to chapter 6, and we're going to start with verse 4.

So, what we've learned so far is that we were that there's a principle that God has in mind, and that's that grace would be the reigning principle. And so, if that is true, in order for it to be the reigning principle, a person like me would say, well, gee, if grace is to reign, the more I sin, the more grace will propagate. And the answer is, no way. It doesn't fit with the scenario of sinning more so that grace might reign.

And then he questions us, he says, don't you know, you should know, that we were baptized into Christ's death, and therefore as we were buried with him through baptism into his death, and just as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness.

We got through most of, or into four anyway, so That therefore, in verse 4, always refers to what went before that. And so, here we are today at verse 4 and 5. We'll do those two together. And the first thing I want to do is take a note about eternal security. We talked a little bit last week, too, about position versus condition. These verses, the first ten verses, are nothing but position. Position, position, position.

This is information that God is giving us that is absolutely true of every believer that can never be changed, because He's the one that put it in place. So you can't change it, no matter what your experience is. So when you are confronted with positional truth in the Word, what do you do with it?

We only have one job, and that's that we believe it. We don't tell them, I want to experience it, You know, the Spirit of God will work us into that. But our job is just to take him at his word and to rest in what he tells us. So, you know, when he says, well, you were baptized into Christ's death. Raise your hand if you remember that. Was there some empirical evidence you have in your life that you know you were baptized into his death? No, all you have is God's word.

So as we go through the rest of these verses, keep that in mind that we're talking about Positional truths. These are things that are true of you, regardless of how you think about them, feel about them, accept them, or not. They are true, and our response is just to believe them.

So, if our position in the Lord Jesus is unchangeable, and it's eternal, and the Holy Spirit baptized us into Christ's death, can you change that? Can it be repeated? No. It's done. One time. So, through all eternity now, we are in Christ. Every believer is now permanently and eternally in Christ. There is no greater security than that. None. None. Because it's something that God has done. No human merit. Your faithfulness won't change it or enhance it. You're already in Christ. So, everyone who's baptized to Christ is united to Him or joined to Him in a union that absolutely can't be changed.

Again, what do you do with a truth like that? You rest in it by faith. the crux of the fulcrum on which our life as Christians is based. If we're not free from all that we were in Adam, then we can't get on with the business of being conformed to the image of Christ. Do you see that? I hope you can see that. So, if you refer to Christ and His death and your inclusion in it, the aspect of it is the freedom that we have from everything we were in Adam before.

And this is the ground for sanctification or spiritual growth. If this is not in place, we don't grow. Because God isn't about the business of making your old Adamic man look like and act like a Christian. As hard as you're working at that, that isn't His goal. His goal is to conform you to the image of the one who is His beloved, and that's Christ.

So Christ not only provided His blood to cleanse us, and judge sin, he did that, but he also took sin away. The final disposition of sin was accomplished by this burial. It's the last act of a human being on the earth. When we have a memorial service, at some point in there you go out to the grave site and what do you do? You put the body or whatever in the ground and you cover it up with dirt and it's over. from a spiritual standpoint and positionally, it's already happened to everybody here, if you're a believer. So, he came out then, Christ came out of the grave, and completely unrelated to the burden of sin now. Now most of us will say, well I can sure believe that about Christ, but I'm not sure I can believe that about me. Well, what does the verse say? We are completely separated from the former existence in the first atom. It's all done. It's been accomplished. Positional truth. It has been terminated by co-crucifixion, co-death, co-burial with Christ.

So, on the other side of that, we're supposed to walk, right? We're supposed to function and act like believers. But you know what? The walk presupposes you have a life for the walk. And so if you weren't raised with Christ, you don't have the life. So you don't have the means that's necessary to perpetrate the life. So what kind of life does it take to live this life, a Christian life? Does it take you making commitments and trying harder and praying more and all of those things? No. It takes an entirely new life to function in a new walk. And that life is the life of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. So it's not merely a manner of living. It's life. It's a new kind of life in quality.

So God, in delivering us from Adam, has provided the possibility and the probability that we will not sin. And He did it by judging the old nature. I ask this question a lot in classes when we're talking about identification truths. Everyone would say, that Christ died on the cross and His blood paid the penalty for my sins. And so I am forgiven, right? Everybody says that's okay. Did God forgive your old man? No, He didn't. He condemned it. He condemned it in death. Why?

So that you could be separated from it. So that you wouldn't be identified with it anymore. So that now you would be on the resurrected side of the cross, identified with the Lord Jesus Christ. Sin would not have dominion over you anymore. So where does that leave us? The possibility of not sinning leaves us in a position where we are dependent on God alone for deliverance from the power of sin by His Spirit. But it's based on the fact that there is no necessity for us to sin anymore. There's no necessity.

I know what you're thinking. Yeah, but Mike, you don't see life from behind my eyeballs. Yeah, I do. I'm just like you, and you're just like me. And when I see news like this, it can either be, oh gee, here's something that's greater than me, and I can't aspire to it.

Or, why don't I just believe what God says, and rest in the fact, and He will implement and work it out in my life. I think that's the right answer. I think the answer is just to take Him at His word, and just believe Him. And as Courtney was talking about this morning, resting by faith in what God tells us. So important.

So, we, because of our burial and resurrection in Christ, we're free to move around in an entirely new plane, which is called the new creation. And the power of Christ, the new man in resurrected life, we're free to do that. Nobody else is, just believers, those who have been identified with Christ. So, let's look at verse 5.

If, for if we have been planted, I'll read the verse and then expand a little bit the second time through. If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. Okay. Expanding it, we say if, or I would say since we have been planted or planted together with Him in order that we might grow together.

And this is a fact. This isn't, if maybe it is true of believers, maybe it's not. This is a fact. It's true of every one of us. We were planted together with Christ in the grave, in the likeness, or in the oneness is a better word, of His death. We were all included in that. we shall be now and forever also in the likeness of his resurrection. So again, is that when we die and go home to be with the Lord? No, it's now, right now. Those of us who are saved have already been positioned in Christ. We're assured and we have a certainty that Christ's death was our death.

So we can enter experientially onto resurrected life, which is eternal and powerful, in order for us to put away sin conditionally in our life. This truth represented for you and I as a child of God is spoken of in a couple of other places. If you look, you don't have to look, but Ephesians 2 Verse 5 says, even when we were dead in our transgressions, when we were in Adam, we were dead to God, separated from Him, He made us alive together with Him. By grace we have been saved. He made us alive in Him. Therefore, we're free to enter the experience of the eternal power and victory of Christ's resurrection. Wayne and I were talking one day and a question came up.

What side of the cross do you live on? Do you live on the side of, I'm going to be crucified and I'm hoping all this works out for me? Or do I live on the other side, which is, I'm resurrected. And if I'm resurrected, then there were a lot of things that happened before I got resurrected. And the happening before was I was crucified and buried. And crucifixion, death means separation. I've been separated. So I do live on the resurrected side of the cross.

So this positional truth, respecting us as believers, has been asserted in lots of passages. Colossians 3 is another one where he says in verse 3, for you died, you're not going to die, you already did die, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. That's where your life is. So you're hidden, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. So to be in Christ, which is the portion of every one of us who's saved, is that we partake in all that He ever has done, all that He ever is now, and all that He ever will be. We're included in that because we're in Him. It is to have died in His death, to have been buried in His burial, and to have been raised in His resurrection. And we are positionally seated in the heavenlies in glory. When? Right now. Right now.

So, to be joined in life with the risen Christ allows us the freedom to walk every minute, every day, in this new life and it's a wonder not conceived by many of us but it is a wonder that we can do that. It's the blessed portion of every single believer to walk that way every minute all the time.

The reason that this verse says and we shall be in the likeness of his resurrection is necessary from a future standpoint. We already have the union It's just a physical reference. Resurrection life is developed in a believer. I hope that's pretty clear. We just don't become a believer, go through this, and then we all start acting like we don't have sin natures and we're walking in newness of life. It's an ongoing, growing thing that we walk into resurrection life.

We have to learn it and rest in it by faith. Okay? Now, Romans 6, 6 and 7. 6, 6 in my mind has always been the fulcrum verse of the New Testament. And it's the sixth chapter of the first book of Christianity. And it has a lot to do with what really transpires and what really transpired about you and me when we were included in Christ's death.

It says, knowing this, And I would say that because we're getting to know this, we're discriminating and apprehending these facts. We have learned things about our position. We trust Him and rest in Him by faith. But then there's a process in which the Holy Spirit begins to open up our understanding about all the nuances and the completeness of what's happened to us, that our old man.

Now, Randy Redd used the word self, not the right word. If you've got self in your Bible, I hate to tell you this, but you can cross it out and put man in there. Our old man, everything we were in Adam, was crucified. For you Greek geeks, it's eris passive. In other words, it's a fact, and it happened to me. I was crucified. My old man was crucified. For what reason?

There's a purpose, and here's the purpose. that the body of sin might be, my version says, destroyed. Some people say put out of business, and we'll talk about that in a minute. There's a power of the sin nature or the resurrected life of Christ to express its life through your body.

And the issue is that God has made it a provision for us through our death with Christ so that you do not have to allow the sin nature to express itself through you. You don't have to do it anymore. If you're a non-believer, you don't have a choice. But as a believer, you have a choice by faith to rest in these facts. This fact is used as a figure concerning the manifestation of sin. But sin's power and means of expression are to be annulled, put out of business.

So, positionally again, we've been co-crucified with Christ. When did it happen? When did it happen for you? It happened when it happened to Christ. So you say to me, well, I don't remember that. Oh, neither do I. But God says it happened. And here is one of those positional truths, another one of these positional truths that comes to us. What do we do with it? We trust Him. We believe Him. And we rest in it by faith. Only because He said it. Because none of you can come to me and say, well, I remember.

I was there. You know, if you ever saw the movie Patton, there was a part in there where Patton was talking about he was reincarnated and he remembers being a Carthaginian and fighting against these guys 500 years before he was even in the Second World War. No, he didn't. No, he didn't.

And you can't remember, but God says you were there. You were in Christ when he died. You were baptized into his death. So, this passage follows the statement of the individual's transfer from headship, and we didn't talk much, we haven't talked much yet about headship. There are two important men in history, there are only two. One of them is Adam, and the other one is Christ. And what really is happening here is God, through including you in Christ's death, is taking you out of your identification with Adam, separating you from Him, and He's placing you in Christ, who is now your new head and your new life.

So, when I was a son of Adam, before I was saved, what I had going for me was all that He was. I had a natural mind. I thought like He did. My heart was like His. I had the same kind of feelings He had. I had the same kind of tastes He had. I had the same kind of desires he had. I had the limited wisdom that he had. And I had the same will he had. And all of that was apart from God. And it was all condemned. Thank God for that. That's what I had in Adam.

So the first Adam has perpetuated, has perpetuated and the believer has been judged by God at the crucifixion of Christ. The old man, the fallen nature, all that we were in Adam was crucified with him, separated. So this co-crucifixion is really, really important to the divine side, to God's side. Because this is the mechanics in which he got you out of and away from and separated from your union with the man who is sin and identified you with Christ, the resurrected man. making possible the deliverance on a conditional level from the power of that old man.

Now that old man, just because you were separated from him, didn't say, oh, well, gee, the gig's up. I guess I better not try to manifest my life through George anymore because he's now a Christian and he's figured it out. Well, you know as well as I do that isn't going to happen. The old man wants to express himself through you.

So does Christ. And so the issue is, who's going to do it? Who's going to do it? And as you walk by faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, enabled by the Spirit of God, manifests His life through you. So, question. When we were crucified with Christ on the cross, did the old man stop existing? And I already gave you the answer. No, he didn't. He's still there.

Ephesians 4.22 says that in reference to your former manner of life or your former way of living, that you lay aside the old man, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit.

That old man in you is still there and still manifesting or wanting to manifest his sinful life through you, but you also have another life, and that's the resurrected life of Christ. And the issue is, which one? is going to live or express His life through you. Christ will express His life through you as the Spirit of God manifests Him through you.

And again, the same question, what do you do? You rest by faith in the facts. It's His job to implement this. As soon as you start to fight it, or to make it happen, you're operating out of the flesh, and sin wins. What is crucifixion accomplished then? The cross is God's judgment upon that fallen man.

And each one of us had a nature or had a place in that man. I want to read a quote. I know what I've been talking about for a few minutes here is very difficult to understand, and I'm not the only one that understands how difficult it is to understand. So I'm going to read a quote from William Newell. There's no more difficult task requiring the attention of the believer that is assigned to the believer, it is a stupendous thing, this matter of taking note of and keeping in mind what goes so completely against consciousness, that our old man was crucified.

These words are addressed to faith and faith only. Emotions, feelings, deny them. To reason, they are foolishness. Your being included in Christ's death, you cannot reason to that. There's no empirical evidence that you can come up with that would say, oh yeah, I guess I was crucified. There is, to your natural mind, to the mind of Adam, it's foolishness. Total foolishness.

But you know what? It's real. And it's who you are. It's who we are in Christ, resurrected. Ask yourself this, let's assume it wasn't true. Let's assume you weren't crucified with Christ and you weren't buried with him and you weren't raised with him. Where does that leave you? Where are you going? I couldn't be living in him risen. Could I? Do you see the logic there? You couldn't be living in Christ if the identification and his death, burial and resurrection were not true. Couldn't do it.

I'd still be, and you'd still be, stuck in Adam. Now I must say that a lot of believers who do not understand these truths, these wonderful truths, are stuck in Adam because they either don't know these truths or they have been presented to them and they don't believe them. And so they're not implemented and they really think they're still stuck in Adam.

So, verse 6, Henceforth from now on, We should not serve or be bond slaves to sin or the old man, for he that is dead is freed or declared righteous or justified or acquitted from sin. They who have once died to sin, as we have in Christ, now stand free from its legal claims.

You okay with that? So what is your relationship to sin? What is your relationship to sin? What was Paul the Apostle's relationship to sin? We have a consciousness now, if you rest in these facts, of not being controlled by sin. But if you don't understand these facts, here's a big problem that we have. It's our awareness that we're sinful that keeps us back from that glorious life that Paul lived. Do you realize that? That our sin keeps us back because we don't rest by faith in what God declares about us. Does Paul show any sense of bondage to sin before God? No, he doesn't. Why doesn't he? Because he personally and positionally looks at things from God's viewpoint. He trusts God with what he says.

The old man has been set aside You can't change anything about that man, but you can't charge anything against a man who's dead. I remember years ago when there was like this case just this week, that guy that shot all those people in the Aurora movie theater.

So we haven't had the penalty phase yet, but let's say they find him that they're going to execute him, okay? So 30 years from now, they're marching him down death row. And he falls over and dies from a heart attack. So are they going to pick him up, stick him on a gurney and put the needle in him? Answer, no. Why? He already died. Why should sin have control over you? You already died.

It's the same principle. So God has broken sin's dominion over us and He's annulled its power totally. Totally. So, Paul could distinguish just like we should be able to distinguish between being freed from and justified from our sins, the things, the acts that we performed and that have been paid for and the guilt thereof by the blood of Christ, just as we should be able to reckon ourselves to be justified or free from the thing sin itself. You don't have to mess with it. Paul knew two things. that he was justified from all guilt by the blood of Christ. And he rested by faith in that fact. And he knew that he was also justified or cleared from the thing sin itself. And therefore, he was holy heavenly in his standing, his life, and his relationship to God. Do you see how I made a statement a few minutes ago that how your sin keeps you back from God?

If you really recognize and rest in the fact that you're free from it, you'll approach him. I have known countless believers who call me up and say, oh boy, you know, I've gone through a period where I've really been sinning a lot and I can't come back to church until I clean up my act. That's totally the wrong viewpoint. You come back to God because the sin issue has been resolved. You don't have to clean up your act to come. He already knew. He already took care of it. Not only did He pay for the penalty of that sin, but He separated you from that sin nature itself. So, rather than separate you from God, a conscious awareness of sin should remind us that we are in Christ, and no thoughts of condemnation because we died to sin, and are looking forward to our redeemed bodies. So again, what's our relationship to sin? What's your relationship to sin? Is it too much of a stretch to say you don't have one? What do you think?

I don't think it is. Not based on these verses. I really don't have a relationship to sin. Physically, at all. Am I to go around then trying as hard as I can to crucify my old man? Am I to, in order to be practically and conditionally free from sin's influence, do I have to work really hard to implement this crucifixion?

Well, number one, you don't have the power to pull it off. But number two, why would you attempt to do something that's already been done? Doesn't make any sense to me. Again, what is our job? To rest in the facts, what God has already accomplished. Must we annul or put out of business our body so that it won't sin anymore? That's a job for the Holy Spirit to implement the resurrected life and to apply the cross to Adam, that old sin nature, and to implement the life of Christ in the believer. That's His job. Your job is to trust Him to do it.

Okay, 8, 9, and 10. 8 says now, and here we go again, some Bibles say if, a better word is since, be dead with Christ, since we're dead with Christ. I didn't say that. The Word of God said that. We died with Christ. We believe we shall also live with Him. Not only now, I mean, not only in heaven, but now. There's so much certainty for the life in Him, as much certainty as there isn't, that we died with Him.

This verse almost, well this verse does, it takes for granted that the believer died. He's not iffing here, he's saying, I'm going to give you some information that takes for granted that you already died. So we go on to expect the blessed life of Christ.

Galatians 2.20 is the best verse of that.

The man in Galatians 2.20 says, I have been crucified with Christ. Not I'm going to be. I have been. I already have been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I'm living. I'm moving around. In the life I now live, in this body, how do I live? I live by the faith. By faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. What's the focus of that man's faith? The fact that he was crucified, buried, and resurrected with Christ. He knows it and he rests in it. And he lives on a daily basis knowing those facts and resting in them.

The future tense in this verse, we shall also live with him, is referring not to really what's going to happen hereafter, so much as the certain consequences of our union with Christ. Also, the life begun here is not completed yet, but you have it, conditionally.

So now Paul is going to give us a reason for our assurance about this. He says, knowing or because we know, that Christ being raised from the dead, again, he knows that, we all know that, from the dead dies no more. Death doesn't have any dominion or power over him any longer. So what are we encouraged to do here? Again, we're encouraged to believe this.

For death, in the death that he died, he died to sin Adam once for all. And the life that he lives, he now lives under God. That's not just Christ. That's you too. That's me too. So how many times does Christ have to die? Once. And he already did it. How many times do I have to die? Or how much work do I have to put in to my own dying? I don't have to put any. I'm already dead.

Now what's happening is the Spirit of God is implementing these truths to conform me to the resurrected, glorified Christ. You see that? He's not doing anything other than conforming me to Christ. I don't have to worry about whether I died or not. I already did.

In Ephesians and other places there is this admonition or this encouragement or this exhortation for believers to put off the old and put on the new. So let's go through that and then that'll be the end. Here's the fact. Knowing that this, that our old man was crucified with him. We know that? We do. Then he says in Colossians 3 and 9, seeing that you have put off the old man, Did you put him off? Were you in your position? Fact? Crucified with Christ? Were you separated from Adam, the Adamic nature, in your identification with Christ on the cross? Answer? Yeah, I was.

That's the fact. What does faith do to that fact? Then you put off concerning the former manner of life, the old man. How do you put him off? By believing him. That's how you do it. He's already off. So my faith rests in something that's already true. I can rest. I don't have to work to put him off. He's already off. But the author, Paul, understands that faith is the means by which these incredible truths become part of the believer's life and his experience. I just trust God with it.

By faith, our new sanctified position, return from Adam, We consider ourselves crucified, because we were, the principle of sin and self within us. We count ourselves as new creations in Christ. We believe Him. We believe that we've died to sin and self. Our part in putting off the old man that God put off from us at the cross. We rest by faith in the fact.

The other side of that coin is to put on the new man. Back to the facts. What are the facts? For as many of you have been baptized spiritually into Christ, have put on Christ, Galatians 3.27, and have put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him, Colossians 3.10. Are those facts? Are they true? Yes, they are. It's our new birth. We were recreated in Christ. and our Christian life is now hid with Christ in God, Colossians 3. Those are the facts.

What do I do with the facts? By faith I put on the Lord Jesus Christ, Romans 13, 14. I put them on. How? By believing the facts. Put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness, Ephesians 4, 24. By faith, by resting in these facts, in the positional facts that our Father has placed us in His Son, we abide in Him, we rest in Him, we acknowledge our place in Him. By faith, we stand in the position that He has already given us. So, to close, one verse, and a verse for me and for you. Stand therefore, having your loins girded about with the truth. I had a guy say to me one time, just stay where you are. Don't move out of where you are. Stay in Christ.

Let's pray. Father, how I thank you for your word. How I thank you how you are so careful to teach us who we are in your Son. what you've already done and how you've freed us from this old man, from sin, from any and everything that's unlike you, and that we might rest by faith in these facts and glorify you in the process. We thank you. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.