"Crucified with Christ" - Did it really happen, & what does it mean? Part 1
Mike Doyle · Jul 12, 2015
Specials
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492659407450

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

Turn to Romans chapter 6, and we'll start with verse 1. Randy read the verses, and it's interesting here that Paul, back in the previous verse, is talking about sin and grace, and one of those principles will reign. And either sin's going to reign or grace is going to reign, and God's purpose is that grace would be the reigning principle.

So he says, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace might overcome or overwhelm? And it's one of those questions, I think, that Paul would ask in anticipation of somebody raising their hand and saying, well, gee, Paul, shouldn't we just keep right on sinning? Because if grace is an overwhelming, overpowering principle, why don't we just keep doing it? because grace is going to cover us, and so we're going to be in good shape.

So we have a couple of other questions that are underlying this, that fit in with this information. One is, eventually you have to come to another question that says, who controls the sin nature in the believer? Who controls it? Is it me, or is it somebody else? And these verses begin to teach us about how the sin nature is controlled and under the principles in which God's ability to control the sin nature in the believer is contained right in these Romans 6 truths.

So, if we continue in sin, that grace may abound. And he's got a really interesting answer. And I try to think about How would I answer that in contemporary English? I would say, no way or it can't happen. It could never be. In other words, it's an absurdity to even ask the question. It can't ever be a possibility that we should increase or sin more so that grace may abound.

And then he gives you the reason. The reason is a really cool reason. And the first time he has said this in the book of Romans is, how shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Oh, here's some new information. What's the new information? I died to sin. What am I going to do about that? If I were not a child of God, I'm stuck, I'm living in sin. If I did become a child of God, then it says here that I died. So he's going to expand on the rest of these verses about this death. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, well, I wasn't there 2,000 years ago when Christ was crucified on that cross, so how can he say that I died?

Romans 6, 1-10 is what we call positional truth. This is something, a pronouncement by God, a truth that is given to us that is true of us in our position in Christ. It may or may not be your condition. It may or may not be your understanding. You may not even know. Or you have read Romans 6 a lot in your lifetime and you just jumped right over this, well, you know, I died business.

But this specifically, this verse specifically says, How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? It means I died. Here's the second thing it means. If you look at that word sin in that verse, there's a definite article in front of that word sin, which is pointing to a specific issue. We're not talking about being dead to your sins, which are the bad things you and or good things you've done as a member of the Adamic race. We're talking about a thing we call the sin nature. the sin nature, that I died to that. I did. Yeah, I did.

So as we're studying in the class on faith, we've learned a couple of really sort of simple issues there. One is, is that faith is really just a trust and a confidence and a resting in what God tells us. So what did he tell us here? That we died. What do I do with that information? I just rest in it. I trust him.

If he says it's so, then it's so. And I can't say to him, look, you know, I grew up in Missouri, you've got to show me. Or, you know, you've got to explain it to me because I'm not going to believe it. I'm not going to believe it until you, like Thomas, until I see the holes in your hand and put my hand on your side. No. If he says it, you just trust him. So we're starting out with just information.

I died to sin. And the question is, if I did die to sin, if that is true, then how could I be any longer at home with it? How can I be comfortable sinning if I've died to it? The obvious answer is, I can't be. I can't be. It doesn't fit. And then he says, Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus, we have been baptized into His death? That's interesting here. What's the word baptize mean? It doesn't mean to get wet. It means to be placed into, never to be taken out of, ever. So the Spirit of God, when you believed in the person and work of the Lord Jesus, He gathered you up and He put you in Christ. through the cross.

And you went in at this specific time frame. If you drew a little timeline, and you said, well, here's the timeline of the Lord Jesus' existence on the earth. And he was born, and when he was 12 years old, he gets lost, or they lose him, and on you go.

And Paul doesn't say, well, we got baptized into Christ when he was teaching the Sermon on the Mount, or at any other time. What he says is, you were placed into Christ or baptized into Christ at the very point in which He died. Why then? Because that's when we die. So when the Spirit of God unites us, through the cross with the Lord Jesus Christ, the union begins at his death. That's when it starts. That's when it starts for you. That's when it starts for me. A positional truth. Again, what do you do with that information? Just rest in it. Trust him.

The argument in this passage is based upon the believer's vital union by which he is, and I love this word, he's organically united to Christ through the baptism into his death. There cannot be a greater union between you and another person than your being united to Christ in his death. Your marriage isn't that close, your family members aren't that close, your parents aren't that close, but you are united with Christ at the point in which he dies. So far, we've been given some information that you have no empirical evidence to back up what Paul just said. You guys all remember when you were crucified? How did it work out for you? Was it painful? What kind of an experience was it? It's not experiential. You can't, by use of empirical evidence, arrive at the fact that I was crucified with Christ. You're stuck with having to take God at His word. He says it, I rest in it.

So then he says, therefore, and I love the word therefore because I always ask, what's the therefore therefore? It's therefore, you take all the information up to this point, we have been buried with him through the baptism into his death purpose so that we so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we also, too, might walk in newness of life. So, if we've been buried with him in baptism, question, can we go to God and say, look, I'm pleading with you to give me power over my tendency to sin. Would that be a proper thing to go to God about?

I don't think so. Because you're still going to have the tendency, because sin didn't die, you died to it. The tendency is still there. Is sin more powerful than your ability to control it? I think as you grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, you discover that sin is more powerful than your ability to control it. So, I think it's another one of those questions that you say, well, I can't I can't go to God and say, look, give me the power to overcome sin. You know what his answer is?

I already did. I crucified you. If somebody that you know near and dear to your heart has left the planet, you don't get to send them text messages or emails because they're not going to respond. Why? Because they're dead. You know, the sin nature can send you text messages and emails and all kinds of stuff, but the real issue is you're dead to it. So, God has provided in these verses the probability of not sinning so much. If you grew up like I did in one of the mainline religions, one of the problems was that you just never could stop sinning. You tried to do everything that they prescribed, And you know what? It just got worse. It just got worse. But here is the first time that in the Word of God, information is given to us as believers that, wow, there's a real chance here I won't sin as much or I don't have to sin at all because I died.

So where does that put us in terms of dependence? It puts us, I think, in absolute dependence on God for deliverance from the power of sin, trusting Him and trusting His Spirit to do it. So what does it mean? It means the necessity to sin has been broken, gone. We're free to move now on another new plane. We're free in the power of Christ and the new man and the resurrected life.

It's interesting how At this point, when you talk to a lot of people, you get what I call the butt monkey. Yeah, butt. You don't know what it's like in my life. Yeah, I do. I know exactly what it's like in you. I've got the same spirit you've got. I've got the same sin nature like you have. And I have the same sort of struggles with sin like you have.

How is it to be dealt with? Am I to work at it, pray more? Cordy was talking this morning, gave a whole list of stuff that we should do to be more spiritual. Well, according to the verses we talked about this morning, all it did is make you sin more.

But God has given you provision in His Word to say to you, look, you're free. And what is, if I ask you, what is really Christian freedom? What really is it? Does it mean that I'm free from the power of sin so I can do what I want? Christian freedom is really an interesting little element that says, look, I have just changed masters. I'm not a slave to sin anymore. I'm a slave to righteousness. I just changed masters.

So the freedom is afforded me in Christ only and through His cross. So if the Holy Spirit to this end indwells me, He is going to implement this freedom in my life so that I do not have to be a slave to sin anymore, all based on the fact that I died with Christ. Now, if you are If you did die with Christ, and you were buried with Him, and you were resurrected with Him, there are certain things about this death, burial, and resurrection that are valuable. And the believer gets to partake of all the values of the cross, the death, burial, and resurrection, and there's a lot of them. When God worked to take us out of Adam and united us to Christ, why did He do it? He wanted to free us, but for what purpose?

Way back in Genesis when God is creating creatures, He creates them with a certain principle in play, and that they could reproduce after their own kind, like begets like. Cats produce cats. Dogs produce dogs. Birds produce birds. I've never seen a flying cat. I hope there's not any really staunch evolutionists in the room.

But God has this principle in place, like begets like. Well, that principle holds true in spiritual realm too. You and I, because we were born in Adam, we did what Adam does. He sins. Like begets like. But because we have been crucified with Christ, We now have a new life, and like begets like thereto. We can walk in newness because we are new, because we do have a new life. And so this word that you see a lot in Paul's epistles, in Christ, in the Beloved, in Him, That word in is a primary preposition denoting fixed position and place or time. The Spirit of God puts you in Christ and that's your fixed position from now on for all eternity.

There's no going back. You know, one of the mentors in my life years ago, people would call him up and say, oh, I have this problem with sin and that problem with sin, and they'd go on and on. And his answer would be, well, it's too late for you. And they say, why? And they say, because you died. It's too late, you can't go back. That's true, you can't go back. Even when you sin, you think about sinning as a believer, it's spiritual insanity. It does not fit with who you are. So, believers actually share, because of being united with Christ in His death, His crucifixion, his death, his burial, and his resurrection, and seated in him in the heavenlies today.

So these terms, when you see them and read them and scratch your head about, really, because we are so experience-oriented, we want verification by feeling or by some sort of incident in our life that would verify when in fact God says, look, I just want you to rest by faith in what I'm telling you.

Just trust me. And my Spirit will not only work in you, but He will persuade you that what I'm telling you is true. This newness of life that we're to walk in is not just something we're going to do in the by and by. It's now. Right now. So the Spirit has worked.

This baptism into Christ Jesus' death, I would say it's the substance. Co-crucifixion, co-death, co-burial, co-resurrection, co-seeding are the attributes of that substance. Baptism is the cause, the others are the effects. All this is unto the realization of one great divine purpose.

And if you go back to the last verse in chapter 5, His divine purpose is that grace might reign. Right? Isn't that what he said? That grace might be the reigning principle. So as you walk in newness of life, the reigning principle is implemented. You're living in grace. You're living under an umbrella that says, I have unlimited and unmerited blessings from God. No limits and no merit. And it's all because of what Christ did on the cross and my inclusion in it. I live under unlimited and unmerited blessing.

So, verse four, he says, Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into his death. So what's the significance of being buried? This word is synthapto. I think I pronounced that right. It kind of means this, it means to be buried together, that we might grow together. You're not buried by yourself, you're buried with Him. So it refers to the fact that you not only died, but the last incident in a human being's life on the earth is when they go into the ground and they shovel the dirt over them, right? We're done now. Now you can go visit the gravesite if you want, but you don't get to see George. George is six feet down there. He's not around anymore. Death and burial, it's over.

Now, if you look at Colossians 2, 11 and 12, you don't have to turn to it. There's two references to Christ's death as judgment on sin, of the sin nature, to those who are already saved. The aspect of his death, which provides the freedom for the Holy Spirit to control the sin nature. You will find this principle all through Paul's epistles. Everything he teaches us is based on the fact that we were crucified, buried, and resurrected with Christ. If there is a fulcrum in which the Christian life balances, Romans 6 is right where it is. Because if you don't know this information, or you know it and you don't just rest in it by faith, what are you stuck with?

You're stuck with trying to make your old man look and act like a Christian. And that is an impossibility. And you spend all your time working on a dead man, trying to get him to get up and walk and look like Christ. It isn't going to happen. So if you rest in the fact that you were crucified, buried and resurrected with Christ, then your whole experience, your whole growth is based on focusing on this new man. this new man, who you really are.

I dare say that we as believers don't appreciate who we are. We don't appreciate what we have and we certainly don't rest in the fact of where we are. Where we are is really important. So this is the ground positional truth of the believers, I want to say, experimental sanctification or being set apart to God's own youth. with the aspects of sanctification as made possible by and dependent on what Christ has already accomplished. It's really important for us when we come to Christ to recognize that He was our substitute. That He bore the penalty and the guilt for your sins. But that didn't take care of you, the sinner. What took care of you, the sinner, was this co-crucifixion with Christ. And you were buried with Him. You were buried. You know, it's difficult. You say, well, Lord, I'm looking around and all these Christians, I know they don't look any different than they did before.

We still live in this wonderful world of ours in which everything is dying. My sin nature never goes to sleep. It's even working when I'm asleep. How can this be true? The issue is, again, do I believe God? Do I trust in what He tells me? Or am I going with my experience? Because your experience will never verify what God's Word says. But we've been indwelt by the Spirit. And the Holy Spirit's job is to reveal to us and persuade us about the things of Christ. And these are the things that He'll persuade us about. So that we can, we are free to walk in this newness of life.

So, He not only provided the blood to cleanse and judge my sin, But he also took sin away. That final disposition of sin was accomplished when I was buried. He went into the tomb, a sin offering, sacrificed unto death. He came out completely unrelated to the burden of sin.

So, another point here. As we read and study under his grace about these, we'll just take these ten verses, What we're reading about is something that happened to the Lord Jesus Christ, and here He's trying to show us that what happened to Him also happened to us.

And so as you go on, especially in Paul's epistles, and you read about these stupendous things that God accomplished in Christ, you're really reading about yourself too, because whatever's true of Christ is true of you. You hear that? Whatever is true of Christ is true of you, and it's not some sort of fantasy or power of positive thinking or anything like that.

It's God's Word that says this is who you are. At this point, you understand that I baptized into my son's death, you were buried with him, and so there you are. So, it also points to the security of you as a believer. Our position in the Lord Jesus is unchangeable. Why? Because He's unchangeable.

If you were to lose your salvation, let's say that you believe that you could lose your salvation, here's what would have to happen. The Lord Jesus would have to come back to the planet. He would have to go back into the grave, come out the other side of the grave, go back up on the cross, wake up, and get down from the cross. If you're going to do that, I mean, that's a little difficult for me to buy that he intends to do that.

I can't find... No, he's not doing that. He's already accomplished what he and the Father have worked out. So I am permanently secure because of him, because of what he's done and how he included me in it. It's important for me to understand how I am included in him and what he's doing. The believer's walk in reigning in grace is God's divine object. He wants every one of us to walk in grace, to live under grace, to live in an umbrella of grace.

I don't know if you watch a lot of TV. I do sometimes. I love sports. But every once in a while I run past one of these shows that's kind of weird. And one of the really weird ones is this thing called Under the Dome. It's kind of strange because there's this town in New England someplace that this invisible dome came down and separated this town from all other towns and cities on the earth.

And you can't get into it and you can't get out of it. But the people that live into it, inside of it, have their own deal going on. And they figured out they're inside this dome and they can't get out. I thought, gee, that's pretty similar to what Christ has done with us. He crucified us, He buried us, He rose us in Christ under the dome of grace. And you can't get out. You're under there, you're blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, and you can't get out. Although we're always trying. You just can't get out.

So you might as well just sit down and rest in where God put you. What God has done has forever satisfied the issue of sin with the Father. And there were demands placed on man because of sin. There were demands. But the work of Christ opened the way for you and I to walk in a manner that's well pleasing to our Father.

2 Corinthians 5.15 says, And he died for all, so that they who live might no longer live unto themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf. When you were resurrected in Christ, did you show up outside the dome or in the dome? You showed up in the dome. You showed up in the heavenlies. You showed up in what the Word of God talks about as this thing called a brand new creation.

If any man be in Christ, he's an entirely new creation. He just isn't renovated. He's a brand new creation with a brand new life that there has never been this kind of human being before. Never. But you and I have been resurrected into this life. We have a new head. We are partakers of an inheritance, which is Christ Himself. We have every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. We're justified forever. And our citizenship has changed from this earth to heaven. So there are two main factors, the resurrection of Christ and the entire company of believers who have been resurrected with him.

Now, I just looked at my, I got my cell phone up here so I can keep track of the time. I could go for another hour. Then you'd never have me up here again. So I'm going to stop there, and next time I'm up here I'll finish up on this one. I'm going to leave you with this.

When you read verses like Romans 6, 1 through 10, slow down a little bit and pay attention to what it says. And when it says things like, you died in Christ, you were buried, and you were resurrected in Him, Don't get excited about it. Don't jump up and down. Don't question. Just trust Him.

That what He's telling us is true. If it's true, then we're free. We're free to live in Him, resurrected, and to be conformed on a conditional basis, on a moment by moment, into His very image. To walk, to actually walk, day by day, moment by moment, under this umbrella of grace. in the realm of blessing only.

Let's pray. Father, how I thank you for the information that you give us, for the blessing and the grace that you've put us under, and as we move and have our being in Christ, that we may be able to continue to grow in His grace, and in particular in the knowledge of who He is and who we are in Him. I thank you. I pray in your Son's precious name. Amen.