Our Sure Deliverance from Sin and Bondage
Romans Six
Romans
6:1¶ To what conclusion, then, shall we come? Are we to persist in sinning in
order that the grace extended to us may be the greater?
·
We shall find out that grace is really defined as the revealed
Person of Jesus Christ within us.
·
The more that the Person of Jesus Christ is revealed within our
own lives, through our yielding to His cross, the more that we will
automatically live out of the grace of God. The grace of God is the very life
of Christ revealed and manifested within us.
·
Watchman Nee defines grace as God doing everything in us and for
us. It is literally God pleasing and
blessing us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places as we obey Him.
·
“The Law” of Moses spoken repeatedly by Paul in Romans 6 and 7
deals with the embodiment of Moses’ law.
The law is defined as us trying to please God and serve Him through our
own strength and means. Indeed we shall
see it that it is an impossible system.
God knew it and gave us the law to expose our sinfulness, as we shall
see later. The law’s main functions are
to expose our sinfulness, humble us and give us a desperate need for
Christ. It is impossible for us
to keep Ten Commandments.!
Ga
3:24 So that the law is become our tutor to bring us unto Christ,
that we might be justified by faith.
2
No,
indeed; how shall we who have died to sin, live in it any longer?
·
We can talk
about dying to sin and being dead to sin.
I am of the belief, after being a believer for twenty-one years, that
this death to sin has to be an actual tangible spiritual death to self that the
believer must go through.
·
For example,
I know that in the eyes of God we have died to sin with Him on the cross, two
thousand years ago. I know that we have
been resurrected with Him into heaven and sit at the right of God in Christ.
·
However
where Paul says in the above how shall we who have died to sin, live in
it any longer?, I have, I still
experience, and I am still of the belief, that the believer must experience a
tangible spiritual death in his or her relationship to sin, in order to no
longer live in it. Remember! A corpse lying in a casket would be the
only perfect candidate unable to respond to a beautiful woman who entices him
in one way or another!
·
The more
that we experience a tangible spiritual death through the operation of the
cross of Christ, the less that we shall live in sin because the dying “self
life” finds itself more unable to respond to sin, on the premises that in its
dying it is losing all of its strength and faculties.
·
The process
is lengthy and painful but of supreme and eternal importance to us, if we are
to be truly effective for Christ.
·
The supreme
weakness of the church are the multitudes and multitudes of “alive
believers”. God does not need our
plans, our wisdom, and our church programs as we have for 2000 years
erroneously believed. God needs
dead believers!!
·
At every
point and in every turn where our sick and diseased self-life is still alive it
will limit and hinder God. Our love of
self will always “draw a line in the sand towards God” if the price is too
high. Our ugly self will always arise
in sharp protest and pain to the Lord and His callings for us, if the price
gets too high for us and the heat is too hot!!
This is why the church is full of spiritual babies still in diapers
after many years of walking with the Lord.
The church is laden with untold believers that have said no the Lord,
once that God took them to a certain spiritual level, where the commitment or
the price took them out of their comfort zone.
Therefore God is severely bounded and limited to how far He can work
through most believers. What a great
pity!!
·
The eyes of
God dart to and fro through the whole earth finding one believer that will
allow his or her self life to be taken to the cross so that God will not have
boundaries to impede Him.
·
Only the
believer that is on his or her way to this death of self will be broken enough,
yielded enough, and is losing the sense and pain of suffering enough, by the
death to self, that he or she will continue to say yes to the Lord. Remember, the more dead we are to self, the
more that the pain of suffering loses it sting, based on the fact that a corpse
cannot suffer!
·
This
believer will be used greatly by God, because his or her life has no bounds, no
hindrances, and no limits of saying “NO” to the Lord.
·
Remember!! God will do more through one dead believer than through one
thousand live ones!!
The
following are some of the tangible aspects of this spiritual death exercised by
the cross of Christ as we yield to Him.
The law of the cross resides in the principle of obedience. The crucified Christ dwells in us and the
law of the cross is resident in Him.
1Co 1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a
stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; This means that
with every act of our obedience to the voice of the Holy Spirit the cross will
do a specific work to continue to kill this diseased self in us.
·
The believer
indeed experiences a gradual but actual spiritual death. There is an annihilation or extinction of
self. The believer progresses and
gradually loses sight of the “I” in him or her. The “I” or “me” finally dies
out, and or literally is extinguished. The self diminishes, loses it life, its
energy and will power. It becomes less
recognizable to the believer and loses its power to exert itself, to be
independent, to be able to overcome by its own strength, and exert its will.
The self as it becomes extinguished, is swallowed up in the immense river of the
Lord’s resurrection life. The
believers’ ability to chose as he or she wants becomes weaker and less
perceptible. The many deaths to
reputation, fame, timing, expectations and so forth, which God takes it
through, cause the death of the self-life.
It is a gradual processes, which takes years until we can say No,
indeed; how shall we who have died to sin, live in it any longer?
3 And do you not know that all of us who have
been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?
·
Verse three
echoes what we have talked about in verse two.
What is this baptism into the death of Christ? Please realize that Christ did not simply comment about His
death. He actually went through
it. Death is not only the absolute loss
of all strength, all faculties, and all will, but also the absolute loss of our
perception of existing. This must occur
to our sinful self for a complete freedom from sin, hurt and bondage to be
perfectly executed. It will not happen
in this life in a perfect form, but we sure can work on it!
4
Well,
then, we by our baptism were buried with Him in death, in order that, just as
Christ was raised from among the dead by the Father’s glorious power, we also
should live an entirely new life.
·
We must also
agree that part of the process of every death is burial. The buried body after death decays into
nothingness. One writer states that a
human body right after death still has the warmth of life, the process rigormortis
is still active and so forth. Only in
burial is the true loss and decay of all life consummated. We must not lose hope however, if we are
called to and desire to go through this process. Hallelujah!
·
We must remember that God does His greatest works out of
death.
Joh
6:39 And this is the Father’s will
which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the
last day.
Eph
1:20 Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the
dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places,
Rom
4:17 ¶ (as it is written, A father of many nations have I made thee) before him
whom he believed, even God,
who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though
they were.
5 For since we have become one with Him by sharing in His death, we shall also be one with Him by sharing in His resurrection.
·
As we have
spoken above. We must become one with
Christ in tangibly identifying with His death in a spiritual sense, to tangibly
experience the infinite liberty and power of His resurrection life. It is a principle. The more we die to self, the more that shall
experience Christ’s resurrection life.
Philippians
3:10 I long to know Christ and the
power which is in His resurrection, and to share in His sufferings and die even
as He died;
11 in the hope that I may attain to the
resurrection from among the dead. (This so called “out resurrection” discussed by Paul is in
this earthly life.
6 This we know—that our old self was nailed to
the cross with Him, in order that our sinful nature might be deprived of its
power, so that we should no longer be the slaves of sin;
Once again
we note Paul’s continuing discussion of having the old self nailed to the
cross with Christ. As the self
experiences a deepening death, it is deprived of its power, as its very existence
is extinguished. The dying self-life
becomes more and more incapable of responding to sin based on the premise that
a corpse cannot sin, and the relationship of its being a slave of sin; is
broken.
7 For he that is dead is freed from sin.
·
A corpse in a
casket cannot sin!! Hallelujah!
8 But, seeing that we have died with Christ,
we believe that we shall also live with Him;
·
The more
that we tangibly experience this death to self, the more that we shall
experience the liberty of the sons of God in the resurrection life of the
Lord. Mortality is swallowed up by the
immensity of immortality!
·
As the self-life is destroyed, we pass on more and more into the
very life of God Himself. Death is
swallowed up into the victory of the infinity, the freedom, the faith, the
immensity, the wisdom, the river of life, and the will of the Lord who resides
within us.
1Co
15:54 So when this corruptible shall
have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then
shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in
victory.
9
because
we know that Christ, having come back to life, is no longer liable to die.
·
The
resurrection life of the Lord is consistent of absolutely no sin, no death, no
bondages or hurts and so forth. Don’t you
thirst more and more to obey the Lord implicitly and finally be able enter into
the wonders and immensity of Christ’s resurrection life here on earth? It is available to every one!!
Isa 55:1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
10
Death has no longer any power over Him. For by the death which He died He
became, once for all, dead in relation to sin; but by the life which He now
lives He is alive in relation to God.
·
The
wonderful attributes of resurrection life!
Death of any type in quality and quantity, whether physical (in heaven), emotional, or spiritual has absolutely no power over
resurrection life.
Acts
13:35 Wherefore he saith also in
another psalm, Thou shalt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
36 For David, after he had served his own
generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers,
and saw corruption: {after…: or, after he had in his own age served the will of God}
37 But he, whom God raised again, saw no corruption.
11
In
the same way you also must regard yourselves as dead in relation to sin, but as
alive in
·
I believe
that true regarding or reckoning of our death to sin can only be fulfilled in
our tangible experiencing of it. We
can, and must always believe by faith for it to be true however. Whether we are a young believer in the Lord
that has not yet experienced the dying of the self-life or not; we must always
believe that we have died with the Lord on the cross, been buried with Him, and
have been resurrected with Him into heaven.
Our faith in these facts, will allow God to bring the tangible
experiences of death to self to pass gradually upon our lives.
13 and no longer lend your faculties as
unrighteous weapons for Sin to use. On the contrary surrender your very selves
to God as living men who have risen from the dead, and surrender your several
faculties to God, to be used as weapons to maintain the right.
·
Once again I
believe that for us to truly no longer lend ourr faculties as unrighteous
weapons for Sin to use we must enter into the liberty of resurrection
life by the death of the self life.
Many times we as believers try to be good, try to make the right choices
for the Lord, and so forth, just to fall flat on our face again and again. This is the mark that resurrection life,
through the grace of the Lord, which is His manifested presence in us, has
still has fully not taken place. As we
shall study in Romans 7 our attempts to serve God by overcoming sin in our
strength and not in the freedom of resurrection life, is termed as serving God under
the law instead of under grace.
14
For
Sin shall not be lord over you, since you are subjects not of Law, but of
grace.
·
Only as we
are living in the resurrection life of the revealed Person of Christ within us,
does grace become a reality. Once
again, grace is defined as the revealed person of Christ within us. You will notice that we do not make a
conscious, laborious choice not to sin.
Sin no longer masters us: it becomes a given fact that we naturally and
gradually enter in, and not labor into.
No type of death, or sin can dominate or touch the resurrection life of
the Lord flowing through us. This is
grace and sin cannot master it.
The law is our trying to have sin not lord it
over, or master us through our own strength and plans in the absence of
resurrection life. This is the state of
many believers today.