I am Alive because my Savior Rescued me from Death
Therefore, I live through his Death and Ressurrwcrion
He paid the Price for my Redemption
The life I live now is lived in servanthood, bought, redeemed, sanctified, and sealed by the blood of Christ, which he paid in exchange for my life, freedom and service to be devoted to proclaim his sacrifice, message, resurrection hope and manifested Glory for the
Gospel of free Grace
If we have become united with Him
in the
likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also
in
the likeness of His resurrection
We have been immersed into
His death
Therefore, we have been buried
with Him
through baptism, or through that immersion,
that union into death,
in order that,
as Christ was raised from the dead
to the glory of the Father, so we too might
walk in
Anew of life
There’s the point.
We are identified with Christ, point one.
Sealed.
And the logical sequence to that is,
I AM
in
union with Christ, likewise,
I have to be
then in union with His death and resurrection
That is exactly right. That’s how
I AM
Joined to Christ in transformation.
I AM in Christ and Christ is in me,
am joined to him in
His death and His resurrection.
I died in Christ, and I rose in Christ.
old is gone, so Anew could come
I share in His death that I may
share in His life.
He became my sin for me
that we might be made righteous in Him.
This is the
transformation
The old has died.
I AM
crucified with Christ.
That’s death. Crucifixion is a symbol of death.
Nevertheless, I live
An old I dies, is
transformed
and
anew I lives, And yet it’s not just me now
It’s Christ living in me
A Christian is a transformed person.
The Caterpillar becomes the Butterfly. death passes over to Life.
Darkness to Glorious Light.. not the same light,
ANew Light
The
Light of Christ in Ever Manifested Glory
It is not just someone who says, once somewhere in the past
I believed, and therefore God declared me just and now it doesn’t matter
how I live, grace bounds toward my abounding sin.
That’s not what Scripture teaches. There is
justification and there is sanctification, which includes an
initial transformation.
Now, that leads to a third step in Paul’s logic.
Through this death the body of sin has been destroyed.
That little phrase is in appeal to common knowledge among the believers, including the Romans. This is basic to all of our understanding of salvation.
You can’t understand salvation if you don’t understand this.
The body of sin has been destroyed, three facts. Fact number one: That our old self was crucified with Him. What we used to be is dead. What does that mean? It means what we used to be isn’t alive. It’s not around.
Sometimes you hear people say, well, before you’re saved, you’re just this corrupt, old person, this “old man,” often the term is used. But when you become a Christian, you get a new man and your whole Christian life the new fights the old. Do you hear that?
What that does, it makes salvation purely addition instead of transformation.
If I am still what I used to be, and you added something to me,
where’s the transformation?
What I read in the Bible here very clearly is that the old self was killed.
And that is exactly what 2 Corinthians 5:17 said. I am a new creation. I am not what I was. The old self is not the flesh
because we still have the flesh, our unredeemed humanness.
The old man is the unregenerate nature, what you are in Adam, what I was in Adam. So it is very, very serious to think of a Christian as an old man and a new man together. That is not what the Bible teaches. It teaches that the old self was crucified. And crucifixion is a metaphor for death.
It’s dead. I am not what I was. I am a new creation.
Paul, in Galatians 2:20, says it and I repeat it again, "I am crucified with Christ.” Ego, I, the old I is dead. “Nevertheless I live.” A new I lives, yet it’s not just I, but it’s now the power of Christ in me. I have a new nature. To put it another way, if you don’t want that terminology, a new disposition. And Paul describes that new disposition in 2 Corinthians 5 when he says, I no longer see Christ the same way I used to see Him. I made an evaluation of Christ; it was totally erroneous because my perspective was all wrong. But once I came to know Him, my entire perspective changed. I used to be able to look at people and evaluate them according to the flesh. After the salvation,I no longer evaluate any man according to the flesh. I see with spiritual eyes. Everything has changed; I have a whole new disposition.
If you want to know what that disposition is like you can go back even to the Old Testament to Psalm 119and you’ll hear that disposition speak when David says, "Oh how I love thy law. It is my delight.” Or when you hear Paul say, "With the inner man I delight in the law of God." It’s those holy longings and those righteous aspirations. It’s that hatred of sin and that love of what is pure and virtuous and that longing to obey and to please God and to worship and glorify and honor him, all of that is coming out of that new man.
Paul insists then that there is a breach, a cleavage, with really complete proportions, complete significance. And it’s not a process; it is an already completed reality. The old man has died. John Murray, in his book Principles of Conduct, writes, "To suppose that the old man has been crucified and still lives or has been raised again from this death is to contradict the obvious force of the import of crucifixion. Paul says our old man has been crucified. He doesn’t say our old man is in the process of being crucified. The believer, that is a new man, a new creation. But he is a new man not yet made perfect. Sin still dwells in him and he still commits sin."
This is true. We still have the unredeemed flesh. The old man is gone; a new man lives in this incarceration of unredeemed flesh. That’s where the battle is. But we are a new creation. And the reason I say that to you is this. You cannot rightly assess a person’s spiritual condition if you think they are both an old man and a new man, because then you can justify a person behaving like an old man and still say they’re a Christian. You understand that? But if you understand that the new creation has holy longings that just are not fulfilled, that are debilitated by the flesh, that’s a different dynamic altogether.
“The old man,” says John Murray, “is the unregenerate man. The new man is the regenerate man created in Christ Jesus unto good works. It is no more feasible to call the believer a new man and an old man,” he writes, “than it is to call him a regenerate man and an unregenerate man. And neither is it warranted to speak of the believer as having in him the old man and the new man. That kind of terminology is without warrant and is but another method of doing prejudice to the doctrine which Paul was so jealous to establish when he said our old man has been crucified.”
The old man doesn’t exist, folks. You’re a whole new creation. You’re never exhorted to put off the old man. You have done that. Colossians, chapter 3, verses 9 and 10: "Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices and have put on the new self." In other words, behave consistently with who you are. You are a new creation.
Now he takes us to a second fact in this third step in his logic. Back to verse 6: First, that our old self was crucified with Him, second, that our body of sin might be done away with. There’s the second fact. "The body of sin is done away with." What does it mean? Some Bibles say “destroyed.” What are we talking about here? What is this body of sin, this entity of sin? I don’t think he’s talking about the physical body here. He’s talking about the entity of sin. What is he saying here? That it is destroyed. Certainly he doesn’t mean it is eliminated, because we still battle with sin.
What does he mean then that it is destroyed?
Well let’s take a look at that word “destroyed” because that’s the key. It is the word katarge. Some have taught that it means eradicated, so that you can reach a point where your sin is eradicated; you just never sin.
But I want you to understand how this term is used. And it’s not really that difficult.
The term occurs twenty-seven times in the New Testament. And if you track its uses you begin to get a feel for what the word katarge means. It can have the sense of devastation and destruction. But it has a lot of other usages as well. For example, let’s see how it’s used in Romans.
When Paul, in chapter 3, was speaking about the apostasy of Israel, Paul said, chapter 3, verse 3: “Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?” That’s interesting because “without effect” is the term katarge. Katarge obviously couldn’t be translated “destroyed” because nothing can destroy the faith of God.
So the translators understood that the meaning of the word was to make something of no effect. You’re not destroying it, you’re not wiping it out; you’re just rendering it powerless. Secondly, also in the third chapter of Romans, verse 31, Paul said, "Do we then (same verb) make void the law through faith? God forbid, yea, we establish the law." This couldn’t be rendered: Do we destroy the law? Because the law is eternal. It simply means when we accept faith in grace are we rendering the law of no account. In chapter 4, we have the same thing. Explaining the promise of God to Abraham, he explains that it was through faith and not law. Paul said, verse 14, "If they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect."
Of course the promise can’t be destroyed; God’s word can’t be destroyed. The faith of God can’t be destroyed, that is the Christian faith, the truth, the gospel. The law can’t be destroyed, none of these things can be destroyed but they can be rendered ineffective by how men respond. In chapter 7, two more times katarge appears and it is used in very similar ways in verse 2 and verse 6. Now, in conclusion, looking at those things, we can sum it up by saying the term katarge means to render idle, unemployed, inactive, inoperative, to deprive of its strength, to make bare, and these are all kinds of meanings coming out of lexicons. To cause a person or a thing to have no further efficiency or effect, to deprive of force, influence or power, to bring to nothing, to make of no effect. That’s what it means.
Now follow that back to Romans 6. Once our old self was killed with him, the entity of sin (the dominating entity of sin) was deprived of its controlling power. That’s the idea. The best translation “deprived of its controlling power.” J.B. Philips even translated this in a way that captures it: "Let us never forget that our old selves died with him on the cross that the tyranny of sin over us might be broken." That is exactly what it is saying.
That leads to a third fact also in verse 6, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. That is a fact, not a request. You understand that? One fact leads to another fact. First fact, we died. That means that the old, dominating, controlling power of sin is rendered inoperable, so that we no longer are slaves to sin. Slavery has been broke; doesn’t mean sin isn’t there. It means we’re not slaves to it anymore. We’re not enslaved. It isn’t mandatory like it used to be that we sin. We are no longer slaves to sin. Verse 17...verse 16 rather. "Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, either sin resulting in death or obedience resulting in righteousness.But thanks be to God," verse 17, "though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin you became slaves of righteousness."
The whole thing can be summed up in saying the old self was a slave to sin; the new self is a slave to righteousness. That’s the change. The old self was in perfect agreement with the fallen flesh; the new self is in perfect disagreement with the fallen flesh. No more bondage, no more bondage. Verse 7 sums it up. "For he who has died is free from sin." When you died in Christ, you’re freed from sin’s tyranny. The controlling, dominating, sovereignty of sin has been broken. That’s verse 14, says, "Sin shall not be master over you for you’re not any longer under the law, you’re under grace."
So what justified person is not only declared righteous, but set free from the dominating power of sin? A sanctified person set free to the dominating power of righteousness. That’s why at first John says we don’t continue in sin, as the continual, unbroken pattern evidencing tyranny. We begin to live a pattern of righteousness interrupted by sin, but not a continual pattern of unbroken sin.
Now, follow Paul’s logic. We are immersed into Christ. Point one. Secondly, we are then immersed into his death and resurrection. Point two. The result of that: That entity of sin which dominated and controlled us has been rendered inoperative. It is no longer in control. Righteousness now is in control, still engaged in battling the unredeemed flesh.
And he’s not yet finished with his thought. He wants to take it one more step, verses 8 to 10: "For if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over Him, for the death that He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God." And this is the fourth step in his logic. From now on, we live to God. Everything is directed that way. We want to praise Him; we want to love Him. We want to adore Him; we want to worship. We want to give to Him. We want to serve Him. We want to obey His law, proclaim His word. You say but I don’t...I don’t do that as I ought to. But you know that’s the cry of your heart. And when you sin, you feel the guilt and the anguish because it goes against the grain of who you are.
Now our longings are right. Now our desires are right. Come rising out of that new man and they collide with evil desire in our flesh. Therein lies the battle. But if you’re not a Christian, there is no battle. If you are, there’s a real war being waged. He sums it all up in verse 11, "so consider yourselves to be dead to sin”literally to have died to sin “but alive to God in Christ Jesus." You’re not just someone declared righteous;you’re someone who’s been totally transformed, totally transformed. And you now live a new life. Christ has broken the power of sin; He has come into your life and made you the righteousness of God in Him.
You have been risen to live the life of a justified sinner, a life that is all together new. The old life is finished, gone, you died to it. And you emerged from that death justified, transformed. The law can’t touch you. The penalty of sin has been paid. And you now have a holy principle operative within you, the divine nature and the indwelling spirit. And the One who was made sin for you has made you righteous.
Now you say, well I haven’t arrived. No, you haven’t arrived. None of us have. We’re still battling the flesh.That’s why in Romans 8 we cry out for the redemption of the flesh so we can get the whole package. The fullness of salvation yet awaits us.
But this is the point I want you to understand: A Christian is not simply a person who gets forgiveness, a Christian is not simply a person who gets to go to heaven, not simply a person who receives the Holy Spirit; he is a person who has become someone he was not. He is a saint, a child of God, a divine masterpiece, a child of light, a born son, a citizen of heaven, not only positionally, not only judicially, but actually. Becoming a Christian is becoming a new creation. That’s what we are. And that’s what we see as we look at our lives. I don’t... I don’t see my own life as perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I see sin in my life, but I hate it. That’s the evidence of my new nature. John Newton, who was a dissolute,dissipated, debauched sinner of the worst ilk, was converted by amazing grace, and wrote so many hymns like that. One thing that he wrote that is not in his hymnology sums up what Paul is saying here.
This is what John Newton said. "I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. But by the cross of Jesus Christ, I am not what I was." That’s it. That’s a new creation. What a gift.
Let’s bow in prayer. Our Lord, we have just touched the surface of this. So much could be said and I pray that Your Holy Spirit would make these things clear to all our hearts. We thank You that You’ve shaped us and made us into new creations. And we’re not what we ought to be and we’re not what we want to be and we’re not what we’re going to be, and neither are we what we used to be.
Father, how glorious a gift is this, to have old things passed away and be made new. To be granted love,joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, the fruit of the Spirit. To be given the knowledge of the truth, the power of the Spirit, oh Father, how rich we are. We thank You for the miracle of transformation that accompanies justification. We pray that this sanctification, this transformation which was begun at that moment of our faith, will progress and continue along the path towards Christ-likeness, ever increasing until Jesus we see. We pray in his great name, amen.
Therefore, I live through his Death and Ressurrwcrion
He paid the Price for my Redemption
The life I live now is lived in servanthood, bought, redeemed, sanctified, and sealed by the blood of Christ, which he paid in exchange for my life, freedom and service to be devoted to proclaim his sacrifice, message, resurrection hope and manifested Glory for the
Gospel of free Grace
If we have become united with Him
in the
likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also
in
the likeness of His resurrection
We have been immersed into
His death
Therefore, we have been buried
with Him
through baptism, or through that immersion,
that union into death,
in order that,
as Christ was raised from the dead
to the glory of the Father, so we too might
walk in
Anew of life
There’s the point.
We are identified with Christ, point one.
Sealed.
And the logical sequence to that is,
I AM
in
union with Christ, likewise,
I have to be
then in union with His death and resurrection
That is exactly right. That’s how
I AM
Joined to Christ in transformation.
I AM in Christ and Christ is in me,
am joined to him in
His death and His resurrection.
I died in Christ, and I rose in Christ.
old is gone, so Anew could come
I share in His death that I may
share in His life.
He became my sin for me
that we might be made righteous in Him.
This is the
transformation
The old has died.
I AM
crucified with Christ.
That’s death. Crucifixion is a symbol of death.
Nevertheless, I live
An old I dies, is
transformed
and
anew I lives, And yet it’s not just me now
It’s Christ living in me
A Christian is a transformed person.
The Caterpillar becomes the Butterfly. death passes over to Life.
Darkness to Glorious Light.. not the same light,
ANew Light
The
Light of Christ in Ever Manifested Glory
It is not just someone who says, once somewhere in the past
I believed, and therefore God declared me just and now it doesn’t matter
how I live, grace bounds toward my abounding sin.
That’s not what Scripture teaches. There is
justification and there is sanctification, which includes an
initial transformation.
Now, that leads to a third step in Paul’s logic.
Through this death the body of sin has been destroyed.
That little phrase is in appeal to common knowledge among the believers, including the Romans. This is basic to all of our understanding of salvation.
You can’t understand salvation if you don’t understand this.
The body of sin has been destroyed, three facts. Fact number one: That our old self was crucified with Him. What we used to be is dead. What does that mean? It means what we used to be isn’t alive. It’s not around.
Sometimes you hear people say, well, before you’re saved, you’re just this corrupt, old person, this “old man,” often the term is used. But when you become a Christian, you get a new man and your whole Christian life the new fights the old. Do you hear that?
What that does, it makes salvation purely addition instead of transformation.
If I am still what I used to be, and you added something to me,
where’s the transformation?
What I read in the Bible here very clearly is that the old self was killed.
And that is exactly what 2 Corinthians 5:17 said. I am a new creation. I am not what I was. The old self is not the flesh
because we still have the flesh, our unredeemed humanness.
The old man is the unregenerate nature, what you are in Adam, what I was in Adam. So it is very, very serious to think of a Christian as an old man and a new man together. That is not what the Bible teaches. It teaches that the old self was crucified. And crucifixion is a metaphor for death.
It’s dead. I am not what I was. I am a new creation.
Paul, in Galatians 2:20, says it and I repeat it again, "I am crucified with Christ.” Ego, I, the old I is dead. “Nevertheless I live.” A new I lives, yet it’s not just I, but it’s now the power of Christ in me. I have a new nature. To put it another way, if you don’t want that terminology, a new disposition. And Paul describes that new disposition in 2 Corinthians 5 when he says, I no longer see Christ the same way I used to see Him. I made an evaluation of Christ; it was totally erroneous because my perspective was all wrong. But once I came to know Him, my entire perspective changed. I used to be able to look at people and evaluate them according to the flesh. After the salvation,I no longer evaluate any man according to the flesh. I see with spiritual eyes. Everything has changed; I have a whole new disposition.
If you want to know what that disposition is like you can go back even to the Old Testament to Psalm 119and you’ll hear that disposition speak when David says, "Oh how I love thy law. It is my delight.” Or when you hear Paul say, "With the inner man I delight in the law of God." It’s those holy longings and those righteous aspirations. It’s that hatred of sin and that love of what is pure and virtuous and that longing to obey and to please God and to worship and glorify and honor him, all of that is coming out of that new man.
Paul insists then that there is a breach, a cleavage, with really complete proportions, complete significance. And it’s not a process; it is an already completed reality. The old man has died. John Murray, in his book Principles of Conduct, writes, "To suppose that the old man has been crucified and still lives or has been raised again from this death is to contradict the obvious force of the import of crucifixion. Paul says our old man has been crucified. He doesn’t say our old man is in the process of being crucified. The believer, that is a new man, a new creation. But he is a new man not yet made perfect. Sin still dwells in him and he still commits sin."
This is true. We still have the unredeemed flesh. The old man is gone; a new man lives in this incarceration of unredeemed flesh. That’s where the battle is. But we are a new creation. And the reason I say that to you is this. You cannot rightly assess a person’s spiritual condition if you think they are both an old man and a new man, because then you can justify a person behaving like an old man and still say they’re a Christian. You understand that? But if you understand that the new creation has holy longings that just are not fulfilled, that are debilitated by the flesh, that’s a different dynamic altogether.
“The old man,” says John Murray, “is the unregenerate man. The new man is the regenerate man created in Christ Jesus unto good works. It is no more feasible to call the believer a new man and an old man,” he writes, “than it is to call him a regenerate man and an unregenerate man. And neither is it warranted to speak of the believer as having in him the old man and the new man. That kind of terminology is without warrant and is but another method of doing prejudice to the doctrine which Paul was so jealous to establish when he said our old man has been crucified.”
The old man doesn’t exist, folks. You’re a whole new creation. You’re never exhorted to put off the old man. You have done that. Colossians, chapter 3, verses 9 and 10: "Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices and have put on the new self." In other words, behave consistently with who you are. You are a new creation.
Now he takes us to a second fact in this third step in his logic. Back to verse 6: First, that our old self was crucified with Him, second, that our body of sin might be done away with. There’s the second fact. "The body of sin is done away with." What does it mean? Some Bibles say “destroyed.” What are we talking about here? What is this body of sin, this entity of sin? I don’t think he’s talking about the physical body here. He’s talking about the entity of sin. What is he saying here? That it is destroyed. Certainly he doesn’t mean it is eliminated, because we still battle with sin.
What does he mean then that it is destroyed?
Well let’s take a look at that word “destroyed” because that’s the key. It is the word katarge. Some have taught that it means eradicated, so that you can reach a point where your sin is eradicated; you just never sin.
But I want you to understand how this term is used. And it’s not really that difficult.
The term occurs twenty-seven times in the New Testament. And if you track its uses you begin to get a feel for what the word katarge means. It can have the sense of devastation and destruction. But it has a lot of other usages as well. For example, let’s see how it’s used in Romans.
When Paul, in chapter 3, was speaking about the apostasy of Israel, Paul said, chapter 3, verse 3: “Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?” That’s interesting because “without effect” is the term katarge. Katarge obviously couldn’t be translated “destroyed” because nothing can destroy the faith of God.
So the translators understood that the meaning of the word was to make something of no effect. You’re not destroying it, you’re not wiping it out; you’re just rendering it powerless. Secondly, also in the third chapter of Romans, verse 31, Paul said, "Do we then (same verb) make void the law through faith? God forbid, yea, we establish the law." This couldn’t be rendered: Do we destroy the law? Because the law is eternal. It simply means when we accept faith in grace are we rendering the law of no account. In chapter 4, we have the same thing. Explaining the promise of God to Abraham, he explains that it was through faith and not law. Paul said, verse 14, "If they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect."
Of course the promise can’t be destroyed; God’s word can’t be destroyed. The faith of God can’t be destroyed, that is the Christian faith, the truth, the gospel. The law can’t be destroyed, none of these things can be destroyed but they can be rendered ineffective by how men respond. In chapter 7, two more times katarge appears and it is used in very similar ways in verse 2 and verse 6. Now, in conclusion, looking at those things, we can sum it up by saying the term katarge means to render idle, unemployed, inactive, inoperative, to deprive of its strength, to make bare, and these are all kinds of meanings coming out of lexicons. To cause a person or a thing to have no further efficiency or effect, to deprive of force, influence or power, to bring to nothing, to make of no effect. That’s what it means.
Now follow that back to Romans 6. Once our old self was killed with him, the entity of sin (the dominating entity of sin) was deprived of its controlling power. That’s the idea. The best translation “deprived of its controlling power.” J.B. Philips even translated this in a way that captures it: "Let us never forget that our old selves died with him on the cross that the tyranny of sin over us might be broken." That is exactly what it is saying.
That leads to a third fact also in verse 6, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. That is a fact, not a request. You understand that? One fact leads to another fact. First fact, we died. That means that the old, dominating, controlling power of sin is rendered inoperable, so that we no longer are slaves to sin. Slavery has been broke; doesn’t mean sin isn’t there. It means we’re not slaves to it anymore. We’re not enslaved. It isn’t mandatory like it used to be that we sin. We are no longer slaves to sin. Verse 17...verse 16 rather. "Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, either sin resulting in death or obedience resulting in righteousness.But thanks be to God," verse 17, "though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin you became slaves of righteousness."
The whole thing can be summed up in saying the old self was a slave to sin; the new self is a slave to righteousness. That’s the change. The old self was in perfect agreement with the fallen flesh; the new self is in perfect disagreement with the fallen flesh. No more bondage, no more bondage. Verse 7 sums it up. "For he who has died is free from sin." When you died in Christ, you’re freed from sin’s tyranny. The controlling, dominating, sovereignty of sin has been broken. That’s verse 14, says, "Sin shall not be master over you for you’re not any longer under the law, you’re under grace."
So what justified person is not only declared righteous, but set free from the dominating power of sin? A sanctified person set free to the dominating power of righteousness. That’s why at first John says we don’t continue in sin, as the continual, unbroken pattern evidencing tyranny. We begin to live a pattern of righteousness interrupted by sin, but not a continual pattern of unbroken sin.
Now, follow Paul’s logic. We are immersed into Christ. Point one. Secondly, we are then immersed into his death and resurrection. Point two. The result of that: That entity of sin which dominated and controlled us has been rendered inoperative. It is no longer in control. Righteousness now is in control, still engaged in battling the unredeemed flesh.
And he’s not yet finished with his thought. He wants to take it one more step, verses 8 to 10: "For if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over Him, for the death that He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God." And this is the fourth step in his logic. From now on, we live to God. Everything is directed that way. We want to praise Him; we want to love Him. We want to adore Him; we want to worship. We want to give to Him. We want to serve Him. We want to obey His law, proclaim His word. You say but I don’t...I don’t do that as I ought to. But you know that’s the cry of your heart. And when you sin, you feel the guilt and the anguish because it goes against the grain of who you are.
Now our longings are right. Now our desires are right. Come rising out of that new man and they collide with evil desire in our flesh. Therein lies the battle. But if you’re not a Christian, there is no battle. If you are, there’s a real war being waged. He sums it all up in verse 11, "so consider yourselves to be dead to sin”literally to have died to sin “but alive to God in Christ Jesus." You’re not just someone declared righteous;you’re someone who’s been totally transformed, totally transformed. And you now live a new life. Christ has broken the power of sin; He has come into your life and made you the righteousness of God in Him.
You have been risen to live the life of a justified sinner, a life that is all together new. The old life is finished, gone, you died to it. And you emerged from that death justified, transformed. The law can’t touch you. The penalty of sin has been paid. And you now have a holy principle operative within you, the divine nature and the indwelling spirit. And the One who was made sin for you has made you righteous.
Now you say, well I haven’t arrived. No, you haven’t arrived. None of us have. We’re still battling the flesh.That’s why in Romans 8 we cry out for the redemption of the flesh so we can get the whole package. The fullness of salvation yet awaits us.
But this is the point I want you to understand: A Christian is not simply a person who gets forgiveness, a Christian is not simply a person who gets to go to heaven, not simply a person who receives the Holy Spirit; he is a person who has become someone he was not. He is a saint, a child of God, a divine masterpiece, a child of light, a born son, a citizen of heaven, not only positionally, not only judicially, but actually. Becoming a Christian is becoming a new creation. That’s what we are. And that’s what we see as we look at our lives. I don’t... I don’t see my own life as perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I see sin in my life, but I hate it. That’s the evidence of my new nature. John Newton, who was a dissolute,dissipated, debauched sinner of the worst ilk, was converted by amazing grace, and wrote so many hymns like that. One thing that he wrote that is not in his hymnology sums up what Paul is saying here.
This is what John Newton said. "I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. But by the cross of Jesus Christ, I am not what I was." That’s it. That’s a new creation. What a gift.
Let’s bow in prayer. Our Lord, we have just touched the surface of this. So much could be said and I pray that Your Holy Spirit would make these things clear to all our hearts. We thank You that You’ve shaped us and made us into new creations. And we’re not what we ought to be and we’re not what we want to be and we’re not what we’re going to be, and neither are we what we used to be.
Father, how glorious a gift is this, to have old things passed away and be made new. To be granted love,joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, the fruit of the Spirit. To be given the knowledge of the truth, the power of the Spirit, oh Father, how rich we are. We thank You for the miracle of transformation that accompanies justification. We pray that this sanctification, this transformation which was begun at that moment of our faith, will progress and continue along the path towards Christ-likeness, ever increasing until Jesus we see. We pray in his great name, amen.
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