Dennis Tuuri

Romans Chapter 6

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Romans chapter 6.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death.

That just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection. Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died, has been freed from sin.

Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion 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. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lust.

Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you. For you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we’re not under law, but under grace? Certainly not. Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness?

But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit, the strengthener. Minister to us now, Lord God, the strength of the Lord Jesus Christ, an awareness of what he has accomplished and a transformation of our very being through his word penetrating us and transforming us. Thank you, Lord God, and thank you for telling us in this word that transformation is surely being worked out. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Elder John S. has his Independence Day tie on. I have my Jonah tie and kind of those go together today in the context of our sermon and in the movement of our very liturgy today. You’ll notice that the songs we sang, the opening songs of praise were essentially songs of repentance, addressing the state of our nation. And what we’re going to see is that repentance is proper, but it moves us toward the celebration of liberty.

I had a kind of a Forest Gump moment this past week. There was a press conference on the steps of the state capital. And I was there. I was asked to be there. I’m never sure why. I really don’t know why I was asked to be there, and I was the second chief petitioner on this same-sex marriage petition. I was asked, and I thought it was my Christian duty and service to do that. I was asked to attend this press conference, and so I show up and then I was told to squeeze in behind the man doing the main work of the press conference, Tim Nashiff.

So I squeezed in, and it turns out in the providence of God, I’m right behind him in my collar, clerical collar that I wear through the week, feeling a little like Forest Gump. What am I doing here? And as a result, you’ll end up on the evening news on some of the stations. Isaac had a similar Forest Gump kind of thing going on. I think he was just trying to do service and drive in his pastor who can’t drive down to this press conference.

When he was there, he was asked if he might want to carry in some boxes of these petitions for ’27. Of course, he’s a good Christian guy and he wants to help out in any way he can. Gets up, starts carrying in boxes. Lo and behold, his picture and name are on the front cover of the Statesman Journal the next day. And his picture, while in the background, is actually on an article from USA Today. They were covering the event, too.

You know, it’s not as if there’s some strategy that Isaac was working or that I was working. We’re just sort of doing what we think is the right thing to do in this matter as in every other matter. And I sort of feel like, you know, a feather on the breath of God that Forest Gump kind of was in that movie. And I felt odd, too, because there was such a moment of opportunity that I felt was somewhat lost.

You know, if you’ve been to the Capitol, as you’re standing on the steps looking at the street, if you go just a minute to the right, there’s a statue of the founder of the Oregon territory, Jason Lee, a Methodist minister. He’s got his Bible in his hand. How long will that be allowed to be down there? I don’t know. But for now it’s there. Reverend Jason Lee, it says on the statue. It says something about him founding the Oregon territory.

Jason Lee, you know, wasn’t trying to had some great scheme to start a state. He was just answering somebody asking him to help him out. Some Indians went to him back East. We need help. They went to his mission board. They sent Jason Lee out to help these Indians learn about the word of God. Then there needed to be a school put together. Okay. So he puts a school together for the Indian kids, and later for the settlers. Well, we need a little government action going on. So Jason Lee becomes an important part of petitioning the United States to recognize this as a territory and establish some government.

And lo and behold, Jason Lee, Christian minister, trying to honor Christ in all things of life, just doing what he’s supposed to do, ends up founding the religious culture that grew up in Oregon, then the political structure was at the base of it, and the educational structure. If you go to Willamette University right across from the capital, it’s a place of great paganism now, of course, but there’s a building there that is essentially the continuation of the school of Jason Lee. That’s what grew—a university as a missionary trying to provide classes for the Indians to serve people and their benevolence.

Just past Jason Lee’s statue, you’ll see the statue of the circuit rider. A big horse, a guy on the Methodist circuit rider minister on the horse. And there’s an inscription under this circuit rider. It’s a huge statue. The inscription says: “Commemorating the labors and achievements of the ministers of the gospel who as circuit riders became friends, counselors, and evangels to the pioneers on every American frontier.”

It’s at your state’s capital, a statue right next to the capital in honor of the men who brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to form the Western territories. Now, on the other side, if you’re standing on those steps and go to the left instead of the right, you’ll see the same thing you’ll see on John S.’s tie today. You’ll see the Liberty Bell. It’s a replica of the Liberty Bell. And the Liberty Bell, of course, has a citation on it as well on the side of the Liberty Bell.

What you’ll read there is these words: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” And it actually gives the biblical citation for the quote. And that citation is not a gospel book and it’s not a New Testament book. It’s the book of Leviticus. So on this country’s Liberty Bell, we have a citation from Leviticus 25. And of course, what they were to do is to blow trumpets proclaiming liberty, or freedom, in the year of Jubilee—the 50th year of the 50-year cycle of the nation of Israel under the Mosaic ceremonial law.

Now, Jesus said when he got up to preach his first sermon recorded in the Gospels that all this year of Jubilee was now completed as he came to accomplish what those blowing of trumpets and the ringing of our Liberty Bell commemorate: the proclamation of liberty.

Well, I’m standing on the steps. I know these things. And I know that Jason Lee is there and the circuit rider was there and the Liberty Bell is over there. And I also know that in the providence of God, right now in this state, if you were to mention, to get up and to oppose same-sex marriage on the basis of the word of God, it is seen as really kooky and maybe even an illegal violation of church and state or something. I don’t know. But how ridiculous is that when our very capital has on the right hand and on the left hand allusions to that very thing? The reason why our civil law should be framed to prohibit homosexual marriage is not because heterosexual marriage is traditional.

You know, I love the pastors that are involved in this movement, that are heading it up, and they all spoke at this press conference. But that’s what was said many times: “We’re here to defend traditional marriage.” I’m not interested in defending anything traditional. As a Christian, we’re called to defend Christianity. If we get hung up on this tradition thing, 100 years from now what are we going to say? “We’re here to protect the tradition of homosexual marriage.” That’s not who we are. And we had this tremendous opportunity to talk about the Liberty Bell and what freedom really is and what it isn’t, and to talk about the founding of our state politically, culturally, religiously, educationally. But a moment gone by, a moment kind of lost in history.

So these are strange days, and they’ve been made even stranger in the last couple of weeks because now I guess there’s a controversy involving whether we should be involved in doing anything as citizens about same-sex marriage or not. Articles are being written, counter articles are now coming forward amongst men that are our friends and mentors in many ways. And you know, the problem is: “Well, do we do this or not?” Well, I don’t understand. And I’m as Forest Gump-like in the midst of that discussion, kind of uncomprehending what is going on, what are we talking about, as I am in the midst of this press conference on the steps of Salem.

Maybe I’m just getting old now. But I feel very strange in the midst of all of this because the word of God seems quite clear about what freedom is and what it isn’t. The text before us talks about freedom from sin. Freedom and liberty is defined by the word of God. We’re not free to do anything we want. It’s not a violation of the true meaning of freedom to oppose homosexual marriage. And the text before us also tells us, I think, in a rather comprehensive way that we are to address every area of life. We’ll get into the text here in a minute. So I don’t quite understand.

Now, I do understand some of the concerns about political action. You know, we certainly face the temptation in the public arena when the cameras are rolling to downplay the crown rights of King Jesus, and we do our political action. This is a real temptation. And we do want to heed the warnings of those who warn us about entering into a political activism that is somehow secularized and removed from the crown rights of King Jesus.

But the answer to that is surely not to retreat from the public arena into our private areas of prayer and worship and the family as opposed to proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus in that arena. I mean, we’re called not just to put off doing things wrong, but we’re supposed to do things right. Right. So, you know, I’m a little bit—I understand the pastoral concern to be careful in what we do in this arena, but I also understand the crying need for Christians to stand up and to speak into this arena, to speak into what is civil liberty and what is not civil liberty, and what are the roots of it and what are the meaning of it.

I love the song we just sang, words by G.K. Chesterton. “Tie in a living tether the prince and priest and thrall.” Prince—the governor, the civil governor; priest—the ecclesiastical leaders; and thrall—the people that are either members of the church and also members of the civil state. “Tying a living tether, the prince and priest and thrall, bind all of our lives together, smite us and save us all.”

Well, we’re going to talk today about this idea of liberty, freedom from sin. And I think that by the end, maybe you’ll see what we’re to avoid in civil action, but also what we are to do in terms of that action. One other thing before we get started: at the conclusion of the outline, if you have one, at the bottom there are some points taken from Peacemaker materials written by Ken Sande. I will probably not address those at the end of my sermon.

I will try to build the case that we should be very much focused on dying to sin, on using everything that we have for the service of Christ. And other than that, the only other option is that we’re using everything that we have to serve sin. And I’ll make a strong case, I think, for us to have a renewed sense of understanding of the liberty, the freedom from sin that Christ has brought for us and the implications of that in our life. So the purpose of the last part of the outline is for you to simply go home and in a very practical way think of your life.

Think of sins that you’re engaging in or have engaged in the recent past. Sins that you may have talked to other people about, maybe in a glancing way—you know, said you’re sorry for—but have you really dealt with sin? Are you dealing regularly with this sin that is such a death-producing activity on our part? And those are given as vehicles to help you to deal with personal sin after I give you the motivation to move away from sin in the context of Romans 6.

Now I’ve structured the outline then in Romans 6 in three sections. Lots of ways to do these outlines, but I thought that it would be good to take a chunk here—the whole chapter properly delineated—I think, and then to look at it. Originally, most commentators would see it in two sections. I see it in three for a couple of reasons which I will just note in passing.

First of all, there are three references in chapter 6 to “Christ Jesus.” Those occur in verse 3, verse 11, and then at the last verse 23. So the first section begins with an early reference to Christ Jesus, and I think the second section should be seen as focused on that designation of Christ as well—”Christ Jesus.” And the third section concludes the whole chapter with another reference to “Christ Jesus.”

So as an organizing principle, the text is really telling us who Christ Jesus is in three different ways. And specifically, what I’m going to make the case for is that the first verses refer to our being dead to sin. You’ll notice when I read the text the repeated references to death in the first section. And in the third section, repeated reference to slavery: slave, slave, slave, slave, slave. And that’s the second element of what Paul is presenting to us.

And the middle really is the practical exhortation—the cash value of these doctrines that he’s laying out is this middle section where we’re exhorted then in a particular way to understand, to reckon something, and to present our bodies in relationship to that. And one of the reasons why I’ve done it this way is because of the three-fold repetition of the phrase “Christ Jesus.” Also, the first and last sections both start with this question, right? The interlocutor asks the question: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” “Horrors, no.” That’s what Paul says. And then the third section begins the same way: “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Are you crazy? Of course not.”

So both of those two sections that talk about the implications of the work of Christ relative to our sin nature, or death nature, they both begin with this question. So I’ve sort of—there are other things I could point out, but I’ve structured it that way for those particular reasons.

And now let’s talk about it then. Let’s talk about this first section. And on your outline, what I say is “Union with Christ’s World-Transforming Death.”

And so this section is marked, as I said and as I read it to you, verses 1 to 10, by a heavy emphasis upon death language. So in his answering this interlocutor’s question, this rhetorical question in verse one, the immediate answer as to why we should not continue in sin is that we have died to sin. So verse 2: “How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Don’t you know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”

Now, he’ll talk about the implications of life, but what he’s really stressing in this section is not resurrection as much as it is union with Christ’s death. So when Rose was baptized here a few minutes ago, Paul says that we’re supposed to think of that—she was baptized into Christ. She was joined to Christ. And in that she is united with Christ in every bit of his work for humanity. In other words, in his living, his life, in his death, in his resurrection, in his glorification, we have a share in Christ’s humanity in all of that. We’re united to that. But specifically, what Paul is focusing on is this union with the death of Jesus Christ. Not something we care to think about a whole lot. We want to move quickly on to resurrection, but not Paul. He wants to linger on this, and he does for several verses.

By the way, in passing again, what I said earlier: this doesn’t mean that to baptize somebody through immersion is a better picture of what Paul is getting at. What Paul is getting at is union with Christ. And the particular emphasis he’s working on is death, but it only flows out of the union with Christ. People were not put in holes in the ground at the time of the writing of this epistle. They just weren’t. They were put in caves or something else. But immersion into the ground is certainly not what baptism was picturing. And Paul was not using this illustration of death and resurrection because of holes in the ground in terms of a baptistry that was dug out.

So don’t get confused by that. Baptism means union. And Paul is stressing when that union—the idea of our union with Christ’s death. “We were buried with him, verse 4, through baptism into death. Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life.”

So he touches on newness of life, but his theme is death. “If we have been united together”—and that’s that word, fused like bone, or you know, if you got a wound and it starts to heal up, this word was used in Greek of those two sides of the wound coming together and healing and becoming one. Baptism is a joining together of the individual baptized with the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. If Rose has been united together, fused as one, in the likeness of Christ’s death, certainly she shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

“Knowing this, that her old man was crucified with Christ”—death language—”that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. So here we begin to pick up—you know, he’ll develop the slavery thing in the second half of this text. After the middle exhortation, he touches on it here. But here the emphasis is death. “He who has died has been freed from sin. If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. The death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God.”

So certainly emphasis on resurrection, but the overarching theme here of Paul is death. A great emphasis on death. Now, in order to understand this, we have to recognize that the question itself and the topic take us back to Romans 5.

And let’s read Romans 5 together as reminding ourselves why Paul is stressing this death of Jesus Christ. Romans 5, and I’ll begin reading in verse 6.

“When we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die. Yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

Not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. And now listen: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world. But sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of him who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift of the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation. But the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification.

For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so one man’s righteous act, the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Moreover, the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What’s Paul doing? Paul is drawing a correlation between the two covenantal heads, right? We’re familiar with this language: Adam, Christ. Through Adam, sin and death reigned. Jesus comes to eliminate the reign, the dominion of sin and death.

When Paul tells us, emphasizes that we should not sin because we’re united with Christ’s death, what he’s reminding us of is that there is this old Adamic nature that we still have access to. But Jesus Christ has come and has entered into human existence to turn the whole world around. Jesus has come to do away with the era of Adamic death and to initiate the era of resurrection life. Death came from Adam’s sin. Everything that the old world was engaged in was essentially characterized, until Jesus comes, as death.

He said that Leviticus, ushering in the year of Jubilee, was not fulfilled when in the 50th year they would ring the bells or blow the trumpets or do whatever they did. All of those activities of the Old Testament were anticipatory of Jesus Christ coming and dying and dealing the fatal death blow to death itself.

What Paul is saying is that the reason why we must exercise this freedom from sin is that Jesus Christ has made you into a new creature born of water. As we said earlier from the scriptures, the world was born in water. Baptism is a picture of the new creature—the person who is joined to Christ.

Some people don’t like it when in our songs we sing about a new race, a new humanity, a new mankind. And we do that frequently. It’s good language. “Race” doesn’t mean, you know, genetic race in terms of this race or that race of human existence. But what the songwriters are trying to deal with is what Paul is presenting here. Paul is saying that Jesus Christ’s death was the death of Adam and the death of the old humanity, and that what Jesus has initiated is a brand new era or epoch. Everything has turned. The old creation has been dealt with definitively through the death of Jesus Christ. And in that death, he puts death to death for his people.

So what Paul is telling us in the first argument here is that we should not continue to sin because Jesus Christ has put—our unity with Jesus Christ is a union with his transformational death. Everything in Adam—Paul has told us in Romans 5—was governed by sin. Total depravity is maybe what we could think of this as—totally. Society, religion, politics, everything that Adam touched, in terms of using Adam as a picture of the old humanity, was infected by sin and death. But now the Lord Jesus Christ has come to do away with that and to bring about the new era with a new humanity, a new kind of man and woman that the world now will move in terms of.

And the songwriters, when they talk about the new race, the new humanity, the new mankind, the new creation, this is what they’re struggling with—what kind of language can we use to get across to congregants of the Lord Jesus Christ in their hymns of praise to help us recognize what Paul is telling us here: Jesus Christ has put death to death. Jesus Christ has done away. We in Adam had a death nature. We think of it as a sin nature, a proneness to sin. But what Paul says is that really, from one perspective at least, it’s proper to think of it as a death nature. We were involved in death. Sin leads to death, and that was our whole way of being in the old humanity. And Jesus Christ has come to create a new humanity.

It has arrived definitively in Jesus Christ. It is no longer bound by sin and its consequences of guilt and fear. Remember, I’ve mentioned this so many times: Hebrews 2 says that Jesus Christ tasted of death so that all we who through fear of death were held in bondage to sin all of our lives—what’s Independence Day? Independence Day is the recognition that Jesus Christ has definitively released his people from sin. And he has done it through his once for all incarnation and suffering death for humanity.

Let me just read a few quotes from commentators here that help to kind of make this emphasis and point.

“Fundamental to what Paul is presenting here is the eschatological claim that with Christ’s death a whole epoch has passed and a new age has begun. We who have been baptized in Christ are caught up in the Christ whose death ended the old epoch ruled by sin and death. Rose has moved definitively from the old epoch into the new world that is no longer ruled by sin and death.”

“The sweeping comparisons that Paul will make in Romans 6, and contrasts, are between the epoch of Adam and the age of Jesus Christ. And as he works this out in Romans 6, it begins to become particularized to the specific situation of us. The transcendent realities are the decisive salvation history events which determined the epochs that followed. Adam’s transgression is contrasted in Romans 5 with Christ’s death. And so there is this movement, a transition from the old world to the new world.”

So Paul says that when we talk about freedom from sin, we must consider in the first instance that we have been freed from sin through the once-for-all world-changing, putting a death to the old humanity and bringing about the new humanity actions of the Lord Jesus Christ. In Adam, humanity had a will to sin and to death. But in Jesus Christ, we have a will to life and not to death.

And what he’s going to tell us here is that while we usually think of this covenantal headship stuff in terms of justification, Paul is saying that there is an absolute link between justification and sanctification. They are two halves of the same coin. Now, we can for systematic purposes, you know, break them out and talk about them in distinct ways. That’s not wrong to do. But Paul knows of no justification—no being brought into relationship through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second Adam—that does not necessarily usher in works of obedience to Jesus Christ and of putting to death actions of sin.

That’s what brings him then to the central exhortation in verse 11. We are to reckon something and we are to present something. Okay, verse 11.

“Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And therefore do not let—or we could say do not keep letting—that’s the sense of the term—sin reign, pain in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lust. Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.”

We were under law. We were under the tutelage of the law until Christ came. But now our relationship to the law has totally changed.

We can get this wrong, this middle section in several ways. We can get all mixed up with verses 11 to 14. And let me explain what I mean.

First of all, he’s talking about members of the body. And we can, in this whole section, as we think about members, presenting members in our body, we can think of these things in Greek categories. Again, like we talked about last week, it’d be real easy to read this language that, you know, sin reigning in our mortal bodies to think of the bodies as bad, that what we want is release from the bodies, that spirituality is not involving the body. But of course it does. The spirit empowers our body, or we obey, or we work against the spirit with our body. Whatever we do is a bodily activity.

So first of all, we have this difficulty of taking Greek notions into the idea of the body as we read it in these verses. Secondly, when Paul says don’t obey the passions or lust of the body, that can get us confused. We can think that having passions or lust is ipso facto, or just by definition, a bad thing.

Thirdly, the way we can get confused about this: we can talk about this “under law, under grace” stuff and develop a grace-law dichotomy and become lawless, which is the very thing that Paul wants us not to do as we get to the last section. We’re not to be lawless.

And so these are the problems with this text. And let’s just think about this a little bit. When Paul uses the term “body” here, he is using the term as a picture, a symbol, a term for everything that we have. In the Book of Common Prayer, in the wedding service, the husband and wife swear submission to the husband. And the husband swears: “With my body I thee worship,” is the vow that he takes in the Book of Common Prayer in the old English wedding ceremony. What does that mean? You know, in our modern term, we think: with his body, he worships his wife. That’s really odd. But the word “body” was being used in the wedding formula the way it’s being used here to speak of the totality of human existence.

Your body is not just your fingers and your hands and your ears. Your body is your checking account. Your body is your house. Your body is the knowledge you’ve accumulated. All the assets of who you are. This is how the term is being used in Romans 6. That we’re not to let sin affect our bodies. All of that we have is not to be given over to sin. Now it’s comprehensive, you see.

And so it’s important to catch it because if we don’t catch it, we’re going to miss the application. Paul is saying: don’t use your body—in other words, all of everything that you are, the totality of your life—to engage in this death nature. You’ve been freed from that. And now you can use everything that you have in obedience to Christ.

So if we miss the comprehensive idea of what this body means, we’re going to miss the implications for what we’re to do in obedience to it. You see, I mean, if we just restrict it, you know, to our bodily activities and we’re going to focus on those only in sanctification, but the scriptures—this is a far more comprehensive term. As I said, it really relates to the concept of total depravity. And as a result of that, if we fail to miss the reference to total depravity—that it touches everything that we do—then we’re also not going to understand the need for total sanctification, that sanctification touches every element of who we are.

Now the passions here, as I said, is something that we have to deal with a little bit. Now he says: don’t obey the mortal body in its lusts. And we can typically go to the New Testament and think: well, lusts are bad. But they’re not. The same word that’s translated “lust” is discussed by our Savior when he’s going to eat the Passover with his disciples. He says: “With desire I have desired to have this meal with you. With lust I have lusted after doing Passover with you,” with strong passions.

Paul said that he had this great desire to depart and to be present with Christ through his death of his body. So you know, passions are not wrong. To engage in things passionately is only wrong when the things we’re engaging with are not done for the motivation of honoring Christ. We get it wrong if we think that this means that all passions are lust, or bad. We must be careful not to think that all passion is wrong.

Even more importantly for Christian sanctification, we must understand from this that even things innocent or okay in themselves can and will be sinfully entered into without the freedom from sin that is in Jesus Christ. So in other words, you can be passionate about a good thing. And if that’s true, then the things that you might do that are good—working, for example. Entering into, you know, political action might be an example—things that may be proper in and of themselves.

But when you do those for a motivation other than honoring the Lord Jesus Christ, then we miss the comprehensive claims of sanctification that Paul is giving to us here.

And then third, we can develop this law-grace dichotomy because we’re not under law, we’re under grace. But again, that would be a mistake. Jesus was born under the law. That’s what the text—that’s what Galatians 4 tells us: that Jesus was born under the law to redeem those who were under the law, to free them from the curse of the law, which is death. So Jesus has come to remove the judicial penalty of death from us because we could not meet the just demands of the law.

And that’s part of what Paul is saying here. The second part of what he’s saying is that law has a different function to us now. The angels were the mediators of the law. Galatians says that the angels were tutors. They were our tutors to teach us things. The law was to teach us things, to bring us to the headmaster. And the headmaster doesn’t come for 4,000 years. And the headmaster who comes is the Lord Jesus Christ.

And when the headmaster comes and brings us the grace of salvation, our relationship to the law is now changed. In the Old Testament, prior to the effective final work of Jesus Christ, the law can be described as an instrument of death to us. We cannot meet the full demands of the law. And even while there are gracious provisions of God looking forward to the coming of Christ, the grace of Christ does not arrive until he actually does his work and puts the old Adamic nature to death.

And so we get it way wrong if we come out of this thinking that somehow the law is now irrelevant to Christian sanctification. In the very next section, Paul will say that lawlessness—he equates lawlessness with sinfulness, disobedience, and giving our members to serve the wrong thing. So Paul wants us to first of all recognize our union with the Lord Jesus Christ in its great transition that Christ has ushered into history. He’s put the old humanity to death. He has created a new humanity. And he says the beginning of Christian sanctification is to reckon yourself part of this new humanity.

To not see yourselves anymore in terms of the lie that you are in Adam. No, that’s not true. Your identity now is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the way you perceive of yourself, Paul says, is absolutely critical for how you’re going to go about presenting your members in obedience to either sin and death or to Christ and life.

So first of all, sanctification is a correct understanding, a belief in acting out of the belief that you are a new person through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And secondly, he says—he calls on us then to present our members, our body, to Christ.

Now when he says to present the members of our body, this has the implication in the text before us of entering into warfare—to present arms is another way to say of it, as instruments to Christ. He says the word “instrument” could be translated “weapon of warfare.” And so what he’s saying is that not only have we been moved from one humanity to the new humanity in Christ, but now he’s saying that our job is to serve in the context of one army or the other.

When we sin, when we fail to recognize the comprehensive claims of Christ and its freedom in all of our actions to serve him, we are waging war for the enemy. We are—