Free From Sin [Part 2]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. This is two different systems of living, under law and under grace. Under law, here's what happens.

Number one, the law makes you nervous. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I am Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, It's All Right Now, from Romans chapters four through seven, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. Now, if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, we sure want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. And you can contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. In order to get at this amazing, amazing statement, building up through this, we got to go back into Romans 5 and review a little bit so that we can get a running start. There's this imagery Paul is drawing upon of how there was a first Adam, a natural man who sinned. And because we all have been born since Adam in the flesh, according to our legacy from Adam, his sin becomes our sin. We're all born in sin. But that Jesus is like a second Adam. He's God, but he's also human. And so he comes, and unlike Adam, he doesn't sin, and he fulfills all righteousness, and he's perfectly obedient.

And so the gospel picture here is magnificent. It means that we're all born in the first Adam in the flesh in the normal way, and we all have sin. But when you accept Christ, you are, the Bible says, born anew.

You are spiritually reborn, and you're born now into Christ, a second Adam, a new man, a new way of being. And what Paul says in Romans 5 15 is the free gift of grace is not like the trespass of Adam, for he said, if many died through one man's trespass, the first Adam, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin, for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. The reason I'm revisiting this from Romans 5 is because if you don't keep this in mind, then Romans 6 is not going to make sense. So there's a first Adam and a second Adam, and in this way, they're very similar.

Their impact is pervasive. All who are in the first Adam are sinful like the first Adam, but all who are in the second Adam, Christ, become like Christ. And the relationship to sin and to grace and to faith changes. So what he's saying is that they're like each other, but the gift of grace is qualitatively different and better and bigger and more glorious than the qualitative aspect of the sin. So sin that gets imputed to us from the first Adam and righteousness that gets imputed to us from the second Adam, Christ, are not in the same category, is what he's saying. What this means is that there's sin and curse and death that comes under the law, and there's grace and blessing and life. I would look at it like this way, and I can't spend as long as I want to on this, but it means that on the one hand, curse and death from the first Adam are different than the grace of God because that curse and that penalty is deserved for humanity.

Yes, we are in the first Adam, and so in a sense, we're born in that sin, but then we all sin, so we're all deserving of punishment. But the gift of God in Christ is different. It's an undeserved gift. Its nature is different.

It is not related to your merits at all. It's different. It's also different in this sense. The curse that came in through Adam, the curse and that penalty that accompanies that curse, it in Christ is utterly revoked. The curse can be revoked through the gift of Jesus Christ. But what's qualitatively different about the grace of God in Christ is that when you receive the grace of God, the devil cannot revoke it.

Oh, wow. It also means this, that because of sin, curse confines us and death reigns. But through the grace of God, blessing releases life and we reign with Christ.

This is why the first and second Adam, first Adam is a type of Jesus, but how the gift of God is, his grace is so much different and so much better. Thinking of it this way, death is the absence of life. When life ends, that's what death is. But life in Christ, shared life in Christ, the grace of God that brings shared life of Christ is not the absence of something else.

It's the absence of something. It's the gaining of something. Life is energy. Life is power. Life is joy. Life in Christ. And it is to say, and this is so important and powerful, I wish I could spend more time on this, but it is to say that under the first Adam, when he sinned, what happened was he went from being innocent, he'd never sinned, to being guilty.

So it was a loss of innocence. And it means that Adam was in a condition in which at any moment before he'd sinned, he could sin and lose his relationship with God. But we are in a much better position, Paul has been describing to us in the first five chapters, because we are in Christ justified. We're made righteous. We're made righteous. We're reckoned righteous. So we were never innocent.

We were always guilty. But now that we've been justified, we can't lose our relationship with God. So the gift is not like the trespass.

It's better qualitatively. And the other thing we have to look back in Romans 5 in order to understand Romans 6, again to review, is Romans 5.20, the law came in to increase the trespass. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.

So this is a strange statement. So that, verse 21, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness. So literally this says that law came alongside of sin. Sin was already here.

Way before Moses got the Ten Commandments, right? It always was sin. Sin since the time of Adam. I mean, Cain killed Abel, and I mean, the world was so sinful, God almost wiped it out with a flood because only one righteous man knows. Sin has been here. And then God, as an increase of the revelation of his nature and the true destiny of humanity, he revealed himself further by giving the law through Moses, which included the Ten Commandments and all these other liturgical laws. So the law came in alongside of sin, he said. And when it did, he says that the sin increased.

Well, what he really means here is that in the first place, the sin was exposed that people didn't even realize they weren't even thinking about it. It's sort of like saying, whatever you do right now, do not think about a pink polka dotted elephant. Don't think about a pink polka dotted elephant. Don't think about it being pink. Don't think about what an elephant would look like if it was pink. Don't think about what color the polka dots are. Don't think about a pink polka dotted elephant. Well, everybody always thought of, now you've thought about a pink polka dotted elephant.

And there wasn't a chance, one in a trillion, that you would have come into church or be watching on your screen right now and ever have thought of a pink polka dotted elephant. But now that I brought the law, don't do it, it exposed and it increased. And there's something like that that's happened with the law. It is to say that God made us to be in His image and like Him, and yet we fell and there was so much that was wrong that when God brought the law, it just exposed it. I mean, I can think of an example of the law, the Sabbath, which is one of the Ten Commandments to absorb the Sabbath. Well, the Sabbath is the greatest command of all time. I mean, it should be the command we just love because the Sabbath says on the seventh day, because we're in the image of God, we should be like God. And He rested. God's not just all about work. God's about relationship.

So on the Sabbath day, nobody work. Everybody relax. Enjoy your friends.

Enjoy your family feast. That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Seeing as Jesus sees, it's the title of Pastor Alan Wright's newest book just released. And it's the giant secret of real transformation. Followers of Christ tend to focus on doing so we've been told to ask, what would Jesus do? But even our noblest efforts to be more like Jesus ultimately fail for the same reason that pledging to keep the law never works.

There's no gospel power in our self-striving. But what if the secret to personal transformation and victorious living isn't found in doing as much as in seeing? Anyone who has ever had an aha moment or has suddenly discovered the truth of a situation knows that fresh vision changes everything. In his eye-opening new book, Alan Wright invites readers into a new simple spiritual practice, a little breath prayer that can be prayed throughout the day. Jesus, how do you see this?

It's a prayer that the savior loves to answer because after all, Christ came to be the light of the world. Clear away confusion, win over the darkness, and open your heart to wonder and joy by getting your copy of the book right away. When you make a gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's new beautiful hardcover book. And as an additional thank you for your support, you'll also receive a free six-week Seeing as Jesus Sees companion video series from Pastor Alan, along with a study guide and a daily reading plan. Let Jesus take you by the hand and show you a whole new perspective for your life.

As you learn how to ask Christ for his eyes, you'll start seeing as Jesus sees, and you're going to love the view. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. Laugh around the dinner table. Tell stories. Enjoy some good entertainment. Have romance with your spouse.

Play with your kids. And don't ever worry about anything on the Sabbath. Nobody's expecting you to return an email. Nobody's expecting you to be productive. You just relax and have a wonderful day. That's the greatest command ever given, right? And it turns out we've got a hard time keeping that one.

I mean, this is a command. This is like the school teacher saying to the students, your homework tonight is go home and don't do any work. Just play video games. Watch a movie with your family. Pop some popcorn.

Just rest. We'll see you tomorrow. There's no pop quiz. I'm already giving you an A for the day. Oh, we struggle with something like that. But what happened was they got the Sabbath. They said, okay, we're not supposed to work.

Oh, no. If we work, then we're under judgment. Oh, well, what constitutes work? Well, can we take a walk? Well, we could take a walk. But how many steps before walking is like work? Can we carry a load? Well, we could carry a little bit.

But how much before you carry it, it's a burden. And now it feels like work. And by the time the rabbis got done with it, there are so many nuanced little laws about Sabbath that nobody could keep it. And by the time Jesus comes, and he's not living like that, and people are accusing him of violating the Sabbath, and finally he says to him, he said, do you not understand this? He said, the Sabbath was made as a gift. Man wasn't made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man. So the law comes in and just exposes how, even on the thing that should be the easiest, like, relax.

We can't even do that. So it exposes our sin, but it also increases our sin in another way. And that is something I'm going to develop further in this message. And that is the law brings in with it the fear of not keeping the law and therefore being punished. And that fear causes most of our sin. So that's the background, that's the running start into Romans chapter 6 where we come up to Paul saying at verse 1, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? If what he's been saying, if when there was sin and then law came alongside of it, but then grace superabounded, does that mean we should just go ahead and sin all the time because it means we're going to get the grace of God? Does it mean we should just give up and say we're going to lose the game because we know we'll be forgiven and we'll have a snack at the end?

And he says, no, that is ridiculous. John Calvin speaks to this in a clear way. He says he rejects it by an indignant, speaking of Paul's writing here, indignant negative, by no means, in order to warn his readers that there's no greater contradiction than to nourish our vices by the grace of Christ, which is the means of restoring our righteousness. That makes sense, you see, to think that we would nourish our sin by the means of the thing that restores our righteousness. Calvin continues, it's false to maintain that that which abolishes sin gives it strength.

It would therefore be a most absurd inversion of the work of God if sin were to acquire strength by the means of grace which is offered to us in Christ. Listen to this, medicine does not foster the disease which it destroys. So you go further with this and say if you've ever been sick, maybe you had a strep throat or something that responds really well to an antibiotic, and you go to the doctor and you get the antibiotic and it clears it right up and all of a sudden you feel better. And you're like, man, that medicine was great. I love that medicine. That thing cleared up my strep throat or it got rid of that ear infection or whatever. And I feel like a new person again because that medicine was so good. What wouldn't make sense is to then say, well, I can't wait till I get another strep throat so I can get some more of that good amoxicillin or whatever it is.

No, you don't want the disease again just because you found some good medicine that gets rid of the disease. That's how ridiculous it would be to say we found grace that pardons our sin and therefore we're just going to sin all the more and keep experiencing more of that grace. Paul's saying it's not like that. And he goes on to say in verse 2, by no means, is that the way we should think of it, how can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. Dead to sin.

Wow. This is just almost opposite of the way most Christians think. Most Christians tend to wake up in the morning and go, well, I'm a sinner and maybe I can muddle through and God help me, forgive me. But Paul's saying here you'd be way better to wake up in the morning saying I'm dead to sin. Dead to sin.

Say that with me. Dead to sin. It's a radical thought. Why would he use such a dramatic image as death? Well, partly he's harnessing the image of baptism. He's not talking here just about the water baptism. He's talking about baptism as a symbol of everything that happens in our justification and everything he's been describing in Romans 1 through 5. And then as you go underwater in this symbol it's like death and you come up it's like life.

So that's part of it. But part of the reason he used this image is because what he's saying is that your relationship to the law and to the therefore penalty for sin when you don't keep the law, that has died. We're going to see later in Romans he calls us widows to the law.

And this is what we're building to. It's a whole new way of being, a different system of life and godliness. Verse 5, for if we've been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self, the old sinful nature, was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing. How, when God justifies you and makes it just as if I'd never sinned, when he puts you in full right standing and declares you to be righteous, how has he done this? Figuratively what he's done is by some mystery he has allowed your sin and your old sin nature to be in some way not just represented but joined with Christ mystically wherein it is crucified. So in that sin nature it got crucified. You still sin, I still sin, but we're dead to that's what he's saying. So that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, the old sin nature be brought to nothing. So we would no longer be enslaved to sin, for the one who has died had been set free from sin. So like the death of Christ and the resurrection, you are joined with Christ such that your old sin nature, that part of you that was in bondage to sin, that was crucified figuratively and mystically. Alan Wright, our Good News message, free from sin. It's from the series It's All Right Now from Romans chapters four through seven.

And I encourage you to stay with us. Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing his parting Good News thought for the day in just a moment. Seeing as Jesus Sees. It's the title of Pastor Alan Wright's newest book just released, and it's the giant secret of real transformation. Followers of Christ tend to focus on doing, so we've been told to ask what would Jesus do? But even our noblest efforts to be more like Jesus ultimately fail for the same reason that pledging to keep the law never works.

There's no gospel power in our self-striving. But what if the secret to personal transformation and victorious living isn't found in doing as much as in seeing? Anyone who has ever had an aha moment or has suddenly discovered the truth of a situation knows that fresh vision changes everything. In his eye-opening new book, Alan Wright invites readers into a new simple spiritual practice, a little breath prayer that can be prayed throughout the day. Jesus, how do you see this?

It's a prayer that the Savior loves to answer because after all, Christ came to be the light of the world. Clear away confusion, win over the darkness, and open your heart to wonder and joy by getting your copy of the book right away. When you make a gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's new beautiful hardcover book. And as an additional thank you for your support, you'll also receive a free six-week Seeing as Jesus Sees companion video series from Pastor Alan, along with a study guide and a daily reading plan. Let Jesus take you by the hand and show you a whole new perspective for your life.

As you learn how to ask Christ for his eyes, you'll start seeing as Jesus sees, and you're going to love the view. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.

When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back here now with Pastor Alan and our parting good news thought for the day.

Again, a bookmark on this teaching, and we'll pick back up with the conclusion next time. Free from sin. Well, that sounds like good news.

It's the best news. God didn't just come to forgive sin. He came to bring the grace that empowers victory over sin. And so when the law came, it accentuated or exposed the sin that we already have, right? So that's the old thing. Like, don't think of a pink elephant with polka dots. Well, now all of a sudden we're thinking about it.

We never would have thought about it. There's a way in which the law did that. And trying to keep the law just increases our struggle. But there's a way in which when grace has come, that it causes a new power at work within us, knowing that we're forgiven, that we can become in our consciousness and in reality dead to our sin. And it's only in that radical notion that ultimately we can understand there's been a transfer of our dominion from one kingdom to another. We still sin, but we're not captive to sin.

And that's really good news. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.