Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. At conversion, a new believer is set free from his old slave master of the devil. He's no longer obligated to commit the sins he committed before. Breaking free from old patterns involves a process called reckoning oneself dead unto sin but alive unto God.
Today, what this is all about. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, if a believer sins after salvation, isn't he or she right back where they were?
Dave, I'm so glad that the answer to your question is no. In terms of their experience, perhaps they might be somewhere near they used to be. But the good news is that their position in Jesus Christ is unchanged. Once we are in Christ, we are in Christ forever, taken to heaven, of course, because of his righteousness.
Let me put it this way. If a child of mine sins, that doesn't mean that they are disinherited. Once they are adopted, and by the way, I do not have adopted children, but others do. Once a child is adopted, that child is a member of the family.
And thanks to the gospel, once we believe on Christ, we are a permanent member of the family. I believe that this series of messages can be a tremendous help to people. It's entitled Rescued, What God Did to Save Us.
And for a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com. That's all one word. Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Along with this series of messages comes a study guide. And this is the second to last day that we're making this offer to help you in your Christian walk. But now let's open our Bibles, and let's find out in a better way all that God did to rescue us from ourselves and from our sins.
Let me begin today with a question. How are you doing in your battle with sin? Did you have some wins this past week? Did you have some losses?
Why did you have those losses? Have you taken time to analyze? And when I talk to you about our battle with sin, I'm not only thinking of the biggies, such as murder and adultery and extortion and perhaps deceit on a huge level, maybe drug addictions, alcohol addictions. We all know that, and there are some people who perhaps are listening to this message who have done one or several of the sins that I just listed. But I'm also talking about some of the more respectable sins such as anger.
To what extent did anger get in your way of relationships this past week? What about envy? Do you envy the wicked? Do you envy the rich? Are you angry with your lot in life?
What are those kinds of issues? What about the issue of lust? In the Sunday evening service, a man came to me last week and said, you know, my wife has left me.
I'm alone. He said the assaults on my mind and the temptation to go to that computer, he said, are very strong. Yesterday, I was with my prayer partners and in the discussion, the confession of the fact that our minds are being assaulted today by sexuality on every hand and people are losing those battles and not just the men are losing the battle.
Where do we go from here? You know, we are creatures of habit and we develop habits of sin and we tell ourselves all kinds of lies about how we aren't addicted or we don't have a real big problem. I was thinking about the words of Mark Twain, you remember, who said, of course I can stop smoking. I've done it at least a thousand times. He stopped for maybe an hour at a time. He can stop whenever he wants to.
You know, D.L. Moody said that when he was converted, he expected that now his battle with sin would be over. And he said, I discovered that I was actually enlisting myself as a soldier in a new war.
The assaults of sin were that strong. This message addresses those issues. But if you're here today and you are simply investigating Christianity or you are listening to this message because somebody wanted you to and you would rather maybe not. But here you are.
Or maybe you're listening by way of Internet, radio, whatever other means. Would you hang in? Would you listen? Because even though this message is primarily directed toward us as believers in Christ, it has implications for all. And by the end of the message, I want to include you in it and give you an opportunity to put your faith and trust in a Redeemer who actually does deliver people from their sins.
So that's where we're going. Thanks for joining me on the journey. Let me begin with another question, and that is, you know, during the Easter season, we often sing the song, which I happen to like. I like a lot of songs and I like the song Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? So I ask you today, were you there?
I remember as a boy listening to the song and thinking to myself, well, that's kind of silly, actually. No, I wasn't there 2,000 years ago. Jesus was crucified.
I'm sure that I wasn't there. But then as I began to study the Bible, I discovered that, yes, I was there in the sense that Jesus died for me. And so my sins were laid on him. In that sense, I was there when my Lord was crucified. And then we take our Bibles, and I invite you to do so, and we open them up to the sixth chapter of the book of Romans, Romans chapter 6, very critical passage of Scripture, and we discover something else. That it's not just that we were there because Jesus died for us, but furthermore, God identified us with Jesus, and when he died on that cross, there's a sense in which we died.
Look at the text, for example, in chapter 6 of Romans, verse 5. For if we have been united with him in death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin, for one who has died has been set free from sin. So God put us into Jesus so that Jesus Christ's history becomes our history. And there's another way in which then we were there when they crucified our Lord. So to put it rather clearly, Jesus Christ died for me, sets me free from the penalty of sin, and I died with Jesus Christ, and that sets me free from the power of sin. That's why when we sing Rock of Ages, cleft for me, be of sin the double cure.
Save me from its guilt, yes, and its power. On the cross, there is a double cure for sinners like us. Now what the Apostle Paul does is he goes through a series of steps, and he begins with the first step, which is called knowing. For example, even back in verse 3, do you not know that all of us have been baptized into Christ?
Verse 5, do you not know, actually, verse 6, that our old self was crucified with him? There's something that you have to know, and that is that when Jesus died, if you're a believer, you died there too. You say, well, Pastor Luther, I sure don't feel very dead. And if you had seen my secret life this past week, you would know that I'm not dead. I'm not dead to sin. Now Paul does say that sin isn't dead.
We explained this last week. But he says that we are dead to it. And so you say, I don't feel dead.
Well, how do you like this? You're leading somebody to faith in Jesus Christ. You want them to believe the gospel. And then they say, well, you know, I don't feel that Jesus died. I just don't feel that he died on the cross. And you say, oh, you know, spare me. You don't feel that he died.
It's irrelevant how you feel. The fact is that he died. Or somebody else says, I just am going to pray that Jesus would die for me. And you say, well, I don't get that at all.
Don't you get it that it already happened? And no matter how you feel about it, and no matter how you as a believer feel about it, it is as silly to pray that Jesus would die for you as it would be for you to pray that he would crucify you when he died. Equally foolish because when Jesus died, the Bible says you did too. The power and the obligation you and I have to sin is over. That's what happened when Jesus died on the cross. Now Paul says in Romans chapter 5 that we were in Adam having to obey all of Adam's dictates and sins. Now we are in Jesus Christ, whole new obligations, and we have no obligation to serve sin. He's talking about the reigning power of sin in our lives. So he says, first of all, you have to get that. Do you have faith to get that, that God made provision on the cross for sin's power in your life to be totally broken?
Or more accurately, he actually broke it on the cross. And then the next step, Paul says, is reckon. As I mentioned last time, I prefer the word reckon to the word consider, though they mean the same thing.
In verse 11, so you must consider yourselves to be dead to sin and alive unto God. Consider it is true. And I pointed out that reckoning doesn't make anything true.
If you have $1,000 in the bank and it's actually there, then you can reckon by writing out a check based on that amount of money. You can reckon it to be true. But you know, it could be true even without you never reckoning it. You never use the money. It's true that you have $1,000, but you never reckon it to be true.
In that sense, it's of no value to you. But on the other hand, you can't create a situation in which you say, I am going to reckon it to be true, and that'll make it true. Like the wife who said to her husband, of course we still have money in the bank. Look at all of the unused checks in our checkbook. You can't create money by reckoning it to be true. But you can reckon something that is indeed true.
Maybe this illustration will help. Many years ago in the lobby of Moody Church after a service, a woman met me and said, you know, I'm living with a guy, and we're not married. And she says, I know this is sin, and I want to get out of this relationship, but there's no way that he's willing to separate from me. And I said, well, I said, what you need to do is just move out. Take your stuff and move out. She said, it isn't that simple. I own the apartment. All right, I see now that it isn't quite that simple. But I said, don't you understand that your obligations to this man are over? I mean, you own the apartment.
You are standing on conquered territory. He may be bigger than you. He may be much stronger than you.
But that's not the point. Your obligation is over. You are dead to any obligation that you have toward him.
But he won't leave. So I suggested, I don't know if this was good advice, but I said, you know, I'd call the police. And I'd have them come, and I would take that man and take him somewhere else and help him to understand why he should never come back again with a little bit of help from the reliable Chicago police district. That's the way I'd take care of it.
And then I'd get a restraining order against him, because you have no obligation to him. See, that's an example of what Jesus did for us. We are standing on conquered territory. We have no obligation to sin. But sin is going to come along and say, oh, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. You still have obligation to me.
We don't. And you need to understand by faith, by the ministry of the Holy Spirit based on the word, that our obligation to the old man, as it is sometimes spoken of, is over. Now maybe what that woman has to do is to join a support group. And maybe it could be entitled Young Women Who Want to Get Rid of Men Who Don't Leave Them Alone.
That might be a support group with a lot of attendees. Yeah, I know you're laughing. But the point is it may be difficult to reckon it because of all this persistence. But the game is over. There's no obligation. Paul says, you no longer now need to let sin reign in your mortal body. For it to reign, you have to let it. For this man to have authority over her, she has to let him because he has no legal ground to stand on at all.
Kick him out, put him out on the street, and help him to understand why he shouldn't come back. Now in the case of the Bible here, the most powerful thing we can do is to believe. You will experience a tremendous amount of spiritual power if you really understand that standing on the conquered territory of Jesus, you have no obligation to sin. Your passions tell you, yes, you do. Yes, you do. And you say, no, I don't. Not because you're saying that makes it true, but because it is true.
Jesus broke its power. So Paul says this. He says, first of all, you have to know it.
Then you have to reckon it. And then he says, present yourself to God. And that's in verse 13. He said, until now you have been presenting yourself to unrighteousness, verse 13. He says, verse 12, let not sin, therefore reign in your mortal bodies to make you obey its passions.
You have to let it. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life. And your members to God as instruments for righteousness. Sin will not have dominion over you because you're not under law. You're under grace. And grace abounds and has broken the power of sin.
So he says, present. The imagery here is that of worship. Present your bodies, Paul says in chapter 12, the living sacrifice. It means that I now present myself to God.
Why? First of all, because I value God. I value God. In our prayer group yesterday, we were talking about how wonderful it would be if our passion for God were greater than our passion to sin. And when you and I present ourselves to God, what we are saying is, God, you mean more to me than my sin does.
I believe that you are of more value. And by the way, this passion that we develop for God isn't something that comes to us by osmosis while we're asleep. It comes because we're reading the word. We're meeting with the people of God. We are in fellowship with God's people and with Him. And our love for God grows and grows and grows until we become passionate lovers of God. That's part of what happens when we present ourselves to God. But also it means not only that we value God, it also means that God owns us. God owns us. After all, we've been purchased with the blood of Jesus Christ, the precious blood of Jesus. Therefore, we are owned by God, aren't we? We're very much owned by God.
We are His privileged possession, the Scripture says. So that means I yield myself to God. I yield my eyes to God.
And I say, God, these eyes are yours. Help me to turn away from evil. And Jesus said, if your eye offends you, pluck it out and cast it from you. What He's saying is, do whatever you need to do so you don't keep going back into the same sin.
I mean, cut off your cable television if you have to do whatever you have to do. Because the temptations are great, there's no obligation, but the old man comes knocking. And so what you do is you present your eyes to God, you present your ears to God, you present your hands to God, your feet to God, wherever they take you, and you say totally, as far as I am concerned, I am an offering to God. I have a pastor friend who said when he was trying to get this across, he actually had one of the ushers bring up an offering plate and he stood in it.
Well, I try that, but you know, our baskets, I don't think they are quite strong enough to be able to hold that, but that would get the point across. What you do then is you yield to God. And then what?
You begin to serve. Now, if you look at your Bibles, as I hope you are doing, you'll notice in verse 15 and following, Paul gives a contrast between being a slave of righteousness and a slave to sin. He uses the expression the slavery of sin at least five times, depending on how you count them, maybe six. And he uses the same expression as being slaves to righteousness and all the way through from 15 to the end, that's what he's doing.
He's contrasting it. What then are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace by no means? Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, either of sin which leads to death or of obedience which leads to righteousness? He says, but thanks be to God, you were once slaves to sin, but now you're obedient from the heart. And of course, Paul's point is simply this, that when we are slaves to righteousness, it isn't really slavery as we generally think of the term. It means finally, we're able to live the way in which God intended us to live as redeemed people.
We don't have to be bogged down by all that sin and guilt because we can live in a brand new way, doing what is righteous. I believe that this series of messages can be a great blessing to you. By the way, the title is Rescued, What God Did to Save Us. And for a gift of any amount, these messages can be yours.
And the good news is that along with the messages, we have a personal study guide that you can use as you continue to dig deeper into this marvelous book, the book of Romans. Here's what you can do. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I'm going to be giving you that contact info again, but I need to tell you that this is the second to last day we are making this resource available. And we want to make these resources available to help you in your walk and, as we frequently say, to make it all the way to the finish line. So for a gift of any amount, go to rtwoffer.
Of course, that's all one word, rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for Rescued, What God Did to Save Us. And we'll put those messages and study guide in the mail right away. It's time now for another chance for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. What do you do to alleviate the pain caused by adultery you have committed? An anonymous listener wants help, Dr. Lutzer, and here is what she says, I had a thirty-year relationship with a man that became a sexual affair. It has now ended, and he told his wife. My sons were aware of the relationship. I've also been called by the wife of the man asking about the details of this long-standing relationship. What else do I have to do besides be forgiven by God? Well, my dear sister, thank you so much for connecting with us. I can imagine the pain that you have been through during all of these thirty years. The conscience, your conscience, as it so troubled you.
A couple of comments. First of all, you say that the man's wife called you and asked about the details. It's not your responsibility to give her the details. It is the responsibility of her husband to give her the details. So I don't think it's up to you to have a phone call from her, and then she begins to dig into your life to find out what happened.
She has a right to know a lot of things, but let her know that through her husband. Secondly, you say that your sons knew about it. Have you genuinely gone to your sons one by one, acknowledging your sin, asking them to forgive you? That's absolutely essential, because if you don't, if you simply put a rug over the dirt, so to speak, your sons are going to be bitter against you. They are going to distrust you.
They will not respect you. Only repentance and genuine humility can bring about reconciliation. Next, what you need to know is that you have to apologize to anyone else who has been affected as a result of this longstanding affair.
And finally, to offer you some real genuine hope. When David committed adultery, there was nothing that he could do to bring Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, back to life. There was nothing that he could possibly do to undo the affair.
The consequences were going to continue. But isn't it interesting that in Psalm 51 he says, restore to me the joy of my salvation. So my dear sister, it is possible for you to still have the joy of your salvation, despite all the pain that has been caused and all of the consequences which will continue in one way or another.
It's your responsibility to clear your conscience so far as it can be cleared, receive God's forgiveness, and keep moving on as an expression and as an example of a sinner, forgiven by God, restored by grace. Thank you, Dr. Lutzer, for your compassionate answer. If you'd like to hear your question answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer, or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Jesus sets us free from the compulsion to sin, but we must be diligent to avoid situations that cause us to fall back into old behavior patterns. Next time, a final look at overcoming sin. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
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