Christians Aren’t Just Forgiven

Today on Summit Life with Jiddy Greer. There are some people who seem to be looking for so little when it comes to salvation. Man, they just want inner peace. They just want to find some meaning in their life. They want to get out of hell free card. And Jesus will give you all of those things. But he is so much more. Union to Christ means that everything that is true of Jesus is now legally true of you also. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we are so glad that you're back with us today. You know, in the movies, when someone's facing a life-threatening situation, they'll often stop to say a quick prayer, right? And it's usually along the lines of, Hey, God, I know we haven't talked in a while, but I've always believed in you and I could really use your help. And sometimes we might think that a prayer like that is what we have to pray to punch our magic ticket into heaven.

So is that really all salvation is? Pastor J.D. answers that question today with a teaching he titled, Christians Aren't Just Forgiven. We know you don't want to miss a single message here on the program.

So if you're a little behind, you can always catch up at jdgreer.com. But for now, grab your Bible, take some notes, and let's join Pastor J.D. as he teaches from Romans chapter six. We are in a short series called Phantom Faith in which we are discussing a handful of things that people just don't get regarding Christianity. When they're new to Christianity, or if even have been around church for a long time, these are kind of things that just don't connect that cause them to live, to go through the motions of Christianity, but often without the soul. That's what a zombie is, right?

Isn't a zombie, last week we talked about is a moving body without the soul. Many people are like that with their faith. They're going through the motions of Christianity, but they've never really developed the heart of Christianity.

And I want to explain why that is. The very first week we went through Romans chapter four, and I showed you how so many people just don't seem to get what the Bible means when it says that we're saved by faith. If you weren't here for that, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it. Not because I felt like it was a great sermon, but because it's a great passage of scripture. And it shares with you the one thing that separates Christianity from every other religious message in the world. Shows you the one thing that you have to understand if you are going to know for sure you go to heaven. Not one thing that we looked at in depth a couple weeks ago is what it means for salvation to be received, not achieved. That's the distinction of what Jesus taught more of any other religious leader is that God credits to us Jesus' righteousness, even though we don't deserve it, even though we don't have it in ourselves.

He credits to us Jesus' righteousness when we trust personally that God accomplished what he said he accomplished in Jesus' death on the cross. And that is the full and the complete payment for our sin. This week, I want to talk about another misconception that people have about Christian salvation, and that is that Christian salvation is just forgiveness. That the gospel is just God's agreement to wipe out your sin debt. You can hear that in how we phrase the question about salvation. We say, I went over this a couple weeks ago, if you died tonight and God were to say, why should I let you into heaven?

What would you tell him? As if that is all that the gospel is really concerned about is how you answer that question. How are you going to take care of your sin debt? What I want to show you this weekend is that in the gospel are not only the resources to be delivered from the penalty of sin, you're going to get the resources that you need to be delivered from the power of sin too. It's not just forgiveness, it's also the power of new life. So the question is not just if you died tonight and God said, why should I let you into heaven? What would you tell him? The question is also if you get up tomorrow morning, if you get up tomorrow morning, how is your life going to look different that Christ is in it?

I'm really excited about this. I will be totally honest with you about being able to teach this to you because what I'm going to share with you today has the potential to radically transform some of your lives because you are going to discover today that there is a power available to you that you may not have even ever known about. You do not automatically get this power when you become a believer. You've got to learn to access it and let's just face it, if some of you were really honest, you would admit that you feel plateaued in your spiritual life.

You're not really going anywhere. The relationship's not developed. The same old temptations you've always had are as in control of your life as they've ever been. You're not developing deeper love for God.

You've got the same bad temper, the same foul moods. I want to try to show you why that is and how it is that you can change that. Romans 6, Paul begins with a question.

Here is the question. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? After what Paul has just taught about how salvation is a free gift, that it is received, not achieved. It's not something we do to earn it. After Paul is taught all that, the natural question is, well, do we now have like a divine visa card with an unlimited balance that we can just run up as much sin charge as we want and Jesus has already got it covered?

You know, when you've got an unlimited credit, then why not just spend as much money as you want? Why don't we just go ahead and sin since Jesus' blood is covered at all? It's a very natural question once you understand the gospel. How can we, who died to sin, still live in it? All right, what does Paul mean when he says we have died to sin?

Well, let me tell you what he doesn't mean. What he doesn't mean is that we are gradually moving away from sin, gradually getting more and more righteous, and this just died to sin is just a metaphor. No, he said dead to sin. Dead to sin is, you're not like mostly dead.

You're either dead or you're not. So Paul's not talking about a gradual process where you become more sinless as you grow more righteous. Nor does Paul mean that we have simply renounced sin saying, you know, like an Italian mafia boss may say to his son if he disappointed him, you are dead to me. You know, he's not talking about that either.

Something much greater, something much bigger is going on. He explains, verse three, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. Putting sin to death was something that Christ did for us on the cross. And when we are baptized into him, we are joined to his killing of our sin. Verse four, 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 also, we too might walk in the newness of life. The baptism that Paul speaks of specifically here is spirit baptism where the Holy Spirit takes us.

It's an invisible process, but the moment that you put faith in Christ, the moment you trust in Christ, the spirit of God takes you and he baptizes you in the spirit of in the spirit into the death of Christ so that Christ's death on the cross becomes your killing of sin and Christ's burial in the ground became the burial of your sin forever. That spirit baptism is supposed to be mirrored by water baptism. We often say here that that water baptism is just an external depiction of what has already happened as an inward reality. That just like you and I, when we were baptized in the spirit, when we trusted Christ, just like we were put into the death of Christ, right, so we are going to put somebody in the water showing that they have been buried with Christ.

And just like Christ was raised from the dead and we were raised in him, the spirit joined us to that, so we're going to be raised up out of the water, right? So that's what we're doing when we do water baptism is we're giving an external picture of something that has already happened on the inside. So occasionally somebody will say to me, you know, well pastor why don't you sprinkle people? It feels like, you know, they're just so much cleaner and easier and it doesn't involve all the tanks and the changing of clothes and why don't you just sprinkle? And listen, when I answer this, I'm not trying to be catty, I'm not trying to be cute, we don't sprinkle because it depicts a burial.

And when you bury somebody, you don't sprinkle dirt on their head, you put them under the ground. People say, well why don't you baptize a baby? Well because a baby has not been put into Christ yet. Water baptism is supposed to be the external depiction, the external symbol of something that has already happened on the inside.

And it happens when you believe on Jesus and when you are baptized in the spirit, you're supposed to demonstrate that by a water baptism. Now I'm telling you, I've told you for a few weeks, we're going to be doing that today. We're going to, you know, throughout the year from time to time, we will give people a chance who have never been baptized to be baptized. And I know some of you didn't come prepared, you're like, I wasn't thinking about it today, I already forgot where you said it a couple weeks ago, which is, well first of all, God graciously has prepared you by making you get wet for the last nine days in a row, so you shouldn't be that nervous about that. But we also have everything that you need, a change of clothes, and at the end of the service today, all of our campuses, we're going to give you a chance because you need to take this step because it's an important one and it's what Jesus said is supposed to be your first act of faith after you become a Christian. Some of you've been Christians for years and you've never done it.

Today we're going to give you that chance. All right, that unification, Paul says, to Christ gives us access now to Jesus's newness of life. Verse five, for if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.

United, that word is a horticultural term in Greek, and it means where you would graft one branch out of one plant into another one. And what he's saying is that our plant was dead, and so Jesus took the branch of our lives and he grafted it into Jesus's root. And because Jesus was alive, Jesus's life began to flow up into us. Now let me just stop for a second. Do you understand? I feel like this just goes right over my head. Do you understand what Paul just said and about the implications of that for the power and the potential that you have in your spiritual life?

Do you really kind of get your mind around? Christianity is not you turning over a new leaf, it's not you resolving to do better. Christianity is the power of new life. There are some people who seem to be looking for so little when it comes to salvation. Man, they just want inner peace.

They just want to find some meaning in their life. They want to get out of hell free card. And Jesus will give you all of those things, but he is so much more. Union to Christ means that everything that is true of Jesus is now legally true of you also.

You've not only got his perfect record attached to your account, you've got the power of his resurrection. Eternal life is not just something God was going to give you by an eternal duration of days in the afterlife. Eternal life is something he wants to give you right now.

It is a quality of living, not just a quantity of days. Does that not change how you see the potential of your life? There is no brokenness or no corruption in you that Jesus did not put in the grave and there is nothing that his resurrection cannot remove, heal or redeem from you.

I want you to think about this for a minute. The greatest people that God used to change the world, if you go back and read their stories in the Bible, are always deeply flawed people. I mean people that you would like learn their past, you'd be like, I don't even know why you're here. Peter was a coward. I mean repeatedly throughout his life a coward. Paul was harsh and abrasive. You would not want to be friends with the apostle Paul.

He was always self-righteous, telling you why he did it better than you. The apostle John was arrogant and vengeful. Several of the most prominent women in the early church had very shady pasts. Yet the new birth made these men and women people of incredible power.

They changed history and they were not made out of money. They were made out of more promising material than the person that is sitting next to you if they are a believer in Christ. Because it's no longer about what you and I are able to accomplish for Christ.

It is what the power of his resurrection can do in and through us. In fact right now, I don't think you're getting this, right now look to the person right now at every campus to your right. Everybody look to your right. Now look to the person to your left. If they are a believer they have literally, literally they have the power that brought Jesus out of the grave inside their chest. Does that not change how you feel about that person? Don't you want to just kind of reach over and touch him for just a minute?

Just be like let me try to get a little bit of that off onto me. That is the potential that Paul says is in you. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We'll return to our teaching in just a moment. Most people in church know how to act the part, but there's no real life in their walk. So our newest resource is focused on helping you and your closest community dialogue about your faith. We have a set of conversation cards which are simply cards with one question or prompt on them to pull out while you're eating dinner or on a long car ride.

They will help break the ice on difficult topics or simply give a launching pad for deeper communication. Our resource this month also includes a book of 15 devotionals on the topics of relationships, rest, and faith. We'll send it as our thanks for your gift to the ministry right now.

So give us a call at 866-335-5220 or check it out at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to our teaching. Here's Pastor J.D. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans 6. So he's going to try to get really practical with you. All right, so go to verse 11.

I'll show you how he gets really down and down in the weeds with us. Likewise you also you need to to reckon yourselves to be a dead indeed to sin reckon but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The rest of this passage is going to be built on around two imperatives, two verbs.

The first one is this one right here, reckon. Now reckon is that Greek word logizomai that we spent so much time on a couple weeks ago. I told you it is an accounting term where you count one thing as if it were another even though it is not. And the first time Paul uses it in Romans he's talking about how when we put faith in Christ God, logizomai, he reckons our faith to be righteousness. He accounts it as righteousness even though technically it isn't.

I compared it to a wild card. Remember that like when your hand of poker if you got a joker and you can count the joker for whatever you want it to be and you need a queen of hearts and you can count that as a queen of hearts even though it's not. And Paul says when we put faith in Christ finished work God, logizomai, he counts that as righteousness. Now Paul says it's your turn to do the reckoning. It is your turn to reckon yourself to be dead to sin and alive to God. And when you reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God it is then that God infuses the power of new life into you. You say but I don't feel dead to sin.

Sin and wrong desires feel very much alive in me. You're totally missing Paul's point. When you believe that God has declared it to be it is then after you believe it that he begins to infuse the power into you. Again Abraham is our example. Abraham was infertile at 90 years old when God declared he would have a son. When God said that to Abraham, Abraham did not say you know I think you're right.

I've been feeling unusually frisky for the last few weeks. I believe you. No, Romans says he didn't he didn't feel anything at all when God said it but he believed what God said because God had said it even though he didn't feel it even though he knew his equipment was way out of working order and when he believed what God said even though it went against how he felt it was then that he received strength. So Paul says in the same way you will receive strength to be dead to sin when you believe that God has made you dead to sin.

This is not some kind of mental trick where you tell yourself I'm brave I'm brave I'm brave I'm brave enough times until you actually become brave. God gives you actual power when you believe that what he says he has done is true and so when you say I am dead to sin and I am alive to God in the resurrection it is then that the power of righteousness and the power of new life comes into you. You see we always want to feel first and then we'll believe and God says nope that is not it at all you got to believe what I said because I said it and then you will feel. This is what we call name it claim it sanctification. You see the name it claim it crowd gets at least one major thing right.

They get some major things wrong. Name it claim it is the idea that you just take a promise of Jesus and doesn't matter if you don't have it you don't feel it you just claim it. It's just not in Jesus and then you name it and it's yours you stab it you grab it however you want to you think of that. What they get right this is you got to learn this what they get right is that when Jesus has made a promise then you can claim it as your own even if you do not feel it in one shape form or fashion at all.

What they get wrong is the object of what you are claiming from Jesus because what Jesus died for was not to give you a new BMW he died to make you holy and holiness is a much greater possession than a Hummer. So when you name it and claim it what you're claiming is you're claiming the promises that Jesus gave not about making you materially prosperous you're claiming the promises about him making you more like Christ. And that is a promise that you can name it is a promise you can claim and when you claim that promise then God will infuse the power of new life into you. Paul says you got to reckon it even though you don't feel you reckon it and when you reckon it that's when God begins to infuse it into you. So Paul continues verse 12 here's your second one. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness instead you should present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. Here's your second command Paul tells us after you reckon yourself dead to sin number two you must restore God as the center of your life. Now he doesn't use the word restore in this text per se but that is what he is talking about when he tells us to present the members of our body daily to God. You see Paul says listen to this watch this there is something at the center of your heart it sits on the throne there's something and every day you will present your members of your body in service to that thing there's something in you that you feel like is so central in your life that you've got to have it this is the God that you worship and every day you will get up and you will present the members of your body in service to that thing and say what do I got to do to obtain you. Now at this point I know some of you may object you say wait a minute Paul I'm not a servant of anybody or anything I do whatever I want. Paul anticipates your objection by the way did you know that for the first at least 100 years maybe even longer at Harvard Law School they read the book of Romans line by line not for theology they read it so that they could learn how to develop a law case where you anticipate objections and just shoot them down as you're making your argument because what Paul does anytime he senses an objection he just goes ahead and takes care of it and so he figured there's a group of Americans 2,000 years ago and he was writing this that would object the way that you just objected so Paul sensed your objection and then watch how he smacks it down verse 16 do you not know do you think you don't serve somebody is that what you think do you not know that if you present yourselves to anybody's obedient slaves you're the slaves of the one you obey whether that's to sin which leads to death or of obedience to God which leads to righteousness every day he says you present your body your members of your body in pursuit of something something's at the center of your heart something commands your obedience it's whatever it is that's most important to you whatever you feel like that you have to have to be fulfilled or to be happy it's whatever you feel like you can't live without that thing controls you functionally that thing has become your master Christian counselor David Palleson and other um others like him have identified a set of what they call core idols core masters in the human heart which are sort of you know based on your personality or based on the time of life one of these four will become more prominent than the others but they're like root idols or core idols that are sort of behind everything else it's really been helpful for me to think through these let me put them up here for you the first one he talks about is power there are certain people that are driven by a desire for influence or recognition man it's just for them for life to be good they got to have power and influence and they got to be at the top there are others that their God is controlled they're going to be happy as long as everything is going according to their plan these are the people that plan all the time these are the people that save lots of money these are people who just feel like as long as everything is just kind of going the way that it's supposed to and there's nothing I'm going to be okay there are others that what the core of their heart is is approval they have this craving to be accepted or desired and they can't be happy unless certain other people are happy with them that might be their family it might be their friends at school it might be the people in their career field it might be their spouse but they live by approval then there are lastly here comfort there are some who what it means for them to be happy is they just want to be comfortable it might take the form of longing for pleasures like sexual pleasure or even alcohol food pleasure or it might just be they want creature comforts they feel like as long as I'm you know just got my my house as long as I got my land and as long as everything's comfortable then I'm going to be okay let me ask you this when you look at those four which one just sort of more naturally thinks that that would be my one right there kind of identify it if you have your spouse lean over and tell them which one you think their one is as well and see if you guys got you came up with the same one there's nothing wrong of course with any one of these things in and of itself it's when it becomes central in your life ultimate when it becomes the thing that you can't live without when it becomes something that commands your obedience more than god does when you get up daily and you think about how to pursue these things because without that thing you could not be happy that's when god has been displaced as your master and that thing has become wicked what's controlling you today that's the question from pastor jd greer on summit life you can access sermon transcripts audio and other resources free of charge at jdgrier.com now jd our newest resource sets out to meet families today right where they are doesn't it tell us about that yeah exactly molly we are all so distracted by the news by the latest app on our phone by whatever reminders are coming through by our families going in a hundred different directions and various activities what we want to do is we want to help you connect easily and quickly without adding something else to your plate chances are it's not something new you need to learn it's just conversation space it needs to be created and so we created a set of conversation cards they're just cards with one question or one prompt on them that will just take the dialogue in some directions that it may not otherwise go to help you and those you're closest with talk about about faith and and rest and what it means to trust god and what it means to to love and serve each other it comes along with the book of 15 devotions that i wrote around those same topics it's even got a few parenting devotions thrown in because i know when we talk about rest a lot of your parents think is that even a real thing i'd love to give you a copy of those things if you will will go to jdgrier.com and reach out to us there then we can we can start that conversation that relationship with you and give you this resource and access to a lot of other things as well we'd love to get you both the 15 day devotional and set of conversation cards today and it comes with our way of saying thanks for your essential partnership with this ministry when you give a suggested donation of 35 dollars or more to summit life you're helping people around the world dive into the gospel and we're so grateful so be sure to ask for the devotions for the distracted family 15 days on relationships faith and rest as well as the conversation cards when you give today call 866-335-5220 that's 866-335-5220 or if it's easier you can donate and request the pair online at jdgrier.com i'm molly vinovich be sure to join us tomorrow when pastor jd concludes this message called christians aren't just forgiven see you tuesday on summit life with jd career today's program is produced and sponsored by jd greer ministries