Christians Aren’t Just Forgiven, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. God has told you in his word that if you are in Christ, you are no longer under the reign of sin. So you need to remember what Christ has made you. You need to reckon yourself dead to sin because that's what he has said.

And then you need to live according to your new identity. You need to reckon and then you need to restore God as the center of your life, as the master who brings life. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch, and we're so glad that you're with us today. So what does the Bible mean when it says that believers are dead to sin? Surely it doesn't mean that Christians never mess up. I mean, let's be honest, I think every Christian still struggles with sin at some level. So the natural question becomes, can anyone really be saved? We're looking for answers in a new teaching series called Phantom Faith. And if you missed any of the previous programs, you can always catch up online at J.D.

Greer dot com. Now here's Pastor J.D. with a message from Romans 6 that he titled Christians Aren't Just Forgiven. 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. 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? 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? Romans chapter six, 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 has taught all that, the natural question is, well, do we now have it 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans six. 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 reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin reckon, but alive to God and 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.

I told you it is an accounting term where you count one thing as if it were another, even though it is not. 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. 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. 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 Pallason and others like him have identified a set of what they call core idols, core masters in the human heart.

The first one he talks about is power. There are certain people that are driven by a desire for influence or recognition. There are others that their God is controlled. They're going to be happy as long as everything is going according to their plan. There are others that what the core of their heart is is approval. They have this craving to be accepted or desired. 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.

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 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. John Calvin, the theologian said that evil is not typically desiring something wrong. Evil is usually wanting something good too much. It's not desiring a bad thing. It's elevating a good thing to a God thing. And then when it becomes a God thing, it becomes a bad thing. In fact, Paul uses a very illuminating word in verse 12 that'll show you this.

If you got your Greek New Testament, you probably saw it when we read it. Let not sin, therefore reign in your mortal body, he said, to make you obey its passions. That word passions in Greek is the Greek word epithumia. Epithumia just means a desire, a strong desire even.

When you add the little prefix epi to it, it means that the desire becomes so large that it controls you or dominates you. I want money. There's nothing wrong with money.

Money is a good thing. But if I can't have it, I'll be bitter and I'll feel like I live a second class life. Or maybe I'll even feel like life is not worth living because it'd just be miserable to be poor. So I'll worry all the time about not getting money or I'll save money all the time, or I'll be jealous of those who have more of it than I do.

I'll overwork. Maybe even I'll cheat to get it. I want a family. I want a family. And if I can't have that, well, then life doesn't really feel like it's worth living. So I'll sit around and feel sorry for myself and ask what I did wrong that would make God hate me like this. Or I'll obsess about finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and I'll be willing to compromise all kinds of standards just to have somebody with me because I can't be happy.

I can't live without companionship. Tim Keller says that there are three tests that'll show you what your spiritual master is. Three kind of litmus tests. First one's anger. Anger. Whenever something blocks you from getting a good thing, you get upset.

That's normal and it's fine. It's an emotion God created. But listen, if something blocks you from getting an ultimate thing, you don't just get angry, you get epi angry. You snap because they have threatened the core of your life. In fact, look through your life and see where you can't forgive somebody else.

Because wherever you can't forgive somebody else, it's because they touched one of your spiritual masters. Fear is the second one. If something good in your life is threatened, you get worried. That's natural. If I find out my kids are in danger, I get worried.

That's very natural. But if something ultimate in your life is threatened, something you feel like you can't live without, then you are paralyzed. Your fear has become an epi fear. You are so anxious about it that you can't think right. You develop worry or anxiety problems. You go through panic attacks.

Here's your third one, sadness. When you lose something good in your life, you grieve and you weep, which you should grieve and weep. But see, when you lose something ultimate, you despair. You fall apart.

You say life is not worth living any longer. You want to throw yourself off of a bridge. You see, those three emotions, the epi version of those three emotions point to where God has been displaced as the master of your heart. So again, just a little self-diagnosis. What triggers those three emotions most in you? What is it throughout your life that has gotten you the most angry? What has caused you the most worry? What has caused you the most sadness? You know, over the years when we've talked about this, I've always told you there's kind of two that sort of fight for dominance in my heart besides God.

One of them is control, which is one of the reasons that when I got married, one of the things that my wife and I thought about as many married couples fight about is we thought about money. Why? Because money for me, that's security. And I was just convinced that one day I was going to open up our bank account and there wouldn't be anything left.

And there's no money there. And I need that to feel secure about the future because as long as there's enough in there to take care of emergencies and get us through a couple of rough months, then I feel okay. And if it's not there, I feel like, ah, you know, it just drives me bananas, right? Because it's control.

The other one is approval. And I've told you this before, but I've just throughout my life always felt like I was a good person if other people around me, the right people were telling me that I was awesome. And so what I did is I just didn't transfer that to our church when I became a pastor. And I thought, well, if the church likes me, if the church is big, then that means I'm doing something right, right? So that's why when that's why when I would preach a bad sermon, it would just devastate me.

I wasn't just sad that you guys didn't get the, you know, the point or I bored you a little bit. It was like, it was because it got to the core of who I was. If I'm not a good preacher, then I'm not worth anything and people aren't really going to like me. And I just was, after I preached a bad sermon, I'd show up the next week convinced that none of y'all were going to show up. That the sermon was just so bad and boring that y'all were like, in fact, sometimes, you know, it's just like, I know it sounds crazy to you, but I drive up and I'm like, you know, this is a volunteer organization. None of you have to be here. And like, this is the week that all of you say, you know what, I'm just sick. I've heard that story like seven times, that same one.

If he tells them that I'm just walking out, I'm not coming back. And you just go to another church and you listen to another preacher. And I come here and there's like a handful of staff because they have to be here. And then there's my wife, you know, on the front row and she's got her iPod.

She's not really there, but she's got her iPod in and she's listening to Matt Chandler because he's funny. And so, you know, it's, and while I'm trying to preach and I'm like, boom, it's just, you know, it's this kind of fear that begins to paralyze my life because the master that I've lived for is approval. Paul says, you got, you, everybody's got to serve somebody. Maybe that wasn't Paul. That was Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan got it from Paul.

He got it from Paul right here in Romans chapter six. So what Paul says is you got to put God back in the center because everybody serves something. You see, if you present yourselves as anybody who is obedient slaves, you're going to be slaves of the one you obey. Either it's a sin which leads to death or of obedience which leads to righteousness, whatever master you choose.

And you're going to choose one. It's going to lead you to a certain destination. And every master that you choose besides God, the destination they lead you to is death. We'll be right back with the rest of our teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to quickly share a little bit about our resources this month. You know, it's not enough to simply go through the motions of Christianity. We have to trade out our phantom faith for a faith that truly lives. To get started, we've created a book of devotionals for anyone who feels distracted and even disconnected at times. And in addition, we've got a set of 20 conversation cards to help kickstart faith-based conversations in your home. There's nothing greater than experiencing deep community with those we love. And what better way than to talk about things that matter, not only to us, but to God.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220, or go online to jdgrier.com and reserve your copy today. So if you're enslaved to approval like I was, your life will be plagued by constant self-pity, feelings of envy toward other people who have what you want, hurt feelings, people always walking on eggshells because they got to say the right things to affirm you and make sure they don't criticize you. You have these feelings of inadequacy. If you're enslaved to comfort, if you're enslaved to comfort, that means that, well, a couple of versions of it, you can't say no to the pleasures of the body.

You get addicted to sex or food or pornography or alcohol or something. Another version of this, a much more civilized version of this, is you can't ever be generous with your money. Why? Because to give away your money, because to give away money for the mission or to share it with somebody else deprives you of some of the creature comforts that you love. So you'll be generous as long as it doesn't affect you having the things that you really want, which is that home, that vacation, driving that kind of car, because you worship the God of comfort and you can't be happy unless the right comfortable things are around you. That's why you can't really be that generous.

When I talk about somebody leaving to go to the mission field, you act like I'm talking to people from another planet. Why would you ever do that? Why would I leave my comfortable home and go live somewhere that's uncomfortable? What are these fools doing good, living in the dwell, living in another part of Raleigh-Durham where they're living intentionally somewhere that's not comfortable? You can't do that because you worship comfort. If you worship, where are we?

If you worship power, you become domineering and vengeful, harsh, even abusive. If you ever saw yourself in the mirror, you wouldn't like what you see. You're the kind of person that wants to talk about yourself all the time, right? You're that guy. You know, hey, I'm tired of talking about how awesome I am. Why don't you talk about how awesome I am for a while and then that'll take it away from me? You just become that person. If you're enslaved to control, you worry all the time obsessively. You'll lose your temper a lot.

People around you feel manipulated by you because you're trying to control them. The wages, Paul says, you see, of sin, verse 23, is death. You've known that verse, the wages of sin is death, but what you've probably never done is connected it to the larger context. Paul is not just talking about going to hell when you die. He is talking about that, but he's talking about a hell you begin to experience on earth before you ever get to hell in the afterlife.

What he's saying is that death is a law that begins to just disintegrate you, and ultimately one day when you do die and go to hell, it's just the fulfillment of the way that you lived on earth. Paul says the wages of sin is death, but the gift, the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Paul says there's another master, and this master doesn't pay. He gives. He gives you a gift, whereas every other master threatens you and tells you, if you don't work enough for me, I'll make you miserable. Isn't that what a master does?

Isn't that what money does? You better work. You better work hard for me, and if you don't work hard enough for me, you're going to be poor, and then when you're poor, I'll make you miserable and you'll be cursed. Relationships say you better work for me.

You know what? If you're hot enough and if you're skinny enough, then you'll get the relationship that you've always wanted, you'll get the attention you want, and then you'll feel like you're worth something. So you better starve that body, and you better get it down.

You better feel inadequate all the time because you got to find that relationship because without that, you'll be miserable. You better work for me. Work for me. God says I'll give you all my joy and all my blessing as a gift. You don't have to work for anything. You can't work for anything. You don't have to earn it.

It's not a wage. It's a gift. Every blessing that I have in Christ, I'm going to give it to you for free. Salvation, my salvation, my blessing, my presence is not something you achieve.

It is something you receive. Tim Keller has a wonderfully simple way of saying this. Jesus is the only master that you give yourself to. The only master who, if you find him, will satisfy you. And the only master that, if you fail him, will forgive you. You see, Jesus is more satisfying and He's more reliable than money.

Why? Because He owns the cattle on a thousand hill and He promises to supply every need that you ever have and He never crashes and never dips below 12,000. You don't have to get up and switch on some business channel to figure out what He's what He's rating at for the day. He is more fulfilling and more comforting than romantic love. You see, earthly marriage, good marriages, all they are is supposed to be a dim shadow of heavenly love.

It turns out that the arms that we yearned for and we sought in romance were actually His arms. It was His tenderness, His security, His companionship that was the ultimate fulfillment of those things. Jesus is better than earthly pleasure. He's the fountain of all pleasures. Jesus is better knowing God is better than earthly power. Y'all, what greater power could there be than for you to know that the sovereign God who cherishes you has commandeered every molecule in the universe to work for His purposes and for your good.

You don't get greater power than that. Jesus is greater than popularity to be known and honored and esteemed by the God of eternity. That is honor. That's the one who I want saying, I approve of you well done good and faithful servant. No matter what I compare God to, God wins. And what Paul says is, listen, you have got to get God back at the center of your life after you reckon yourself dead to sin. Realize that the way that you were living, you'd put something in your life that was leading you to death.

You got to put God back in the throne and daily present your members to Him because that will lead you to life. One of our campus pastors had a great illustration of this. He says, you know, he said, I have a shellfish analogy, an analogy, allergy. I have a shellfish allergy, not an analogy. He says, what I do is I, if I ever eat shellfish, he says, my throat constricts, so, you know, break out in a rash.

I can hardly breathe. He said, the problem is, is I love shrimp. I just love the taste of shrimp. And so he said for years as a young man, I just convinced myself, you know what, willpower. This time I'll eat shrimp and I'll just kind of mind my way over the thing. He said, it never worked.

It never worked. And he pulls up this little thing. He says, the good thing is I have one of these. It's an EpiPen. An EpiPen that, you know, if you eat shrimp, then you stick it, you know, somewhere in your body and you parents know what it is.

And it counteracts the effects of the shellfish. Now he's not suggesting, nor am I, that you just develop that as a routine of life where you eat it and stick yourself with an EpiPen. He said, but you know, it sounds like that's what you're saying, that essentially sin and the gospel, that's how that works, is sin is epithymia that begins to take over your whole body.

And man, you love the taste of it for a minute, but it begins to constrict your breathing and even constrict your circulation. And it begins to work death. And the only way that you can counteract that is to take the EpiPen of God's word and you got to put it into your bloodstream. And you got to have a vision of God that begins to open up those passageways and open up what sin has created in death. I've got to re-infuse with life. Paul says, you got to serve somebody and what you've been serving leads you to death. You need a vision of God and His promises that will infuse you with life.

God needs to become Epi again in your life because He's the only one that will give life. So Paul began this discussion with a question. The question was, if we're really saved by grace as a free gift, should we just go on sinning like we have an unlimited spiritual budget to cover sin? Paul's answer was, God forbid.

Why? Because sin is a trajectory that leads to death. And if you've really repented, you don't want to be on that path. And by the way, if you do want to be in that path, Paul would say that begs the question of whether you've ever really repented. There's some who are like, oh, I got my heavenly gift.

I'm going to give it to you. Some who are like, oh, I got my heavenly visa card. He's like, that's not repentance. That's trying to use God.

Right? What repentance means is that you recognize I was walking a path that led to death. I want to walk a path that leads to life.

And so I forsake this path and I'm going to choose this one. And if you were not choosing to follow after God, then I don't care what prayer you prayed. You didn't really become a Christian because repentance means a change of mind, a change of mind about one thing and beginning to pursue another one. Paul says, after you have made that choice that you want to follow God, how is it that you begin to live victoriously over sin?

He says your two steps. You've got to reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God. You got to believe what God says. You got to believe that you're not a slave to sin anymore. They, you know, they say that back in the days of the 19th century, after Abraham Lincoln had made the Emancipation Proclamation, and even after the civil war had been won, there was a whole generation of slaves, former slaves, who just could not get their mind around the fact that they were free people because their identity for all their life had been, I'm a slave. And they would say that when their other, their former masters would come around, sometimes they would tremble and they would quake and they would just begin to be servile and do whatever was said.

All right. You want to tell those people you're no longer slaves. You are free. You don't have to tremble and quake because you are not under the control of that person anymore. Paul says, when you have become a Christian sin, that old master comes around you and you don't have to listen to them anymore because they start saying things to you like, Hey, you know what? You're always going to be an addict. You're always going to be a failure. You're never going to get any better. You've seen what you've done in your life.

That's what we can expect from you. And Paul says in Romans six, no, no matter what you feel, no matter what you may have experienced, God has told you in his word, that if you were in Christ, you are no longer under the reign of sin. And when you do fall into sin, it's because you've forgotten who you are. So you need to remember what Christ has made you. You need to reckon yourself dead to sin, because that's what he has said. And then you need to live according to your new identity.

You need to reckon. And then you need to restore God as the center of your life, as the master who brings life. All this starts with just trusting Christ.

That's where it begins. Just trusting Christ, that what he has said about what he's done for you is true. The gospel, the gospel is that Jesus Christ has removed both the penalty and the power of your sin. We've been freed from sin.

We don't have to be slaves to its commands anymore. That truth is encouraging. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian J.D.

Greer. We're just starting a new teaching series called Phantom Faith. It's because of your partnership that your neighbors in your community can hear God's truth each day on this radio station. So when you give a financial gift of $35 or more, we'll say thanks by sending you our brand new 15-day resource called Devotions for the Distracted Family. As I mentioned earlier, it also comes with a set of 20 conversation cards. Our goal is to keep you and those that you're closest with talking and communicating about important things like faith, relationships, and even rest.

We all live in a distracted world. So we want to set you up for success, facilitating deeper conversations that build stronger friendships. Request these resources today when you call 866-335-5220 or donate online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Tomorrow Pastor JD talks about the problem of consumer Christianity.

Wondering what that is? Join us Wednesday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program is produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.