Grace That Changes Everything (Romans Week 13) by Michael Williams

Your life isn’t stuck the way it is—real change is possible. In Romans 6, we see that God’s grace doesn’t just forgive us; it transfers us into a new identity in Christ and begins transforming us from the inside out. As we learn to “reckon” what’s true of us and surrender every part of our lives to Jesus, we step into real freedom from the power of sin.

Romans 6v1-14

Transcript

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And we're going to continue this morning in the book of Romans. We've been in Romans as a community since we started as a church in January, and we've made it all the way to chapter six this morning. So nice job, everybody. Five chapters down. We are in chapter six. It's good to be in the book of Romans. I want to start by just asking you a question. Have you ever known anybody who has radically changed? Maybe think back in your memories. Somebody that's radically changed. Somebody that's like become a different person. I remember I went to high school at Granville for most of my time, and there was a kid in our class at Granville. His name was actually Doobie. I don't know why, I've known like three or four doobies in my life as a young adult and teenager, but as an adult, I don't know any doobies. But apparently it was popular for a little while. And his name was Doobie, and like I remember he radically changed between the sophomore year of high school and junior year of high school. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do know that he got in lots of trouble as a sophomore. He would like drink in class, he was suspended multiple times. And his parents, they sent him to a camp all summer long, and he like came back like 50 pounds lighter, strict, like disciplinary, like the dude was different. It was like, what happened to you? And and he just mumbled about how he went to some camp. I never did learn, like what did his parents do to him? So sorry, parents, I can't refer it to you. Um if you have a kid like that, my bad. But um, yeah, he he radically changed. I love hearing stories of transformation. The Bible's full of stories of how people change and and our lives, our world, is full of stories of how people change, which which is really sometimes hard because a lot of us, our experience has been that people don't change. I remember watching the TV show House for a long time, and one of the premises of the show, and House is this genius doctor, but one of the premises that he had that was like fundamental to his worldview is people don't change. And if you just bet on that, you won't be let down. And a lot of us we we kind of carry that attitude into life. Like, you know, a zebra doesn't change his stripes, an addict doesn't change, a person who's proven themselves untrustworthy, I can forgive them, but I'm not gonna trust them again. We don't we don't really think like, do people change? You know, it's like we know the Jesus answer is yes, but we know our neighbors haven't changed. Or that annoying person in our family, they don't seem to change. And and we wrestle with that. I was reading a story recently, it's actually a whole documentary. There's a guy named Brian Welch, some of you have maybe watched the documentary, but he was the lead singer for a rock band called Korn. And he uh it was a huge band, he was really, really famous, and he made tons of money touring the world. Um, but but he was in the pits. He was addicted to meth, his life was falling apart, and he had a daughter, and and he had a realization one day that he was going to not just destroy his own life, but he was gonna destroy his daughter's life. And so he decided to go to church, and he immediately realized that church was not his crowd. Umbody in the church, and nobody really here today looks like they belong in a rock band in the 80s and 90s, but he he didn't think like this is this is where I belong. Um, and but he stuck with it because he was at rock bottom, and and actually in church, he had an encounter with God. He uh met with Jesus in a way that he described as like being overwhelmed by the love of God, and and he radically changed. He entered into rehab, he he got off drugs, and and a year later, people would say things like, You are a radically different person. Like you have fundamentally changed. Something has happened to you. There's stories like that in the Bible. We've we've probably known the story of the Apostle Paul. Paul was Saul and he was killing Christians, and then something happened. Something happened on this road to Damascus, if you believe the story in the Bible, something happened on this road to Damascus, and his life completely changed. He became one of the primary missionaries of early Christianity, and and one of the main reasons that Christianity even survived or made it out of the tiny little nation of Israel. And when you think about stories like that, it it's hard to come up with an explanation. I mean, you have to kind of dismiss all the evidence and shove it in a corner and and just not look at it to ignore all the evidence to say like that people don't have radical changes. And so the question is like, why? What changes a person? And there might be many, many reasons that people change. We don't know all of them, but but this morning, as we move into Romans 6, we're gonna look at how Paul makes the argument how people change, how people actually are impacted and become different. So I've titled the message Grace That Changes Everything. Let's pray and then we'll get right into the bat the passage today. Lord, we welcome your presence. And we welcome your Holy Spirit. We know that you are here. We ask that you would draw near to us. We ask that you would reveal yourself to us. We ask that you would speak to us. We welcome you, Lord. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So we're gonna be in Romans 6 and just a real quick review. The first five chapters of Romans we've been in, all about the gospel, all about the gospel. And that's the reason we we picked the book of Romans, because we wanted to start this church grounded in the gospel. And we're not gonna summarize the whole first five chapters, but if you if you wanted one word for it, it would be gospel. If you wanted two words, it would be total grace. Paul's argument over and over, he begins by exclaiming the gospel in a song, then he summarizes the gospel. In chapters two and three and four, he starts to show the need of the gospel, and then he has his crescendo about justification, the heart of the gospel. And now he's gonna pivot, though, to this gospel of total grace. What does it do to us? Like, why does it matter? Like what it what happens when you believe this thing. Another way you could frame Romans is the beginning. Romans 1 through 5 is all about how we overcome the penalty of sin. But Romans 6, 7, and 8, the next three chapters we're gonna be in, is how we overcome the power of sin. How we can actually walk into freedom. Paul is not under any illusions. He believes that we, just because we know these things in our head, that we're gonna change. And so, Paul, he has this belief that he's gonna unpack for us in the next couple chapters that there is actually a path to freedom. That there's a path for human beings to fundamentally change. And so we're gonna begin in chapter six. Just a reminder, last week we we talked in chapter five at the end of chapter five. Paul gave us the cosmic story of the gospel, and he talked about being in Adam and being in Christ, if you remember, and in the depths of the problem, and now he's gonna move in to chapter six and explain how we change. What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is free from sin, but if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all, that the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under the law, but under grace. Amen. There's a lot there, so we'll unpack it slowly. Paul is never short on words, is he? Yeah, he likes to take us into the deep end. And I think one of the things we see right away, though, is Paul's anticipating an objection. And his anticipation, his objection is that people are gonna be like offended or think that what he's saying has to be wrong. He he actually brings this objection up again in verse 15, which we'll get to next week when Pastor Rich is preaching. But he, if you remember, he's he's echoing the same thing he brought up in chapter 3. When he's anticipating objections, he's he's anticipating that this is what people are going to say. And some of you, you might be thinking this too. He's thinking, if you make it this easy, if you make it this free, won't people just do whatever they want? Won't they just keep on sinning? Like, like really, like, won't, like, I hear you, Paul. We're totally free. We're totally forgiven. We're justified. The verdict of the judgment seat at the end of our life, it's already been given to us. So why can't I do whatever I want to do? Like, why can't I just keep on sinning? Now, Paul, he's talking to a church in Rome that's that has Jews and Gentiles, and most of this critique is probably coming from the Jews. The Jews are probably thinking, if you throw out the rule book, it's gonna be chaos. Everybody knows you have to have a little discipline. Certainly lots of grace, lots of God's favor, lots of God's blessing, but there has to be some obedience, right? There has to be some like salvation is all a free gift, but I'm earning it a little bit, right? Or I have to respond a little bit. Like, like think about it. If if a person is is just out there, maybe you think of your kid, and they do something really, really bad, and you just forgive them. You just say, no big deal, and there's no consequences. Don't we intuitively think like that's not gonna work for very long? It doesn't take a super bright kid to realize, like, I can abuse this system. And that's what these these people are in Rome saying. Paul is reacting to this question. He's like, aren't people gonna abuse grace if it's totally free? And so the first thing we actually see about grace is grace is grace that offends us. Grace that changes us is grace that offends us. One of the marks that we're preaching the gospel truthfully is that people respond this way. People respond with, that's too good, that's too free. That is way, way, way too easy. One of the marks that we're preaching the real gospel is that people's responses, people are going to abuse that. That means that we've we've preached the gospel that Paul is preaching. Jesus actually told a very similar parable. He said, the kingdom of God is like this worker who had a field and he hires employees, and he he hires some early in the morning and says he'll pay them a certain amount, and then he hires others midday, and he says he'll pay them the same amount as the people that worked all day. And then he hires people like an hour before work day is finished, and he pays them the same amount as the people that worked all day long. And of course, the people who heard this story, and in this story, the people who worked all day, they're offended. Why are they offended? Because I worked all day long and I'm getting paid the same amount as the person who only worked an hour. Grace, it offends us. Jesus' sort of famous reply is, why are you jealous of my generosity? Why are you mad that I'm kind to them? See, most of us, we we naturally are a little offended by grace, and it kind of falls on one or two sides. Those of us who are are generally nice and good and work hard, we're kind of offended that other people who aren't trying as much as us are getting the same thing as us, right? I was a firstborn child. Any firstborn child that like you had a sibling who's younger than you, and it's kind of annoying that they got off easier in life than you, that you're like the good kid, and they don't get treated the same. It's not fair. And as a firstborn child, everything was about being fair, and so grace offends those who want to be fair. Usually the people that want life to be fair are the people who think they're doing a good job. But then there's the other side, the people that have too much shame that grace offends them. One psychologist once said that we receive the love we think we're worth. Shame is this inner voice that says, yeah, God's loving, but not towards me. The promises of God are true, but not for me. It's this, I'm the exclusion, I'm unworthy, I'm not good enough. And when we have shame, we we're also offended by the grace of God. We wouldn't call it that, but we we push it away. We build up dams sort of in our heart to keep the river of grace from actually getting to us. And so the grace of the gospel that changes us is a it's a grace that that gets through. It's a grace that offends us at first. One good way of knowing whether the gospel's really hit your heart is by asking the question: has it ever offended me? Has it ever hit me in such a way that something in me objects to it? Paul's gospel got objected to. Second thing we see in the story, though, is in these passages is a grace that transfers us. We see not just a grace that is offensive, it's a grace that changes where we are. Listen again to these words about the transfer that takes place. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore, we've been buried with him by baptism into his death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we've been united with him in a death like his, we'll certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. If you remember in Romans 5 and 6, Paul has continually used kingdom language. In verses 14 and chapter 5, he talks about the reign of sin. In 15, he talks about grace abounding for many and the reign of grace. In verse 12 of what we just read, he said, Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies. All these words, reign, dominion, power, they're words of kingdom. In Paul's mind, there's these two kingdoms: there's the kingdom of God and the kingdom of sin. When Paul talks about us dying to sin, he's not primarily talking about us making mistakes. He's talking about sin as a power, as something that reigns over us. And he's saying that the grace of the gospel that changes us is a grace that transfers us from one kingdom to another. Now, this is super fundamental to what Paul is saying. We uh actually we have an idea that kind of captures the heart of what Paul's saying. We we say in philosophy there's this phrase called a speech act. A speech act is when something we say isn't just describing something, but it enacts something. It's language that creates. Probably the most famous example of this is like at a wedding. When at a wedding two people say, I do, they're not just saying a pronoun and a verb, they're creating a marriage. The Bible is full of speech acts. We see it in Genesis where God speaks and He He creates just out of speaking. When we see blessings and curses, these are speech acts. They're causing something to happen. What Paul is saying is that when we are justified, God is not just legally saying, you're off the hook. When he declares us righteous, something is happening to us. It is a speech act. Justification, if you remember, is God's verdict over our lives. When we put our faith in Jesus, the verdict over our lives is righteous. Not just innocent, not just you're off the hook, but everything that belongs to Christ is given to you. The speech act is when he says that, when he declares that you're righteous, you transfer from one kingdom to another. It's like you're a citizen of one kingdom, and the naturalization process of becoming the citizen of a new kingdom happens when you're justified. Your position changes from the kingdom of sin to the kingdom of God. This has a profound impact on how we understand the gospel. See, many of us, what we think and what we feel is that, okay, God has forgiven me, God has justified me, but I know I'm still a rotten scoundrel. I know who I am. I don't feel different. We don't believe that God's word actually creates a difference when he justifies us. And because of that, we we miss the power of what the gospel and what Paul is saying here. He's saying, when you were justified, you changed governments. You changed who was over your life. That you no longer belong to this old kingdom. It doesn't mean that you can't still live according to the old way. It doesn't mean that the habits that you build over a lifetime always disappear right away. But you are no longer under the rulership of sin, death, and judgment. You are under the rulership of Christ. The gospel grace is that it transfers us. Third, we see, though, that the gospel doesn't just transfer us, but the transfer leads to the gospel of grace transforming us. Look at what he says. The first, he talks about his baptism. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? The idea is that when Jesus died, our baptism, it united us to him and we died with him. We are transformed because we have been baptized. Now, many of us we've been baptized, and we might not remember what that was like because it's been a long time ago, but but when we're baptized, we are enacting the gospel. When we go down into the water, we're uniting with Christ in his death. When we come out of the water, we're being raised to life with Christ in his resurrection. The gospel is lived out or it's enacted in our baptisms. Paul is saying that we experience this transformation when we remember our baptisms, when we're connected to this idea that we have died with Christ. Now, for a lot of people, we've been taught around this verse, and some prominent theologians and schools of thought have taught that to be dead to sin means like we're insensitized to it, like a dead person's no longer aroused by it, that we're not tempted by sin anymore. And the problem with understanding this passage that way, that to be dead to sin means you're no longer tempted, is there are several problems. One, it doesn't conform to any human experience. Experience. We all know that we're still tempted by sin. Two, Paul is going to go spend the next couple chapters telling us how to fight sin. Why would he tell us how to fight sin if we no longer were tempted by sin? And three, we see over and over in the Gospels that transformation is a process, not just an event. And so being dead to sin, it can't mean that I just no longer ever desire to sin anymore. It has to mean something different. And here Paul is telling us if you want to grow, if you want to change, you have to see yourself connected to Christ. That He died to sin, so I am dead to sin. Sin no longer reigns over me. The habit that you have that you can't get rid of, no matter how many times you've done it, it doesn't reign over you if you are in Christ. Your old self might still feel stuck under it all, but you have transferred to a new kingdom and you are dead to sin. The second thing he shows us is that union with Christ is how we actually receive this transformation. If you've been united with him in a death like his, we'll certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. This phrase union is going to be a theme in the next couple chapters. And I want you to get this. I know it's a little heady, but I want you to understand this because I really believe we're mapping out a path to freedom. And many of us were desperate for freedom in our lives. Paul says, you have to know in your head, you have to know that you've been united with Christ. The word actually means like to be merged and to grow together. What he's saying is that you have to know that you're connected. Before you were a little Lego with no friends connected to you, now you are a Lego connected to his Lego. You are connected. This is a radical statement. He's saying when you put your faith in Jesus, the verdict over your life, the verdict from the judgment seat, the verdict from the future is you are righteous. And this speech act, him declaring that, actually makes you righteous. You might not feel it, but it is now the reality. It is your new position. You are righteous because he said it, and when he said it, he created it in you. Christ Jesus, when he rose from the dead, he was the firstborn of a new creation. You might imagine a big empty field. When Jesus rose from the dead, he was like a small tree coming out of the field. The firstborn of a new creation, the first tree in a new world. The promise of the Bible was always that this world was going to be made new, that it was going to be restored. And the first piece that was made new was Jesus. It was God's stamp of approval. And so what Paul is saying is when that first new creation came out of the ground, when you put your faith in Christ, you are now a part of the new creation. You are a little tree growing right up next to Jesus' tree, and your roots are connected. You are tied. You are with him. You have been transferred out of this world of sin and darkness, and now who you really are is a piece of the new creation. And that piece is inside of you. There is a new you inside of you. And it is a righteous you, a redeemed you. And it's a you connected to Jesus, which is how you were always made to live. The old self became the old self because it didn't have union with Jesus. If you had grown up in union with Jesus, you wouldn't have had an old self. The old self that you have, all those bad habits, all the temptation, all the stuff that went wrong, all of it exists because you grew up apart from Christ. Paul is saying, now you are united. And when you see that, you see that the reason why you're forgiven is because you have already died with Jesus. On the cross, you were with him. When he rose from the dead, you were with him. The secret to life is this phrase, in Christ. That you, you, not your neighbor, not somebody else who you think is more religious or more worthy, but you are in Christ. You're connected to him. And what's true of him is now true of you. That all of heaven's favor that's for him is for you. All of heaven's reward for him is now yours. You're connected to Christ. He's created a new creation. And we grow up together. You advance in the Christian walk as you pursue that togetherness with Jesus. Those little trees, that little sapling, it grows up as you pursue union with Jesus. You will never outgrow intimacy with God. You'll never advance to some other stage of Christianity. This is our life. What does Paul say elsewhere? What is the hope of glory? Christ in me. He teaches others to pray. Let Christ grow in your heart. Isn't that an interesting thing? We've heard lots of people preach about accepting Jesus into your heart. Paul never used that phrase, but he does use the phrase, let Jesus grow in your heart. Let Jesus grow. How does Jesus grow in our heart when we are with him together? It's time with him, it's union with him, it's intimacy. But how do we do it? We learn or we realize or we know that it is the fact, which leads to the third thing. He commands us to reckon, if you have an old translation, or consider yourself dead to sin. Reckon or consider yourself dead to sin. To reckon or to consider, it's a mental word. And if you read this carefully, there's actually a bunch of commands that are all mental. He says to know, to reckon, to consider, over and over and over again. If you want to grow in your faith, if you want to experience freedom, holy living begins with a renewed mind. He's going to say a little bit later that actually we're transformed by the renewing of our mind. How does our mind get renewed? We start to reckon or consider. It's actually the root word for where we get logic. He's saying think about it. Meditate. Consider it. Count it as so. Reckon, put all your weight on it. Trust this. Think about over and over again. What do I think about? That I am one with Christ. That I have been united to him. That I have died to sin with him. That I am raised to life with him. If you want to overcome different sins in your life, if you want to grow up in your faith, the way you do it is you begin to reckon. You begin to think about it. You begin to reckon. I've died to sin with him. Maybe you have a problem. I don't know. I'm going to pick a problem, I hope none of you have. Maybe you sniff glue. And you just, you know, you're sniffing glue and you're sniffing glue. The world would approach that, and often we approach it from a moral perspective. We either try fear or we try pride. Fear is I'm afraid it will happen if I keep doing this. Pride is, you know what? I don't want to be one of those people. I don't want to be in the glue sniffer club. I'm better than that. It's pride, and we we try to manipulate and try to make ourselves better by pushing one of those buttons. But the gospel, it comes underneath. It dismantles fear by saying you are loved no matter what you do. It dismantles pride by saying you are under the power of sin. It breaks both, but it addresses what's underneath the motivations of the heart. And when I put my faith in Christ, and I reckon, I think about, I consider the words, you are the righteousness of Christ. You have died to sin because you are united with Jesus who died to sin. That all of his purity is your purity, all of his courage is your courage. All of his non-anxious presence in peace is your non-anxious presence in peace. That all the holiness in the world is already inside of me. When I think about that, when I meditate on it, when I come into an agreement that that is who I really am, I am not this old self. I'm not the person who keeps screwing up. That's who I was. I'm not going to listen to the circumstances. I'm not going to make the tally in my mind, well, I was good six times and I was bad five times and I don't know who I am. No, I'm going to come into agreement with who he says I am. He calls me righteous. He calls me dead to sin. He calls me united with Christ. He calls me alive with God. That that is what is true about me. And so I agree and I reckon. And then that leads the fourth command. Offer your body. Offer your body. He says, Therefore, present your body. Do not let sin exercise dominion in your body to make it obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourself to God as those who have been bought from death, brought from death to life. Present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. Do you catch that? It makes sense when you think of the progression. He's saying that righteousness is inside of you and it has to grow. How's it going to grow? Well, you're going to begin to hand over the different parts of your body to the Lord. Why? Because sin resides in our bodies. See, when we sin in our hearts, we're dethroning God, we're de-Godding God. That's the root. But the fruit takes place in my body. I steal with my hands, I lie with my lips, I look lustfully with my eyes, I run away with my hands, I kill, you know, run away with my feet, I kill with my hands. Like the place, the location is the body. The heart is where it starts, but it works its way out, and the actual sins I commit with my body. Now Paul is going to completely reverse it. He's going to say, when you accepted Christ, when you put your trust in him, when you were justified, the Lord spoke over you. He spoke and he said, You're righteous. All of the merits of Christ are yours. He spoke, and when he spoke, he created something new in you. A new you who's connected with Christ. And now that that little seed has to grow. And we're going to see in Romans 6, 7, and 8, the promise of the gospel is that it will be protected and it will grow. It won't die. But that little seed has to grow. And so, first, to grow it, we reckon it's true, we acknowledge it as real, but but then we begin to offer the different parts of our body to God. Be Lord here. At salvation's beginning, we say yes to Jesus and make him Lord in our hearts. But to progress, salvation's progression is to make him Lord in our bodies. See, many of us we've said yes to Jesus in our hearts, but we've never given him our hands. We've said yes to Jesus in our hearts, but we've never given him our feet. In fact, we have a no-fly list for heaven. Like, I'm not going here or there. Many of us we've given Christ our hearts, but we've never given him our eyes. We've given Christ our hearts, but we've never given him our strength. We've given Christ our hearts, but we've never given him our emotional life. Our relationships. Paul is saying if this united union with Christ is going to work itself out, you have to begin to submit your body. And not just your body vaguely, but your body particularly. He says, the different parts. I have a question. Have you ever thought about which parts of your body sin the most? For you. Like which parts of your body most get out of a line with Jesus' kingdom the easiest? He's saying, get that particular. You are the righteousness of Christ, but your hand doesn't know it yet. Start to submit your hand. You are the righteousness of Christ. Reckon it, consider it, count on it, declare it, know it, and start submitting your feet. Start submitting your appetite. Start submitting those different parts of our body that are out of alignment. This is a grace that transforms our lives. For so many of us, the gospel has been a ticket to heaven someday. And Paul is saying, no, no, no, no, no. Heaven will come, but first, it's going to come in you. First, your entire body is going to come under the Lordship of Jesus. Every single area where sin might dwell. See, God is far more interested in getting heaven into you than he is getting you into heaven. He's not worried about when you die in the pearly gates. He's got that covered. But justification is not just about that. He wants all of us, all of our bodies. A grace that transforms us, the grace of the gospel, it's going to offend us. It's going to offend us because of how radical and total it is. Paul doesn't apologize. He doesn't say, yeah, you guys are right. Total radical grace lets too many people off the hook. He doesn't say that. He says, no, you don't know what grace is going to do to you. It's going to change you. It's going to overcome you. It's going to capture you piece by piece. Maybe some of you, you've had that moment at the altar, and that's like Normandy in World War II. And it's the beginning of the end of the war. But salvation is a process that's far more than the beginning of the ending of the war. It's a conquering of all of you. And what Paul is saying in this passage is if you understand grace, you will get that. How could you keep sinning? You're dead to it. You are dead to it. And there will be a day if you are justified. If God has declared you righteous, there will be a day when the truth that you are dead to sin that is being declared here is your lived experience. It won't be until you are purified and glorified in heaven. But it will be true of you. Have you ever thought of that? That one day you won't sin anymore? That one day your entire body, after you've submitted every part, your entire body itself will be made new. And your new body will enter into this new creation. God's intention is to restore every part of you and me. And the grace of the gospel is the beginning of that restoration. And some of you I know you're like concrete, hard to change, and this seed of the gospel is like a small weed that is so persistent it breaks even concrete. Paul is saying that this is the power of grace. This is the power of the gospel. This is what happened to you when you were saved. And now you must reckon it. You can't file it away. You can't say I filled out the sermon notes and I left it over there, and how come I'm not changing? You have to reckon it, consider it, count on it, put all your weight on it. Say every single day, every single morning, every single evening, I have died with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. I have been united with Christ. Him and I are stuck together by the strongest superglue imaginable. I am inseparable from Christ, who I really am is one with Christ. I'm incorporated into his body. I will overcome sin because I'm connected to him, and he has already overcome my sin. I will overcome lust because he was pure. And if I want to overcome it, I don't marshal my strength. I don't summon my willpower. I focus on his purity and I ask his purity to manifest and grow in my heart. I consider myself dead to sin. Grace is not sweeping our mistakes under the rug. It's far more powerful than that. Grace is a word declared over you that has started a process that He will bring to completion. And we partner with that process by reckoning and by presenting our bodies. He's going to unpack this more in chapters six and seven, but as we stop here this morning, I just want to ask a question. As we spend the next five, six weeks in chapters six, seven, and eight, Paul is going to lay out what I think is the most brilliant exposition on how a human can change. How you can fundamentally change. Is there anything that needs to change? See, a lot of a lot of times we we have our passions stirred. We want to change. We start fighting a sin or a problem. And then we lose and we give up. And most of us, we're not actually fighting sin in our lives. We have a series of sins we've compromised with. And it's been a long time since we've actually fought the sin that we've compromised to. It's just who we are, is what we'd say. Everybody has flaws. We're content if the world doesn't see them too much. Or if our spouse isn't too annoyed by them, right? Like we, we have like the tolerable level, and every every congregation has one. And you know, coming out of the vineyard, we're a pretty nice congregation. There'd be some churches where some of us would be feeling guilty all the time, right? But like most of us, we we're not going to get like socially pressured to change unless it's our family. And so the real question I want to ask as we as we enter this section of scripture is is there something the Lord's putting his finger on? Is there something that, you know, this path of freedom, it's not meant to just be talked about, but to be walked out in the next six to eight weeks? Paul is going to give us a roadmap. You know, one through five, it's all about the heart of the gospel and understanding that we are free from the penalty of sin. But six, seven, and eight is he wants us to know you're not just free from the penalty, you're free from the power of sin. And I wonder do you experience that freedom from the power of sin? And each area of your life. Are you incongruent with who you are? One person famously defines sin as any attempt to be somebody you're not. And if it's true that who you are is in Christ and righteous, then anything we do out of alignment with that is sin. And for many of us, and I believe this, and I've been praying for us all week long, like for many of us, I feel like we, it's been a while since we've been bothered to face those places in our life. We just don't want to stir the waters. We've changed enough that we can make it to the end of our life with anybody calling us out. And we've stopped the sanctification process at where we think is an appropriate level. And the question is will you continue to block this work of grace, or will you allow for the possibility that God wants to turn you into a saint? Not into an average Christian, not into a good attender, but into a saint, full of the Spirit and the power of God, sanctified and holy. That maybe his plan for you is not for you to stop at 12th grade. But you are meant to have the master's and the doctorate and to keep on going. And yes, you've stopped at a level that's good enough that none of us will ever call you out. But there is more. There is more, more sanctification, more change. That he wants to deal with the depths of us, the messes that we ignore. That he actually has far more planned for you than you could ask or imagine. And that your healing, your sanctification has eternal ramifications for others. Because he intends to use you through your wounds. And this isn't a promise that we're gonna make it to the end of the process in this life. I hope none of us ever in here think like I'm all done. Grace has changed me 100%, nothing left to change. I'm good to go, Pastor. No, we all know that there's more. What sins have you been declared dead to, but you still feel alive to? Where is the incongruence? Where is the Spirit putting his finger? Let's pray.