SPEAKER_00: So open up your Bibles to Romans 6.
SPEAKER_00: Find the book of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're new to the Bible, okay, Romans is in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: So you go to the center of your Bible, you turn right.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you're if you're looking this way, you're turning this way.
SPEAKER_00: You go past Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, past Acts, and you're gonna get to the book of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: As you're finding your seat and as you're finding the book of Romans in your Bible, let me just tell you a little bit about this book.
SPEAKER_00: Romans was written by a man named Paul.
SPEAKER_00: Paul was an enemy of Christians.
SPEAKER_00: He hated Christians because he was a devout Pharisee, and he thought that these messianic Jews, these ones who thought that Jesus was the Messiah, he thought they were the enemy and the threat to traditional Judaism.
SPEAKER_00: And so he was on a campaign persecuting Christians.
SPEAKER_00: And God knocked him off of his horse and asked him a question, Paul, why are you persecuting me?
SPEAKER_00: He said, Who are you, Lord?
SPEAKER_00: And the voice that he heard says, I am Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul had this incredible encounter where he realized that he was an actual enemy of God.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you may be at church, because you only go to church on Easter, and all of a sudden you're realizing, wow, maybe I thought I was a good person, but I didn't realize that, hey, I'm an enemy of God if I am not surrendering my life to his plan.
SPEAKER_00: And God loves you, and he's sometimes willing to take life and use life to knock us off our horse and help us find our way back to what he designed and what he purposed for us in our life.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are gonna get baptized today because you're in that journey and you came to church because you're like, oh, they give away free food after church.
SPEAKER_00: This sounds so fun.
SPEAKER_00: But then you've been sitting here as we've gone through Matthew, and God's been touching your heart, and you realize, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I want to be a follower of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I'm ready to surrender my life to Him and to follow Him.
SPEAKER_00: And we've been learning about that on Sundays together as we go verse by verse through the book of Matthew.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we left off in Matthew 19, and we had a lot of fun discussion about marriage and divorce.
SPEAKER_00: We got cut short by our time, and uh we'll have to pick that up next week when we get back together.
SPEAKER_00: But this morning, on our Easter theme, um, I wanted to talk about this passage out of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: So, Paul, a persecutor of Christians, became a radical Christian himself, and he planted churches all over southern um or what we would call um Western Asia, northwestern Asia, there in um Turkey, and then across Southern Europe.
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote all these letters back to the churches that he planted, and he would address different issues that would come up.
SPEAKER_00: And so the book of Romans, can you uh guess where the church was that uh this was written to?
SPEAKER_00: To Rome, right?
SPEAKER_00: So this was a church in Rome, and Paul is teaching them about justification by faith.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be how is a person born again?
SPEAKER_00: How do they, what happens as they transition from uh their life of following themselves and being self-interested to surrendering and saying to Jesus, I'm ready to follow you.
SPEAKER_00: What does that faith look like and what takes place?
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul's been explaining that sometime as a church we'll go through Romans, um, but he's been explaining that, but then there's this question that hangs out there around, okay, I am a follower of Jesus, but there is this ongoing struggle with sin.
SPEAKER_00: There's this ongoing fight with this internal rebellion against the good things that God has in my life.
SPEAKER_00: And so at the beginning of chapter six, Paul asks this question: should we continue to sin that grace might abound?
SPEAKER_00: He spent all this time explaining that God's grace is towards you and I.
SPEAKER_00: That God wants to pour out his grace into our lives, and his work in our life is to forgive our sins and put our sins away.
SPEAKER_00: And what argument kind of Paul addresses is like, well, if God just forgives me and keeps working in my life, should I just keep sinning that God's grace would abound?
SPEAKER_00: And Paul is gonna speak truth right into that place.
SPEAKER_00: He's gonna, what we're gonna read this morning, the material that we're gonna look at, is material that comes along and it says to you and I, this is what is true and needs to be reckoned as true.
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be appropriated into our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's gonna really talk about what God has done and not so much what you need to do.
SPEAKER_00: And so, what I want to encourage all of us to be doing is to be listening to the truths that Paul is going to declare and then be obedient.
SPEAKER_00: Let it just soak into your soul, and then let us be a people that obey the ramifications of the truth that Paul is proclaiming.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've heard that God's forgiveness covers everything.
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere inside you wonder if that means you're destined to keep repeating the same mistakes.
SPEAKER_00: If God's forgiveness covers everything, should we just keep on going sinning?
SPEAKER_00: In Romans 6, Paul pulls back the curtain on this old struggle that the church has faced for centuries.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be truly free from our sin?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we often live as if the cell door is still locked, even when Christ has already opened it?
SPEAKER_00: And how do we move from knowing about resurrection to actually living with his power?
SPEAKER_00: And so we want to listen as Paul proclaims this truth here in Romans 6, verses 3 through 7.
SPEAKER_00: Or are we unaware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: For if we have been united with him in the likeness of his death, we certainly also will be in the likeness of his resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: For we know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless, so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin.
SPEAKER_00: Since a person who has died is freed from sin.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you and we love you.
SPEAKER_00: We pray that you would speak to us through this text this morning as we're meditating on the resurrection and the new life that we have with you, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Teach us by your Spirit this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We pray in your name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: If you've been with us on Sunday mornings for the last couple weeks, you know that we've been in the section of Matthew where Jesus is teaching his disciples that listen, if you're going to be in my kingdom as a follower of me, then sin is no trivial matter that we accommodate.
SPEAKER_00: When we see it in our own lives, we want to cut it off.
SPEAKER_00: We want to get rid of it.
SPEAKER_00: When we see it in somebody else's life, we want to help them be free of their sin.
SPEAKER_00: And then when that person is taking steps of obedience and they've they're asking for forgiveness of us, we're saying to them, I forgive you.
SPEAKER_00: I forgive you.
SPEAKER_00: And then when there's that temptation to break off your core relationship in your life, your marriage, to end your marriage, probably because there's sin in your life and sin in your spouse's life, the thing you need to do is you need to hang in there.
SPEAKER_00: There's really only some small accommodations for when there's grounds for a Christian to end their marriage.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is saying, look, the ideal for the Christian is that you hang in there and you don't give up, even though sin is a reality, and you work aggressively on getting rid of your own sin.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here Paul is talking about this reality of our relationship with that internal rebellion.
SPEAKER_00: You see, if you're new to the Bible, one of the things the Bible says is that humanity is in this state of rebellion against God.
SPEAKER_00: And that when we do the wrong thing, we're not just violating our own ideals.
SPEAKER_00: We're not just violating other people, but we're violating God's law.
SPEAKER_00: And that's no trivial matter because God is a just God and He's holy, and He cannot allow just sin to run rampant over the thing that He made, which is creation.
SPEAKER_00: Because sin is this, it's this, it is this element that brings decay and death across everything.
SPEAKER_00: And so, whether you know the Bible well or you don't, you know your lived experience that the world you woke up in this morning is full of suffering and brokenness and the symptoms of death.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can feel it in your physical body, maybe you can feel it in relationships that you have or your own story.
SPEAKER_00: You're wrestling with addiction.
SPEAKER_00: All of those things are evidence that the world is broken and it goes back to human rebellion.
SPEAKER_00: And God sent his son Jesus into the world to be the remedy.
SPEAKER_00: The remedy for moral guilt.
SPEAKER_00: The healer, our healer that takes away that atrophy and the decay that sin brings about, and to have ultimate victory over death.
SPEAKER_00: Our death, the sentence of death over our lives.
SPEAKER_00: And so here in this section, we have Paul breaking it down.
SPEAKER_00: He starts off in verse three by saying, Are or are you unaware?
SPEAKER_00: Or are you unaware?
SPEAKER_00: Even after hearing Paul's words, sometimes when when we read the text that we just read, we we have this resistance that comes up into us.
SPEAKER_00: If we've died with Christ, if we've been raised and we're set free, why do I still struggle with sin?
SPEAKER_00: We've heard that Christ has set us free, and yet we are still in this place of suffering our own dumb consequences for things that we do.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's audience in Rome, it wrestled with the same question.
SPEAKER_00: If God's grace overcomes everything, maybe my sin doesn't really matter.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I can just keep living in the way that I have.
SPEAKER_00: Or others may have said, Why don't I feel any different?
SPEAKER_00: Why do I keep falling into the same patterns, the same habits, the same shame?
SPEAKER_00: It's as if there's a spiritual amnesia that has come over these individuals, and Paul is saying, Are you unaware?
SPEAKER_00: And maybe you're not.
SPEAKER_00: And the material we're going to cover this morning, one of the reasons why I wanted to look at this text is because it ties beautifully in with Easter and baptism.
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul is communicating about our relationship with sin in the context of the risen Christ and baptism.
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to forget who we are once we are baptized.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are going to be baptized, so I'm talking to you this morning.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to get baptized this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And listen, it is easy after you get baptized to forget the reality of baptism.
SPEAKER_00: We forget that what Christ has done and what our baptism represented.
SPEAKER_00: We live as if the old self is still in charge, as if the cell door is still locked, as if resurrection is just a word for Easter, but not reality, a reality of resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: The tragedy is it isn't just that we misunderstand grace, but that we settle for a version of Christianity where nothing really changes.
SPEAKER_00: We accept defeat as normal, we call ourselves free, but we live as slaves.
SPEAKER_00: This city is full of that.
SPEAKER_00: Baltimore City is a city that knows the Bible pretty well.
SPEAKER_00: We got a lot of people in our city that went to Sunday school as a kid.
SPEAKER_00: Their grandma or their mom taught them the scriptures as a child.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the lived out reality is with very little change.
SPEAKER_00: You would think that Jesus was still in the grave and that lives were not impacted, that there was no difference made on Easter Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you go out of this driveway here, you turn left.
SPEAKER_00: You go to Alice Anna Street right here, you turn right, you go down a block, and you look on the left, there's a house there.
SPEAKER_00: And in 1830s, a man named Frederick Douglass lived in that house.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we can look at it from the corner right here.
SPEAKER_00: And there was a slave owner's wife who thought it would be cool to teach this little slave boy how to read.
SPEAKER_00: And she did it for a couple of weeks, enough for him to catch on to a simple alphabet and and how how phonics worked.
SPEAKER_00: And after a few weeks, the slave owner realized what his wife was doing and he shut her down.
SPEAKER_00: But it was enough for Frederick Douglass to be exposed to words, and he began to be self-taught in learning how to read.
SPEAKER_00: And as he learned to read, he was like, I cannot be a slave.
SPEAKER_00: I am not a slave.
SPEAKER_00: I may be a slave, but I am not enslaved.
SPEAKER_00: I can't, this is untenable to be a Christian and to even be taught and be held as a by-Christian slave owners.
SPEAKER_00: People who called themselves Christians.
SPEAKER_00: He he took up the scripture and he says, How can this be?
SPEAKER_00: In um around that time, he uh he he tried to escape twice, ended up back in Baltimore, and in Baltimore there was more what they called more free colored men, that was what they called it in the time.
SPEAKER_00: Free colored men that lived in Baltimore and worked in the shipyard right here, right?
SPEAKER_00: And that's where Frederick Douglass worked.
SPEAKER_00: And finally, and the interesting thing about it was that these um Douglass, before he escaped and up to New York City, he lived in this paradoxical reality.
SPEAKER_00: He was legally bound and worked a skilled job here in the shipyard, earned wages and moved freely through the city.
SPEAKER_00: Um this was an autonomy that was unheard of in these southern plantations.
SPEAKER_00: Douglas described this existence as almost a free man, yet he remained a slave, forced to surrender his earnings to his enslaver.
SPEAKER_00: He wore the clothes of a free man, spoke like a free man, and even felt like a free man, but the chains of slavery still held him.
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the week, when he got his paycheck, he would turn over, it was$20, he would turn over 18 to his master, and he would be able to hold on to two.
SPEAKER_00: It was a strange, Baltimore was weird, and it continues that trajectory to this day, right?
SPEAKER_00: And it was, it had all of these men who had more autonomy than you saw down in the south, but it was not a free state like you had up north further.
SPEAKER_00: And to this day, people are living in that type of state where there is a measure of autonomy.
SPEAKER_00: This may be you.
SPEAKER_00: You are uh technically on paper, you have been set free, you've been baptized, you've been liberated from sin, but you still live as a slave.
SPEAKER_00: Douglas's biographer writes that urb of urban slaves that they enjoyed autonomy but not agency.
SPEAKER_00: They enjoyed autonomy but not agency.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, angel, what's your question?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's who that that's what Mondamen is named after.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Douglas, he's Douglas's name all over.
SPEAKER_00: If you go over to a couple blocks this way, there's some um houses that he owned that it were rentals.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Marianne.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, right, yeah, with his face, the cool the bronze one.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that awesome?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't read Douglas's um autobiography and his writings, it's super powerful.
SPEAKER_00: And it's really important, especially as Christians, it's really important to read it because you see how horrible Christians have been in the past.
SPEAKER_00: Not just humans, but people who claim to be followers of Jesus, that they would read their Bible and do something that horrible.
SPEAKER_00: So what if the greatest obstacle to new life isn't the strength of our sin, but our failure to believe and live out what Christ has already accomplished?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe when you look at the things that just get in the way, you you may be the kind of person who brushes it off, like, well, that's just my personality, that's who I am.
SPEAKER_00: You just love it or take it, you know, some people are gonna hate it about me, and just, you know, but that's kind of some people's attitude towards their sin.
SPEAKER_00: Other people have just walk around just beat up, perpetually defeated by their sin.
SPEAKER_00: But there is this sense, there is this sense that sometimes the enemy is that the uh the idea is, well, sin is so strong it cannot be defeated.
SPEAKER_00: But uh the Bible and what it's teaching us this morning is that the obstacle in the way is not sin, but our failure to believe and live out what Christ has accomplished.
SPEAKER_00: What if we're living like slaves who've forgotten that the door is open?
SPEAKER_00: Let me read to you some more of this passage.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Paul writes, all of us were baptized into Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: All of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.
SPEAKER_00: You see, baptism, and he's talking here about the real baptism, like the one we're gonna do here.
SPEAKER_00: Baptism for the follower of Jesus, it's just normal.
SPEAKER_00: Like you don't become a follower of Jesus and not get baptized, it just goes hand in hand.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's the first step of obedience.
SPEAKER_00: As soon as you find out, like you decide, wow, I I I've decided, I I think I want to follow Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Then you go get baptized as soon as Josh can get the thing out there, right?
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Devin.
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know you're trying.
SPEAKER_00: But you see, here baptism in this culture was not just something created by Jesus, it was also, it was already a custom that represented washing and entrance into a new community.
SPEAKER_00: It had its, it marked a significant moment.
SPEAKER_00: So you think of John the Baptist, he was going around baptizing people as a significant marker in their personal life that they were ready to turn and have a soft heart prepared for the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: There was this baptism of repentance that John baptized people with, but then the baptism of Jesus was different.
SPEAKER_00: It was a baptism of signifying, I'm ready to follow you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm ready to be a disciple of Jesus, the time has come.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul here he says, of all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is connecting the act of water baptism with the spiritual reality that is, that signifies union with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: What he is saying, what Paul is saying, is that when these guys, After the service here, go and get baptized.
SPEAKER_00: They are united.
SPEAKER_00: It's a picture of this being united with Christ in his death, and we'll see with his resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, baptized into Christ Jesus, he means being so closely joined to Christ that what is true of him becomes true of us.
SPEAKER_00: It's about identification.
SPEAKER_00: We are now in Christ, sharing in his story, his status, his destiny.
SPEAKER_00: It's a spiritual reality that begins at conversion when the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Water baptism is this outward sign, but the inward reality is what Paul is emphasizing.
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you do a wedding ceremony, that ceremony is an outward sign of an internal commitment that you and your fiance have made.
SPEAKER_00: You're commemorating it in front of other witnesses that this is our commitment that we have made to one another.
SPEAKER_00: Baptism is like that.
SPEAKER_00: It is this outward sign of this internal commitment.
SPEAKER_00: And he says that we are baptized into his death.
SPEAKER_00: What does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: To be baptized into his death means that in God's eyes, we've participated in Jesus'.
SPEAKER_00: Do you got that?
SPEAKER_00: We've participated with Jesus in his death.
SPEAKER_00: When you're baptized, God's looking at this scene and going, You have died with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just a metaphor or a symbol.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is saying that the old self, the part of you that was enslaved to sin, has died with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The power of sin as a tyrant over us has been broken.
SPEAKER_00: This is the indicative before the imperative.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is declaring what God has already done, not giving us something to achieve on our own.
SPEAKER_00: You see, what Paul is saying is this is what is true about you.
SPEAKER_00: You have died to sin.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, but but you don't know like the pull that that addiction has on me.
SPEAKER_00: You don't know how used to I've become to gossiping when something's just eating away at my heart.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you don't know, like I just talk like that.
SPEAKER_00: Those kind of words just come out of my mouth because that's who I am.
SPEAKER_00: No, Paul says the reality is that when you were baptized, when you became a follower of Jesus, this reality happened where you're with Christ, dead to the old self.
SPEAKER_00: You do not have to sin anymore.
SPEAKER_00: You've been set free.
SPEAKER_00: Now you may sin some more, but you don't have to sin any longer.
SPEAKER_00: So he goes on in verse 4, and he says, Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into his death.
SPEAKER_00: Burial is this significance of like, look at it's final, right?
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you go to the hospital, hopefully you don't get buried at the end of your stay.
SPEAKER_00: It's not final, right?
SPEAKER_00: But we'll all get to that point where there's a death and then there's a burial.
SPEAKER_00: In ancient times, the burial, you're you're you're it's a public declaration that a life has ended, that a chapter was closed, and he says that we, not Jesus only, but we were buried with him by baptism into his death.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see how significant this baptism is?
SPEAKER_00: He's just saying, look, go back to your baptism.
SPEAKER_00: Remember that thing of when you were baptized, you decided I'm gonna follow Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You're you were with Jesus in his death.
SPEAKER_00: But he doesn't just leave us in the grave because he says it's in order, it is in order that.
SPEAKER_00: So it's this is an instrumentality.
SPEAKER_00: It's in order that Jesus as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see that?
SPEAKER_00: You didn't just die with Jesus, but you're raised with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: When we take you, and we we're some of us are, you know, I can't, you're you're frail, and I can't dunk you under the water as much as I wish I could.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get y'all wet.
SPEAKER_00: Others of you, I'm gonna dunk under the water and I'm gonna pull you back up.
SPEAKER_00: But there's this coming up.
unknown: Right.
SPEAKER_00: The water's gonna be dripping off of you.
SPEAKER_00: And you are going to be with Christ raised from the dead by the glory of the Father so that, do you see that?
SPEAKER_00: So that we, or so we too may walk, it's to this end that we may walk in newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: The purpose of this burial isn't to end something, but to make way for something that is entirely new.
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand the the thing, the suffering that you have um accommodated for so long in your life?
SPEAKER_00: The things that you don't like about yourself, but you've just decided I've got to live with this stuff.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says no, he wants to come and make these things new.
SPEAKER_00: And listen, I know you get beat down in the city.
SPEAKER_00: I know life is hard and things are upsetting, but listen, listen.
SPEAKER_00: When you became a follower of Jesus, he wants to give you newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: Just like Jesus coming out of the grave, you're raised with him.
SPEAKER_00: Not just someday in the future, but right now, you've been raised to walk in newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: This is at the heart of the Easter story.
SPEAKER_00: The resurrection, it's not just Christ's victory over death, it's the beginning of our new story.
SPEAKER_00: The same power that raised Jesus from the dead, it is at work in you, not just to forgive your past, but to transform your present.
SPEAKER_00: You're not meant to look like a dead person walking, but you're meant to live and look as one who is alive from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's gospel is not just about what you're saved from, but what you're saved for.
SPEAKER_00: We're not just preoccupied with death, but we want to let this idea of the newness of life transform us.
SPEAKER_00: You're buried with Christ, yes, but you're also raised with him.
SPEAKER_00: Let's look at verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: He says, For if we have been united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly be in the likeness of his resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: He's building on the foundation that he's already laid.
SPEAKER_00: We've been buried with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Our old life has been put to death.
SPEAKER_00: But now Paul wants us to see the unbreakable link between Christ's story and ours, between his death and his resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see here this word?
SPEAKER_00: You've been united.
SPEAKER_00: That is the secret.
SPEAKER_00: That is the secret to this newness of life, is the fact that you are united to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: If you think that the Christian message, listen, listen, if you think that the Christian message is that you're gonna kind of identify with Jesus, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get your act together, you got it totally wrong.
SPEAKER_00: That's just not what Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus invited people to follow him, and he accomplishes the work on your behalf.
SPEAKER_00: He dies, and he says, Listen, you're united with me in death.
SPEAKER_00: And in my death, I'm putting to death your old self, that addiction to sin.
SPEAKER_00: And when I'm raised, I'm imparting to you in my resurrection, I'm uniting your life with my life and you're given new life.
SPEAKER_00: You're united with him in the likeness of his death.
SPEAKER_00: We will certainly be united also in the likeness of his resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: And so verses six and seven says this.
SPEAKER_00: Why is Paul so taken up with this subject of sin?
SPEAKER_00: Like, how often do we did you use the word sin this last week?
SPEAKER_00: Not very often.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe if you're a Christian, you've talked about that word a lot, but it's just not a common word in our language.
SPEAKER_00: But here Paul is really taken up with this theme of sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's because underlying the brokenness that you've experienced this past week, the disappointment, the hurt, is this issue of sin.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not how God made the world.
SPEAKER_00: God made the world beautiful and perfect.
SPEAKER_00: He made humanity in this beautiful garden and said, This is where I want you to be fruitful and multiply, subdue and rule.
SPEAKER_00: He gave this mandate that's just this flourishing mandate.
SPEAKER_00: And yet humanity rebelled, and that's what we call sin.
SPEAKER_00: And it's led to so much destruction and death.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul here is saying, Here's what is true, here's what we know.
SPEAKER_00: It's that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body that was ruled by sin might be rendered powerless, so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin.
SPEAKER_00: For years, Frederick Douglass lived with a kind of partial freedom.
SPEAKER_00: He worked in the shipyards alongside free men, he earned wages, he even wore the clothes of a free sailor, but every week he was forced to hand over his hard-earned money to his master.
SPEAKER_00: No matter how much freedom he tasted, he was still in the reality a slave.
SPEAKER_00: The system still had a claim on him.
SPEAKER_00: He wrote that the practice of being openly robbed of all my earnings kept the nature and character of slavery a constant before me.
SPEAKER_00: Even when he seemed free on the outside, the old master's claims were never gone.
SPEAKER_00: But then came the day that Douglas took the risk.
SPEAKER_00: He boarded a northbound train out of Baltimore, disguised as a sailor, with borrowed papers and the help of friends, and in less than 24 hours he crossed into free soil.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine the transformation that he felt?
SPEAKER_00: And that story can be your story.
SPEAKER_00: As you do life, you're called to leave the life of slavery to sin.
SPEAKER_00: That it no longer has power over you, but instead it is rendered powerless so that we are no longer enslaved to sin.
SPEAKER_00: That's what God wants for you and I.
SPEAKER_00: And so those that are going to be baptized, now's the time.
SPEAKER_00: Now's your moment.
SPEAKER_00: You've made a decision.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm trusting is that you have wrestled, some of you have wrestled for a few years with this idea of who is Jesus and his call upon your life.
SPEAKER_00: And you're willing to obey, you're willing to step in obedience to that call and to go into the water.
SPEAKER_00: So let's uh let me pray and then we're gonna head out here.
SPEAKER_00: Again, what we're gonna do is we're gonna do our baptism and then we're gonna come back inside and take communion together.
SPEAKER_00: So leave the chairs where they're at.
SPEAKER_00: You may, I don't know who's here.
SPEAKER_00: I love all of you.
SPEAKER_00: I have don't know everybody, so take your purses with you, take your personal possessions with you, and then we'll come back into this space, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we thank you for this um word about um what is accomplished on the day of the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: And um we pray as we enter this time of baptism that you would make it meaningful and significant to those who are baptized.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for this step of faith, this step of obedience that these individuals are going to take.
SPEAKER_00: And we pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.