PASTOR'S MESSAGE

 

Alive In Christ

Romans 6:1-11 

Perhaps you heard the amazing story this past week of a young twelve-year-old girl in Ethiopia, who was rescued by lions.  That’s right – not rescued from lions, but rescued by lions.  Apparently a man and six of his friends had abducted the girl, in order to force her to marry him against her wishes, which evidently is not unusual in Ethiopia.  Often the perpetrators will rape and severely beat the girl in an effort to force her to get married.  But in the case the lions came to her rescue, which is being hailed as a miracle, because the lions in Ethiopia are very ferocious and will normally devour humans.  However, when the young girl started to cry it seems that the lions to it as the mewing sound of a lion cub and came to her aid.  They chased off the men, and surrounded the girl and protected her until the police arrived.  When the authorities got there, the lions just left her like a gift and went back into the forest.  In an incredible twist, this girl, who by all rights should have been dead is now alive and well!

Well, as St. Paul points out in our Epistle lesson for today, in an even greater way the same thing has happened to you and me.  In our Baptism, we were rescued from our abductor, Satan, by the Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ our Savior.  For although we once were dead in our trespasses and sin, we are now alive in Christ.   And yet that freedom of new life in Christ is often abused and misused as a reason to sin.  Such was the thinking of the antinomians that Paul was struggling with in our text.

By definition, antinomianism means: ‘against the law.’  And it’s the false idea that because Jesus has saved us from the punishment of the Law, we no longer have to keep the Law.  Instead, we can do whatever selfish, rebellious things we please.  As the antinomians would say:  “We should sin, so that God’s grace will abound.”  Strangely enough, that same kind of perverted thinking is still popular today.  For example, within the liberal elements of ‘Christianity,’ which say that the Bible is a human book containing errors, and that we have to sift out the truth from the chaff.  That’s exactly what the Jesus Seminar tried to do by boiling down the Gospels to just a few isolated statements that they believed were the actual sayings of Jesus.  This kind of destructive approach to Scripture says that we can pick and choose those parts of God’s Word that we want to believe and follow, rather that teaching and accepting the whole counsel of God.

Likewise, the ‘moral relativism’ of post-modernism says that there is no absolute right and wrong.  Truth is simply what you make it.  And so what may be good and right and true for you, may not be for me.  Which means that each individual can do whatever they want, including lying, cheating, stealing and destroying others.  And that, my friends, is the same kind of antinomianism that Paul was fighting against – the kind that says:  “We should sin, so that God’s grace will abound.” 

Of course, St. Paul’s stern rebuke to that was:  “BY NO MEANS!”  After all, sin leads inexorably to death – eternal death in hell.  Only God’s grace can save us from that and make us alive again.  And we do not need to sin to make God’s grace abound.  Quite the contrary!  His grace abounds to us in spite of our sin.  As a matter of fact, the verb abound in Greek actually means: ‘to be more than enough’ or ‘to be superfluous.’  In other words, to have an excess of something.  And that’s what God’s grace –  His free and underserved love to us in Jesus Christ – is like.  He has more than enough grace to cover all our sins, an excess of grace to pardon all our offenses, because all of our guilt and iniquity has been wiped clean by the blood of Jesus our Savior.  So, we don’t have to sin to prove the magnitude of God’s love.  Instead, with the Spirit’s power we can live godly lives to His glory, to thank Him for His grace.

Unfortunately, because God’s grace is so free and abundant, often times people think it’s too good to be true.  And as a result they think they have to do something more to deserve it.  Such was the case with the legalists, whom Paul also struggled with in our text.  They’re the ones who thought that God’s grace in Christ is no sufficient to cancel out the debt of our guilt.  And sadly, we fall into that same pitfall, whenever we believe the lie that God doesn’t love us, or that we’re not truly forgiven, or that we somehow have to ‘perform better’ as Christians to earn God’s favor.  And it is one of the greatest temptations we face, for like antinomianism, legalism also leads to death – the death of our soul.

That’s why St. Paul went to such great lengths to tell us that, “our old self was crucified with CHRIST so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin, because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.”  In fact, what the Greek text actually says is that when Jesus was crucified our sin was ‘rendered powerless.’  It’s a word that was used to describe a field that was left fallow, or an employee who had been laid off from his job. 

Dear friends, such is the saving grace of Jesus’ death for us.  It not only is more than sufficient to cancel out the debt of our guilt.  It’s also mighty enough to render Satan’s accusations against us powerless.  He’s like an annoying co-worker, who’s been fired and can’t bother us anymore.  For we have been completely forgiven and pardoned of every wrong we’ve every committed.  As C. F. W. Walther put it:  “Christians are pilgrims through this world on their way to heaven. The devil, like a highway robber, assaults them, and they go down before him because of their weakness, not because they meant to go down. To a true Christian his fall is forgiven because he turns to God in daily repentance.”   

How good it is to know that such free forgiveness is what Jesus has poured out to us richly and abundantly in our Baptism!  Martin Luther once suggested that on the wall at the foot of the believer’s bed should hang, side by side, the crucifix and the person’s baptismal certificate.  As the Christian goes to bed at night the last thing he sees is the cross of his Savior and the baptismal certificate, which is his assurance that He has been made alive in Christ with all the benefits of forgiveness and salvation.  And as he awakes in the morning he is again reminded that he is God’s precious child.

That’s what St. Paul was talking about in our text, when he said that:  “IF WE HAVE BEEN UNITED WITH CHRIST IS HIS DEATH, WE WILL CERTAINLY ALSO BE UNITED WITH HIM IN HIS RESURRECTION.”  That’s exactly what happened in our Baptism.  Our old sinful Adam was put to death with Jesus and drowned with all its evil lusts and desires.  Just as Jesus was crucified on the cross, so in Baptism all our sin and guilt was crucified and put out of commission for good.  But in Baptism we were also given a new man, that has arisen within us to live before God in purity and holiness forever.  He now sees us as perfectly righteous and beautifully innocent and blameless in His sight.  And all because we have been united with Christ in faith.

    As a matter of fact, that word ‘united’ in our text literally means: “grown together.”  It’s an agricultural term for branches that have been grafted into a vine or tree.  Well, through Baptism we have become one with Christ by being grafting into His heavenly kingdom.  As Jesus Himself said:  “I AM THE VINE AND YOU ARE THE BRANCHES.”  For just as a branch receives its sustenance from the vine, so our strength comes from the Lord.  We Christians would be unable to bear the fruit of new life if we were left alone to battle Satan and his evil schemes on our own.  So the only way we can defeat antinomianism and legalism, is by remaining united with Christ through constant use of the Means of Grace.  That’s how we remain dead to sin and alive in Christ – by daily studying the Scriptures and meditating upon them, by weekly coming to God’s House to feast on His nourishing supper for the health of our soul, and by regularly remembering our Baptism and rejoicing in the assurance we have that in Christ we are forgiven and free!

Booker T. Washington was born a slave on a Virginia farm in the mid–1850s.  He was just a young boy when a government official came to the plantation and read Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, granting freedom to all slaves in America.  Life after slavery was in some ways worse than before.  Chains and the lash were replaced with a campaign of fear and abuse.  Lynchings, extreme poverty, and intimidation were used to maintain white supremacy.  In his book, Up from Slavery, Washington later wrote, “The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States Officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper, the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were free, and could go when and where we pleased.  My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks.  She explained what that meant, that this was the day for which she had been long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.”

Dear friends, in a similar way the slavery of sin does not discriminate.  Its chains know no boundaries; it whips and beats the rich and the poor alike. It destroys the families and the lives of whites as well as blacks; Hispanics and American Indians as well as Asians; uneducated as well as educated.  Sin makes no distinction.  But thankfully Jesus Christ our Savior has emancipated us from our slavery to sin by His death and resurrection.  And in the free gift of our Baptism we have been rendered dead to sin and alive to in Christ Jesus.  May God the Holy Spirit empower us to live that out in our daily, for His glory and praise.  Amen.

          

                                                 

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