Yielded Servants of Righteousness - Part 2

Walkersville Christian Fellowship

7.06.03 - Gary L. Cox

Verse 9, “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dies no more, death has no more dominion over Him.  For in that He died, He died unto sin once, but that He lives He lives unto God.”  We find here the comparative understanding of the single work of the death of Christ, one sacrifice for all forever.  Christ seated at the right hand of the Father, giving evidence that sin has been put to death in the body of flesh.  At that juncture there is this that we are transitioning into an understanding that the Christian life is not a life based upon new deaths but upon a remembrance of the one death, the death of Christ.  It is our association with the death of Christ and our remembrance of it that we simply remember, “I don’t have that right.”     The spiritual reality is we keep reminding ourselves we are a dead man, that desire of our flesh, that has already been put to death in Christ.  There is nothing in that that is good or that is wholesome or that is desirous to be maintained.  It is to be let go.  So our practice of death, today, in taking up our cross, is zeroing in on the reality that in our position in Christ we are no longer in this body of flesh, we are now a new creature in Christ and we have the expectation of the body of life, the resurrected body.  We are literally called today to live as those who are resurrected though we are not yet appearing in our resurrected bodies.  

Verse 11, “Likewise then reckon ye yourselves also to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.  And here’s the great mystery of the church.” We are in circumstances and in the current circumstances we are in, we need to remember who we are before we resolve the matter that is at hand.  And we need to reckon, reckon means to bring everything into balance according to the facts.  We are alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.  The reckoning is looking for the point of orientation.  Where are we supposed to be giving our attention, in terms of our expert effort?  Notice that it is not back to the law.  We are breaking through the law by death and all the power and all the righteousness of the law is settled and satisfied in Christ and we no longer look back to the law as the means by which we grow in grace.  We rather look to the established fact that the law had its say and there was death and we are dead in Christ and all that the law had a right over us is crucified in Christ, “the just for the unjust,” all our sins nailed to the tree and it’s finished.  We no longer have anything to do with the law.  Instead we now look and realize, “Where is my life now?”  Now our life is hid in Christ, now our life is alive unto God.  We have no obligations today whatsoever except to be alive in God, to respond to the smallest promptings of the Holy Spirit that we might reflect the resurrected life of Christ in any matter that we are dealing with.  Who of us is able to by our own judgment make proper judgment?  None of us can.  We are now obligated to live in spiritual judgment and God is not obligated to give us spiritual judgment when we are walking in carnality.  Being carnal isn’t an excuse any longer because carnality has been taken care of in Christ.  We are freed agents and we have no obligation to the flesh.  And God Himself, dwelling in us, quickens our mortal bodies to respond in a proper way.  And we will satisfy all of the pleasures of God’s righteousness by learning to respond to that prompting of the Holy Spirit. 

Verse 12, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies that you should obey it and the lusts thereof.”  God can place on us the expectation to no longer walk in the lusts of the flesh.  We are a purchased object of the love of God and therefore we have one obligation - to glorify God in the deeds of our body.  In the end, we are either going to surrender to the carnal flesh or we are going to surrender to the authority of God in us in the resurrected Christ.  Yielding to the carnal man is death.  It’s always a denial of God and His authority in me.  For us it that is the instrument of death.  Nearly every decision we make all day long is a decision whether we are yielding to the Lord or whether we are yielding to the flesh.  If we have an authority that God has put over us, we bring our life under that authority and within the jurisdiction that that authority has.  We lose our life for the sake of Christ and the gospel.  By our nature we are carnal and we are sold under sin and so we have lost, by the death of Christ, all our rights.  They have been purchased by the blood of Christ and now we have one duty: to yield. 

Verse 14.  “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you: are not under the law, but under grace.”  When we yield, when we give our life over, right at that moment and only at that moment we are free from sin.  The impulses of sin are gone when we have yielded our body as an instrument to righteousness; sin no longer has dominion.  Christian life is learning how to walk outside of the flesh, walking in liberation of righteousness.  And the only way we can be liberated from our carnal flow is to die to it and the only way we can die to it is by suffering some natural loss. When we yield we suffer in the flesh.  If we are yielding, it’s not really much if we are yielding stuff up and there is no sting in it. We have to give up something that we want.   Whatever we want, that is what we must yield to God and we need to give up every desire that we have because to be driven by desire is to be driven by the instrument of death and it’s to inherit the inheritance of death. 

“What then? shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? God forbid.”    We are not under law but under grace.  We deserve death and hell.  We have life and peace.  Christ died for us and we now can live for Christ.  A simple exchange; a simple transaction. As a blood-bought son and daughter of Jesus Christ, our only right is to yield over to Christ His full jurisdiction.  He has a right over us and we have no right to complain.   

“To whom do you yield yourself to?”  

We are called even now to yield ourselves as servants of righteousness.  Take up our cross, yield our rights, die to it, follow Jesus.  What we deserved, Christ has protected us from and what we get is totally the inheritance of Christ.  Let go and let God have His way in our life.  Let God be God in our life because He alone can fill it the way it was ever meant to be filled.  We can let it go and die to it and yield ourselves as an instrument of righteousness.   

Verse 20, “When you were the servants of sin you were freed from righteousness.”    May it be true that we are no longer free from righteousness but that righteousness reigns in our spirits and in our desires and in our ambitions because of the grace and the glory of God.  “What fruit had you when you were in those things whereof you are now ashamed?”  Death was the fruit.  There was no benefit to pleasing the flesh.    We have a fruit unto holiness because we’re servants of God.  The question of holiness is simply whose interests are we serving?  Today, if we are in Christ, we have the heritage and the right to yield ourselves as a servant, servant of God and  our body an instrument of righteousness.  And in that process of yielding, it’s going to hurt.  God is going to cut across the grains of  our flesh and He’s going to say, “I know you”.  God knows how to single us out one by one.  It’s not meant to be a justification for those who inflict us with wrong.  Those who are the instruments of injustice in our lives are not exonerated because God did good with it, and that’s where we always stumble in the process. 

Can we trust God in this situation and yield ourselves to life?  Can we let go of our carnal need and say “yes” to death and “yes” to life?  It comes down to that one word.  Yield.  Submit ourselves to the obedience of righteousness and let God bring upon our back with His own precise judgment just what’s needed so we can yield to God instead of clamoring and grasping and holding onto the worthless things that will only bring us death.

Verse 23, “For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  Whenever we say, “Yes,” to the flesh, we are going to get its wages which is death.  When we are working under the law as a servant to the flesh, our only inheritance is death.  God has given us the way out, the way of escape. When we die to self, we are actually accepting life from God.  God is granting us a heritage of life at the very moment that we’re, by His grace, saying “no” to death.  An unbeliever cannot yield his body over to Christ to whom he has never given his life in the first case.  There must be a beginning because yielding ourselves as instruments of righteousness is a literal spiritual reality.  We have a real Father in Heaven who is tenderly and precisely working out very specific things in our own lives, things that nobody else would know about except God. That personal involvement in our lives is what we are yielding ourselves over to.