Yielded Servants of Righteousness

Walkersville Christian Fellowship

7.06.03 - Gary L. Cox

Romans 6 begins with the question, “What shall we say then, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound.”  We tend to excuse sin and to discount it and deny it outright.  We tend to reclassify sin as some failure or foible and transfer the responsibility and the blame to others in our presence.  We are naturally and constantly inclined to deny our own fault, and our own need of a Savior.  We can never lay hold of redemption until we recognize the substance and the significance of our own sin.

Using the Law Lawfully

 The purpose of the law brings us to an important crossroads in our understanding about what it means to walk in a new and living way by faith and not in the oldness of the letter of the law.  God already knew we were sinners.  Our problem?  We didn’t so readily know we were sinners.  The purpose of the law was to come alongside and to shout the truth of our own wickedness, the immenseness of our sin.  This picture that the law entered so that the offense may abound simply means that awareness needs to be increased as to the significant need that we have.  As a carnal being, we live under the dictates of sin.  Our natural inclinations are continually sin.  What the law did is it held up a mirror and in the mirror it has two sides.  Our image only shows up on the side based upon whether we are righteous or a sinner.  We hold up the mirror of the law and here’s our deed and it classifies sin and so all manner of sin abundantly breaks forth as we compare ourselves to God’s righteous standard of the law. When we use the law lawfully, the law points out our own inherent sinfulness and our choices and our inclinations are only evil. We are completely sold under sin and grace comes in and brings us a righteousness that’s superior to our wicked nature and it overcomes, it abounds even more than the sin in us and we achieve righteousness not by our own effort but by that which is declared of God because of faith in Jesus.  Grace overcomes all of our sin because its power to forgive and cleanse exceeds all of our sin together.  Take the totality of sin and you have that which is less than the grace of God.  Grace is superior in that it completely overcomes the sin.  It’s important for us to recognize first of all in a personal sense: all of our sins are forgiven, not just so many.  Grace is excessively and exceedingly abundantly above that which the demand and the duty is created by the righteousness of the law. 

The Abuse of Grace

The number one problem in a grace oriented church with Satan attacking it is the abuse of grace.  We use grace to excuse sin and we misunderstand.  Read the epistle of Jude if you want to see in a snapshot what a grace-abusing church looks like in its fullness.  Here is the perverse lie of the devil, “If when sin abounds grace overcomes it and over abounds, then how much more glorious the grace of God if the sins are piled even higher.”  We excuse sinful inclinations under the false premise, “Grace covers our sin.”  The carnal man is looking for excuses for his carnal nature.  There’s a temptation to dismiss our duty to holy living under the banner of the dismissal that we are not under law, we are under grace.  It’s a true sentiment but it’s an erroneous application when we use it to cover our sin.

Dead With Christ

  In this first discussion, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”  The answer being, “God forbid! How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?”  There is a vicarious relationship that we have to the death of Christ. Remember these words.   “How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?”  Paul has in mind here someone lying in a coffin.  And because the individual lying in a coffin is dead, he has no response toward any stimulus of life.  The simplest concept of discipleship centers around one thing, “take up the instrument of your own death and follow Christ daily.”  When you and I are believers, we are relationally connected to the person and the work of Jesus Christ.  The person is now sitting at the right hand of the Father, extending the outcome of His grace constantly to us, but His work is finished, that is why He is sitting.  We have one of the most awkward and unusual conceptual ideas to wrestle with which is who we are.  In an absolute sense, we are exclusively, by the reality that Christ living and seated at the right hand of the Father, and that Christ Himself has totally annihilated our sin and our own judgment and we are already dead in Christ.  One of the secrets of resurrection is that it unveils to us that this body of death must be put off.  The hardest part about the Christian life today is the fact that we have a body of death and our natural instinct is constantly pressing to improve the performance of this carnal body.  We are not going to visit the holy throne of God in this body of flesh. 

 With that background in our understanding, we must recognize that God did not start a reform movement with Jesus Christ dying on the cross.  God started a death movement.  And when you are in Christ, you are dead in Christ and the oldness of the old man is crucified and is buried in Christ.  And the only thing that remains in Christ is the newness of the new man, which is made after the similitude of Christ. 

Yield – You are not your own

Verse 3 says, “Know you not that as many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death.”    Remember that passage in Corinthians that says “you are not your own, you are bought with a price, therefore glorify God with the deeds of your body.” If we are believers Christ has purchased all of our rights and they are His and He has granted us the inheritance that He shares and He has dominion in our life and it is right for Christ to do with us as He sees fit.  God is not obligated to satisfy us or to give us anything of our desire.  We have one obligation and that is simply to give over what remains of this mortal body, to give it over to the service of God on His terms. 

The Spirit of Christ baptizing us into Christ is a very literal, spiritual reality by which we share in the very death of Christ on the cross.  And our old man is crucified, it is dead, it is nailed to the tree with Christ.  All the law did was show that we had a need for redemption.  But now being redeemed by Christ, we cannot go back to the law as an instrument of righteousness because it is only an instrument of death.  In Christ we have suffered that death righteously and so now we are new creatures whose life is based on resurrection.  Every motive that the believer has today if it’s a resurrection of the expectation of the newness of life in that eternal place, not resurrection of the old flesh.   

Verse 5 simply says this, “If we have been planted together in the likeness of His death,” that’s a past tense action. “We shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,” future tense. 

We are dead in Christ and we have been buried in Christ.  But we are to be in the likeness of His resurrection in the future, and we are living in between.  One thing that I can say to help us understand is the difference between now and when we get to Heaven is that when we get to Heaven there will no longer be the capacity to be tempted to sin.  The perfect righteousness of Christ and of God will be ours in such a full inherent reality; there will not even be the slightest capacity to imagine a temptation towards sin.  Today we are at that place where the fixed place of the death of Christ brought us into a position of death with Christ.  But we must live today in the flesh based upon the theoretical application of that death in our lives on a constant basis. 

Verse 6, “Knowing this that our old man is crucified with Him that the body of sin might be destroyed that henceforth we should not serve sin.”  If we are crucified in Christ, we have been baptized, we have been totally immersed in the death of Christ and we are now made alive in Christ by His resurrection.  The second fundamental is this application, “we have an old man that has been crucified with Christ,” that is an application, “that the body of sin might be destroyed and henceforth we should not serve sin.”  We know that we have been crucified for the present reality of reckoning with the body of sin that it might be destroyed.  Here is the picture of the Christian life: today if we are going to walk in Christ, we are going to actively experience the release of death in our mortal body.  Choices for Christ today will result in death to our flesh today.   Whatever would raise its ugly head in our flesh that’s what Christ wants to be put to death.    We are disciples which means that we deny ourselves.  “If any man would be My disciple, let him deny himself and take up the instrument of death, take up his cross and follow Me.”  Today, if we are Christian, we faced ourselves and by the grace of God we learn to say, “No.”  Christ in us the hope of glory reckons with the flesh and says, “I’m a dead man, I have been crucified with Christ and my flesh has no vote in my life today.”  Self denial is the essence of the Christian life as it is practically experienced in day to day living. 

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.