Hello? Okay, we want to read some Scriptures in Romans 5, starting with Romans 5:12.
Actually, what I would like to do is read verse 12 and then skip on to verses 18 and 19. Verses 13 through 17 are a parenthesis, so I want to read verses 12, 18, and 19 together.
Just want to mention something: when we read this, notice the words one and many. Keep this impression with us. We are looking for one and many.
For this cause, even as by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death; and thus death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
So then, as it was by one offense towards all men to condemnation, so by one righteousness towards all men for justification of life.
For as indeed by the disobedience of the one man the many have been constituted sinners, so also by the obedience of the One the many will be constituted righteous.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, we come before You right now in Your presence. Thank You for giving us Your Word. We ask that You would open up the eyes of our hearts, that we can see what is on Your heart.
Lord, we pray that these words in the Scripture would come alive to us personally. We pray that we can have Your glorious good news revealed to us. We cast ourselves upon You and depend on You completely. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, today we have good news for Christians. Today, what we are looking at is the gospel preached to saints.
Usually, when we talk about preaching the gospel, if we ask somebody, “When was the last time you preached the gospel?” we are always thinking, “When was the last time you preached the gospel to sinners?”—those who do not know God, those who do not know the Lord.
But according to the Word of God, and especially here in the book of Romans, the gospel is very big. The gospel message needs to be preached both to sinners and to saints.
The good news is actually a Person. This Person, our Lord Jesus Christ, did something two thousand years ago on the cross. When He died on the cross and rose from the dead, He accomplished something so good that is for the salvation of man through and through.
This work that He has done, and who He is, is our good news. But today we want to look at the good news for ourselves as Christians—those of us who have received the Lord, touched the gospel already, experienced Christ, received eternal life, and been forgiven of our sins.
But the good news gets better. Just like we talked about before, an onion: you can peel it once, and there is more onion. It gets even better. So the gospel—the further you go, the deeper you go—is even gooder and gooder. This is good news. This is glorious good news.
In the book of Romans, we have been going through this book and looking at it in a different way. We are trying to learn how to preach the gospel from Paul’s example.
In the past, we have been looking at preaching the gospel to sinners. But now we are going to look at Romans 5:12 through the end of chapter 8.
If you are into outlines, before we said that Romans 1:18 through Romans 5:11 is Paul’s gospel message to sinners. From Romans 5:12 through the end of chapter 8, this is preaching the gospel to saints.
This outline is not according to the doctrines in Romans; it is according to who Paul is preaching to and how he is preaching.
Before, we divided the gospel message to sinners in half. First, Paul preaches until the revelation of the righteousness of God comes. Then the second part is the realization of the righteousness of God—the righteousness of God being established in our lives.
When someone comes to Christ, they need follow-up help. We need to get solid in our salvation. We need to be assured of our salvation. We need to be so solid that we are experiencing the good of it today.
Now we are going to go through these verses quickly, but what we hope to see is the righteousness of God revealed again.
In Romans 1:16, it says that the gospel is God’s power unto salvation to everyone who believes. But this salvation is a thorough salvation.
He goes on to say in Romans 1:17 that the righteousness of God, in the good news, in the gospel, is revealed from faith to faith.
What I want to point out is that God has a righteous way of saving us, not only from the penalty of our sins, but also from the power of sin.
When we preach the gospel to sinners, all that is on their heart is this punishment that is coming, this penalty of sins. But for us believers, we have been delivered out of that penalty. What about sin as an entity, almost, that has had power in our lives in the past?
We have been under this power of sin, and we need salvation from that. What we see in the good news is that God has not only saved us from the penalty of all our sins; He has actually saved us from the power of sin in our lives. God has delivered us.
This is good news today for Christians. Christians do not want to sin. Christians hate it when they sin. It is so refreshing to know that God has provided a way to be delivered from our sins.
I want to divide the verses we are looking at into three parts. In Romans 5, we want to learn a principle. I am using some “P” words, hopefully to help us remember: there is the principle of one and many.
Then, in Romans 6 through about verse 10, we see the provision of God in the good news. This is what God has provided to deliver us.
Then, from verse 11 through the end of Romans 6, there is a practice—our response. This outline is extremely loose, because it overlaps a lot.
For the first part in Romans 5, we want to read it together and go a little inch by inch. If you have your Bibles open, trail along with it in verse 12.
For this cause, even as by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death; thus death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
Who is this one man that Paul is talking about here? The one man is the first man who sinned. According to the Bible, in Genesis 3, Adam was the first man who sinned.
He is only one man, but when Adam sinned, death passed upon every man—all mankind—because everybody came from Adam. We are all part of that big Adam family tree.
When sin started, it started with Adam. He brought sin into this world. Now, you may say Eve did it first, but actually God said the two have become one, so we can just say Adam for both.
Adam sinned, and God said, “On the day that you sin—if you do this which I told you not to do—on that day you are going to die.” With sin comes death.
Actually, Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” Basically, what is the result of sin? It is death.
With Adam, death worked through and through upon the whole race of mankind. Notice that death passed upon all men, and then it says, “All have sinned.”
We already know that all have sinned. We looked at that when we were preaching the gospel to sinners. When you preach the gospel to sinners, they are mainly convicted about specific sins they have done.
Sometimes you may not even know that you are under a power, a master of sin. But you know that in your life, you have done at least one sin.
The other night, we were doing some Bible reading together at the house with some kids. We were trying to figure out how many sins it takes to go to hell. Somebody said, “A thousand.” But then we asked, “What about 999?” They said, “They should go to hell too.”
Actually, what we learn is that even one sin separates you from God. Sin is what God cannot be with. God is righteous; sin goes against the righteousness of God. Sin is when you do wrong against God, and He cannot be in that presence.
But if you go even further, we are not just talking about specific sins. There is a bigger problem: we are born in sin.
It is not just that you have sinned. It says here that all have sinned, but all having sinned proves that you are a sinner.
What proves that sin is in this whole race of Adam—this whole mankind race? Two things, according to this verse. One is that there is death, because God said when there is sin, there is going to be death.
Man was not created or meant to die as we die—spiritually, soulically, and physically. But the second thing is that we have all sinned.
There has not been a man born in Adam who has gone without sinning, except that Man, Christ, but He is a little unique. No one has ever done it.
The reason is not that we all have innocence until we sin, just like Adam. The reason is that we are actually born as sinners.
Some people may bake cookies, but that does not make them a baker. But if you are a baker, you will probably bake cookies. If you are a thief, you will steal. If you are a sinner, you are going to sin.
It is bound to happen. It is going to happen, and it always has happened, because it says all have sinned, just like in Romans 3:23:
All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.
There is no person in this room who has not sinned. This truth proves that we should not just look at our own specific sins. Let us look behind them: there is actually sin inside of me. I have been in bondage to it. I have been born in sin. That is why I have sinned.
Let us look at Romans 5:13-14.
Until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not put to account when there is no law. But death reigned from Adam until Moses, even upon those who had not sinned in the likeness of Adam’s transgression, who is a figure of Him to come.
Here he says that death was reigning from Adam all the way until Moses. I would call this the time period of death.
At Moses, the law came. When the law came, it exposed sin. The law consists of rules that say, “Do this; do not do that.” The law shows us God’s righteous standard.
When we see the law, we see what it should look like. Then we look at ourselves and say, “I failed.” But without the law, sin is still going on.
Even before the time of Moses, all men were sinning. Sin was in this world. It is just like in this country: there is a law, “Do not steal.” If you steal and you get caught, you will get in trouble for stealing.
But let us say this country had no laws and you steal. You would still be sinning. You still stole; you still sinned.
The law says, “Do not murder.” In this country, you cannot kill people. That law is right. If someone kills, the law shows us that person did wrong, and they get in trouble for that.
But without the law, if someone kills somebody, they still sin. Do you see that? Sin is sin. Sin goes against God’s righteous standard, whether it is exposed by the law or whether you simply know you have sinned.
God gives you an inward law of conscience, so all of us know when we sin. Think of Adam’s firstborn child, Cain. Cain sinned by killing his brother, but he had no law. Still, he knew that he sinned when he did it.
At the time of Cain, the only command God had given, as far as we know in the Word, was for Adam not to take of a certain tree. There was not a big list of rules about what to do and what not to do.
Still, Cain was born as a sinner, so he sinned. Abel also was born as a sinner, even though we do not know what sin he committed. We know he was a sinner because he was born of Adam.
Two sinful parents make sinful children. Everybody can say amen, right? If your parents were born in Adam, you were born in Adam.
It is not your fault. It is your parents’ fault, but it is not their fault; it is their parents’ fault. It goes all the way back to Adam. This was no choice of yours. You had no doing in it. You were just born in sin. This is our condition.
With Abel, he understood it. He was like, “I am Abel. I did not do it, but I am born from Adam and Eve.” If only he could have had different parents—but no, he was born by Adam and Eve. There were no other parents. This is where he came from.
When Abel went to worship God, the difference between Abel and Cain was that Abel knew, “I am a sinner by birth. I have got to come to God by the blood.” That is why he brought a sacrifice.
As Hebrews 9:22 says, without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Abel knew he needed the blood to come into God’s presence, and he came as a sinner.
Cain came as if he was not a sinner. Maybe because he did not have a thousand rules in front of him, he did not even know what sins he had done. Or maybe, as far as actions went, he did not feel like he had sinned.
So he came and presented his best. He was basically saying, “I am pretty good. I have never even done what my dad did.” But God was not pleased with his sacrifice.
Let us look at this Adam race. This Adam race got really big, and all of us were born into it. From Adam up until the time of Moses, death reigned.
When Adam sinned, death started. God said, “On the day you eat of this fruit, you are going to die.” The death of sin started in Adam’s spirit. Adam died spiritually.
What that means is that he could no longer fellowship with God. From then on, everyone born in Adam is born dead in their sins. They are dead spiritually to God because they are born as sinners.
Death kept on reigning and working on mankind. From Adam to Noah was about fifteen hundred years. Death was working, working, working, and those people lived very long—into their nine hundreds.
Death was working on them, but it was working on the soul. By the time of Noah, death had worked so badly on mankind that God said man had become flesh.
Man was spirit, soul, and body, but now he had flipped upside down. He was standing on his head: body, soul, and spirit. Flesh means body, but man was basically like an animal, just going by instincts.
His body had so corrupted the soul that his soul did whatever it felt like doing. You can see it in Romans 1:20 through the end, where man rejects God and God allows them to go their way.
He gave them up to their desires—gave them up, gave them up, gave them up—until it gets to the point where He gave them up to a reprobate mind, a mind that has no morals.
By Noah’s time, God looked around. Consider Lamech: he had even gone against the order of God. God said there should be man and woman, and the two will be one, but Lamech had two wives.
Lamech came from Cain. Cain had killed one person, his brother, but Lamech was killing people almost for fun. When he talked about his killing, he was actually happy about it. At least Cain was sorry about it.
But Lamech’s soul was hardly even convicted. His conscience was so darkened at that point. After fifteen hundred years, death had worked so much in the soul of man that what was good was evil and what was evil was good. They had no idea about morals.
After the flood, God told Noah, “You have got to start eating meat,” because now death was going to work on the body. God allowed man to take in meat because the body was going to start deteriorating.
Noah lived 950 years. The people before him mostly lived around that age—Adam lived 930 years, and somebody even lived 969 years. They were dying because they had sin, but they were living a long time.
After the flood, if you look at the ages of the people, they start going down drastically. They went from nine hundred years to four hundred, then three hundred, two hundred, and even only a hundred years or so.
Abraham was only 175 when he died. It goes down all the way until Moses. Moses lived 120 years, but that was not as old as his father and grandfather.
In Psalm 90, Moses said that at this point people live about seventy years, and if they are strong, they live eighty years. He said our life is so short, so we have to number our days and make the time count.
Death has worked and worked and worked through the whole race of mankind. It worked from the spirit into the soul and into the body, until we are at this point right now.
All of us have death around us. We have things like cancer, all kinds of death, diseases, and problems. This is the result of sin on Adam’s race.
Basically, what we inherit from our parents is a disease of sin. Everyone who is born in Adam—everyone born in Adam’s family tree, which is all of us—has inherited the disease of sin.
One man, Adam, infected his whole family. The whole family has been brought into sin because of that one man, Adam. Here is one man, and then many people.
If you look around on the earth, there are so many people, but all of them are born in sin because of one person, Adam. One person—whatever happened to him happened to everybody.
Adam did one action: he disobeyed God and took fruit from the wrong tree. That one action gave a problem to all of us. This is the principle we have to learn: one person caused a problem for everybody. One and many.
Now I want to look at another Man.
But shall not the act of favor be as the offense? For if by the offense of one the many have died, much rather has the grace of God, and the free gift in grace, which is by the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded unto the many.
That one is Adam. If by the offense of Adam the many have died, much rather has the grace of God, and the free gift in grace, which is by the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded unto the many.
Remember that Romans 5:14 says Adam is a figure of Him who was to come. Adam is a picture of Christ who was to come.
In many ways Adam is a picture of Christ, but in this case, Adam started a human race. All of us come from this same race. There is only one human race: Adam.
But now there is another human race. One Man, Christ, started a whole other mankind.
What Adam did happened to everybody in his family. What Christ did happens to everyone in His family.
And shall not, as by one that has sinned, be the gift? For the judgment was of one to condemnation, but the act of favor of many offenses unto justification.
Basically, Christ did one thing, and Adam did one thing. What Adam did was with that tree that he should not have eaten from, and it was sin.
What Christ did was on that tree, on the cross. He obeyed God, and what He did was righteous. His was the free gift of salvation for us.
What Adam did brings us all to condemnation. But what Christ did means that everyone who believes on Him is actually made right with God.
When you go through Romans 5 on your own, it can be helpful to take a piece of paper and look at both sides: one man and many, one man and many. Look at Adam, look at Christ, and go down the line with all these verses.
Let us go on quickly with verse 17, because these are all very similar.
If by the offense of the one death reigned by the one, much rather shall those who receive the abundance of grace, and of the free gift of righteousness, reign in life by the One, Jesus Christ.
We said that with Adam’s sin, death started to reign and corrupted his whole race. But with Christ’s work on the cross, life reigns in those who have believed in the Lord Jesus.
Just like Adam, when he sinned, started spiritually and became dead to God, those who believe in the Lord Jesus are born again in the spirit. They are made alive to God.
Life begins from deep within, spiritually, and it continues to work through and through. All who are in Christ are helped and graced by life—spiritually, soulically, and bodily.
Life is going to reign in those in the Christ family, those who are born again. This is a real thing.
I have sometimes had trouble putting this together in my heart. I knew from my first experience that I had seen the difference between Adam and Christ, even in my own life. I could not explain it, but I knew, “That is Adam; that is Christ. There is a difference.”
Here Paul shows us that this is the race of Adam, this is the humanity of Adam, but there is a whole other way in Christ.
Remember John 3, where He says, “You must be born again”? Why do you have to be born again? You have to be born again because you are in Adam. You are in the wrong race.
You are a sinner as an Adam. But if you are born into Christ, if you are born into the Christ family, you are no longer a sinner; you are righteous.
If we are in the family of Adam, we are sinners and not right with God. But if we are in the family of Christ, we have been made saints by Christ alone, and we are right with the Lord.
For as indeed by the disobedience of the one man the many have been constituted sinners, so also by the obedience of the One the many will be constituted righteous.
These many are the many who have believed on the Lord Jesus. Naturally, you are born in Adam. You have no choice. But you can be born again into Christ.
Born in Adam, you are a sinner. From the mother’s womb, you have been infected with that sin disease. But now, in a sense, you have a choice to be brought in and born again into this new family.
In John 1:12, it says that as many as received Him—which is Christ—to those He gave the right to become children of God. Whoever receives Christ is brought into this other family, the children of God.
Then John 1:13 says that you are not born by your parents’ will, man’s will, or the will of the flesh. You are born of God. This is something we have to do personally ourselves.
The many who are in Christ have believed on the Lord Jesus and have been born again.
In John 3:6, He explains that whatever is born from physical parents comes out physical. Two parents have a little plump of a baby—it is physical.
But what is born from above, from the Holy Spirit, is spiritual. This is actually real. Just because you do not see something physical happen when you are born again does not mean it is not real.
It is a different nature. The way you are born in Adam starts physically. You are born physically. But the way you are born again in Christ starts spiritually.
By the Holy Spirit, you are actually born again. It really happens. Spiritually, you truly are born again. It is a new birth. You are truly brought into the family of Christ.
It is not a picture. It is not just a good phrase that we use. You are either in the family of Adam, or you are truly in the family of Christ.
This family of Christ starts when you are born spiritually. This connection is a definite experience in a person’s life.
This is our principle. If we get this down, it will affect our understanding of what God has provided on the cross.
If we see that in Adam, I just cannot overcome sin—no matter what—then we understand that Adam is a sinner, and everyone born in Adam is going to sin.
But Christ does not sin. His life does not sin. Those born in Christ are right with God. Those born in Christ have the life of Christ, which does not sin.
Let us go on to Romans 6 and look at God’s provision. This is the great provision of the gospel.
When we first touch the gospel, we remember that we are saved by grace through faith. You cannot do anything to earn it. You cannot do anything to keep it. It does not matter about works.
When you are born again and first saved, you have to realize that this salvation was completely free. The salvation God has wrought for us is a free gift.
But on that basis, if we are still thinking like Adam, we might say, “I am saved. I am not going to be punished for my sins. So can I keep on sinning?”
That is Romans 6:1: “What shall we say? Should we go on sinning? Should we keep on sinning that grace would just get bigger?”
I sinned in the past, I got grace, and I got saved. Now if I keep on sinning a thousand more times, does grace get bigger?
The problem is that this believer who asks this question has not heard the gospel. This is the gospel for saints.
The gospel for saints is, “Do you not know?” In verse 2, we who have died to sin—how can we keep on living in it?
Verse 3 is like, “Are you ignorant? Do you not know this thing?” This is something we have to know. We have to actually get revelation from God.
As many of us as have believed on the Lord Jesus—when you believe on the Lord Jesus, look at what happens when you get baptized, because this is the picture showing what happened.
When you are baptized, you are baptized unto His death. Why do we have the water? The water is the grave. The water is burying the old man, Adam.
Why would you go on sinning? When you sin, that is the way of Adam. But those of us who have believed in the Lord Jesus have actually buried that Adam.
We were in the wrong family, the family of Adam. But when we were baptized, we left that family behind. We left that family and joined up with a new family.
When we were born again, we came out of the one family and into the new.
Let me back up. With Christ, the one Man, what He did affects everybody, just like with Adam. What Christ did on the cross was that He was crucified.
When He was crucified, He took the Adam race and crucified it. When Christ went to the cross, remember, He was born of a human and of the Holy Spirit—born of Mary and the Holy Spirit.
He was born kind of in the race of Adam, but without sin. So Christ is able to be what the Bible calls, in 1 Corinthians 15, the last Adam.
He took the Adam race and finished the race on the cross. When Christ died on the cross, He took the old man, Adam, and crucified Adam.
When He was buried, Adam was buried. But when He rose up from the dead, He did not bring Adam with Him.
When Christ rose from the grave, all the old ways of Adam that God was not pleased with were left in the grave.
As a human, He walked, and on the cross He took upon Himself every sin. The Bible says that He even became sin for us. He took on all those sins of Adam, the whole Adam race.
But He took them to the cross. He crucified them, and they were buried. All of it was buried, just like when we were baptized.
We are the many; He is the One. Our experience is like His experience. His experience is that He took Adam, crucified Adam, and buried Adam.
Our experience is that we are baptized unto death. We are crucified with Christ, the old Adam, and then we leave Adam behind.
That old life you used to live was always under the power of sin. Before you were a Christian, you had to sin because you were a sinner.
In a way, you had a choice and responsibility too. But if you tried to quit for one week, you would find out, “I just cannot quit.”
That old way and old strength of Adam was buried in the water. But just like Christ rose up from the dead, His life is a resurrection life. Death does not hold His life down.
In Adam’s race, death was reigning and crushing the whole of mankind. But with Christ, His whole life overcame death. Death cannot touch it. It is all life.
Romans 6:4 says that we also have new life. We are the many; Christ is the One. He had that resurrection life, and He gave us resurrection life. This is God’s provision for us.
Romans 6:5 says that since we have been connected with Him and identified with Him in the likeness of His death, just as He died, we were one with Him. He rose from the grave, and we are one with Him.
The Christian life is the life of Christ in us. Here is the provision of God: we have a new life. In the family of God, when we are born again, we have a brand-new life. This is not just a story.
Let us look at the picture in Romans 6:6.
Knowing this, that our old man has been crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be annulled, that we should no longer serve sin.
The old man is Adam. He is very old; he started the whole race of mankind. The old man has been crucified with Christ so that the body of sin would be annulled, or put out of a job.
The body that kept on sinning—we have these bodies, and we kept using them to sin—a body of sin no longer has that job. We would no longer serve sin.
Here is the picture: sin is the boss. This is the race of Adam. Sin is the boss. The old man is like an office manager, and the body is like a secretary under the office manager.
The boss, sin, and the office manager, the old man, have a lifetime commitment. The old man has a contract to work for the rest of his life with the boss, sin.
Whatever the boss tells the office manager to do, he does it. The office manager tells the secretary to do it, and the secretary does it. The office manager is married to the secretary, so wherever he works, she works with him.
What God does is not kill the boss, sin. He kills the office manager—the old man who was always obeying the boss.
If He crucifies the old man, that office manager, what is the secretary to do? She lost her husband. The boss speaks in a different language than her, so she cannot obey him directly.
She only worked there because the office manager worked there. When the office manager is dead, the secretary leaves, because she gets remarried to a new office manager: the new man.
The new man’s boss is righteousness. Here you have the boss, sin, and the boss, righteousness. You have the old man and the new man.
The secretary was married to the old man, but the old man was killed in Christ, with Christ. So the secretary remarries. This body now belongs to the new man, to Christ.
The life of Christ is always righteous. The way of the life of Christ is the way of righteousness. Before, we were under bondage to sin. But now, in a sense, our boss is righteousness. We love to do what He does.
If Adam was crucified with Christ, that means all of us were crucified with Christ. How does that work? It sounds kind of strange.
My last name is Pittman. Maybe five hundred or seven hundred years ago, there was a man who worked in the pits. I do not know the story.
If you could be outside of time, go back there, roll a boulder over him, and kill him before he had any kids, I would be gone. That pit man is where I come from, and so does our brother Kenny.
If you took him out way back then, both of us would disappear. We both come from that pit man, that man who worked in the pits.
I do not know how distantly all of us are connected, but somewhere we all connect way back in the family tree. You may look at each other and say, “I do not think I am related,” but you are—far, far back.
You go back at least to Noah, because he had three boys, and with them the whole earth was populated. From Noah, we go back to Adam.
What Christ did was take our great ancestor and that spiritual infection in the race of Adam, and He crucified the whole race.
So we say, “Because I am from Adam, and Adam was crucified, I am crucified.” Just like if you took out Pittman, then you took out me.
In the same way, Christ has crucified the old man. This is God’s provision.
But what is really on my heart is this: What is our experience with this? How do we respond to this?
The third section is Romans 6:11 through the end. If we know what is going on, if we know what God has done for us, if the Lord shows it to us and we actually believe—not make-believing, but truly believing something that is true—how do we respond?
It is like that secretary. What is she to do now that her husband has been crucified, now that the old man is gone? She has already been brought into this new employment, but what is she to do? Try to go back and work for sin?
Remember that question: “Shall we go on sinning?” How can you think to go on sinning if you are crucified to sin? If you are dead to sin, why would you go on in sin?
This is based on Romans 6:10:
For in that He has died, He has died to sin once for all; but in that He lives, He lives to God.
Now what about us? Romans 6:11 says:
So also reckon yourselves, or count yourselves, dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Then he goes into talking about the members of our body. “Member” is not a word we usually use for body parts now, so just think of your body parts.
Offer up your body parts. Offer up your body to the new Master. Do not yield yourself to follow sin, to obey sin, and to go that way. Yield yourself to righteousness.
Here is our part. When we believe in the Lord Jesus, this believing is believing with action. This is something we get to experience daily.
When we hear the good news and see the good news revealed to us, we should respond by saying, “I do not want to work for sin anymore. I want to go the way of righteousness.”
“I am no longer with that old man who has been crucified. I am with the new man. I am with Christ.”
Sometimes the struggle is that the old man is only crucified in Christ. The only time you are going to experience the old man being crucified is in Christ, in the Christian family, when you are coming to that new Man.
In the new Man, Adam is finished. Outside of Christ, Adam is still alive.
In Christ, I am crucified with Christ. The old man is finished. The old man has been crucified. But if you try to live outside of Christ—even though you are a Christian deep within—if you try to turn back to your old ways, you will find Adam is still alive.
But if you come to Christ and offer up yourself to Christ—“I want to live under Your rule”—then you will find that in Christ, Adam is crucified.
This is, in a way, the declaration of faith. It is like Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ.”
When the temptation to sin comes, this is what it comes down to. If God has shown us this truth—that Adam is finished in Christ and we have a new life—then what is our response in specific temptations?
In that time, we yield ourselves to God and allow the life of Christ to live through us.
Do not try to overcome sin like you used to try. When you used to try in Adam, it did not work. With our own strength, we will not do it.
But if we yield ourselves to God, if we yield ourselves to the new Man, then we will find that resurrection life rising up. It will overcome sin, because the life of Christ never sins.
When the Christian lives the Christian life, they do not sin as a lifestyle. It is possible for a Christian to sin, because if the Christian does not come to Christ and live by the life of Christ, they live by the old way of Adam.
Notice that this gospel preacher has to lay some foundational groundwork in the beginning. One reason is that sometimes, even as Christians, we do not think in these terms.
When I was first saved, I was just thinking, “I am trying to do good and not do bad.” I was not even thinking there was this Adam issue, this Christ issue, a new life, and an old life.
If I did good, if I did not do the five outward things I had tried to quit, I felt like I was doing so well.
But what God wants us to see is that it is not a question of how many specific things you can check off your list that you did or did not do.
What He is looking at is: are you living in Adam? Are you living by the old life, or are you living by the new life that He has provided for us?
Do we come to Christ and yield ourselves to Him so that we live by His life, or do we yield ourselves to sin? You cannot do neither. It is one or the other automatically.
Remember those two bosses. No one can serve two masters. If you are mixed, you are actually on the side of sin.
Let us say I yield up my arm, but I do not yield up my leg. I am actually on the side of sin.
Why does he mention specific parts rather than just the whole body? I think it is because our response comes down to specific issues and specific things in our lives.
The descriptions of sin in Romans 3 use body parts. When he talks about how everyone is a sinner, he says their feet are quick to shed blood, there is poison on their lips, and their throats are like graveyards.
These bodies were bodies of sin. We used to use this body to sin, but now it should be a body of righteousness.
Some temptation comes. Somebody wants you to go somewhere, and you know if you go there, you will sin. But that was the old feet.
Now you have yielded your feet to God, and you have to tell them, “I am sorry, my feet cannot go there. My feet have a new Master.”
If sin were my master, my feet would go there and sin. But my feet have a new Master. I cannot do it.
Your eyes used to look at things, but now your eyes have been given to the new Man. When temptation comes and something is wanting you to look at it, the world is all flashy and shiny.
You say, “These eyes have been given to the Lord.” By His grace, He will live through you, and He will show you where to look with your eyes.
The same is true with your mouth, tongue, and throat. Before, you used to curse. Romans 3 says their mouth was full of cursing. You used to say evil things, lie, and gossip. This is the old way of the mouth.
When we give our mouths up—even specifically—you may be tempted to gossip. But then the life of Christ rises up, and you remember, “No, no, this mouth belongs to Him. I cannot talk that way.”
Sometimes this happens even with kids. Parents ask the child to lie: “Just tell them this, this, this.” You know what you can say? “I am sorry, my mouth belongs to the Lord. I cannot say that.”
People ask me to lie sometimes. I just cannot do it.
The same is true with our ears. We can choose to fold them over and not listen to certain things. That would look kind of funny, but if you hear gossip, is your ear itchy, like, “Scratch my ear, I want to hear the gossip”?
Or do you ask the person, “Do not tell me anymore. I would rather not hear about it. Go talk to that person directly.”
To hear gossip is as bad as to tell gossip—to talk unnecessarily about somebody and to listen to it over and over like that. What are we doing? That is the old Adam ear. We have new ears.
We give our ears to the new Man to walk in the new way.
When we were in Adam, we were in bondage to sin. Paul goes on to give a picture. He says he is using human terms because we are weak as humans. It is not completely like this, but it is kind of like this.
Before, you were a slave to sin. Now you are a slave to righteousness. Before, we were under this master and did what he said; now we are under a new Master.
In the last year, there was a big company locally, a Fortune 500 company, that went bankrupt. It was like a big sinking ship, just dying.
Then a new company came and bought out the good parts of it and took some of the key employees. During the transition, both companies were in the same building.
One brother meeting with us was there, and he got hired by the new company. The people from the old company asked him to do some things.
He was in charge of some computers and staff, so they were asking him, “Can you bring those computers down to this place for us?” But the computers belonged to the new company, and the staff under him belonged to the new company.
They asked, “Can you bring these computers here? Can you guys go work on this for us?” This was the old company. So what did he say?
This is how we count ourselves dead. He said, “I will have to ask my boss. You will have to talk to my boss. I work for the new company.”
He did not obey them. He was not rude about it, but he was just saying, “I have to check with my boss.”
That is our experience when it comes down to temptation to sin. Check with your Boss. You work for a new company.
We are in Christ now. We are no longer in Adam. This is glorious good news.
There is more to it, and we will get into it more with Romans 7 and 8. It gets down to the nitty-gritty even more.
But as an initial response, I want to receive Your good news, Lord. How do we receive this good news? We receive this good news by faith.
Remember, the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith. This also is by faith. You do not have to earn this one either. Christ has done it on the cross.
So we just come to the Lord: “Lord, I thank You that You have done this for me. I thank You that You not only died for me; You died with me. You took me out as well—the old way.”
We just come to Him and thank Him by faith. We believe His Word. His Word actually says it: “Knowing this, that our old man has been crucified.”
When temptation comes, you can stand there and say, “My old man has been crucified. I no longer have to sin.”
To stand on the Lord’s Word and believe His Word is a real receiving of this. Oftentimes, there is an initial, thorough offering up of your whole life to Him based on this.
You are not offering yourself up with your own strength and talents. You are coming to Him as a crucified one, saying, “Your life in me—I want to live it all for You.”
You are coming to Him saying, “This body, I want it to be strengthened by Your grace, and I will live for You completely.” You get into all the areas of your life.
If you leave out one area, you leave out all of it. But with the Lord, our response of faith—the obedience of faith—is to come to Him and thank Him for what He has done.
We come to Him often. This is a daily thing. This good news is for our Christian life.
The good news we heard in the past—that we would be forgiven of our sins—still applies right now. It is not merely something in the past. It is an experience we step into.
This good news also is for our daily living as Christians. This is God’s provision for us, that we would no longer go on sinning.
Grace does not abound when you go on sinning. This thought is lawlessness. When there is a law, your sins are exposed. When there is grace, you do not even need the law because you do not sin.
But if you reject everything, you turn into lawlessness. You just want to sin, and you do not want God’s grace. But God’s grace actually strengthens us to overcome sin.
Grace does not mean, “Keep on sinning.” Grace means you can now overcome your sin. Grace means you have a new life, and the life of Christ does not sin.
Let us pray together.
Dear Lord, we just want to come and appreciate all that You have done on the cross for us.
Lord, we have to confess: if we look at our experience, we fall down. But Lord, we look in Your Word and see this new way You have shown us. We see this glorious good news.
Lord, You are so wonderful. What You have done is so good.
Lord, thank You that we do not have to be bound up in sin. We thank You that we are no longer slaves to sin.
Lord, we come and want to respond to You. Whatever is going on with us, we offer up our all to live in this new way.
We give ourselves to You, Lord. We give everything going on in our lives to live by the new Man and not by the old.
Lord, we thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.