“There is only one requirement and that is accepting the free gift of Christ and we are instantly, completely and irrevocably new citizens of the kingdom of life. We have given up our old identity, handed over our passport and begun a new life. There is no such thing as dual citizenship. There is no such thing as deportation. There is no such thing as extradition because God has no treaty with Death. There is no way in the world to give up our citizenship or to return to that land from which we were rescued. This is a land in which we do not have rights because we do not need them. There is no fear of anything being taken away because we came with nothing and we have been given everything. Our total identity has changed and we now have been identified with Christ. I still have my old nature to contend with what Paul calls the body of sin but I have a new identity. It is not my adhering to all the rules that makes me a citizen. It is my status as a rescued refugee who accepted the grace of God when I was powerless. I have discovered who I really am and have begun to understand what I was meant to be.
Yes, there are times when the king of the old kingdom shouts across the border that our failure to be perfect only means we are aliens here and we still belong to him. We fall prey to believing that it is perfection that keeps us here and there is bound to be something we can do that will get us deported or some serious infraction of the law that will get us extradited. But there isn’t. In fact, it is my experience that those times in my life when I am most straining toward perfectionism is when I am the least kind and graceful to others. I am unforgiving, impatient, bound up in control and earning my way that it leaves no room to show understanding to others. My perfectionism is little other than spiritual narcissism.
Yes, there are disciplines for when we sin but there is no deportation. We are not treated as aliens or strangers when we sin but as people who belong here as citizens. It is not a world without rules but a world without threats and arbitrary punishments for infractions.”
We heard from Philippians that we are a colony of heaven eagerly awaiting a Savior who will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
In that same way we are looking at what Christ has accomplished and what we are still waiting for. It’s what we call Advent. The arrival announcement has been made and we are eagerly waiting for it. It is what has been called “living in the now but not yet.” We are living in the in between time as we wait for the full redemption of creation.
2. And that is where we find ourselves this morning in this passage. We have moved from the kingdom of death to the kingdom of life. We have put off our bondage to the sin of Adam and moved by grace into the service of the man through whom God has made peace with the world and reconciled us to him forever. We are saved now but then what? “We are not just saved. Grace is bigger than that, isn’t it? God’s interest in us is bigger than that. We are saved in order to become who we are and help others do the same.”
“Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” That does not just refer to our living with him in eternity. It means we have been grafted into his life and that the life we now live in the body is, as Paul says in Galatians, we live by faith in the Son of God. It is not just that Christ shows us a better way to live. Any moral teacher can do that. It is that we have literally exchanged one life for another. He has begun to live His life through us and has begun to turn us into what Paul will call later “instruments of righteousness.” Our natural life is withering away and being replaced by an entirely different sort of life whether we fully understand that or not. An exchange has been made and we are no longer in charge of the life that has begun to grow in us. I’ve never been pregnant but I suspect that is what it must be like to discover this new life growing inside that is new and out of our control. Except we are both the mother and the child! We are experiencing the growth of new life and are, like the baby, totally dependent on Christ to care for us.
3. It also means that (look at verse 10) the death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” I love that phrase “once for all” because it means when I died and was buried with him I don’t have to keep dying over and over again. I’ve told you before about Mrs. Perkins in the church where I grew up. Every Sunday she rededicated her life by walking down the aisle on the last verse of the invitation hymn. I know it was real for her but as a child I always wondered by Mrs. Perkins needed to do that Sunday after Sunday. Now, of course, I realize I have the same tendencies and maybe you do as well and what we need to understand is we are free from that continuous worry about our being covered. Some of us are working hard not to live the life the author of Hebrews describes in chapter 10:
“Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.
The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:
“This is the covenant I will make with them
after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.”
Then he adds:
“Their sins and lawless acts
I will remember no more.”
And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.”
We need not keep bringing our sacrifices over and over again. We are now being made holy through the new covenant with God. As we read earlier in the same book: “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
But it also means that this being made holy is constantly going on in the life of every believer because, again as Paul says in Philippians, the one who began the work will not stop until that work is finished. It is going on and on until it is finished whether we have a sense of great progress or not. It does not say we can finish the work because we know ourselves too well. We stop for breaks. We lose interest. We grow tired of the work. We grow proud of how far we have come. We lose our way. No, only God can make the commitment needed to finish the work he began.
4. But then Paul says we should not let sin reign in our mortal bodies so that we do not obey its evil desires. How can sin be physical when we think of it is as either psychological or spiritual. Sin is not embodied. It is outside the body. If we misread Paul we may come to the conclusion that the body is evil and those who mortify the flesh or consider the flesh as unimportant are right. We should live only in the world of the spirit. But that is not what he is saying. Just as goodness can be incarnated as it was in Christ so can sin be incarnated. We talked last week about the body is infected but not evil. It is the infected body that influences us toward sin. Even though we no longer are slaves to sin we are not free from the infection that can still plague us. Not until our bodies are glorified will we be completely free from sin.
And then he goes on to say that we cannot live our lives and grow toward holiness if we live in fear of sin. Yes, we need to be constantly aware of the power of sin in our mortal bodies to lead us into trouble but our lives are not to be lived reacting to and protecting ourselves in unhealthy ways from that possibility. That is why he says we are to “offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.” Spend more time and attention on what we can do as instruments of righteousness than how we might slip and do the wrong thing. What does it mean then to offer the parts of our body as an instrument of righteousness?
Well, first I think it means that righteousness is physical and not psychological or spiritual. It means we do things with our bodies that lead toward God being glorified. The Westminster Confession asks the question, “What is the chief end of man?” and the response is, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” That is righteousness. To glorify and to enjoy. Again, it is not just disembodied holiness that God desires. I was with a group of philanthropists this week in Portland and one of them said a great danger of being a donor is that giving money would replace doing something tangible. It would become easier to write a check than do something for another person. Giving is not a substitute for our members being instruments of righteousness. Giving will not replace a visit or an act of service in the name of Christ. It will not replace listening or compassion or doing something that takes time and effort. In “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” Eugene Peterson writes, “Jesus keeps our feet on the ground, attentive to children, in conversation with ordinary people, sharing meals with friends and strangers, listening to the wind, observing the wildflowers, touching the sick and wounded, praying simply and unselfconsciously. Jesus insists that we deal with God right here and now, in the place where we find ourselves and with the people we are with. Jesus is God here and now.” That is being an instrument of righteousness.
Second, righteousness is not the same thing as rightness. Rightness is being moral. It is being a good person by the prevailing standards of the world around us. But it is not righteousness. It is not the same as “being made holy”. Holiness is a life of substance. It is a life of weight. When Solomon says, “Get wisdom” he is saying the same thing as holiness. That is not just morality. It is deeper than character or personality. It is the very essence of who you are. Psalm 62 says that “lowborn men are but a breath, the highborn are but a lie; if weighed on a balance, they are nothing.” God says in 2 Kings 17:15: “They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless.” The word for “holiness” literally means to have weight and morality simply staying away from what is wrong is not the same. It is the defining characteristic of a righteous life.
“Jesus never expected us simply to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, bless those who persecute us, give unto them that ask, and so forth. These responses, generally and rightly understood to be characteristic of Christlikeness, were put forth by him as illustrative of what might be expected of a new kind of person – one who intelligently and steadfastly seeks, above all else, to live within the rule of God and be possessed by the kind of righteousness that God himself has, as Matthew 6:33 portrays. Instead, Jesus did invite people to follow him into that sort of life from which behavior such as loving one’s enemies will seem like the only sensible and happy thing to do. For a person living that life, the hard thing to do would be to hate the enemy, to turn the supplicant away, or to curse the curser… True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.” Dallas Willard
So, Paul sums it up in verse 22: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.” We get both, don’t we? Life now and the life we wait for.