The People, Promise and Pleasure of Dying to Sin

At the start of this year, I was sitting in South Africa. Most of you guys will probably know that. It's February 16 today and it was just over a month ago that I was holidaying over in the motherland, so to speak. It was a wonderful trip. I think I've talked to some of you about it.

Wonderful trip of being with family, extended family that still lives there. Sort of getting connected to the old nostalgic memories of growing up. And obviously seeing some of the most beautiful landscape and nature I think that there is in this creation. But on one particular Sunday, we had the chance to sort of pause our holidaying and driving around and tripping through South Africa to go to church. In fact, it was the church that I grew up in when I was a boy.

Now the pastor there preached a fairly typical start of the New Year type of sermon. Sort of those sermons about, you know, setting goals for the New Year. New Year's resolutions and whatnot. And he preached on this text, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, which reads, "Train yourself for godliness. For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come."

While I was listening to this sermon, rather than being encouraged and spurred on towards action, I felt heavy and quite helpless. Having spent an incredible three weeks in South Africa, eating barbecued saucy meats, nibbling on snacks all day, eating certifiable feasts every night as we visited extended family members one after the other. Not only was I hearing in this sermon God's word saying, bodily training is of some value, you chubby little slug. I was hearing that what is even more important than physical training is spiritual training.

The development of this thing called godliness. And while the pastor thankfully emphasised that godliness was a work that God would do in me through the power of His saving grace in Jesus Christ, I was left with a question that I felt he didn't answer, which is how. How do I develop godliness? How does God work godliness in me?

How can I effectively train and work and develop myself into being a more holy person? A person more after God's own heart. A man who is known to be godly. I wonder if I was to ask you that question right now when we pass the mic around. May I ask you, how would you explain how to be more godly?

If someone in your small group asks you, how am I more godly? Or someone in your family, a daughter or a son, asks you, how do I become more godly? How would you answer them? Well, it's from these sort of questions that I wound up buying this little book. A book written by a seventeenth century pastor and theologian, John Owen, called The Mortification of Sin.

John Owen was a Puritan of the seventeenth century in England and he was a spiritual giant of his time and I could probably argue even today. The book is a collection of a series of sermons that he preached on the topic of how we as Christians can and will stamp out sin in our lives in order to live more godly lives. Over the next few weeks, I hope to be able to glean some of his understandings and his wrestling through scripture, probably combine it with some of my own studies and reflections, and I hope that all of us will be able to grow through this together. And my prayer is, because I understand that some of us may be coming to this cold, some of us may not have been convicted by this sort of question at the start of the year, I hope that all of us by the end will be able to identify and answer the question, how can I become more godly?

And I hope the motivation for all of us is, I want to be more godly. This morning, as a way of introducing the topic, getting our minds around this concept, I want us to read from Romans chapter 8 and we're going to read from verse 1 through to 17. Romans chapter 8, verse 1. And focus specifically this morning on verse 13 in this passage. But let's start, Romans 8:1.

Paul writes to the church in Rome, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh. In order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh.

But those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. For it does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. If in fact the spirit of God dwells in you, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.

For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. And the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

And if children, then also heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him." So far our reading. This morning's sermon is entitled, "The People, the Promise and the Pleasure of Dying to Sin." And as we come to grips with what Paul has to say on this topic of becoming more godly or becoming more holy or in his terminology here, coming to life or enjoying life, we read this command specifically in verse 13 that we're going to focus on. If you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

And so the first question looking at that statement is, who is Paul talking about? And our first point to look at is: the people who are being addressed are Christians. People who have come to trust in the finished work of Christ. That is who Paul is referring to when he is saying you, and he's writing that letter.

People who have come to realise that Jesus Christ is the greatest prize in their life. He's the greatest prize in the next life because He is the only one, as Paul writes in verse 1 of this same chapter in Romans 8, which we started by reading, that He is the only one that can offer us no condemnation for our sin. Christians are the ones who have received a full pardon and who will escape the justified wrath of God when God returns to earth to judge every man's life, every woman's life, every child's life.

So the you Paul is addressing here is not simply the Christians of Rome. Those people he wrote to two thousand years ago in the first century AD. It's not referring to an isolated group of people who have somehow received just a specific special revelation only to them. Paul is talking about here all those who have come to believe in Jesus. But Paul has been making some amazing claims about the incredible status of these Christians, of those who have put their trust in Jesus and His finished work.

He says this, that every Christian believer has received such an incredible change in status that it's almost impossible to fully grasp. Although they may not always feel like it's true for them, the Christian has become an almost entirely different creature. At various other points in Scripture, the Christian is referred to as being a new creation. A new creation. Other times, a Christian is labelled to be the one who has been moved from the kingdom of darkness into an entirely different kingdom, the kingdom of light.

They're not even citizens of the same place anymore. Paul describes them here in our passage in Romans 8, a little bit later, that they have become heirs of God the King. And thereby they have become princes and princesses of the King of Heaven. Inheritors of everything that God has created. That is an incredible thought.

There's a story about a preacher by the name of Henry Ironside who once found himself travelling in a train on his way to Chicago. And it was a trip that was going to take him a few days to get there. In the same railway car, he was staying with a group of nuns. It just so happened to be. And every day they would walk by him and they would see him and stop and say hello to him and they spoke with him.

One morning he was sitting there reading his Bible. And the nuns, a group of nuns, came by and they started talking to him about spiritual things. And every morning he would have this same habit. And about the third day, he asked them, and you can see he has a theological bone to pick. He asked them if any of them had ever seen a saint.

They were Catholic nuns. They all answered that they had never seen a living saint. We know that the Catholic faith venerates certain individuals as saints. They said they had never seen a living saint. And they declared that they would very much like to have seen some one of them.

But then the preacher astonished them immensely when he declared to them, "I am a saint. I'm Saint Harry." And then he opened the New Testament and he took them to part of the Scriptures that shows that God doesn't make a saint by exalting an individual, but through the exalting work of Jesus Christ on every believer's behalf. So that every believer is holy, which is what saint means. Every believer is holy.

Every believer is a saint. This is who Paul is addressing, the saints who believe in Jesus Christ. Those who have been made holy by His work. And Paul is saying, you have a life, a holy life to live. You have a holy life to receive, to enjoy, to grasp.

But then he moves on and explains what exactly this promise is. This promise that is being made. Paul writes in that verse, verse 13, that if you die to sin, if you die to sin, you will live. In the older English Bibles, the word used here was to mortify, to kill, to make dead something. This is why theologians still today talk about the concept of mortification of sin.

This is why this book is entitled that. When you are mortified at something, when something embarrasses you and say, oh gosh, I'm so mortified at that idea. It's like you're saying, I wish I could curl up and die so that I don't have to experience the embarrassment. Or that embarrassment is just killing me. Paul is addressing Christians and saying to them, this is the promise to every Christian that if you kill sin, if you murder sin in your life, you will experience a thing called life.

But do you notice that this is a conditional statement? There's a conditional clause attached to this sentence. For those of us who have never passed grade 10 English, let me explain to you what a conditional clause is. I had to, incidentally, do tertiary level Greek grammar to know what a conditional statement is. So don't worry too much if you don't know what that is.

We can say something along the lines of, if you want to have dessert, you need to finish your dinner first. That's a conditional statement. The promise of dessert is conditional on whether you finish your dinner. So what does it mean then for Paul to be saying that receiving life is conditional to mortifying sin? Does he mean that if you want to receive life, you must be able to kill the sin in your life?

And immediately, some of us might think this is exactly what the Bible is saying. Because this is how Christianity is often understood. This is how Christianity is explained to us when we turn on the TV, when we watch movies. They will say this is what Christianity says, live this good life. If you live this good life, you will receive eternal life.

You will receive God's love. You will receive His forgiveness if you have done just enough right. But I hope after all the sermons on the fundamental concept of grace at Open House, all of us will be able to come, who have come here this morning, will understand firmly that this isn't the teaching of the Bible. In fact, we would be especially confused if we heard this teaching coming from the apostle Paul, who taught so ferociously, who defended so vigorously the primacy of God's grace in Jesus Christ. So then what does this conditional statement, if you mortify sin, you will live?

What does that mean? Well, in grammar, the conditional clause can also be used in a second way. And that is to stress the cause and effect relationship of two individual statuses. So rather than the stress of uncertainty of one situation over against the other, for example, you may not eat your dinner or you may eat your dinner depending on how much you want dessert. You may say, well, I don't really want dessert so I won't finish my dinner.

Then I won't have dessert. It's an uncertain statement. But if you do, then you can have that. That's one way of explaining a conditional statement. But here is another usage of the conditional clause.

And that is to stress the certainty of the result. It can be used to stress the connection between two things that are being spoken of. We might say, if you hit your uncovered thumb with a hammer, it will hurt. There's no uncertainty about that. If you do it, it's going to hurt.

But we still use a conditional phrase. If you hit your hand, that's going to be the result. Now, given what the apostle Paul has been arguing throughout the whole book of Romans up until chapter 8 here, this is the most logical conclusion to make about understanding this sentence. Just a few chapters earlier, Paul makes this blunt statement in Romans 6:23. "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

The free gift. There is no condition to this. Something is free and it means there is no condition, unconditional. So here we find the two things being mentioned exactly by Paul and what he says here in Romans 8, death and life. But Paul is mentioning that eternal life is a free gift.

How then can Paul then say that life is conditional on whether we are able to put sin to death? That's a conditional statement based upon actions and the result is not free. It is conditional. It's transactional. And Paul has been arguing and arguing and arguing throughout Romans 1 through to 7 that it is a free gift, this eternal life, if you will receive it.

We also know that this can't be some sort of blip or some inconsistency with Paul's arguing, that it's a minor thing that he's sort of overlooked, because you go and read his other letters and you'll see the exact same understanding. Famously, Ephesians chapter 2. "For by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not of your own doing. It is the gift of God." So the conditional clause here is not emphasising the uncertainty about whether or not we might choose to kill sin in our lives. What Paul is emphasising here is the certainty that killing sin in our lives will lead to life.

To every Christian then, Paul is announcing this promise. If you die to sin, you will receive life. There is a certain connection to those two things, die to sin and receive life. But then the next logical question and the third point and the final point this morning is, what is this life that Paul is talking about? And we come to the third point, the pleasure that is being received in this promise.

Following along with Paul's discussions throughout the book of Romans, you get to the understanding that this life mentioned here is not referring to the eternal life of God. Because like we've just established, the magnificent end point to God's free gift is eternal existence with God. And so we assume therefore this life can't be referring to eternal life. How are we sure of this? Well, because again, we have to go to verse 1 of the same chapter, which says, "There is therefore now no condemnation."

No condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That is a huge statement. It's the turning point to his whole argument. From here on out to the end of Romans, everything changes. This is the life that has been given to every Christian.

All who have placed their trust in Jesus are guaranteed a pardon. They will never face condemnation for their own personal disobedience. The Christian is guaranteed forgiveness of their sin and they are guaranteed eternal life instead of death. And so when we get to this verse, in verse 13, in the same chapter and it starts with this promise, if you die to sin, you will live. What is this life that is being talked about?

If there is no condemnation, no eternal death that the Christian will receive once they have accepted the free gift of God's grace, what is this death? What is this life that is being talked about here? Well, it's talking about the inner life of a Christian. It's talking about the here and the now experience of life as a Christian.

It's the idea that Christians will experience in reality, even in daily life, a difference to the way everyone else who aren't in Christ, how they will experience life. We have a number of new Christians in this church. I don't know if you know that. New Christians. I want to call them baby Christians, but some of them are not even close to being babies.

And they will tell you the significant shift between the life before Christ and the life now in Christ. They will talk, even if their status in life hasn't changed. Even if their financial situation hasn't changed. Their marital relationships, their family relationships, their career opportunities, none of those things may have changed and yet their entire experience of life has shifted. They talk of feeling lighter.

They talk of feeling grounded. Feeling hopeful about the future. They've been gripped by something they describe as joy. This is what is being talked about here. It is the comfort, it is the energy, and it is the optimism that the Christian enjoys in the here and the now.

That is the life that Paul is talking about. And Paul is saying that dying to sin, killing sin, mortifying sin leads to more of this life somehow. And that the Christian can enjoy it more fully, taste it more tangibly, drink it in more deeply if you are willing to die to sin. Conversely then, this death that Paul mentions is not eternal death. It can't be.

It can't mean that the Christian can somehow lose their salvation because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But this death is the crusty, decaying, slimy things of life that drains our joy. It makes us sad. It makes our hearts heavy. It makes us feel downcast.

And Paul is saying, get rid of the sin that brings you to that place and chase after the things that will bring you life. And this is the thought that is shared in Hebrews 12:1, isn't it? Where the author of the book of Hebrews admonishes Christians and says this, "Lay aside every weight and every sin which clings so closely." Who can say yes to that? "Lay aside the sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us."

For the Christian, sin isn't the same condemning force that it once was. Sin doesn't condemn us because we've been forgiven completely. We've been restored completely back to the God who cherishes us now, who has adopted us as His sons and His daughters forever. But we are still encouraged to lay aside the sin which weighs us down. Why?

Not because those sins will destroy us, but because they become distractions that create enormous drag and prevent us from an even more wonderful life now. A life which is meant to be enjoyed even as we run it to its glorious end to receive that grand prize at the end. On the other side, a non-Christian may not realise it, but they are also running in this race. The same race. We're not running two different races.

But non-Christians hate this race. This race is painful for them. This race is horrible. They can't see anything good in it and they are going to come to the end of this race and they will realise they've lost it anyway. Their result at the end is condemnation, Paul will argue.

There is condemnation for those who are outside of Christ, and they will have realised that they've run this race dismally. They have failed in it. Only the Christian has the optimism and the hope that they have the energy to endure that race and that they will even enjoy it. But again and again, the Scriptures promise this, cast off the sin which causes that drag, which slows you down, which makes you turn down dead end roads, getting caught up in thorn bushes that slow you down. Those things don't bring life.

They bring death. Those things smell and they stink and they, like decay, will drain you of joy. They will make you feel heavy. One preacher illustrated it this way. He said, "It's perfectly legal to run a race in army boots if you want.

You could probably go to the Olympic Games and you could decide to bring along your big, big, thick, heavy leather army boots. But," he says, "that won't be wise. And it probably means you will fail. Even though legally, you could do it." Many of the things that prevent spiritual life, many of the things that prevent the good life for the Christian is being referred to here in Romans 8.

These aren't sins that will disqualify you from the grand prize. You won't be condemned. But these sins won't help you run that race with success either. They won't lead you to running that race well or running that race with joy. So over the coming weeks, we're going to be unpacking all of that.

What does it mean? Okay. So how do I enjoy this race? How do I make sure my best boots are on? We're going to be exploring dying to sin in order to live more fully.

But I can guarantee you it's going to be a challenge. It's going to be a challenge to all of us and it's been a challenge to me. I just had a look for interest's sake at who's downloading our sermons on a weekly basis and it's been very encouraging to see that we have people all over the place. But I wonder whether this will really be one of the most popular sermon series to preach. But I know that I am being challenged in my faith with these truths and I am looking forward to what the Lord may be teaching me in this process.

And so I want to encourage you to participate in these things with me as we work through them. Finally, this morning, if you know that you have never received Jesus Christ as your Saviour. You know that you have not really had your heart gripped by His love and that you have been rescued from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. This morning is your chance. This morning is your chance to make yourself right with God.

There is forgiveness available to you. There is acceptance. There are open arms of welcome that are available to you. And all that we have to do is receive it and believe that Jesus Christ is the one who has done it. His death and His resurrection on the cross is my victory.

Don't leave this morning without making a decision. Even as we sing a few more songs after this sermon, speak to God. Confirm in your heart your faith in Him, your heart for Him, your love for Him. And then I want to encourage you to speak to someone about it. Find out about joining a small group.

Speak to someone about it. Be encouraged in your walk with God. Be sharpened by other believers. And then for the rest of us who may know Jesus as our Saviour, those who have been gripped by His grace, commit yourselves to grow in that grace. To drink deeply from the life of that grace that is drawing near to you.

Identify those areas that still need work. Commit yourself to killing that sin. Destroying it even. And then bear witness to the light of God's grace pouring into your life, giving you life. We have a great life.

We have the greatest life because we have a great God and we have a great hope that makes this race worth running. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the truth of it that we can reflect on again, knowing, Lord Jesus, that you have accomplished everything for us. Lord, we are simply sitting here this morning overwhelmed by this truth.

Like the floods on Mount Tamborine this past week, your grace has just overwhelmed us. And Lord, there's nothing left but to be humble before a God who could love so much. Oh God, we pray that you will help us. Help us to see that we are the recipients of this promise. Help us to believe that in our own hearts, the deepest parts of us that sometimes want to doubt, sometimes want to think it can't be, not for me.

Lord, help us to believe and receive that it is to us, to the saints, that this promise has been made. Help us, Lord, to understand this promise is about life. This promise is about something that is pleasurable and good in this life, that makes this life worth living. Help us to hunger and thirst after this life, not to be satisfied with second best, second rate, things that will inevitably make us heavy and sad. Help us, Lord, to chase after the good and to disentangle ourselves from the things that so bind us and slow us down.

And, Lord Jesus, help us to see you clearly as the great prize, the great finish line for this race. That to have you, to be with you, to sit at your feet for all eternity is the greatest that we will ever desire and ever know. Help us to so see you, to so know you that everything else will fall quickly into its place. Everything will be given the best perspective. We pray for this series.

We pray for your work in dealing with us as we think through it and then do the hard thing of applying it in our lives. And we just pray, Lord, for your grace even in that process. In Jesus' name. Amen.