Welcome to Episode 3 of Series 2. I hope you will have listened to the earlier episodes but if you haven’t, they are worth going back to.

Recap and Background

In summary, in Series 1 Paul was describing the gospel - what it was, why it was important, and why people needed to respond to Christ through the gospel. In Series 2 we have been looking at how we can live the Christian life effectively. It started at the beginning of Romans 5, with those wonderful words where Paul describes how we have peace with God, we are in his grace and we have hope for the future; and we have been justified by faith. He then begins to explain how we can live the Christian life effectively and he introduces the person of the Holy Spirit. That is going to become a major theme in chapter 8. Chapter 5 ended with Paul going back to explain in more detail how sin came into the world. He told the story again of Adam and Eve and the fall into sin.

In the last episode Paul, in Romans 5: 17, describes once again the magnificent reality of the gospel.

“For if, by the trespass of the one man,” meaning Adam, “death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!”

He makes a comparison between Adam, and the impact of Adam and Eve’s sin, and the impact of Christ’s salvation. Death came to us through Adam and Eve. Death biblically means not only physical death, the separation of the spirit from the body, but also spiritual death, our separation in this life from God through sin. It even means eternal death, or the second death, the permanent separation between us and God in eternity after we die. Death came into the world through Adam and Eve - something terrible happened to the human race. But what Christ did was even more powerful. What we can now become is what we were intended to be at the beginning, before mankind fell into sin. Through Christ, according to Paul, God’s abundant provision of grace comes to us. All his mercy and grace that he wants to give to us is available through Christ. We receive the gift of righteousness which Paul has discussed several times before. ‘Righteousness’ means being put right with God, put in a right relationship with him.

Grace versus Sin

Now we come to Romans 6, where Paul faces an interesting question. Somebody might challenge what he has been saying about God’s grace in the following way: if God is so kind, so generous and so forgiving, why don’t we just carry on sinning? Surely he will just carry on forgiving us. He puts it in the form of a question that someone might ask him. As Paul writes this letter, sometimes he has a question in mind and he puts the words into an imaginary questioner’s mouth, in order to discuss the issue.

“What should we say, then? Should we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can you live in it any longer?”

Romans 6:1-2, NIV

Paul is coming to a very important point. In this episode, he tries to explain clearly, in a number of different ways, how we have to be quite clear in our thinking, that when we become Christians we have moved away from the life of sin fundamentally. What happens in life when people carry on sinning, or doing things wrong, and there is no accountability for what they do? Things go wrong. Imagine the young boy who steals from his mother’s food store every day, and takes food that she says he can’t have. She gets really angry with him every day and, then she suddenly starts to feel sorry for him and she gets very emotional. She says, ‘I’ll forgive you for that - just don’t do it again’. He knows that he can carry on stealing food out of the kitchen. She will get upset about it but she won’t do anything about it, she will forgive him and they carry on like that. His behaviour gets worse and worse. When he becomes an adult he will start stealing from other people. This is what would happen if God took the approach of not minding when people sin and kept on forgiving them. But God is not like that. He is a just God. This is the point that Paul has in the back of his mind. God is a just God and he has dealt with sin because it was such a serious problem; he has dealt with it by giving his only son, who died on the cross and paid a terrible price for our sin. As Christians, we should not think that sin doesn’t matter to God. It will corrupt us if we allow ourselves to fall back into sin; it will compromise our faith and it will make us very unhappy and uneasy with ourselves.

Paul introduces the idea here that we have died to sin. We are no longer under its power. We are not under the power of sin; we are under the power of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit which is even more powerful than the power of sin. You can’t go back to your old life, says Paul, without terrible destruction. Imagine a boy who is a talented footballer at school and he plays for the school team. The school team has a red shirt and red shorts as their football outfit. Then his parents move to the other part of the city and he has to transfer school and they notice he is a very good footballer as well. Their kit is blue; blue shirt, blue shorts. He is playing for this new school and they announce that they are going to play against the old school. At that point, he sees all his friends from the other team. He goes back to the old school; he remembers what it was like being in the old school. Can he swap back his shirt and go and play for the other school? No! That is the past. He is now playing for the new school. He has to stay with this team and play for them. In the same way, the past can’t control what we are now if we are Christians. But very often it does, in our experience. Paul is trying to help us to know how to escape from that control and not go back to do the things we did in the past.

Baptism

The next point he makes really shows us the force of what he wants to say.

“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

Romans 6:3-4, NIV

Here Paul is teaching about baptism. This is one of the few places that he discusses baptism in detail and it is very important for us. Baptism is the symbol of entering into the Christian faith. Paul says that we are baptised into Christ’s death. Just as Christ’s physical life ended, so our old life ends as we enter the water of baptism, in Paul’s mind. He says, we are buried with Christ. That means that we identify with his death as we go under the water, we are symbolically going into death in order to come up into new life. We are identifying with him in death so that we might live a new life. Paul thinks of baptism as something tremendously important - not just a symbol, but something that powerfully changes our lives, if we let it do so.

The Early Church practised baptism amongst those who believed: the baptism of believers. This is seen first on the Day of Pentecost where thousands of people were baptised in big pools around the Temple compound in Jerusalem; when the Church goes to Samaria in Acts 8; the Ethiopian eunuch, in Acts 8 who is baptised by Philip the evangelist, out on the road going south to Egypt; and the baptisms that are recorded in the New Testament where whole households or family units are baptised. There are several examples of this in the book of Acts; Cornelius, a Roman soldier who, in Acts 10, believed in the message that Peter preached to him in his household and it says that ‘he and his whole household believed and were baptised’; a trader called Lydia, who traded in clothing and fabrics, was baptised with her household in Acts 16 when Paul preached there; and in the same city of Philippi, the Roman jailer, who was looking after Paul in prison, and suddenly was converted through dramatic circumstances, he and his whole household were baptised. There are no examples in the book of Acts of small infants being baptised. None of these households are likely to have had small infants in them. ‘Households’ meant relatives, servants, business partners - people who might live in an extended family. All these three households, Cornelius, Lydia and the Philippian jailer, were all quite wealthy people. One was a senior Roman soldier, Lydia was a rich trader and the jailer was a civil servant with a salary from Rome. They probably had quite extended properties and had a number of people living there who were all converted at the same time. Baptism in the New Testament represented the baptism of those who had chosen to follow Jesus. That is what Paul had in mind when he mentions the significance of baptism here.

Thinking about our baptism is helpful in order to live the Christian life. What happened when I was baptised? What did it represent? What did I leave behind? These are important questions to think about.

Resurrection Life

“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.”

Romans 6:5-10, NIV

Paul says that after baptism and after conversion, we experience resurrection life. Something of God’s resurrection power is within us. From that point onwards we experience new life through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We experience the hope of future resurrection after we have died. Our old self is no longer in control. Christ’s death and resurrection give us hope for our future destiny.

In the last few verses, Romans 6: 11 - 14, we come to the absolutely crucial climax to his argument. He gives us the key that helps us to understand how to live effectively as Christians.

Accurate Christian Thinking

“In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who’ve been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law but under grace.”

Romans 6:11-14, NIV

‘Count yourselves dead to sin’ means calculate your situation, think accurately about where you are in your new Christian life. One of the problems in Christianity, very often, is people are not clear enough in thinking of the difference between being a Christian and not being a Christian. They don’t realise the difference is very large. ‘Count yourself’, make the right calculation - it is almost like a mathematical calculation. Think carefully and accurately about your situation. This is very important because the destination that you go on depends on the calculation you make.

Here is an example from my own experience: many of us spend time catching buses, or perhaps trains, to move around from place to place in our country, to work, and for other reasons. When you are catching a bus it is very important to catch the right bus. In order to do that you often need to ask the driver, or look at the number, or perhaps the destination written on the bus. I remember once being in Kenya and I wasn’t familiar with public transport there. I found that I needed to make a long journey of 300 kilometres from Nairobi to an outlying city, called Eldoret, by bus. I was unfamiliar with the situation and I knew that I had to make the right decision at this point. My mind had to be clear. I had been told which number bus to look for but the buses didn’t have any numbers in this bus station. People just seemed to know which bus to catch. It was tremendously important, as a foreigner coming into the country trying to find the right bus, to make sure I got on the right number because if I got on the wrong number, the buses from this particular location, went all over the country so I could end up many hundreds of kilometres away from my destination. I had to think carefully and I asked several passengers, and the driver, and the person sitting next to me to make sure I was on the right bus! Later that day, I got to my destination 300 kilometres away. Paul is encouraging Christians to think carefully: Which kingdom am I in? Who am I obeying? Who is my loyalty to? Who do I belong to?

These are the basic questions that we need to consider. Christian obedience comes from the heart. We feel that we want to serve God. We have an affection for him that is really important. It also comes from the mind, according to Paul here. ‘Count yourself dead to sin’. Count yourself in God’s kingdom. Calculate where you are. Think carefully about it, especially when you face the complex challenges of life.

Paul goes on to explain that this affects how we use our physical body - the very parts of our body. Our mouth: what we say to people and what we say about people. Our hands: are my hands going to the market and to steal things to put in my pocket? Are my hands going to be used for acts of physical violence? Are my sexual organs going to be used for sexual relationships outside marriage? Are my thoughts going to be used for negative thoughts about myself? Or really critical thoughts about everyone around me? Our body has to be brought into line with our faith. It is not just in the mind. It is not just in the heart, not just in the emotions. It is not just on Sundays. What we do with our body matters. What we eat matters - do we eat enough? Do we eat too much food that we don’t need that is bad for our bodies? What we drink - are we dependent on alcohol? These are the sort of questions that Paul has in mind.

He says that the way forward is to think accurately about our situation and the best way to do that, according to Paul, is to go back to the beginning of your spiritual journey, to your baptism. I wonder whether you remember clearly your baptism, for those who have been baptised as believers. There are other traditions in the Church, but Paul had in mind here people who had been baptised as believers. A very healthy thing is to go back and think what did that action mean? What was I saying to God? What was happening in my life? I was literally saying goodbye to the person I was, and saying hello to the new life that God was promising me at the time.

Reflections

Paul is challenging us about our thinking, so my first reflection would be that right thinking is a very powerful force for good in our lives. It is actually part of our discipleship. One of the biggest problems many Christians face is thinking negatively about themselves, and we need to challenge that too. God loves us. He accepts us as we are. He forgives us our failures. He knows we are weak and vulnerable and we make mistakes. He really wants us to succeed in our Christian life. He wants to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to help us. So let us offer every part of our bodies to Christ, to serve him. Let us use the resources of these chapters, Romans 5 to 8 to help us live effective Christian lives.

We continue with this theme, as Paul develops it further and gives other ways of thinking about it, in our next episode.