13
Nov 16
ROMANS SERIES, PART 6
“Know Ye Not…”
Eric Prost
In order to leverage this document
for yourself personally or in a group, it will be necessary for you to take
notes, even pictures of various PowerPoint slides, in order to capture key
quotes in order to reflect on the text.
We encourage you to take notes, develop your own questions and engage
with the text as you feed yourself and perhaps those you lead.
Series
Title: Good News Bad News
Description: From the moment we wake up
to the moment our heads hit the pillow, we can be bombarded with bad news.
Social media has made our world a lot smaller and exposed us 24/7 to the
constant deluge of bad news. This fall we are starting a study in the book of Romans. In the first 17 verses Paul talks about the
good news, the good news that he will expand upon in his letter to the Romans.
Join us as we unpack the good news, are challenged by it and anchored in it.
I
like Romans, especially Romans 6, because it’s all about facts. Amazing, difficult, almost unbelievable facts, but facts
nonetheless. Our chapter isn’t concerned
with your experience or how you feel.
It’s all about what you know. How
you feel can be important, but whether you feel
something is true doesn’t affect whether it is or not.
I think we often live as if the facts in Romans 6 are not
true. Here’s an example from psychiatry
- I have patients who tell themselves they are incompetent or even
unlovable. But when I ask them, as
they’re sitting in my office, how much they really believe that, they are able
to come up with lots of evidence to prove that idea wrong. Using their reasoning skills, they believe
they are competent at work and that
they do get along with others. They can usually quickly come up with other
explanations for the examples that they originally used to show that no one likes
them. But, even though the facts are to
the contrary, those patients still go about their lives, day-to-day, living and
feeling and believing that they are incompetent and unlovable.
That’s
why Paul starts off at four different times in our chapter with “Know ye not…?”,
i.e. “Don’t you know…?” This is theology
that you can and should know because it’s life-changing.
Paul
writes bluntly. Question:
What statements of fact do you see in the chapter?
Here’s
the central point we need to understand:
“How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (v. 2) Question:
What does this mean?
You
have died to sin. You weren’t alive when
the Cubs won their last World Series in 1908, let alone when Adam was in the
Garden of Eden. You never met Adam. Nevertheless, your self, your whole humanity
from the moment of conception was aligned with him. You were born a sinner and lived under the
reign of sin. There’s no question that
there were a lot of very real consequences to that alignment. Then, when you became a follower of Christ,
that old self died. Your old humanity
died. You are no longer under the reign
of sin.
And
then you have risen, not in the future, but already. You have risen with Christ to a new life, a
new alignment, a new humanity, so that going forward “you should not serve
sin.” (v. 6) You weren’t around when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of
knowledge, but you were part of their humanity and their fall in every
way. You weren’t around when Christ was
crucified, you weren’t nailed to an actual cross with Him, but the effects of
His death, burial, and resurrection have had effects on you, the Christian, that
are every bit as real as the effects of Adam’s sin. You are a different self, a new creature (2
Corinthians 5:17), risen with Him and united to Him.
Question: Why do you still sin then?
Look at the next verse (12):
“Do not let sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body to obey its
passions.” What? Paul tells me I’ve died to sin over and over
in eleven verses and now turns around and tells me not to let sin reign in my
body?
You still have a “mortal” body.
That’s not news. Your body is a
good piece of matter. It is an important
part of you. But, even though you are a
new self in Christ with a complete break from the old humanity, your body is
not yet the one you will have in Heaven.
It is not yet a glorified body.
Christ had a glorified body when he rose from the dead, but you still
have your mortal one. It still is
wracked with sin, and its parts—including the brain—are still subject to sinful
passions.
So that is why we get the terrible struggle we do in chapter 7
that Pastor Mark will look into next week.
Question: What does it mean in the second part of this
chapter when we’re called “slaves of Righteousness” and “slaves to God” (v. 18,
22)? Is this how you picture your
relationship to God?
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