Please stand as we read God's word. Our Old Testament reading is from the book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel 37, and our New Testament reading is from Romans chapter six, verses one through 14. We'll begin with Ezekiel 37 and then move to Romans chapter six. Remember, as I read, as you listen, as you follow along in your copy of God's word, this is the word of God. Ezekiel 37, one. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley, it was full of bones. And he led me around them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, oh Lord God, you know, Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me and the breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet an exceedingly great army. Now from Romans chapter six. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not therefore sin reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace. Please open your Bibles, if you haven't already, to Romans 6. We've read the text already, but we'll be picking up in verse 5. Let's pray once more before we hear from God's Word. Our great God, we would ask You to teach us Your way. Instruct us from Your Word. Move in us by Your Spirit. Cause us to look to the Lord Jesus Christ and to know more of Him as we come to Your Word. We thank you, as we have already, for the great promises that attend to those who listen to your word, cause us to have open ears this morning. Do all of this, we ask, in Jesus' name, amen. There is a peculiar phrase that all of us have used at one time or another, or if we haven't used it, we certainly have heard it used, and we know more or less what it means. It's a phrase that's not unique to the English language. In fact, we find variations of it in other languages throughout history. But this is the phrase, too good to be true. Now what do we mean when we say that something or someone is too good to be true? Well, typically we mean something like this, that all the details described, all the facets of whatever it is that we're presented with, are just too perfect. We think when we hear about a particular offer that it can't possibly be that simple. There has to be a catch. Or sometimes we'll meet someone and we're left with the distinct impression that the answers that they gave us and the topics that they addressed were covered too neatly. We might say, she was just too good to be true. Or, that offer is too good to be true. Sometimes you hear people use this phrase after the revelation of some great fraud. I remember reading a report of the Bernie Madoff scandal that hit many in the New York City financial community. And what was often said by those who had invested their money with Madoff was, you know, it did seem like it was almost too good to be true. And similarly, those who had not invested said the same thing. They said, we knew it was too good to be true. We'll say this sometimes even about news that we hear or reports that we receive. That can't be right. It's too good to be true. In fact, that's actually a phrase that's used as a kind of technical phrase in newsrooms across America. They'll look at headlines and say, we can't use that headline. People will think it's too good to be true. Now, the reason why I bring up this phrase that is so commonly used and so commonly understood in our culture today is because there is a sense in which These first verses of Romans 6, beginning in verse 5 and going all the way down to verse 10, almost appear on the surface as too good to be true. In fact, these are truths that are so remarkable. It's such good news. that we can often take it for granted or overlook it or fail to meditate on it properly because in our minds it simply can't be this good. There is a new reality that is described by Paul for Christians, beginning in verse five, really beginning in verse one of this chapter, but beginning in verse five of this chapter, there is a new reality that is described by Paul that is true of Christians. If you're a Christian, Paul says, these things are true of you, and they're not too good to be true, although they are certainly the best news we could hear. Paul mentions at least four things, beginning in verse five, that are true of Christians. The first is in verse five itself. We have been united with Christ in a death like his. Now, Paul is making a larger argument here that goes back to the earlier chapters of Romans. But nonetheless, as he reaches this pinnacle of the argument, one of the points he makes about Christians is that we are united to Jesus Christ and we are united to Jesus Christ in his death. This is what the Apostle Paul says in Galatians chapter two when he describes his own experience, his own Christian experience. He says, I have been crucified with Christ. And it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. This truth of union with Jesus Christ in His death is pervasively found throughout the New Testament. You can hardly come to a book that describes our salvation at all without the writer going immediately to the fact that we are united to Jesus Christ. In fact, actually, this is one of the New Testament's shorthand ways of describing a Christian. It is someone who is in Christ. and has Christ united with him or her. Christ in you, the hope of glory. It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. This union with Christ by the Holy Spirit is fundamental to what it means to be a Christian. And Paul goes on to then make another point. We are united with Him in His death, and therefore, verse 5, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. Paul recognizes that this union with Christ not only means that there is a new life right now, that certain things are gone and certain things have come, but he also looks forward to the future. He touches on this again in verse 8 when he says, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Christ. This union with Christ is not something temporary. It's not something that only has one particular consequence. This union with Christ has implications for eternity. This union with Christ means we have not only died with Him, but we also will be resurrected in a resurrection like His. You remember perhaps in 1 Corinthians how Paul goes to great lengths to describe this resurrection, this bodily resurrection that all who are in Christ will themselves receive. We are united with him in death and we are united in his resurrection. Now, Paul goes on then to describe in verse 6 another reality related to these two. That because we've been crucified with Christ, because we have died with Him and will be raised with Him, therefore, verse 6, we know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. Our old self, Paul says, was crucified with Christ. And the implication of this is that the body of sin will one day be done away with. So decisive is this fact of our union with Christ that Paul can speak of it as having already taken place. Our old self was already crucified. And in fact, the body of sin then will be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. And as we've seen already, this leads again to Paul visiting the future resurrection in verse eight. All of this has happened, and therefore we will be raised again with Christ. We know, verse nine, that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him, for the death he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. These glorious truths are so remarkable, so astonishing, in some ways so mysterious, that we can often be tempted to doubt whether they're actually true at all. When we look at our own selves, when we look at our own lives, when we evaluate our everyday experience, we might be tempted to read something like this and say, this is too good to be true. Why is that? Why is it so hard for us to believe these things that Paul describes for us with clarity beginning in verse 5? Well, the first reason, of course, that it's so difficult for us to believe that these things are true, that these realities are actually ours in Christ, is because we look at ourselves and we look at our experiences and we recognize that we still struggle greatly with sin. We confessed, as we ought to, earlier in this service. about the ways in which we have sinned, the ways in which we do sin. In fact, the Bible acknowledges this, of course. The Bible says if anyone says he has no sin, he deceives himself and the truth is not in him. So the Bible is not describing sinless perfection here, far from it. In fact, the Bible explicitly denies that doctrine. And so we look at ourselves, we look at our struggle with sin, we look at the difficulties we face, and we compare it with what Paul describes here about our union with Jesus Christ. And it becomes sometimes difficult for us to imagine that this could actually be so. Another reason I think it's difficult for us sometimes to grasp these truths in their fullness is because we look at the Bible and we take the Bible seriously and we know that the Bible talks about the effects of sin. In fact, we read from the very first chapters of Genesis about the fall of man and we see immediately upon man's sin, the effect of sin. We see how immediately when Adam sins, There is relational conflict, there is guilt, there is this sin now that is on the inside of all of them, of both of them. And we see it with their children as well, we see their hiding from God, their blaming of others. We see the curses that come from sin. And we see that play out through the rest of Genesis and indeed through the rest of the Old Testament. We read statements like this in Genesis 6, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was very great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of man's heart was always evil all the time. We read things like that. We see the effects of sin in our own life. And it's difficult for us to believe these truths about union with Christ that Paul so vividly describes. Ah, but when we read further in the Old Testament, the picture clarifies for us. Because as we move further on into the Old Testament, the prophets are clear about the fact that God himself will work by His Spirit in those who are His, transforming them completely. There's a kind of spiritual resurrection that the prophets look forward to and Jesus Himself describes. You remember when Jesus meets with Nicodemus, he's very aware of these truths of the Bible, these truths about sin, and it's why he says to Nicodemus, Nicodemus, unless a man is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. And Jesus builds on promises like the one we read earlier from Ezekiel 37, promises of the work of the Holy Spirit This is the kind of thing that Peter means when he describes our salvation. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This is what the Apostle John means when he describes in 1 John the new birth as God's seed being planted in us. It is true, of course, that the problem of sin is deep and vast, universal in fact. But it is also true that the message of salvation given to us in Scripture is a message about new birth. the work of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit bringing spiritual life where there was only death. In fact, one of the great statements about this was made hundreds of years ago at the Synod of Dort when they were describing the work of the Spirit in salvation. He said this, by the efficacy of the same regenerating spirit, he pervades the inmost recesses of man. What I think we often fail to take into account when we read passages like this and we look at ourselves is the Bible's teaching about the work of the Holy Spirit in our redemption. The Holy Spirit works in the deepest parts of us. And so we have to ask ourselves as we read verses 5 through 10, what do you think God cannot change in you? What do you think is beyond the reach of the spirit who works within us? What is exempted From these truths of verse 6, we know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. Well, in the midst of our unbelief about this, Paul declares it very clearly. If you are a Christian, you have been united to Jesus Christ. United to Him in His death, and united to Him in His resurrection. I should also pause at this point and say this, if you're reading this text and hearing these words, and you're not a Christian, then these things are not true of you. The Bible describes something else entirely in terms of your future, The Bible describes a day when you will be raised and judged. And while Jesus Christ will acknowledge and stand in for those who are his, there is not that hope for you. In fact, the justice of God will have to be displayed in your punishment. for failing to acknowledge and trust in Jesus Christ. Jesus says that anyone who comes to him will not be cast out, and he will raise them up on the last day. Jesus makes many offers of himself. He says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. The Bible says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. And there's an urgency to this biblical message because the Bible is clear that that day of judgment and even the day of your death is not something that's revealed to man. None of us knows the day or the hour. So this is why the scriptures say when you hear these things, when you hear these truths about Christ, about what he offers of himself, now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Well, for those who are united to Christ, the implications of this union with Christ are profound. In fact, what the Apostle Paul does, beginning in verse 11, is he gives three commands based upon this good news. The first command is found in verse 11. And Paul says this, because you've been united to Jesus Christ, Because of all that that means for your life now and your life in the future, because of this good news, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. This is the first command in the passage. And the command is simply this, that you need to count yourself for Think of yourself or calculate, reckon yourself, consider yourselves, the ESV puts it, dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. The first command then has to do with our identity, with how it is that we understand ourselves, with who we understand ourselves to be. Now we live in an age where identity is hotly contested. And partly this is because in our age and in our little corner of the world, identity is seen as something malleable, something that we need to develop from the inside or discover on the inside. Sometimes this can come out in insignificant ways. We might identify ourselves by rather mundane features. We might identify ourselves with a certain sports team. We might identify ourselves with enjoying a certain kind of vacation. That tells us something about ourselves. But sometimes this desire to identify ourselves comes out in sinful ways. Many times people will identify themselves with sinful practices. In a sense, excusing those things on the basis of what they claim is their identity. In some situations, if you can stack up enough of the right kind of identity points, it puts you in a different category from others. This leads us, of course, to a kind of perpetual identity crisis, a perpetual status anxiety about our identity. And it forces us to make smaller and smaller distinctions between us and other people. It also has to be said that this can sometimes happen in a religious context. The Apostle Paul, after all, in Philippians 3, talks about his own identity, and he talks about the fact that if anyone wanted to go toe-to-toe with him in terms of religious confidence in the flesh, he's certain that he could match them. He says, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. And then he lists off these markers. I am circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Then you know, of course, what the Apostle Paul goes on to say, whatever gain I had, I count it as loss for the sake of Christ. And indeed, that's what he's saying here in verse 11, that when we look at our identity, when we think in terms of our identity, Paul says, what you need to think of first, and what you need to understand in a foundational and fundamental way, in a way that supersedes all of these other things, some of which might be trivial, you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. I wonder if I had caught you before this service and asked you, what is at the core of your identity? What is really the foundation of who you are? Would you have given this answer? Will I consider myself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus? And yet that's the first command that Paul gives, flowing out of this glorious news about our union with Christ. If you are united with Christ, then consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. The second command comes in verse 12. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. What Paul is saying here flows directly from his command in verse 11. Because you are to identify yourself as dead to sin, Therefore, you also need to be sure not to allow sin to reign over you. To reign over your body. Don't put sin in the driver's seat. Don't let sinful desires be in charge of how you act with your body. We need to be careful about saying things like, this is just how I was born. You can't control it. It's how I'm wired. You can hardly expect someone like me, who's been doing this for years, to stop. All of those phrases are ways of essentially saying sin has control. Sin reigns. Sin's the one in charge. But because we're not to consider ourselves as alive to sin in that way, as under sin in that way, we're to consider ourselves dead to sin, we can't let sin reign in our body in this fashion. We will often talk about our agency or our lack of agency when we sin. We'll say, I didn't set out to get angry. I didn't intend to fall into this sexual sin, but I couldn't help it. There are some sins, perhaps, in your life that have taken over. They're part of who you are. You schedule around them. You expect them to happen. You think that you can't live without them. Those are all symptoms of letting sin reign in your mortal body. And the way in which this plays out relates to the third command found in verse 13. It's really two commands, one a negative and the other a positive, but they're essentially two sides of the same coin. The negative is this, do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness. And the positive is, present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life. Now it's striking, first of all, to see the comprehensive nature of this command. Every individual part of you is taken into account. And Paul says, no part of you, no part of your life, no part of your body, no part of your time, no part of your energy should be presented to sin as an instrument for unrighteousness. So we might inventory ourselves and say, how is it that we could present our eyes as instruments for unrighteousness? We could certainly do that by what we watch or what we read. How would we present our ears as instruments to unrighteousness? Well, what is it that you listen to? Who is it that you listen to? Perhaps our mouths could be taken into account. What is it that you eat? What is it that you drink? What comes out in your speech? Where is it that you go? Are you presenting your feet as instruments of unrighteousness? What about your hands? What are you applying yourself to? Is that an instrument of unrighteousness? Or how about those things that you possess? Are you using those, presenting those as instruments of unrighteousness? Are they being used for sinful purposes? Or are they being presented as instruments of righteousness, instruments to God. All of this has an effect. You may need to cut out certain things that you watch, certain things that you fill your mind with as you read. You may need to seek out new friends, new influences. That may sound radical, but it's precisely the kind of thing the Apostle Paul is describing, because we can't present our members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness. There are foods you may need to avoid, drinks you cannot have, places you cannot go. And then positively, there are things that you must be reading. Things that you must be listening to, filling your mind with, places you should be going more, people that you should be spending more time with. Those are ways you can present yourself to God as those who have been brought from death to life. And you're members to God, Paul says, as instruments for righteousness. See, all of this is really just the natural effect of the news that we are given earlier in the text, that great news, that news that almost strikes us as too good to be true. That news about our union with the Lord Jesus Christ. But you know, the Bible promises that as we do this, As we think of ourselves differently, look at our identity in a different way. And as we live differently, not presenting our bodies as instruments of unrighteousness, but presenting them instead as instruments of righteousness. As we do this, we're promised the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Spirit in our midst. We're promised the companionship, the friendship of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our King. We're promised that the one who began a good work in us, the one who united us to Christ, will bring it to completion in the day of Christ Jesus. These things with which we struggle are not the fundamental definition of who we are. And there are practical ways in which we need to avoid them. New habits, new schedules, new ways of thinking of our time and energy. But remember what all of this is rooted in. It is perhaps a temptation to us to look at verses 11 through 13 and think of our duties before God and consider in some way that those are what gives us our standing in God's sight. Now these are duties that we have to take much more seriously than most of us do, but it's all rooted in what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Look at how Paul ends this paragraph in verse 14. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace." See, none of that was our own doing. All of that is a gift of God, by His grace, given to us freely in the Lord Jesus Christ and applied to us by the Spirit of God. Indeed, we say as we look at these commands, We say with the hymn writer, he's the one who breaks the power of reigning sin. He sets the prisoner free. His blood can make even the foulest clean. His blood, we declare, availed for me. Let's pray together. Our great God, we thank you for the clarity of your word. We pray that we would continue to be shaped by it, that we would be those who look to you for our identity and obey you as you have commanded. We thank you for the great truths, great blessings that are ours in Christ. Be with us now in Christ's name. Amen.