The Church IS Free From Sin

Romans 6

Read Verses 1-4, 8-12, 20-23

Why did the math book look sad? Because it had too many problems.

I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. It’s impossible to put down.

The church IS free from sin.

How many of you sin daily? The answer is all of you! And myself, we all sin daily and are guilty of it.

So what do I mean when I say, the church is free from sin?

I mean that the church is a place where we make the choice to live like Jesus.

Jesus has set us free from sin so we don’t have to live our lives in it but that we have the freedom to chose to follow Jesus.

Anything we do has consequences no matter good or bad.

(STORY) My daughter Evie is learning about consequences. She has a potty chart where if she goes to the bathroom, she gets a GOOD consequence of ice cream as a prize! If she yells at her mom or her baby sister, she gets a BAD consequence of being put in time out or has a toy taken away.

I don’t know how often you might have thought about this, but all of our actions have a consequence whether good or bad.

Do you guys ever think about how your sins have consequences…?

Let’s read about what Paul says in Romans regarding the consequences that follow us when we sin.

(SLIDE) Romans 6:1–4 “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Paul is saying here, that Jesus has paid the debt for our sins so we don’t have the consequence of eternal separation from God.

However, does that mean we should live our lives as though our sins don’t have consequences?? NO!

We still face consequences in this life for our actions even though we are set free eternally.

One of those consequences Paul says here in Romans 6, is that we are not representing Jesus to others as people who have been changed by him.

Let’s read on from verse 8….

(SLIDE) Romans 6:8–12 “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be 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 lusts,”

Paul is saying we shouldn’t let sin have power over us in our lives because it has been put to death with Jesus and just as he rose from the dead, we are now risen back to life as Jesus is our savior.

Why are we still sinning when it has consequences??

We don’t need to live as though sin has control anymore because we have been set free from Jesus.

Paul continues on this concept in verses 20-23…

(SLIDE) Romans 6:20–23 “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Don’t live your lives as though sins don’t have consequences…!

We have been set FREE from sin! We no longer have to feel that we have to go back to sinful patterns in our lives once we places our trust in Jesus…

(SLIDE) “As the church, we need to live free from sin so that the world can see the love of Jesus in us.”

So as a church, we individually need to live our lives apart from sin as we are representing Jesus in our actions and in the world.

How would you feel if you were new to church and had people around you treating you no different than the rest of the world..?

How do you think it represent Jesus when we chose sin as opposed to choosing to live more like him…?

Those are the consequences that we deal with…

The bad consequences of living in sin by how we treat each other or how we act around others, is that it poorly represents Jesus and doesn’t interest people in wanting to learn more about him.

The good consequence, is when we decide to live like Jesus in every area of our lives, we bring him glory and we allow others to see the changes that Jesus made in our lives….

And if we are the church…. as the CHURCH IS series has been discussing each week, we have to live like that.

The church is how the world is supposed to see the love of God…!

When we have sin in our lives we have to talk about it…

What ways can you be learning to your brothers and sisters in christ? What about your friends, leaders, or parents…?

Whoever it is, we have people surrounding us as a church to encourage us as we try to be more like Jesus and abstain from sin…

We have to work on it together. We have to help each other deal with sin so that we can get back to showing the world about the love of Jesus so the good “consequences” for our choices to live like him will come.

(PRAY)