Claim the Easter Victory
Romans 6:1-14
I. Intro
A Sunday School teacher had just finished telling her third graders about how Jesus was crucified and placed in a tomb with a great stone sealing the opening. Then, wanting to share the excitement of the resurrection, she asked: "And what do you think were Jesus’ first words when He came bursting out of that tomb alive?" A hand shot up into the air from the rear of the classroom. Attached to it was the arm of a little girl. Leaping out of her chair she shouted out excitedly "I know, I know!" "Good" said the teacher, "Tell us, what were Jesus first words." And Extending her arms high into the air she said: "TA-DA!"
A. Transition: In the last few weeks we’ve talked a lot about:
1. Our Guilt before a Perfect God
2. Our made being made right through the Passion of Jesus, and…
3. Our faith in, or trusting Him.
B. But, today it’s Easter, and there’s a victory to celebrate and claim.
II.The Easter victory: Dying & rising with Jesus
A. Paul brings up this resurrection victory in our passage this morning where he deals with the anticipated objection of rule-minded Jews to getting right with God by faith alone.
1. Read Romans 6:1-14
2. If we are justified by grace, won’t that encourage sin?
3. So many of us do this when we say “well, God will forgive me, so…
4. No, things are different now. We died to our old sin life, we can’t live in it any longer.
B. We see this in our baptism. We die to self and are raised to new life in Jesus. There is the water imagery that helps understand the true spiritual baptismal transaction. We were initiated into his burial and death when we identified with him.
1. Let me illustrate with this Video Clip: O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?
a) Three runaway convicts, Delmar, Everett, and Pete, are at their campsite when (in a surreal scene) a group of worshippers in white robes walk past to be baptized.
2. Delmar had it right. Through baptism we are buried with Christ, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
C.The first part of our Easter Victory, the resurrection life Jesus shares with us, is identifying with Jesus’ death
1. (How? In true faith we give away our old life, we reject it, we repent of it. It was already in our own opinion not working well enough not to want better from God.)
2. And if we were not buried with Him? Can we expect to rise with Him? How did we get with Him in the grave w/o dying? So if we died with Him, and clearly that was not a separation from the body, from what were we separated? Was it not from our old life of sin, from our self-rule rebellion? If we have truly repented, it is of this self-rule that we have repented, as it is the core issue in our separation from God. So is we have been crucified with Christ, we are no longer living for our old selves, but it is Christ living new life!
D.The 2nd part is identifying with Jesus’ resurrection life, the Easter victory!
1. • 2CO 5:17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
2. “You are not a remodeled sinner but a remade saint.” -John MacArthur. (Not self-improvement, but new-self-actualization; not just behaving better, which should be true, but a new kind of life.)
3. This being so, why do we struggle and fail so? What has to happen for you and I to walk in this power and victory?
III. Claiming and walking in easter victory
A. We claim it by UNDERSTANDING
1. Gal 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me
2. We need to understand what we have seen so far this morning from our passage. We have really died to self and risen to new life in Jesus.
a) Did you really die, or are you very much alive and demanding our own ways, refusing to change, to be loving and considerate? What did Jesus say in Lk 9? We’re still trying to save our life, gain the world. Jesus says that is the sure way to loose it all. It does not need to be like that.
b) • In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was proclaimed in America. The word spread from Capitol Hill down into the valleys of Virginia, and the Carolinas, and evens into the plantations of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. The headlines read, ’Slavery Legally Abolished!’ However, the greater majority of slaves, in the South, went right on living as though there had been no emancipation. They went on living like they had never been set free. In fact, when one Alabama slave was asked what he thought of the Great Emancipator, whose proclamation had gone into effect, he replied "I don’t know nothing about Abraham Lincoln except they say he set us free. And, I don’t know nothing about that neither." How tragic. A war was being fought. A document had been signed. Slaves were legally set free.
Yet most continued to live out their years without knowing anything about it. They had chosen to remain slaves, though they were legally free. Even though emancipated, they kept serving the same master throughout their lives. Yet, so it is with many believers today. They have been set free, yet they have chosen to remain slaves to the same strongholds that have gripped them all of their life. Contributed by: Paul Berkley
3. Transition: We need to know we have been set free and we need to believe it
B. We claim it by BELIEVING
1. We need to reckon as reality what is real in the spiritual realm. We are dead to sin. We are only alive to God. If we don’t believe sin’s back is broken, we lack faith to resist, seeing resistance as futile.
2. Israelites lived between Slavery and Freedom for 40 years because they failed to trust in the power of God to defeat their enemies. What/who are our spiritual enemies?
3. Video Illustration: This clip from the Shawshank Redemption illustrates how surprisingly hard it is at times to live in a new life even if it is given to us.
a) In this clip from the film The Shawshank Redemption, an old con, Brooks Hadlin, becomes enraged and threatens to take another inmate’s life.
C.We claim it by SUBMITTING
1. The old man is still demanding. It shouts “me” “I want” “I deserve” And when you wake up in the morning and consider taking up the cross it screams – “NO!!!” and gives you a million great reasons why not.
2. Everyday we choose to walk in our own ways and do our own thing – to save our life, or we choose to surrender to the life of Christ in us.
3. Offer yourself to God 24/7
IV. iNVITATION
A. Have you separated yourself from sin and to God? Offer yourselves to God, submitting surrendering to Him to serve Him in holiness. Claim the Easter Victory!
B. Are you counting yourself dead to sin, by faith living to God alone? No? Claim the Easter Victory!