Great Doctrines of Salvation
Mike Doyle · Oct 31, 2010
Great Doctrines of Salvation, No. 44
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926218173345

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, we are working in what is titled Lesson 6, Romans Chapter 6, Verses 1-3, Death and Burial. And we had gotten down to 6. Question 5 was who controls the sin nature in the believer? What's the answer to that? The Holy Spirit controls it. Do we have the freedom to plead with God the power of a tendency to sin over which there is no control? And maybe to help set this question up, we all have a tendency to sin, right? Except for Steve. The sin nature is still active in us. And the second part of that is that it is more than we can control. And I think that that statement sometimes It takes a believer a while to come to that conclusion that the sin nature is not controllable by my will, my desire, my strength, my resolve.

But let's go through the logical steps. If you think about it, it would not be becoming of a child of God to live any longer in sin, right? It's not normal for a believer to live any longer in sin. So why is it not necessary to live any longer in sin or go about bearing the fruit of sin? Why isn't it normal for a Christian to be comfortable or living in sin? Yeah, we died to it. That's a pretty simple...

The third thing is, if that's true, then can we plead the power of a tendency to sin over which we have no control. Is that question clear? Not clear. Can I go to God and say, you know, I have this insatiable desire to break into Steve's garage and steal his bicycle, and I just can't help myself. Would you help me not do that? Is that a legitimate request? I'm asking God to help me do something or not do something that He's already made provision for. You see that? You see? So, I mean, is it for sure that I'm weak and can't do it? Yes.

I don't have the strength. The logic is kind of simple, but I have to tell you that when you talk to a lot of believers, they don't get this principle. They don't understand that God has provided the possibility of deliverance from the power of sin. He's done it already. And He does it by judging the old nature. The old nature had a trial and it was judged and it lost. And He gives us the Holy Spirit. Now, how does it work?

If I'm not to plead with Him, what's my attitude? What's my attitude towards sin? What should it be? If you buy into the logic that how can we who are dead to sin live any longer in it? So what do I talk to God about when it comes to my sin? Yeah, I've talked to Him all about it. I'm a sinner. That's right. You go to Him and you say, look, I agree with you.

I believe you when you say, how should I live in sin any longer because I've died to it. I trust you with that and I also recognize that sin, the sin nature in me is more powerful than my ability to control it. I cannot stop. So I have to be dependent on your spirit based on what I know and my faith in what you tell me to deliver me from the power of sin. Does that make sense? Okay. Say I go and do it again. OK. Oh, I guess. I guess it didn't work. Southern nature. Yeah. It really does come down to who am I? Yeah, yeah.

I would say it's probably most prevalent to understand this, especially for a man when he's dealing with sexual sin. Because the sex drive in a man is so strong, especially when he's young. I mean, if he's trying to walk with the Lord, it isn't long before he realizes he can't do anything about it. And you know what? God will prove to him that the principles that he has laid out in his word, he means it and they're true. And he can depend on the Spirit of God to deliver him based on the facts.

See that? I may break into that garage again, but there's going to come a day where the garage is not an issue anymore. Well, it's not so much of a wait as that there's a resolve of your faith that this is really true of me. I don't have to do this anymore because I'm not I am dead to my sin nature, and I am depending on the Spirit of God for deliverance. You know?

Yeah, no, that's totally true, but I think in practical life, that, you know, it's like how much is our own responsibility? Am I going to say, well, you know what, I'll have to take this down to a 5-5. Not bad. Is that my responsibility? No. The issue is this. If I can't control my sin nature, yet if I do sin, I'm responsible for my own sin, what am I going to do? I'm in a box.

And God says, well, you need to depend on the facts that I've given you and the fact that my Spirit baptized you into Christ. And you need to trust Him. So my responsibility moves from not sinning to trusting Him. My responsibility is now one of faith, not one of sinning or not sinning. Do you see that? Does that make sense? No?

In other words, if I am vitally united to Christ, and I live on a new plane altogether, if that's true, yet I recognize that I have this tendency to break into the garage, you know, every time I think about it. What do I do with that? The issue is, I have to come to a conclusion in my mind which one is true. You know, will my sin nature go to that garage every single time it thinks about it and be tempted to break the door down and go in and see what's in there that I might steal?

Do I believe what God has taught me in his word about who I am and what the Spirit of God has done by baptizing me into Christ? And can I trust him to deliver me? Answer, yeah, I can. And yes, he will. Practically, because he's delivering me based on what he's already done positionally.

Does that make sense? I mean, it's tough. When there's a besetting sin in a person's life, it's really hard. It's almost like it's been, I hate to try to verify spiritual facts by anecdotal evidence, but God has demonstrated to me in my life in a lot of cases where there's something that I couldn't stop doing before and he just, through my understanding and trust in him, it went away. It was not an issue anymore. I'll give you a good example. When I first became a Christian, I was already a realtor.

And realtors have a tendency to, you know, stretch the truth just enough to make it happen. Yeah, we do. You know, if it comes down to the question of, you know, does the house have X, and if it does, you know they're going to buy it, and you don't know if they do or not, and you say, oh, no question, it does. Sign here, I'll figure it out later, you know.

And I got convicted about that very thing. over a few years after I was saved. I found myself in situations where the buyer or seller would ask me a question and I'd start to answer, like, well, you've got to tell her the truth. I found over time that actually telling the truth was a better deal. It always worked out a lot better because it gave veracity to who you are and two, you could solve problems.

You could fix it. If you lied about it, you're in trouble. But in a sales situation, at the point of what they call the point of sale, there's always a tendency to, if they're leaning, just to give them a little shove, whether it's factual or not. And you know that it's almost instinctive that you do that if you've been a salesman a long time like I have. That's got to change if you're a believer. Based on who I am in Christ. It's consistent with me as a believer to be lying. It comes down to that. Sure. That's right. It's something that's already true of me.

So it didn't become difficult. It quickly became kind of the norm. Plus, in that process you learn all other kinds of things like it isn't your sales skills that determines your income as much as it's God's sovereignty and what he wants for you. that every dime you have in the bank, he put there, you didn't. And every dime you don't have in the bank, he put there, too, and you didn't. So you have to trust. You learn to trust him over time.

And there's a million and one circumstances in which you find yourself there. And it's always, do any of you read the Hungry Hardship on a daily basis? There was one a few days ago about how do you know the leading of the spirit as opposed to, you know, the push of the flesh. And the push of the flesh is always urgent, kind of uncomfortable, expedient.

The leading of the spirit is calm, quiet. You don't need to hurry. It will be done. I would say it's not so much a give up as it is a recognition of what God has done. If you're a rational thinker and you don't take anything you read for granted, you want to kind of mull through it.

If you come to Romans 6 and you start reading it, you think, whoever wrote this is crazy. This is not reality. How can you, who were who were dead to sin live any longer in it. Who came up with the idea of me being dead to sin? And then he starts talking about my being baptized into Christ's death. He's nuts. Do you see what I mean? I mean the information itself is crazy. Who would ever buy that? Who would ever buy the fact that the Spirit of God baptized you into Christ's death? Would you buy into that? And what that means in terms of freedom from the power of the sin nature?

It's insanity. But it's true. It's insanity to the old man. And so, rather than give up, the focus goes on to, you know, God says this and I believe him. And this is what's reality. Yeah, I give up on self because I found something better, which is the power of the Spirit to deliver me.

Yeah, rest. Yeah. So, what does the word baptism And for you Greek geeks, it's an indicative eros passive. Indicative mode means that it's a mode of reality. This is real. Eros means it happened in the past. It's a done deal. And it's passive voice, which means all of the action was done to you. So what does it mean? What does the word baptizo, or baptize, mean? means to get really wet. Yeah, that's the water baptism symbol. But the word bapto means to dip. Dip.

And so, it was used among the Greeks, they would use that word when they were talking about dyeing a garment. I don't know if you, I'm sure at least some of you have been in one of Hal Malloy's classes when he went through that process. He would take a handkerchief out of his pocket and he'd have a little glass of some sort of dye and he would put the handkerchief in the dye and then he'd bring the handkerchief out again and he would say, how do you separate the dye from the cloth? Can you? The answer is no, you can't.

So what the Spirit of God does is he dips you or puts you or places you spiritually into Christ. Puts you in him. And he puts you in him at the very time in which he is dying. You want a bunch of references? There's Acts 19, Romans 6, 3 and 4, 1 Corinthians 1, 13, on and on and on. So the next question is, and I've asked this question a lot and I think it's significant, at what point in Christ's history does a believer become identified with him? The Word of Jesus. At what point in the history of Christ does a believer become identified with Christ? At the point in which he died.

Why? Why weren't you in before then? You see, until He's made sin for us, He doesn't have to die. Do you see that? Because here's the principle. The soul that sins, it will surely die. That's what God told Adam. So Christ has made sin for us. Guess what? He's going to die. That's the point in which you go in. And the reason is you don't get separated unless you're there when He gets separated. When He's made sin, Here's Christ, here's sin. He's made sin. He's going to die or He's going to separate from sin.

You better be there at that point because when He separates, so do you. You see that? You want to be in the capsule when it separates from the rocket. If you're not, you see. So it's important to understand that at the point in which the whole identification truth It's based on the fact that we were identified or baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ at the very point in which He died. Because if you weren't in Him when He died, you didn't die. Now, death means separation.

What did you separate from? What did you separate from? from sin? Is that a hymn or sin? Sin. You separated from your own sin nature because your sin nature was the thing and my sin nature was the thing that was put on Christ at the time right before when he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

He was at that point made sin. And everybody's sin nature in this room was put on him. The whole sin principle was put on him at that point. And so then he died. He separated from it. And when he did, you were now identified with him and not Adam. So you separated too.

And that's why you go in at that point. Alright with that? You can spend a lot of hours just contemplating that point. That's such a wonderful thing when you think about it that God in His wisdom and by the power of His Spirit included you in that transaction. Isn't that something?

Now once you're identified with Him, you're united to Him permanently. That union never goes away. So we've talked about, as we were in Adam, and all that was true of Adam is that was true of us. Now, all that's true of Christ is true of us, starting with his death. That's where it starts. Because think about it.

All creatures that come into this world, come in, are born, and they die. Right? Human beings, animals, plants, everything. They come into creation, and they die. In most cases they don't. In all cases they just cease to exist. Human beings come in and they are conceived and born and live until they die.

So if you were going to be a member of a new creation, how would you get out of the old one? How do you get out of the old creation? You have to die out of it. How does anybody ever leave this planet? which is where the first creation abides. How do you leave here? You have to die. You have to be separated from it.

That's what death is. So, from a spiritual standpoint, and an identification standpoint, that death for a believer takes place at the point in which they believe. Because at that very instant, the Spirit of God identifies you with Christ's death, baptizes you into it, so that you now leave. And so, you start reading in all of Paul's epistles, like, Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grape, where is your victory?

Why would a Christian say that? Well, he already died. Do you see that? So for Francis Hallam, what happened? She didn't die. She just went home. And that's why Paul uses the term for believers that they don't die, they go to sleep. Do you see that? A non-believer does in fact die. We don't. Any questions about that?

Okay, let's talk a little bit about the primary preposition, in. Used 147 times in the New Testament, or used by Paul. I think it's 160 sometimes, and Paul uses it 147. What this in means, it's a preposition of fixed position and time. in place, or state, or relationship. So, if you are in Christ, what events in Christ's life do you partake of? Now, here's how you think about it.

Remember Romans 5.12?

That by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin. So death passed upon all men, for all men sin in Christ, or sin in Adam. Right? So here you are participating in Adam's sin, right? Well, if I come up with this plan to disassociate and cut you off from Adam and unite you to Christ, well, now we have to start looking at what events in Christ's life that happened to him that would be true of me. Give me some. Yeah, I was crucified when he was crucified. When he was buried, so was I. When he rose, so did I. What's that? Yeah, your history changed now, didn't it? Okay, and that's kind of next week's question, but that's all right. I'll answer it now.

Why burial? Why is burial so important? That's right. Burial is so important because it's the final act that you do with somebody who's dead. You could say, I was dead with Christ and risen. Well, how do I know you were really dead? Because they stuck you in the ground. One of the answers to the questions coming up is that very question. It's the final act of a person's life when you lower them into the grave. That's it. You're done.

Because there are some people that, when I was first a believer, one of my close friends, he was kind of a Christian counselor. He was a friend of Steve's, too. He used to do this with people who were really struggling with things in their life or sin. He'd have a burial ceremony with them.

He'd say, I want you to gather up all your crap. We're going to put it in a box. We're going out in the field. We're going to dig a hole, and we're going to put it in there, and we're going to cover it up. and we're going to walk away from it. So that you get straight in your mind that that isn't who you are anymore. That's why burial is so important. It's that act, you know, that says, well, yeah, but you know how people are, you know, somebody they love dies and they go to the cemetery all the time like they're still there. No, they're not. No, they're not. A couple of thoughts.

Death but is setting forth the great fact that we federally died and were buried with Christ unto sin, unto the world, unto Satan, unto all creation. Now we're just talking and have been talking about sin, but this co-crucifixion with Christ, this death, did more than separate us from sin. The Word of God will tell us that we got separated from the world. And I laugh on Tuesday, I tell those guys, well if you're separated from the world, how come you're going to vote on Tuesday? You're separated from Satan and the entire old creation.

When it comes to burial, this guy Godet said that burial is the act which consummates the breaking of the last tie between man and his earthly life. This is likewise the meaning of our Lord's entombment. Similarly, by baptism there is publicly consummated the believer's breaking with the life of the present world and with his own natural life. That's what baptism really is about. It's about death. When you're baptized, you go down into the water. You go down and die into the grave. And when you come up, you're new. We'll talk new.

In the Old Testament mosaic system burial was foreshadowed by the scapegoat. The scapegoat, there are two goats required on the Day of Atonement are representative of what Christ did on the cross. The first one is the one that was sacrificed and his blood was poured out and taken into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled around to show that it was death. The second one was the scapegoat. And what the high priest would do is put his hand on the head of the scapegoat, transferring all the sins of Israel to the goat, and they took him out into the wilderness, and off he went. He never came back. Symbolizing the work of Christ in terms of putting away sin. Putting it away, out of God's sight and yours too. Okay, and resurrection, which is verse 4, 5 and 8 in Romans 6. What are some of the elements of your resurrected life?

Number one, you have a new head. You don't have Adam anymore, you now have Christ. And we've gone through in the identification truth class the 34 things that are true of you now that you're a believer. But some of them are, you're now a partaker of a new inheritance. You're blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ. You've been justified forever. Your citizenship has been changed from earth to heaven. To some of them. Okay? And you now have a heavenly association. Do you understand what I mean by that? You now have a heavenly association.

If you're like me, you wonder sometimes, there's so much noise and influence on me 24-7 from the world that as I spend time in the Word of God, there is this quiet revealing to me that that's not you anymore, and that's not who you are, and that's not where you're from, and that's not really important. You see that?

And I think about guys like, we send guys to, soldiers to Afghanistan to fight, and they're over there, you know, and they're risking their life. But you know what? In their mind, that is not home to them. They're really involved in the circumstances there, but they can't wait to get out of there, and their thought process is not about Afghanistan. It's about what's going on from wherever they're from.

You see that? So the more we learn of our heavenly association, who we are in Christ, our thoughts do go there. And we do realize, you know, we're not from around here. We're here because the Lord has sent us here for a time. Peter says we're sojourners, you know, and strangers in the planet. We're hanging around for a while, but this is not where we're from. And the trouble we have is that our familiarity is with a country that we're not of anymore.

Do you see that? That's the problem. So, the more time we spend in the Word and hanging around with believers who understand this, the more you become heavenly minded. And the heavenly mindedness is the thing that keeps you above the fray. See that? Okay. So, is this a new principle that God has just instituted? Here's what I'm after.

Remember when we first started talking about identification? That there was this principle that God installed in the Garden of Eden, and the principle was called, like begets like. Remember that principle? That, you know, cucumbers beget cucumbers, and dogs beget dogs. You know, birds beget birds. Adam begets Adam and sin begets sin. Well now, from a spiritual standpoint, if you're a new creature in Christ, how does that begetting get on with you now?

Do you understand my point? That out of you will flow the life characteristics of who you now are. which is heavenly citizenship. You see that? I must say, you have to know about it. That's why you have a Bible. And that's why you have Paul in the Bible, because without Paul you wouldn't know. No. It's not. It's an old principle. It's interesting how God institutes these principles in Eden and they still work. It's still going on.

So if baptism is a cause, what are the effects of our baptism in Christ? Do you understand what I mean? Baptism, when the Spirit baptized you into Christ, that was the cause. What are some of the effects? That's an easy question, right? Same answers we've been talking about. Effects. Effects. Effects of an event. Freedom? Sure. How about crucifixion? That's an effect. Right? You don't? Okay.

If the Spirit of God took you and placed you in Christ, He caused you now to be in Christ. There's going to be some effects from that. There's going to be some things that are now effectually true of you that weren't true of you before that event. And the basic ones are, you were crucified with him, you were buried, you were resurrected, you're now seated in the heavenlies in Christ. If baptism is the cause of all of this, everything else is an effect of what the Spirit did. You see that? Does that make sense, Polly?

I think that one of the problems we growing believers have is the fact that we spend some time studying the cause, but we try to verify the effects based on our experience. You know, the last time I broke into Steve's garage, it didn't demonstrate that I had been crucified with Christ, buried and resurrected, did it? So maybe I wasn't. Or maybe I don't believe it hard enough. Or maybe it's only true if I work at becoming a better Christian.

Do you see that? Well, if I was baptized into Christ at the point of His death, buried and resurrected with Him, then in not too much of a time it should become very clear to me that that is an activity that someone who has been placed into Christ, caused by the Holy Spirit, is an activity that is not consistent with who I am. Do you see that?

So it's not a matter of my fighting it, it's a matter of my understanding who I am. It's like being my age and going to a cross-country meet and cheering for kids and wishing you could be out there running with them, but you know what? It ain't who you are. You're not going there. It just isn't who you are. It isn't consistent with what the Spirit says He's done not only for you, but to you.

You see that? It seems like I'm pounding on a horse trying to get him to die. But this is the fulcrum in which your freedom comes from. Are these facts true and did the Spirit of God baptize me into Christ or didn't He? Am I buried and resurrected with Him or am I not? And if I am, there are certain consequences to that. If I'm not, there are consequences to that. So where does that leave me? What do I do with all those facts?

Simple, I just believe them. That's all. And you know what? The Spirit of God will hang on, because you're going for a ride, and the Spirit of God will free you practically and conditionally, just like He's already done positionally. Yeah, absolutely. That would be a total effect. Who controls the sin nature is number five.

It's the Spirit of God who does, not you. Okay, so the last question is from an identification standpoint, does baptismal water have any spiritual effect on a person? The question's too tough. Does the water have any spiritual effect? Answer, no. But that's a physical effect. Oh, that's right.

Holy water. Now, if you come out of Catholicism like me, it's got to be, holy water. Baptism is a picture of our federal death and burial with Christ, which Paul sets forth so positively in a second, such as ones as we who died. That's who we are. Water baptism is an outward demonstration of an already accomplished spiritual event in a person's history. Okay? All right. Managed to get through lesson six. Everybody have the questions on seven? Who doesn't have seven?

How do they make it holy? I'm trying to remember. I think we used to have these ceremonies on like Good Friday and Saturday and Sunday where they would put all this stuff in the water. Put candles. Huh? They blessed it and I think they put some oil in it and they did some other stuff and then they put it in a mayonnaise jar and kept it. And I'm one of those people that really believe that if you have children and they want to be baptized, they ought to understand this principle. You know, this is not just believing in God and believing. They ought to understand exactly what that going down in the water means and coming up.

That's right. That's right. Well, it's like, you know, at one of those Billy Graham concerts. That's what I call them, concerts. A guy sitting up on, you know, tier 57, row 12, seat 1, and Billy gives him the gospel message, and that guy believes, and then Bill says, come forward and come down. When did that guy get saved? Sitting in that seat. He got baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ then. He didn't need to come forward. That doesn't prove anything.

You know? Sure. Oh, absolutely. I mean, they're so Jewish, they've got to have signs. You know, they've got to count their noses. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's a score sheet. You know? We used to have a guy down on the mission, he came to Christ every Sunday. Every Sunday. Yeah.

He didn't think he was going to get the sandwich and the coffee and the clothes if he didn't come forward. So we could always count on one. So question number one of lesson seven is really what we've just covered from a worldly viewpoint. What does Bear Hill prove has taken place?

A death. You know, Francis Helen got buried on Thursday. How come? because she died on Sunday. Why? It just proves that there is a death that has taken place. So what is God's object or aim in being identified with Christ in His burial? Why does He have an aim in our being identified with Christ in His burial? He wants to demonstrate to us that we were federally separated from all of our associations with Adam and the world All of the old creation, all of it. He wants to demonstrate to us that that's what's happened.

Your entire past ended at the moment that you believed in Christ. If you were the Apostle Paul writing about identification truths, what kind of language and logic would you use? Death, burial, and resurrection. And burial would be a really important part of it.

All right, we'll pick up at question three next week, and I have questions for the following week. Do you want them? I don't know if we'll get through them. I'll hold off until next week. All right, let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you for what you've done to us, that you took us out of Adam and you baptized us into Christ at the point at which he died. that we were in fact buried with him, separated from all that we were in Adam, and now resurrected in your Son, identified with him, united to him forevermore. Father, that we might enter more fully into those truths personally and individually. We thank you. We pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.