You can turn in your Bibles to Romans 6. We're going to get into the Gospel tonight. The Gospel is good news. And really, you know, what I want to do is build off in my message tonight.
I want to build off what Mark Haulston's guard two weeks ago started. He was just bringing us through the good news of the Gospel of Jesus and really highlighting that Jesus is worthy of a bride fully in love, that Jesus is worthy of a bride that knows who she is. And then last week at the three o'clock, they got a little bit of a different message, but the 530 got just straight Gospel message, right? And I want to build off of this because I believe what God is doing in so many hearts in the room is actually there's stakes in the ground being set around the area of freedom from sin.
And I believe that there's a time of consecration that God is actually having many of us in the room in. And I want to just kind of throw gasoline on the fire of what God is already doing. You know, we feel called as a community to empower everyday believers. And one of the ways that we can empower everyday believers is through removing hindrances to the relationship with God.
It's like, let's remove all of the rocks that are in the way of your relationship with God, you understanding your identity, and then you actually having something to share when you're talking to someone that doesn't know Jesus. And if you feel like you don't have good news to share, that's a problem. So you need to find and learn the good news and actually experience the good news personally and how that good is to transform your life so that you're not welcoming people into misery when you're trying to share the good news of Jesus. How many, I don't know, there's a time in my life, maybe you've felt this way in your life before, maybe you feel this way right now, where you're going, I don't even want to talk about my faith because I don't really have too much good to say.
I'm just as miserable as they are, right? We need the gospel to actually take root so then we go, no, I know that what I've got is completely different than what they've got. And I've got so much good news that I'm just bursting at the seams. They need to know what I know.
They need to know who I know, right? And so you can turn into your Bibles to Romans 6. The truth sets us free. That's what John 8 says and how many of you know it's for freedom that Christ set us free.
Do you know what that verse means? God set you free so that you can bring others into freedom. It's for freedom. It's for other people's freedom that He set you free, right?
And so tonight I'm hoping that you begin to catch what we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks that it would just be a domino effect of truth. And so Romans 6, verse 1, we're going to be in Romans 6, 1 through 14. It says this, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
For sure no. By no means, of course not. How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into the King Jesus were baptized into His death?
We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death in order that just as the Messiah was raised, Christ needs Messiah, 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, our old nature, our old identity that was a sin nature has been crucified, nailed to a tree, completely destroyed with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, so that we no longer have a master called sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.
Now if we've all died with Christ, I know I'm reading a lot here, if we've all 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 and for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God.
What Paul is doing in these 10 verses is he's actually trying to give us all of these examples that are opening up our eyes to see that we are dead to sin, and that our old sin nature is completely destroyed. There's a message that we preached this last fall in the Identity series, and if you're kind of new to every day and you weren't here in the fall and you didn't hear that message, I want you to have the opportunity to have that leaving tonight. So do we have that slide for the Spirit Soul Body message? If you have not heard this message being a part of every day called Spirit Soul Body, I want you to hold up your phone and actually click on that QR code so that you have it.
It's on our podcast, and I want you to listen to this because I think it is imperative that you understand this basic truth about who you are as a person and how God created you. So this is really important. And if there's things that I'm saying that kind of feel confusing, that's going to be a really important context for this message. So please listen to that message if you're confused after I talk about Romans 6.
What Paul is doing in verses 1 through 4 is he's giving this example of baptism. And then in the following verses, starting in verse 5, he's talking about crucifixion. And then following that in the last couple verses, he's talking about slavery. And he's using these three pictures to show us that we died.
So in baptism, you get dunked, and it's this picture of death and your old sin nature. Everybody's born of the sin nature, and that sin nature, which is the essence of who you are. It's the core, it's your spirit. That's what you're born with.
That spirit man. That is the sin nature. It gets buried. It gets drowned.
And that's baptism's picture. Then he goes, that old nature also got crucified. In other words, nailed to a tree, it dies and it got buried. So he's going, your sin nature is dead.
It drowned. Your sin nature got nailed to a tree and put in a tomb. It's gone. It's dead.
Your sin nature was left in the slave camp, and you've been freed. So he's going, hey, I want you to know your sin nature is now a corpse. It's gone. That's really, really important for you to know.
Because a lot of us grew up believing that I'm a sinner, saved by grace. So you're thinking in your mind, that's part of my identity, is I am a sinner. And Apostle Paul and Romans 6 is going, no, that identity of sinner actually got crucified. No, that identity of sinner got drowned.
No, that identity of sinner is what was making you enslaved to sin. And I freed you from that slave master called sin. So he's trying to be really clear that is not your identity. And that's really important for us to understand.
He also, then he, then he, in verse 11, he wants for us to not just know, hey, your identity of sinner has been destroyed. Because what happens if you think you're a sinner, you're going to fulfill that self-profency. You're going to go, man, why am I still struggling so much with sin? Well, it's probably because your identity, you think that you are a sinner at your core.
So you actually need to get set free from that mindset of that identity so that you can start walking in your identity in Jesus that Jesus purchased for you, right? Let's look at verse 11. Verse 11, he says this, all of these things are true. So this is what you need to do.
You must consider yourself and see yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So what he starts doing is he starts painting this picture. He's going, hey, I don't want you to just know that your sin nature identity is over. I want you to consider yourself dead to the old master that you had.
Let me say it differently. He's, it's like if you were a gambler, you know, like you had a gambling addiction, and your identity was gambler. You know, that was like part of who you were. And then you got free from gambling.
Now you have a new identity of, of like, I am a pure, I'm, I don't live in that lifestyle anymore. And you know, that's not my identity anymore, right? And then when you see a casino as you're driving, and when you see that app advertisement that says like sports betting, you know, or whatever, you automatically go, I'm dead to that. So you've already, the sin nature identity is dead.
And now you're dead to all of the sins that are associated with that identity from your old life, right? But what happens oftentimes for believers is we've died. We, we understand maybe that that sin nature is dead. In the spirit, we know that that's gone.
But then we still flirt with the slave master sin, right? And so, you know, I picture it like, maybe this is a better picture. Cain and Abel. Do you remember Cain and Abel?
And God chooses Abel's sacrifice rather than Cain's. And Cain is upset, right? Cain's discouraged. He's disappointed.
Maybe Cain feels misunderstood. Maybe Cain feels overwhelmed, right? Many of us in our everyday lives, we feel stressed. We feel overwhelmed.
Maybe some of us feel discouraged. Maybe some of us feel alone. Maybe some of us feel like we just can't catch a break. And in that moment, God has a conversation with Cain and he says, Hey, I want you to know sin is crouching at your door.
Now that word crouching and he was actually more so resting. Okay, so sin is resting at your door. How many of you guys remember in the book of Revelation when Jesus is knocking on the door? I believe when we have a bad day or there's negative circumstances, you know, it's like things don't go your way.
That moment of disappointment or like emotional pain, it's a seed bed for encounter with Jesus or it's a seed bed for sin. And for the very first time when you give your life to Jesus, you actually have freedom to choose which one you want to go to. There's two doors. The front door with Jesus with a welcome mat and he's just patiently knocking because he's a gentleman.
And then there's the back door with sin, your old master. And it's not your identity more. You have a corpse that used to be enslaved to this master that made you suffer. And you have a choice in that place of disappointment, discouragement, loneliness, misunderstanding, self-pity, whatever it is.
And you have a choice which door do I go to? And most of the body of Christ is kind of like, I think I heard something in the backyard. And oh, is there something out there? I hear noises.
And then we go to the door and we just kind of like, creek it open a little bit. Listen, there's no door handle. Sin is resting at the door. In other words, sin doesn't barge into your life.
Sin responds to a door open. James says that God doesn't tempt, but we're carried away by evil desires. And what I would encourage us to do is just have a moment where we can realize I am going to consider myself dead to the back door. Dead to even the idea of sin.
That's just not, it's anti my new identity. That's just not like me because I'm a new creation and the old identity is gone and the new identity has come. Now I'm the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. That's just not in line.
It's out of alignment of who I am in God. So it's unnatural to go to the back door and open the door to sin. For a believer, it's actually anti your new nature to do that. It's actually freeing to know I have a choice.
Many of you think that you don't have a choice. You've been struggling for so long. You don't even think you have a choice anymore. It's just like you react and that's what you do.
We've got to come out of the cloud of just sin is normal. And we've got to come out of the cloud of just I do whatever I feel like doing in the moment because my neuro pathways have trained me that whenever I feel this way, whenever I feel discouraged, this is how I medicated. I just go right to the back door and I swing it open. And then I don't ever want to go to the front door because I feel shame and guilt even though he's washing me clean from the shame and guilt.
And I don't have to feel that because he's washed me from all of my past, present and future sins. But I still feel like I can't go to that front door because I just swung open the back door again and the Lord is going, you don't have to do that anymore. You're free to not open the door to sin. You don't have to do it.
It's really good news that you don't have to anymore. I'm just wanting to break you free. Like break the box. Because we've been living in about so many of us have been living in the box and I'm almost like there's a fire hydrant of truth and these are not profound truths.
But there's a fire hydrant of truth hitting you in the face right now because you're like I can be free. And the truth is you already are. You already are free from that back door guest. You're free from him.
What used to be enslaved to him died and now you're a free son. And now you get to live into it. It's I think that there's a prophetic word given just this morning that one of the prophetic voices in this community received a picture of a cattle getting branded. And the Lord actually like branding us as his people.
And I believe that the Lord wants to do that today with many of us. Where there's an ownership and we go, I belong to someone. It's just like I have a wedding ring. And I stood at the altar and I said no to all the other lovers.
And I chose one lover. And I said no other love. I'm actually dead to even the idea of any other lover. I'm dead to all of them.
I'm dead to every single woman on the planet or an image of a woman. I'm dead to all of them. And I chose one. And that's what God requires of us when we say yes to him.
He goes no I'm not going to be divided. My bride. I don't want her divided in her affection. I want a bride fully in love.
I'm fully in love with her. I want to not that I need it but I desire. Full, abandoned love through obedience. It's I think that it's important for us to pause and realize that that dead to sin thing is really anti-church culture.
Because there's so much sin focus. And that we think the strategy to experience freedom is to focus on sin. And what I want to articulate today is that many of you think that your anger problem or your depression problem or that your lust problem or all of the other problems that you have, greed problem, self-hatred problem is actually something that you need to deal with on the surface. So a lot of us are literally fighting against lust and we're literally plucking off the leaves of the weed of lust every single time it happens.
I'm like man I got to really stop doing that and we focus on not doing sin. We focus on I got to really focus on not being angry. And what we need to realize is that there's a whole world of a root system underneath what just sprouted up as a struggle of sin. And it's actually so many of those issues that are happening in our lives.
We're going I have a lust issue and I'm telling you your lust issue is not really about your lust issue. And it's not every man's battle. It's not every woman's battle. That's not true according to the Bible.
The Bible said that your old nature got crucified and you're actually free and it doesn't need to be your battle. That's really good news. So it's important that you understand that that issue in your life is literally a medication for pain. That's like emotional pain or one of those other things that's underneath the surface that maybe is going back many years of like I don't feel loved.
I feel lonely. I feel discouraged. I feel misunderstood. Remember that seed bed that I talked about.
You feel misunderstood. You feel discouraged. You feel unhappy. And the way that you can deal with the pain that you're experiencing in your brain is that you've learned to go.
I'll feel better if I just have medication. I feel better if I just have a remedy. And the easiest remedy to reach for is this issue. Is this sin.
Is going to the back door. Or the thing that feels natural to me is to react in anger when I feel this emotion. And I'm trying to help us understand that it's really not about anger. It's really not about the lust.
It's about pain that is unhealed and lies that have not been replaced with truth. And the Holy Spirit wants to dig up all that junk. And many of us are like I don't want to dig it up. I don't want to dig it up.
I don't want to dig it up. I feel it's dirty and messy and I don't want to go there. And the Holy Spirit, wonderful counselor, he's just like let's dig it up. Let's break up the follow ground.
I want to bring healing. And as I break up all of that ground, you know what I'm going to be doing along the way? I'm just going to be seeding truth. So all of that follow ground, all of that hardened soil that can only produce weeds, it's going to be broken up and it's going to turn into a garden.
Do you know that that place of struggle, there's actually a garden on the other side of you allowing the Holy Spirit to dig up those lies? And dig up the pain that has gone undoubt with that's actually feeding your sin struggles in your everyday life. God wants to speak. I in my own life.
This is a journey of our entire lives, of noticing sin and going that's not who I am in Jesus. That should be your reaction. That doesn't line up with who I am in God. What was that?
And then you humbly go, God, that's not who you created me to be as a new creation. This is out of alignment. And you respond in humility and you start agreeing with God. I don't like that.
And you both agree, we don't like that. That's not who you are. That's not who I am. And then you go, Lord, what the heck is going on?
Why? And then you get an answer from the Holy Spirit and you're like, why? And you start going down, I love that Scott taught us this many years ago, why? Why?
Why? And you start getting the core of what's really going on and then you replace those lies with truth and you invite Holy Spirit into that and all of a sudden you're like, whoa, I don't even struggle with that anymore because I actually saw the enemy's hand. And you don't even have to cut off the sin and try like several of you like in the name of Jesus. You know, and you got like, and it's like, hey, that's not how you talk.
You don't have to do a growl, you know, to get free. You can if you want to, that's right. But you can just go, man, I'm going to let him in to bring healing to that place and replace those lies with truth. And I'm going to consider now every time that I have that feeling or that emotion come up.
Now I know I don't have to like cut off the idea of the back door with sin waiting. I can just kind of like reorient my positioning. It's like I'm walking down the hall of my house and it's like, I don't even consider going to the right. I'm just going to go to the front door.
I'm just always going to go. I hear knocking. Who's that knocking? Who's knocking?
And it's like, oh, yeah, it's the Lord. He's always knocking in the moment of your pain. I want you to know he's knocking. He's knocking because he wants connection in that place.
You feel like you're a mess. You feel like you're coming to the end of yourself. You feel like you can't do it. How many of you said that in the last week?
I just can't do it. I think I said that this last week. I can't do it. I can't do it.
That's what literally Katie and I, we look at you. We can't do it. In that moment, do you know what the Lord is doing? He's knocking.
Your phone isn't knocking, but the Lord is knocking. Your phone is just sitting there resting, waiting. But the Lord is knocking. Let's answer the door.
And let's be dead to sin and alive to God. That's all standing. I think we should do some joyful repentance. What do you guys think?
Did you know, repentance can be a joyful thing, just like breaking off these lies that we've been believing and replacing them with truth. It's actually a joy. So let's just all spread out. I want to respond to the Lord.
Worship team, you guys can come to the front. I'm so thankful for the Lord's leadership even this morning as we got that word that came in that confirmed the message that was to be preached. And I think what's been happening for many of us in the room is there's this story in the book of Hosea where there's a woman who, and she represents the nation of Israel, the people of God. Her name is Gomer.
And she's wayward in her lifestyle. And it seems as if the Lord keeps on hedging her in. And it kind of just keeps on finding herself going to God, even though she's been wayward in her lifestyle. And I think that there's many of us in the room that you feel like he's been hedging me in, in love.
And I just want to give language to that, that God has been hedging you in, and it's because he loves you. It seems like you keep on hitting up against walls, and it's because they're all of the path is actually leading straight to him, because you really want him. All of these other lovers just leave you dry. There's only one that is a deep well when you drink of it.
You'll never thirst again. And his name is Jesus, and he's the one at the door with your destiny in hand. He's the one that brings redemption. He's the one that brings peace and shalom that you desire.
In the midst of all of the overwhelming emotions feeling like you don't have capacity. He's the one at the door to comfort you. When you feel isolated and alone and you feel betrayed, he's the comforter. And I want to just begin to ask the Holy Spirit questions.
Sometimes what can happen in these moments is we don't know where to start because there's so much that we feel like is wrong. I don't know if you felt that way before, but you're like, I just want everything in my life to get fixed right now, now. And the Lord is a gentleman. He sets tables for us, and he doesn't overwhelm us.
And so what I want to do is start a conversation with Holy Spirit. You guys good to have a conversation with God? And we're going to ask him this question. We're going to do it in our own words.
I want it to feel authentic to you. But I want you to ask him, Holy Spirit, what sin do you want me to beat that to? What issue in my life do you want me to beat that to? You can just ask Holy Spirit in your own words with a whisper.
You just wait and you listen. What sin? What's happening in my life do you want me to consider myself and see myself dead to it? I'm just going to provide a moment.
You can ask the Holy Spirit. This question is, is there anyone that I need to forgive that's connected to this issue in my life? You can just ask the Holy Spirit that question. And when you hear a name, you can just walk in obedience to the Lord and you can start extending forgiveness to that.
You need to understand that they're not going to apologize. They're not going to apologize the right way. Your job isn't to wait for an apology. As a son or daughter, your job is just to forgive because you've been forgiven.
Forgive. The Lord's so proud of us when we forgive. The Holy Spirit in this question. If you're just asking the question, is there a lie that I've been believing?
So ask him in your own words, is there a lie that I've been believing? When you hear that lie, you can just acknowledge that and then you can replace it with truth because a lot of times what happens is those lies really feel factual. They really feel like they make sense. And you can acknowledge that as a partial truth.
And then you can replace it with a truth that Holy Spirit wants to say. So you can just ask Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, what's your truth? What is the truth from your word about that? But what do you say?
If you want to just ask him that. But what do you say? I know this is the lie, but what do you say? To just decide to agree with the truth.
You can just make a decision. Make a choice. Remember that we all have a choice. This is a choice that you can make.
You are a powerful son or daughter of God. You are more than a conqueror and you are a free man or woman. And you are free to make choices. And you are free to make decisions.
You are free to make a decision to disagree with the partial truth that you've been believing. And you can choose to say, I'm going to agree with God on this one. So you can just verbalize, I agree with you, God. I make a conscious decision.
I agree with you. What you say is true. What I believe in was believing is false. I agree with you.
And then you can begin to say thank you to the Lord. Thank you for this truth. Thank you for this good news. Thank you.
I think there's a moment that we can have. We did this a month or two ago. I can't remember if it was a prayer room or something. It was kind of like a farewell moment.
Just like a goodbye. And what we get to do is be dead to sin. Dead to the sin. And if it helps you to engage with a smile on your face, you can join me in waving goodbye to the sin.
See you later. It's been good. It's actually been horrible. But I'm so glad that I'm not going to open the door to you anymore.
I just love going to the front door instead of the back door. See you later. There's a lot of dust that's going to collect in that room of the house. Don't ever go back there.
I don't even remember what it looks like in there. Thank you Lord. Lord, we thank you that you've set us free. Lord, I thank you that my sin nature drowned.
And my sin nature got crucified and buried. And thank you that my old nature, it actually is gone. And it's been crucified. And now I'm no longer a slave to the master of sin.
But I have a new master that loves me. A new master that knows what's best for me. A new Lord that knows exactly the way that I tick and understands how I can be comforted and brought into truth. Lord, I thank you for being my Lord and my master.
I surrender to you. And I say that I'm not only just dead to sin as my identity as a sinner, but I'm even dead to sin. And Lord, I love being in the entryway with you. I love being in the entryway every single time I feel all out of sorts.
I just say I'm dead to sin in a life to God. We love you Lord. I just want us to sing this together. Whatever you guys got.
Thank you Lord. We just worship you.