Or, The Grace in Grace
Scripture: Romans 6:1-4
Date: May 29, 2022
Speaker: Sean Higgins
Have we made the point that grace is great and greater than all our unrighteousness and self-righteousness? The gospel of grace is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. Christ alone shows the glory of divine love by dying for sinful men. Christ alone is our righteousness, our access to God, our mediator of peace with God. Through the grace of Christ we rejoice in God (Romans 5:11).
Christ has redeemed us from our guilt in Adam. We lost everything in Adam, and life in Adam is full of vanity and striving after wind, and then you die. In Adam we were separated from fellowship with our Creator. In Adam we lost confidence to come before the Lord in His majesty. In Adam we lost a clear conscience. In Adam we lost life. In Christ, and Christ alone, our hope is found. In Christ is reconciliation for the disfellowshipped. In Christ is access to the throne of grace. In Christ is the peace of justification. In Christ we are dead to the sin that killed us.
By no doing of their own the mourners are comforted, the poor in spirit are made heirs, the guilty are forgiven. The only condition is faith, which itself is a gift of God (see Ephesians 2:8-9). You can do no thing to earn your salvation. You can do no thing to lose your salvation. You do not even need to be able to define sola fide in order to be saved, you are justified by faith alone.
If that gets close to making you uncomfortable, that’s grace. All it would take is a prayer of faith by grace and Putin goes to heaven, Biden gets the mind of Christ, any abuser can be absolved before heaven’s throne, your spouse forgiven of all sins before the Father through the Son. It is, according to some, unfair. It is, if not unfair, useless. Where atrocities against the infinite excellence of the God of heaven abound, grace abounds even more.
God delights to show His grace. Sin is no match for grace. Sin stands the same chance of survival as a withered leaf on the surface of the sun. Grace swallows up our guilt.
I am laboring on about and lingering over grace for a few reasons. Most importantly, I long for you to know it, to own it. Not everyone has a faith-hold on grace. You hear it, but it is still just an idea, not a balm. Others are believers, but still have unbelief. You believe, but you are still troubled in accepting the peace, or living in peace with others by grace.
The other reason I am elaborating on grace is because as great as grace is for granting forgiveness, it is as great for enabling obedience. Grace delivers from condemnation and grace delivers amidst temptation. The ocean puts out a flaming box of matches, and then it soaks it through.
Good old Yankee know-how has turned the gospel into its lowest common denominator in order to get men through the door. The American church got good at narrowing grace down to praying for Jesus to come into our hearts. Fine, but maybe better would have been praying for our hearts to get buried with Jesus in His death and raised to walk with Him.
Evangelism that doesn’t lead to holiness is conversion (at best but) not discipleship (think Driscoll, in his ministry and his life; coming to Christ was the end rather than being more and more conformed to Christ). The Great Commission isn’t about getting others to “pray the prayer,” it’s about getting others to walk in all Christ’s ways. Without justification we can’t have peace with God. Without sanctification we have no proof of justification.
Paul answers abounding abuses of grace in Romans 6 and 7. He does not preach a “cheap” grace, though perhaps the more accurate pejorative would be about a “powerless” grace. Grace abounds when sin increases in more than one way. Grace abounds to unite us to spiritual realities and then to remind us of those spiritual realities and empower us to live in our spiritual identity. We live, and we live as those dead to sin. So, by grace, stop sinning.
If that gets close to making you uncomfortable, that’s also grace. Grace is a nature changer. It does not change us so that God will justify us, but it changes all those whom God justifies. Justification and sanctification must be distinguished, but they can’t be separated.
Three parts in 6:1-4.
The flesh loves to torture theology, but the truth is obvious.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! (Romans 6:1-2a, ESV)
Is it true that where sin increases grace abounds all the more? 110%. Paul himself wrote those words in the previous sentence (Romans 5:20-21). It also seems that as glorious as grace is, so is the tendency for some junior high student to purposefully misunderstand it. Paul must have run into this kind of theological arguing before.
The truth is true that grace is greater than sin. Grace always scales to cover sin no matter how much sin there is. The blanket is never short, so God be praised when more grace is shown.
But it is not true that grace gives us a cover to keep sinning. It is not true that grace only is external to us, like a blanket, it is also like new blood, about which the rest of the paragraph says more. Grace is obviously not an excuse to continue to disobey. By no means! “May it never be!” (NASB) “Absolutely not!” (NET). “God forbid!” (KJV)
Why would you want to stay in sin? You wouldn’t, but you might want to argue.
Though the word grace isn’t repeated, grace is God’s instrument toward us in completely changing our spiritual reality.
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 were baptized into his death? (Romans 6:2b-3, ESV)
Prepositions are a blessing. We were dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1), but, in Christ who died for sin, we are dead to sin. Being dead to sin means that it no longer has any authority. Its reign is over.
The focus is on the death: “we who died ,” a past event, “baptized into his death .” (Note how many more times death comes up through verse 13.) The Good in Good Friday belongs with His propitiation for our sin, but it also belongs with our position to sin. When Christ died, we died. Paul doesn’t argue for it, it argues from the reality.
The picture of this reality is baptism. It’s almost an unexpected time in the letter to bring it up. When we think about grace we should think about our baptism. When we think about why we should not sin, we should remember our baptism. Baptism isn’t the end, it belongs with the beginning of our life as disciples (Matthew 28:19); discipleship starts with our death.
Paul can not mean that there is guaranteed grace in the water (against those who teach “baptismal regeneration”), but he makes no distinction that water isn’t involved. We know that it is not the work of the water but the work of the Spirit; “whatever the Lord offers by the visible symbol is confirmed and ratified by their faith” (John Calvin).
Baptism pictures our being dead and buried with Christ. When He died He died for us. When He died we died with Him. a weapon in our sanctification as disciples.
The death we died in Christ is determinative, but like Christ we are no longer dead.
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. (Romans 6:4, ESV)
Death is reiterated. But death is more than part of a sequence, it has a purpose in our salvation. Baptism is both the burial and the resurrection.
The Father raised Christ by the glory . “Power” would be easier, and found in other passages (cf. Ephesians 1:19). Raised by glory or “through glory” (διὰ τῆς δόξης τοῦ πατρός) is worth some meditation. Resurrection is a glory issue, and God’s glory brings all His excellencies to bear. The Son knew it was His glory to die (John 12:23), the Father’s glory raised Him up.
We are raised to walk in newness of life . To walk is to think of our daily conduct, and newness is of an extraordinary character. We run on grace.
Is this a tension of grace? Is the left hand of grace forgiveness and the right hand of grace obedience? Not really. To separate these elements of grace is not accurate. It’s the same grace.
What should you expect for yourself in sanctification? What standard do we hold for fellow believers? Is it possible to be impatient and punitive toward others? Sure. But admonishing a brother in sin isn’t always legalism. Regularly when someone says something such as, “There’s no grace at Grace”, that is a misunderstanding of the real grace in grace.
Guilty about feeling guilty? Get grace; Christ died. Stuck thinking you’re stuck in sin? Get grace; you died in Christ. The battle of sanctification is a battle of faith in the gospel, to believe the realities of our baptism. By faith we are dead to sin’s penalty and dead to sin’s power, alive with Christ.
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. (Galatians 3:27, ESV)
We have Romans 6 to help us with this, but the pendulum of abuses swings back to complaints about legalism in Romans 7. Doing depends on doctrine, and the doctrine is that you are dead to sin. Your baptism is an immersion ministry, and your walk is new.
Christians, you are union walkers. You are united to Christ. When you walk, it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you (Galatians 2:20). You’ve been crucified with Christ, buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him (Colossians 2:12). So you have been forgiven, and this is in order that you would bear fruit for God (Romans 7:4). Believe and bear fruit in keeping with your baptism.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. (2 Thessalonians 2:16–17, ESV)