It takes time to come to the point where you realize you don’t have it all together. I referred earlier to the sin-repent-sin cycle (which once again we might as well call the ‘spin-cycle’) that all of us come to know quite well. We come to Christ because we have sinned. The guilt drives us to Jesus. We see him there on the cross and know that it should have been each one of us. He took my place. He took your place. It changes you forever. You feel like a swimming pool full of thousand-dollar bills. You’ve been forgiven and you swear that you are never going to forget it.
How long did it take you to forget? At first you just couldn’t believe that Jesus allowed himself to be treated like he lived your life, so that you could be treated like you had been living his. But then life came knocking. Everyday, clock-watching, bill-paying, re-run life. Things you vowed to never do again, you did. And then you did it again. Spin-cycle. It made you sick to your stomach. It was even worse now, because you let Jesus into your life, and it’s a mess.
There is another dimension to the Spin-cycle that we should take a second to spot. It is what has been called, The Law of Diminishing Returns. It goes this way: You indulge yourself in some sin – gluttony, lust, greed, pride (self-inflation) – and it has a sweetness to it that you secretly enjoy. But the next time, it feels like someone switched the sugar for sweet-and-low. And after that, you begin to barely taste any sweetness at all. Hebrews 11 calls it “the passing pleasures of sin” - sin for a season. It’s all re-runs after that. Never as good as the first time. And then you move on to a new one. You constantly jump ship and swim to the next port for a chance aboard another. It takes time to realize that the fate of each is exactly the same. They all run out. There are holes in every bucket that promises to be bottomless. But for a while, you believe the lies.
Many Christians live in this place for a long time. They think back to when they first got saved, before the Spin-Cycle – before the Law of Diminishing Returns. They long for those feelings of joy from the early days. They sprung up quick, but the roots were shallow. They withered. Even wilted, they tried to prop themselves up any way they could. Maybe that was you. It was definitely me. I was a wilted Christian for 15 years. Sin still had this strangle-hold on me that I just could not shake. I hated it. It made me hate myself. It crippled my growth. I knew I was still forgiven, but that didn’t seem good enough. Why would God forgive me, but still leave me just as prone to need more forgiveness? Was this all my life was going to be? I wanted out of the washing machine.
Romans Six. It’s a chapter in the Bible. New Testament, after the four Gospels, after Luke’s sequel – the book of Acts (the Acts of the Holy Spirit), then we have Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. This is the first explanation we have for all of the stories that we just read. What came before was Lego, fresh out of the box. The Gospels and Acts are blocks of different shapes and colours. Romans is the little picture-book that comes with the set. You flip from frame to frame to piece the whole thing together. You don’t actually know what the thing is supposed to look like without it. That’s why people so often get the Gospel wrong. They try and piece it together without the instructions. They make it sound like Jesus gave us the flip-book in the Gospels. He didn’t. He said so himself, you know. John 16:12,13 says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth.” Romans is the Spirit speaking to us.
The first five chapters of Romans are spent trying to get through our coconut heads (ever tried to open one of those things?) the fact that we are guilty, cannot save ourselves, but that God in Christ did something about it. We read that even though God had sent three different wake-up calls, we just ignored them. Who are the three amigos, you ask? Three C’s – Creation, Conscience, and Commandments. They’ve been banging on the door from the start, but we pretend they are telemarketers who love their jobs a little too much. But another stands at the door as well. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He has not come asking for anything. He has come to offer you everything for free. That’s chapters one to five. Then we get to six. Pick up sticks. Big ones. Cross beams.
Jesus once said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” I thought for a long time that what he was talking about was the old idea of a “cross to bear.” It’s like this: You have this neighbour who has a habit of lining his eaves trough with beer bottles and his four dogs make it hard to go into your own backyard without gagging. You say, “Oh, it’s my cross to bear.” No it’s not. That is not what Jesus had in mind at all. Everyone puts up with the troubles and encumbrances of life. That’s what we complain about in line at the grocery store. But Jesus was not talking about putting up with bad neighbours or high gasoline prices. He was talking about you. He told us to take up our own cross. What is a cross? It is a place to die. Jesus walked the Via Delarosa with that cross-beam on his back, because he was going to Golgotha to die. Taking up your cross daily is to agree with the Lord about Jesus’ cross. The truth is, His cross is ours. His death is ours. That’s what Romans Six is all about.
Romans One to Five is good news for the lost. Jesus paid for the sins of the world by his shed blood on the cross, offering life for all for free – no strings attached. That’s good news. But there’s more. Romans Six to Eight is good news for the found. It’s good news for Christians, but once again, you have to know the bad news first. Once someone realizes that they are in debt to God for the non-recyclable waste they have made of their life, they are ready to receive his free gift of salvation. For the Christian, they need to realize that they have a deeper need for deliverance from sin itself before they will find it in Christ. This takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is Romans Six.
It takes about a year for most babies to learn how to walk. It is then at least another (long) year before toddlers are potty-trained. God allows young believers to crawl along until they are ready to take those first steps. If kids are encouraged to walk too soon, they can become like an old western gunslinger – bowlegged. Someone once said, “When God makes a squash he takes a few months. When he makes an oak tree he takes a 100 years.” It takes time to realize that crawling will just not be enough to get through life. You want desperately to stand up on your own two feet – to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, so they say. But that’s impossible.
My daughter was about two years old when she discovered that she could not pick herself up. She told us so. She was crouched in the kitchen with her hands under her thighs, groaning as she made the attempt. We thought there was something else going on at first… but when she said, “Mom, I can’t pick myself up” I had this epiphany. That is all of us from God’s perspective. He watches us try to levitate our lives into holiness and Christ-likeness, and he knows we can’t do it. What the Lord is waiting for, is for us to realize it.
Romans Six is gibberish until you need it. It seems redundant – like training wheels on a tricycle. It gets treated like its just another way of saying all that came before in chapters one to five. But the Spirit has Paul write these words, “Do you not know…?” The day you are born, you have no earthly idea what just happened. That’s probably best for many reasons. But when you are young, you have no clue about so many things. That’s why two-year-olds walk around saying “why?” all the time. Being spiritually reborn is just the same. Romans Six tells us that not only did Christ die as our substitute, but he died as our representative as well. His death includes our death. That might not sound like good news, but it is. It won’t sound good until you have exhausted yourself trying to be like Jesus, and give up trying.
Time is so necessary. Spiritual infancy can last three years – like it did for Paul who spent that time alone in the Arabian Desert. But it can take much longer. For me, it was 15 years before I gave up trying to be like Christ. It was only when I realized that I didn’t need help from God to be more Christ-like, that I began to accept what He had already provided for me in Christ. I didn’t need more life. I needed death. Romans Six tells us that our old man has been crucified. Once again, that’s good news for Christians. It goes on to say that “He who has died has been freed from sin.” The only escape from sin is death. Jesus provided that for me and you on the Cross. Anything else is only a bandage.
The Cross is spiritual surgery. The problem is that many things have anesthetized us into thinking that it never happened. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. If you have received Jesus as the ransom paid for your sins, then you got more than you bargained for. You died with Christ – and you were raised with Him too. It’s time to live up to the name “Believer”. The Lord wants to be believed. It’s time to take Him at His word. Romans Six declares that we are free from sin, right now, this minute, because of our great Saviour. It sounds too good to be true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.