(Palm Sunday) The 2nd Wrong

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Sorry, I need to get a little sorted here. A little bit different with the non-Lapel mic today. It's all right. We'll get it figured out. Well, look, today is Palm Sunday. Just in case you had not heard that, today's going to be Palm Sunday. And so we are celebrating the day that Jesus—in fact, churches all over the world, actually— celebrating the day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. And when he did, it inaugurated something that was going to be really, you know, reality changing. Okay, everything was going to change. But it all started as he was riding on a donkey, going up to Jerusalem. And as he does, he is fulfilling many Old Testament prophecies, but one of them that he is fulfilling is Zechariah 10, 9, 9, and 10. Excuse me. So because it is Palm Sunday and because many churches all over the world are celebrating and I thought it'd be somewhat appropriate for us to do a

responsive reading. Now some of you may not be familiar with what a responsive reading is. A responsive reading is there's gonna be some words on the slide. Throw that first one up there Levi. Okay so I'm gonna say the small print that's italicized and you're gonna say the big print that's big fat and bold underneath with the space under it, okay? All right. I tried to mark it out as clearly as possible so There's there's a few of these and what I'm gonna ask you to do is to stand back up

Go ahead and get all the way back up to your feet. I know I know and and my other my other encouragement is man look Really get into it. Don't just read this like you're reading a grocery list. This is some good stuff. This is scripture, okay? Here we go. Are you ready? Okay, you ready? Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey. He will stop war in Jerusalem. His rule will be from sea to sea. And all the people said, Amen. You guys can have a seat. Man, for your first time doing that, that was pretty impressive.

Man, you about made my morning. That's good. Today, we are gonna be continuing through Romans chapters five and six. And we are discussing, we're kind of in the middle of discussing what we're calling two wrongs and a right. Two wrongs and a right. So last week we looked at the first wrong, and that was Adam's sin. We saw that at the end of Romans chapter five, also called Original Sin.

And if you wanna kinda catch up on that, I encourage you, you can always go to our website and find the sermon and listen to it there. But today we're gonna be talking about the second wrong. The second wrong is a question that we see at the beginning of our verses that we're gonna be reading today, which is Romans chapter six. So we're gonna be in Romans six, we're gonna start in verse one, and we're gonna go all the way through 14 today. And this is part of our larger series, we're going through the book of Romans this whole year. We don't do it every week, but we try to do it in big chunks to where we get through all 16 chapters of the Book of Romans this year. And so we are gonna be in Romans chapter six verse one, and we're going through chapter six verse 14. So we're gonna start with the question that we see in the beginning of Romans chapter six verse one, okay?

And it says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? Okay, so it kinda comes out swinging with the provocative question at the beginning of verse, at the beginning of Romans chapter six. Are we going to keep sinning? Are we gonna keep doing what we shouldn't do? Are we gonna keep defying God just so that the grace keeps flowing, okay? Is that what we're looking at now? And really, it is provocative, but it's a question that follows Romans 5's idea of repentance. So let me put it this way. If repentance means that we remember Jesus's grace is already ours, if repentance means that we understand that our condemnation is already gone, if that's what repentance means, then won't that persuade everybody to abuse that setup?

In other words, if I talk to my kids and I said, hey listen, no matter what you do, you're never going to get in trouble, ever. I know, that's insane. We had a kid who just, his mind was blown just then. It's like, what is that? I don't understand. The invitation would be, I remember, there's a really funny story in our family. There was a friend of mine named Rafael And he babysat the kids. So he babysat our kids once, and they were much younger. They were just probably 10 years ago. And so we're dealing with like, we're basically dealing with like eighth grade to fourth grade, OK? That range, that's our grades. The kids were in those grades. And Rafael was, you know, he was a young man. And so he didn't understand, you know, you got to put like hard boundaries. And so they said, Rafael, can we have something from the pantry? And he said, yeah, sure. And they said, well, what can we have?

What can we not have? He was like, I don't know, but I'll tell you what. I'll give you one minute to get whatever you want from the pantry. Which in his mind was like, oh, I'm only giving them a minute. But he vastly underestimated our children's ability to completely raid the pantry in 15 seconds flat. So in other words, Raphael set up a system that was easily abused by a fourth grader. Okay, easily abused.

Aren't we doing the exact same thing, right, in Romans 5? Aren't we saying to people, look, your condemnation's gone. Here's a ticket, do whatever you want. Isn't that what we're saying? And that's the question that we have in 6.1. If I'm not condemned when I sin, why not just sin and say sorry all the time? It's what these verses, what Romans chapter five seem to be saying, and it seems to undercut really any attempt to truly follow Jesus. Another way to frame this question and maybe a little bit more positively, and really maybe it's the question behind the question, is what is our ambition supposed to be now? We're following Jesus, we don't wanna do bad things, but not doing bad things really is not a good ambition. What is our ambition supposed to be now? And the answer supplied in verse one is so I can indulge in whatever I want. Jesus has forgiven me, past, present, and future,

so I have a golden ticket to self-indulgence. Okay? Over the spring break, and many, many, many other spring breaks before it, our family likes to put together a puzzle. And it usually takes, you know, days. This puzzle kind of yawns over sometimes weeks. And if you were going to put together a puzzle, there are basically two approaches. The first approach is that you look at the box. On the box, you have a picture of what the puzzle is supposed to be. And then the other approach is going to be just look at the pieces and how they fit together and try to match colors and all that stuff. If you're going to finish a puzzle, You need to do both. You can't just look at the picture on the box, and you can't just stare at the pieces endlessly, hoping your mind will magically find another piece among the other thousand of which it fits. You need to do both. If you just look at the box, the pieces can be confusing.

If you just look at the pieces, you don't get the whole picture. Ambition is the picture on the puzzle box. Ambition is what you are aiming for with your life. That's what we're talking about. And so what picture do you want your life to show? And verse one is kind of asking that question in a backwards way. And the reason that we're starting this is because the answer to that question, your life's ambition, what are you living for? What are you aiming for? The answers to that are largely determined by culture. So outside of Jesus, you're going to answer, you're gonna have all those answers filled in by your parents, by your friends, by where you grew up, all of those things. Your culture will answer all those questions for you. It will paint a deep and wide and somewhat beautiful picture of what your life could be. It's gonna put it on the puzzle box right there for you.

In Burleson, although there's some variation within Burleson, in Burleson, the picture on the puzzle box is being well thought of by outsiders. or by insiders. The ambition is climbing the social ladder. Climbing the social ladder of work, a family, of church, gym membership, whatever, friend circle. And in that ambition, you have to be careful you don't rock the boat. You have to be careful to keep your nose clean. You have to be careful to pray before meals, hold the door open and be really, really sweet. Okay. So the ambition that we see in Burleson is different maybe than what you would see in New York City, or still different than what you would see in Los Angeles, or still different than what you would see even a couple of states over. It's being well thought of by other people, by insiders and outsiders. But when you follow Jesus, when you follow Jesus, you see that that social ladder leads to nowhere.

You see that you can't climb high enough. You can't please people enough. You can't live in the best place. You can't do those, you can't meet everybody's expectations. And so you understand that you don't need to climb those social ladders. But, and here's the conundrum, but without another ambition, without another picture on the puzzle box, you're going to keep returning to old ones. Right, so if you, hey man, some of you born and raised in Burleson, God bless you. You're born and raised in Burleson, right? If you don't get another picture on the puzzle box, you're going to grow up like every other Burlesonite. The picture on the box is going to be painted by the history of Burleson and nothing else. You're going to keep returning to these old pictures. And this is where this question in verse 1, and we haven't even gotten past verse 1, I'm sorry. We're going to move quickly past the other verses,

but in verse 1, we got to kind of camp for just a second. This is where this question in verse one about ambition, it shows us the second wrong. Okay, we talked about the first wrong, the second wrong on the right. The first wrong is original sin, and in original sin, in that first wrong, whenever Adam sinned, okay, we're the victims. We weren't there. We didn't tell Adam to take a bite of an apple. We didn't tell Adam to leave Eve. We didn't tell, we weren't there. We were victims of that. In the second wrong, we are willing participants in our own condemnation. The two wrongs work together in our life. We're born into sin slavery. We're born into that condemnation. We are victims of that, but we also are willing participants of that. In the second wrong, we willingly return to our old ambitions. And here in Romans chapter six, verses one through 14, it's a deep dive on what our ambition should be,

What the aim of our life should be. What goes on the puzzle box? What replaces your old ambition? And growing up in Burleson, or really growing up wherever you grew up, your culture really determines a lot of that. But when your culture answers that question of what should go on the puzzle box, a lot of it, especially in America, it starts with the question, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do? What kind of house do you want to have? What do you want? And when you follow Jesus, the answer never starts there, ever. When you follow Jesus, it doesn't start with what do you want. It actually starts with what has happened to you.

It's not what you want, it's what has happened to you. And we read this in the next verse. Finally getting to verse two, okay. Romans chapter six verse two, it says in answering the question, it says by no means. So should we sin more because grace gets to reign free? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it? Okay, so the question should we keep on sinning? Answer, no, you died to sin. We see it again in the verses that follow, verses three and four. It says, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. 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.

Question, are we going to just keep sinning? Answer in verses three and four. No, you were buried so that you could be raised. It's not starting with what you want, It's starting with what happened to you. There is a very similar exchange in John chapter three. It's very famous, so I'll just allude to it here without showing you my work, but you can go see it in John chapter three. Jesus is in a garden at night talking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, okay? So Jesus is talking to Nick at night.

Oh, come on. It was right there. It was right there. Jesus is talking to Nick at night in John three, And he says, Nicholas, Nicodemus, excuse me, says, he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Okay, so this is a question of what do I, what action do I take, Jesus? What is my part in this right now? What do I need to do? And what does Jesus respond? He says, be born again. Jesus says something must first be done to you. And Nicodemus is actually really frustrated at that question. He says, how can I enter my mother's womb again and be born? That's ludicrous. That's ridiculous. And the reason it frustrates Nicodemus is the same reason it's gonna frustrate us, is because it's not actionable. There's nothing we get to check off. There's nothing we get to say, oh yeah, look, I did that thing. And when we ask, what should I do? When we ask even about our own life,

what should the aim of our life should be? What should the aim of our life be? The answer is that God has already done something. To be a Christian, it is so simple, it is maddening. To become a Christian, you simply need to believe. Believe what? You simply need to believe that something was done for you. That God in heaven wants to continue to do something in you, wants to continue to do something to you, wants to continue to do something with you. This is the basic substance of what it is to follow Jesus, is to understand that something has been done to you. you. And if we're going to fight the second wrong, if we're going to somehow make a stand against being willing participants in our own condemnation, in our own destruction, if we are going to turn away from old ambitions and replace them with new pictures on the puzzle box, then we're going to need to ingest

verses 6 through 14 here. We're going to really need to just take it all the way into the heart, really get it, to see exactly what happened to us and how that gives us a new ambition. We've been talking about it a little bit in the previous verses, but let's let's keep going. Romans chapter 6 verses 6 and 7, how do we get this new ambition? What happened to us? It says, we know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Okay. When you follow Jesus, when you say yes to following Jesus, you are joined together with Him in His life and death and resurrection. Okay? Life, death, burial and resurrection actually. So when you You follow Jesus, what these verses are telling us, when you follow Jesus, you follow Him in crucifixion.

You follow Him in a death of your old self. We're gonna be getting a lot more into this the next couple of weeks, but you follow Him into crucifixion. What's more, you keep going, verses eight and nine. Romans six, eight, and nine says, now if we have died with Christ, Again, we're joined with Him. 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. So when you follow Jesus, you follow Him to the crucifixion, you follow Him to the burial, but you also follow Him to the resurrection. You are also raised with Him. And then verse 10 kind of puts a fine point on it for us. It says, for the death He died, He died to sin. Let's stop for just a second. The death He died, this is past tense. The death that Jesus died, He died to sin. Okay? Once for all. So, doesn't need to die again, doesn't need to keep dying.

And we follow Him in that death. When we follow Jesus, we follow Him into that death. But the life He lives, He lives to God. That's present tense. And it actually is really important that the first half of that sentence is past tense, in the second half is present tense, okay? But the life he lives, he lives to God. Jesus died your death. If you have, if you follow Jesus, if you've said yes to following him, Jesus has died your death and Jesus is currently living your life for you. It's in the next verse, verse 11. So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ, in Christ Jesus. You are alive in Christ Jesus. Now that's a mouthful, and that's not even really just trying to be poetic at this point. This isn't some kind of grand way to say that we really love Jesus, okay? This is an ontological fact. This is something that is right there.

Your core identity, the essence of who you are as a person, You are as a person. And I know, I know in American culture, Western culture, a lot of times we wrap our identity around a lot of different things about what we do, what we wear, what we buy, where we live or who we're friends with. We wrap our identity around a lot of different things, but let me just tell you, in Christ, the core part of who you are, your fundamental essence of a person, you are defined by Jesus's atoning sacrifice for you.

You're very core. Strip it all down. Strip all your preferences down. Strip all those things away. Who are you? Who are you whenever you're all the way stripped down? You are a sinner saved by grace. More than anything else. More than the fact that you're a man or a woman. More than the fact that you are American. More than the fact, whatever. Whatever identity you wanna slap on top of that, It's not more. It's not more than the fact that you are primarily, fundamentally, essentially a sinner, a recipient of grace that you did not deserve. That's who we are as a person. Colossians 3, 3, it says, For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Philippians 3, 8, 9, it says, For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. And if we understand, if we kind of get that this is our core identity,

if we follow Jesus, this is our core identity, if we get that, then we are ready to read verses 12 through 14. We'll read it in two chunks. Romans 6, 12 through the first part of 13. It says, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, okay? So in our identity, in the understanding of who we are, this is where we can begin to fight against sin. This is where we can begin to resist things that we don't need to do. Let's keep reading and then we'll talk about this a little bit more. The second half of 13 and 14 says, But present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace. Let me just spell it out.

The picture on the puzzle box is holiness. It's Christ-likeness. It's having a life that looks like Jesus's life. the true ambition of our lives as we follow Jesus. The one thing that should be on the puzzle box is a picture of Jesus. Jesus is who we worship. Jesus is who we emulate. Jesus is who we wanna be like. That's our true ambition. And the key, the real key, what we just spent, you know, 20 minutes talking about, in verses six through 11 talked about, established this really well. The key on all of that is the motivation. Motivation. What Jesus did to you. What Jesus did for you. What Jesus does with you. How you live currently in Jesus. Jesus lives his life to God for you. He lives your life to God. And the real key is motivation. If we get our motivation right, it's really helpful. But it's also helpful for you to see other motivations. Let's talk about some lesser motivations.

There's plenty of them, but I'm only going to name three. Plenty of lesser motivations. Lesser motivation number one, on resisting sin. Oh, by the way, by the way, I just want to take a second and say, when you don't have the proper motivation to resist sin, what you get in its place is going to be monstrous. It might not seem monstrous at first, but it's going to end up being monstrous. And this is why you have some people that kind of grew up in some kind of religious cult where everybody had to be perfect, okay? Well, if you would kind of ask them, like, well, what were the motivators? What kind of things would they say to you to help you not sin? Oh man, let the horror stories begin. It's a terrible real. It's a terrible thing what people tell children, what people tell teenagers, what people tell other adults about what's gonna happen to them if they don't resist sin

or the reasons that they should resist sin. I'm gonna list three here, and they're pretty tame, no horrors, and then we'll talk about kind of what our motivation can be. So I should resist sin. Here's lesser motivation number one. I should resist sin because people are watching me and I'm an example. Sounds really good, right? I'm sure, I'm sure half of you have been told that in your life. I'm sure, I've been told that. You should resist and you shouldn't do anything wrong because people are watching you and you have to be an example for those people. Okay, that is true, that is true. People are watching you and yeah, it's true that you're gonna be an example, that's good. But it does not hold up as a motivator for very long.

Right? Because while all that is true, the underlying thought is, okay, people watch me, I'm an example, So I can't mess up, and I especially can't mess up when people are watching. The underlying thought is I can't mess up because people are watching me, and if they see me do something wrong, then I'm responsible for what they do wrong. What a burden. And like I said, it's not untrue, but as a motivator, it doesn't feed you for very long. It might get you from A to B, You might make it through the week on that, but you wanna build a life on that, it's gonna crumble. It's not a good motivator. It doesn't feed you long term. Another motivator, I should resist sin. I should stop sinning because I'm a good person. I'm a decent person. I was raised right. That's a common one, right? And look, you might be able to point at your own good track record. You might be the most noble among your friends.

And that's great. That's laudable. That's fantastic, really. I'm not that sad about it. That's good. We need more noble people in this world. Yes, fine. Some of you, I mean, some of you, you take it a little further and you can get like the rich young ruler. And you'd be like, go ahead and list some commandments. I haven't broken any of them. I've never broken these commandments. I've not killed. I haven't stolen. I haven't committed adultery, I haven't said Jesus' name in vain, I haven't committed idolatry, I haven't even cussed out loud in like five years.

You got like a sweet track record, okay? The underlying thought is, hey, I'm a good person, I'm a decent person, I was raised right, and my righteousness is good enough. You can trust me, right? I'm trustworthy, right? I would never do something like that. Look, if I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody's testimony who said, hey, you know what? I was involved in this thing. I was up to my eyeballs. And I thought, man, I would never have guessed that I would be in this position. Someone like me, I would never guess that I was into meth or whatever, whatever the story is. I would never guess that somebody like me would be into pornography. I would never guess that somebody like me would cheat on their spouse. I would never guess that somebody like me would, whatever, just fill in the blank. And the reason that you don't think that it's you is because you're convinced that you're

a good person. You're convinced that your righteousness can hold up against any temptation that comes your way. You're like, oh no, no, I would never do something like that. I'm better than that. And you might not ever say that out loud because that's actually not good to say out loud, but you believe that? That's running through your mind. And then another lesson motivator that is kind of related, I should resist sin because it's the right thing to do. Okay? And look, that's look, that'll sell. That'll sell in Burleson, Texas. It's the right thing to do. Boy, just tip your Stetson, you know, spit your chew and just say it's the right thing to do. And boy, every cowboy with a 10-mile radius is gonna like shed a tear and clap as hard as they can. Like it's a thing, okay? It's the right thing to do. It's part of the code. I mean, yeah, okay, look, and I'm not gonna make fun of them too hard because

they'll beat me up. But, I'm not kidding. Because it's the right thing to do, right? It's the right thing to do. Well, let me just say, let me just help you here. That first of all, that statement is intellectually soft. It doesn't hold up to it really any kind of scrutiny at all. In fact, it's not just intellectually soft. It'll hurt you. That statement, that thought process will hurt you. We all need to know why. We all need to know why. And if you try to pass off some kind of statement, like we should all know, like it's somehow common sense, like it's the difference between left and right, that it's just the right thing to do and people who know know and they're going to do the right thing. It's intellectually soft. We all need a why. And when anybody, when somebody in particular, somebody who loves you, when they call you out on it, when they say no, no, no, why? Tell me why. A lot of times as kids, they have this really wonderful

way of saying why. Why do we do this? And they mean it. When you need a why and you just say, well, it's the right thing to do. I mean, it's bro code or whatever, cowboy code and somebody calls you out on it and you don't have a reason why it will fall apart very very quickly. We all need a why. You only do things because they make sense to you and if you're kind of just rolling on this thing of like it's the code and it's what my dad did and it's what his dad did I mean that's cool that's great but that's going to fall apart that's not going to feed you long-term it's not going to be good. So how do we fight sin with a solid motivation. How do we make it our own ambition to please Jesus? How do we do this? Well first and primarily really, you need to remember what has happened to you. You don't need to somehow take how great you are and put that on your

shoulder and be like, we're gonna make it! And you just kind of keep trying. That won't work. It just won't work. You need to remember that you are broken and that something has been done for you. That's first and foremost that needs to be what is at your mind. Okay, but here's the problem, we forget that. So what I want to do very quickly is just give you three things to think about of ways that you can do this. First of all, you need a family. Full stop. You need a family. You need a spiritual family too. You need a spiritual family that tells you when you're being stupid. You need a spiritual family that reminds you of of what's true about you, what has happened to you, how you are still loved and accepted, no matter what, because of what Jesus has done for you, no matter how bad you screwed up.

You need a family to convince you of those things. In our church, we have what are called life groups. Those life groups are groups of two to four people, a lot of times there are three or four people, and they meet every other week, and part of their goal is to speak truth to you. to remind you of what's true, to hear from the Lord, to pray together, to bear burdens, right? You need a family. And look, whether that's a life group or something, whatever, I mean, it doesn't need, you know, like the branded name on it, it just needs to be a spiritual family for you.

And as a church, we would be insane to say that people need that and not offer something. And so we offer life groups. If you're interested in that, you could talk to me afterward. So you need a family. That's one way that you can keep your ambition on the front of the puzzle box. Another way is that you need to worship. You need to have times where you just worship the Lord. And yes, Sunday services are a great time to do that. We take a lot of time and energy to, like, you know, David Tribble and I, whenever we meet, we talk and we say, okay, like, we're asking these questions, but all these questions are about, like, did people worship? Did they connect? Did they sing loud? Right? Like that's how we're judging ourselves on did we do a good job, right? And the reason that we do that is because the purpose of us meeting here together is not for people to be impressed, it's for people to worship

the Lord Jesus Christ on his throne. That's, I mean, that's it. With all that said, right geographically here is not the only place that you can worship the Lord. Okay, you wanna get some worship music going in your car? put that thing on full blast on your commute home, no one will judge you. They're gonna see you in your car, crying with your hands up, and that's okay. We'll just count that as grace, and it's cool. Look, find times to worship. Find times to speak to the Lord, and when you do, you will find that your mindset will be refreshed. You will be able to remember what is true more often, in the heat of the moment. Look, the next time you do something, I just wanna leave you with this and then we'll pray. The next time you do something right, the next time you do something right, I want you to try to capture why.

Okay? I want you to try to capture why. I want you to try to remember, in that moment, okay, what was my motivation here? Why am I doing something nice for my friend? Why am I going the extra mile here? Why am I doing these things? Am I doing these things because I think I'm a good person? Is it just the right thing to do? And if you're tipping your stats, and when you think that, you might be thinking it's the right thing to do, okay? But what's your motivator there? Are you just thinking, oh, I've just gotta be a good example? Your motivator is that something has happened to you, and that motivator will feed you forever. This is what it is to be a Christian, is to accept grace, accept something that you don't deserve. Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you for this morning. We pray that you would help us to listen, to remember your word to us, remember what is true,

remember what you have done to us, for us, in us. And that's your name that we pray, amen. Look, as we sing our last song, I wanna just encourage you, I'm gonna be sitting right over there. And not during the song, but after the service is over, I'm just gonna be kinda standing right over there. And if you wanna come talk to me about whatever question you have, if you're interested in anything like, just what it is to take a next step with us, or even if you just have some random question about our church, that's fine, that's great. I'd love to talk to you, and like I said, I'm gonna be right up here at the front row after the service, and I'd love to see you join me there. Let's stand as we sing.