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[0:00] If you've got a Bible, you can turn to the New Testament book of Romans, Romans chapter 6.! I'm going to read the first 14 verses that Paul writes, the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Rome in Romans chapter 6.

[0:24] Paul says the following, he says, Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

[1:30] For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again. Death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all. And the life he lives, he lives to God.

[1:42] In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.

[1:53] Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.

[2:06] For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray, let's ask for God's help as we study together this morning.

[2:20] Gracious God, won't you speak truth into our hearts? We are very grateful for your word, your inspired, holy and errant word. We ask to be taught it this morning.

[2:32] We ask to have it come into us this morning, that we don't just engage in an intellectual exercise, but we engage in an act of heart transformation as your spirit works in us.

[2:45] Bless us with this, we pray, for Christ's sake. Amen. So one more week, thinking about the implications of the resurrection, as we've come out of Easter and the few weeks after Easter.

[2:58] Last week, we looked at how the resurrection empowers us to die daily, which sounded a little bit counterintuitive, but that's what we said. The resurrection empowers us as Christians to die daily, that is, to live lives of death.

[3:13] Death to worldly desires, and death to the sort of anti-God influences in this world upon us. Today, I want to kind of turn it around, and I want us to look at the positive.

[3:23] Not that the resurrection empowers us to die, but that the resurrection makes us alive. The resurrection truly makes us alive. In that passage that we just read, Romans 6, verse 4, Paul says this, he says, Just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

[3:43] This is a pretty common theme that you'll find if you read in Paul's letters, as he reflects on the significance of the resurrection. Because Jesus is alive, we Christians, who are united to him by faith, we are now alive to new life.

[4:00] And it's not just, he's not just talking about the future there, as in you're going to get this new resurrection body, all the great stuff he talks about in 1 Corinthians 15 that we saw last time. There's also a sense in which we're raised to new life now, in the present.

[4:16] Jesus is alive, we should be truly alive to God in the way we live now, and experience life now. But I know, that when I say that, a lot of Christians who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus don't often feel particularly spiritually alive.

[4:31] Maybe on a day like this when it's all gray and rainy and you drag yourself out of the comfort of your bed to come to church, you don't feel particularly spiritually alive this morning. A lot of Christians, I think, are confused by this experience.

[4:42] They're confused by their own behavior sometimes, their own habits and ways, in light of what they think being a Christian is all about, in light of the resurrection. And it's a very disconcerting experience.

[4:55] Because a lot of Christians know something of the gospel. That's why they're in church. They know, hey, look, we know what this Jesus thing is. We know that we're in sin.

[5:06] We know that God has come into this world in the person of Jesus Christ, and we trust in Him. We have eternal life and relationship with Him. We know this gospel. We can give the Sunday school answer on this.

[5:18] So it's very bewildering then that we still have this thing called sin in us that seems to be so powerful. Such a present reality, even after we've come to faith in Jesus Christ.

[5:30] Even after we've trusted in the risen Lord. Now in the Bible, sin is quite an extensive thing. So in the Bible, to give you a summary, sin is really any thought or action or motive, attitude, even desire, that exists in an individual that is contrary to God's will.

[5:51] In fact, the Bible goes so far as not just to divine sin in terms of disobedience to God's will, active disobedience in thought and deed, but even as a failure to do God's will.

[6:03] So what we might sometimes call, or traditionally is called sins of omission. Failing to do good. Sin corrupts every single part of us, even the good that we do. Now that's been the historic kind of orthodox understanding of what sin is for 2,000 years in Christian theology.

[6:23] Now how do you make sense of the experience of that sort of sin in your life in light of the resurrection? What do you make of the fact that indwelling sin is still there?

[6:36] So Jesus is alive. We celebrated it now at Easter time. Jesus is alive, but why do I still feel so dead and tired sometimes?

[6:47] Why do I sometimes carry a sense of shame and guilt? Feeling far away from God's presence. If he's alive, why don't I always feel like he's alive in my heart?

[6:58] How do you make sense of that? And we're going to try and answer that question today by going to Romans 6, verses 1 to 4, because I think Paul answers that question there. It's a place where he's actually dealing with objections to the notion of grace, the doctrine, the theology of grace, the idea that we are saved not through what we do, but purely through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[7:20] And he preempts that people are going to object to him when he teaches this. And he specifically brings the resurrection to bear on this question. So here's where we go. I'm going to follow his argument here in the passage.

[7:31] We're going to see three things. Number one, we're going to see an objection to grace that he preempts. We're going to see an argument from grace that he makes. And then we're going to see the sort of outworking from grace that he presents at the end of the section.

[7:45] And the resurrection you'll see all the way through is key to everything that he talks about here. So here's the first one, the objection itself, the objection to grace. Have a look at the first two verses. Paul says, What shall we say then?

[7:58] Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means. We are those who have died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? In these preceding chapters, building up to this section, Paul's been making a very, very powerful argument that salvation is by grace.

[8:14] God's love and forgiveness, the way that it comes to us, the way that it comes to you, the way that it comes to me, is not on the basis of any merit that we sort of bring and say, Hey God, here's my good works. You must accept me.

[8:24] It's not like that. It's an undeserved gift. It's grace. Now this naturally raises some objections from his readers. And he's preempting it. He's imagining what the objections would be from the people reading about this radical free grace.

[8:37] And so this is what he says. Well, he's thinking this. He's looking at these guys and he's thinking, this is what they're probably thinking. They're thinking, so this grace covers over my sin. This grace is so big.

[8:48] It's so powerful. It's so wonderful. No matter how often and how badly I sin, grace just seems to increase all the more. If that's what grace is like, if that's the nature of this grace you've been talking about, can't I just keep on sinning?

[9:00] Grace will cover it. In fact, God will be shown to be more gracious. Like if I can give him some more sin, then he can apply more grace. And so look, he's more gracious. It's a win-win situation here. And Paul is like, by no means.

[9:12] That is not in your life, no. That's not how it works. Now let's just pause and think about this objection before we move on to the argument that he makes in response. On face value, this looks like the sort of argument that would be made by the sort of person who's looking to try and live whatever lifestyle they basically want to, but keep Jesus at the same time.

[9:36] It's like, I want to have my cake and eat it. I want to have Jesus, but I also just want to live however I want. I want the salvation, but I want to live how I please. They love the idea of grace.

[9:46] Sounds wonderful. Love it. God forgiving me, God taking my sin away, God saving me, God taking me to heaven, God having a personal relationship with me, love all that stuff, tick, I want that, but I don't want to have this grace place any sort of obligations upon me in terms of how I live my life.

[10:06] If you came to faith as a teenager or in primary school, and you were one of those people who liked to push the boundaries, so I'm not talking to the goody two shoes over here, I'm talking to the people who are like me, who like to push the boundaries, you might have gone through this thought process at some point in your life when you were younger.

[10:27] I remember having a conversation like this or similar to this multiple times with my Sunday school teachers. I would say something like, so God, God saves by grace, right?

[10:39] And the teacher would say, that's right. Well then, Stephen, you're getting this. That means nothing I do or don't do affects whether or not I get God's grace, right? The teacher would say, right. So in one sense, my behavior is inconsequential, right?

[10:52] Well, sort of, I suppose. That's right. So I can do like a whole lot of naughty stuff. Like I can go into Spur Restaurant, I can go into the bathroom, I can put the plugs in all the basins, turn the taps on and then leave and come back later to find a plumber working on this stuff.

[11:08] I actually really did that, by the way. I can do all that and still be a Christian, right? At which point the Sunday school teachers, well, not quite.

[11:20] Now it seems like that's the sort of person who would come up with an objection like this. That person is what theologians would historically call an antinomian, anti-law. Nomos means law.

[11:32] Anti-God's moral commands, his moral law. Sounds like that's the kind of person who would raise this objection. But it's actually equally possible that this objection would be raised by legalists too.

[11:44] These are the people who are looking at what Paul says about all this radical free grace, salvation by faith alone. They've looked at all of this and they've gone, hang on, no, no, no, no, Paul.

[11:56] This free grace is just giving license for people to sin. Salvation can't be this way. If you teach this, people are just going to lose their minds. Society's going to fall apart.

[12:08] Now I think we often get legalists wrong. And when we think about that term legalists, any person who seems vaguely interested in keeping God's laws, we call a legalist in today's sort of progressive culture.

[12:18] But that is not what a legalist is. A legalist is not somebody who is concerned about being holy, about following God's moral commands. A legalist is somebody who looks to those commands to save him.

[12:31] That's a legalist. The legalist says in their heart, if I follow all the rules, God's going to accept me. The licentious person, on the other hand, says God's law is irrelevant.

[12:43] The legalist says God's law justifies me. Paul says, well, actually, you're both wrong. You're both wrong. And then he provides an argument from grace to tackle that objection to grace.

[12:58] You see, whether you are a legalist or an antinomian, we all object to biblical grace at some point. We have a problem with it.

[13:09] In our hearts, we have a problem with it. The grace of God is so radical. It is actually so countercultural that we are actually constantly looking for ways to sidestep it in our faith.

[13:22] We'll sidestep it by living ways that are radically inconsistent with the grace of God, breaking God's law. That's what the antinomian does. Or we'll sidestep it by looking to our good deeds, our works, to supplement grace in sort of attempts at self-salvation.

[13:44] In both cases, what you've done is you've objected to God's radical grace as it's presented in the Bible. You've objected to that I am saved purely through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, not through anything I do or don't do.

[13:57] So that's the objection. And maybe, depending on where you would kind of sit in that spectrum, you can think about how you, in your own heart, maybe try and sidestep the grace of the Lord.

[14:09] So what does Paul say to a person who would raise an objection like this? Well, here's the second point, the argument from grace. Have a look now. We'll read a longer section from verse 2. In response to the objection, Paul says, It says, Now, Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him.

[15:04] For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again. Death no longer has mastery over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God.

[15:17] Now you read that and it seems like there's quite a lot of repetition in there. Recapitulation of the same argument. And it is kind of Paul's rhetorical style. There's actually one sustained argument that he makes behind that repetition.

[15:30] And the argument is this. Christ died to sin, was raised to life. Christians then who are united to Christ in faith have also died to sin.

[15:41] And they will be raised to life. It's a pretty simple standard argument. There are two simple parts there to Paul's argument. His comeback to those people who would say, well it doesn't matter if we just keep on sinning because grace will increase.

[15:53] And he says, no, no, no, here's my comeback. My comeback is this. Don't you realize, friends, that you have died with Christ to sin? Don't you realize, friends, that you have been raised to life with Christ?

[16:09] To righteousness. To God. Something fundamental is changing you. Something has happened. It's like a switch has been flipped. When you, by grace through faith, came to Jesus.

[16:23] Something objective changed. It's there in verse 6. For we know that our old self was crucified with Christ, so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with.

[16:33] That we should no longer be slaves to sin. We died to sin. Past tense. Before you have any sort of resurrection, right, there's got to be a death.

[16:47] We died to sin. Past tense. That is, it happened already. It's not something that's going to happen. It happened already. Paul's not talking here about ongoing dying to sin, what we might call modification of sin that comes in later parts of the Bible.

[17:00] He's talking about something that has happened. It happened when you believed. You died to sin. Your old self was crucified. So why not keep on sinning? Well, because you're no longer a slave to sin, he says.

[17:15] Something fundamental has changed in you as a result of the grace of God and Jesus Christ. Now, when the Bible says that, it says that you died to sin, what exactly does it mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean.

[17:28] It doesn't mean that you automatically stop sinning. It doesn't mean that you stop struggling with sin and temptation. We know this because later on in the same book of Romans, Paul is going to urge believers to strive in holy living.

[17:42] Now, he wouldn't have to say that if this is sort of automatic. Believe in Jesus, voila, I stop sinning. So what does it mean then to die to sin?

[17:52] Well, that we have died to sin. The clue here is in the result. Paul says, because you died to sin, you are no longer slaves to sin.

[18:02] You are free, he says. In other words, before coming to Christ, you weren't free. The reality of every person who has not come to Christ is that they are, and this is going to sound weird, but they are not free to not sin.

[18:22] Every person who hasn't come to Christ is not free to not sin. Do you get that? The person who hasn't received grace is not free to not sin. In the book of Romans, Paul repeatedly talks about sin as this sort of tyrannical slave master.

[18:38] It rules you. It dictates to you what you ought to do. Before and without Christ, all of us are slaves to that sin. We're not free to not sin. We are only free to sin.

[18:51] That is because sin is not just the odd bad thing you do, but even the motivations, the impulses, the desires behind the good things that you do do. And so without Christ, none of us is free to not sin.

[19:05] But if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, if you've received this grace, when God regenerated you by grace, when he made you alive, you suddenly were granted the power and the motivation to begin to resist sin.

[19:18] To not live subject to it constantly, but to say no to it. All because of Jesus. That's what it means to be dead to sin.

[19:33] Now I ask you, do you know that about yourself this morning? If you're a believer, we can't talk about living a resurrection life if you don't first understand the death that you've undergone.

[19:46] You don't understand what's happened to you. And so I say, do you really know that you're dead to sin? Do you know that that supernatural activity has actually taken place inside of you? In other parts of the Bible, it's described as the believer getting a new heart, a new identity.

[20:03] Do you know that that's who you are in Jesus Christ? You know that something objective took place inside of you when you came to faith. A lot of Christians, I think, don't. They live in a very defeatist way with regards to sin.

[20:16] They struggle with sin, which we all do. But their response to the struggle, I think, is to default to this sort of thinking, is to say, I have no power to defeat this sin. And so they remain enslaved then.

[20:31] And they fail to see that objectively they have died to sin. And God has given them a new heart, a new approach to now wrestle with and fight against and even start to beat sin.

[20:43] They remain enslaved. I think one of the most helpful ways this was once illustrated to me and I've thought about it and I've probably used a similar illustration before was if you think about our own country, the history in our country.

[20:55] 32 years ago, we ended apartheid formally. We were freed from the formal legislation of apartheid 32 years ago. There are now no formal apartheid laws in our country.

[21:09] There are no formal laws that entrench white supremacy and black inferiority. That's on the books. Objectively, happened in history.

[21:22] But when I go to the petrol station and I fill up my tank and I roll down the window and I have a conversation with a black petrol attendant, more than 50% of that time that black petrol attendant will refer to me as boss.

[21:36] Even if that person is like 20 years my senior. At the same time, I'll also sit in white conversations at brides or at dinners, often sadly with older white folk, but sadly also sometimes with younger white folk, who will scapegoat black people from just about every social ill that we have in this country.

[21:59] Or you know it's because they do this or they do that. And so 32 years after apartheid, and some blacks are still living with an inferiority complex, and some whites are still living with a superiority complex.

[22:15] Even though objectively apartheid was ended, the legislation was fundamentally rewritten. And so our lives, and sometimes, for some of us at least, our lives are not taking their cue.

[22:32] From that objective ending. We're taking our cue from a bunch of other things, rather than an objective ending. And so sometimes, some of us still remain enslaved to apartheid, and that's the way.

[22:44] Whites and blacks. Now many of us live our Christian lives exactly the same way. We have objectively died to sin. Objectively.

[22:55] It's happened. Past tense. It's not something that we're waiting for. It objectively happened if you're a believer. But we continue to live in slavethate. Discounting the fundamental change that God has brought about in us through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

[23:12] And so I ask you, if you're a Christian this morning, do you know who you really are? Do you actually know who you really are? Do you know what has been done for you in the grace of God? Because if you do know that, then grace is not a license for sin.

[23:25] How could it be? Rather, it's an incredibly powerful motivation for holy living, for fighting sin, for resisting its temptations. Now Paul goes further.

[23:37] He gives us the positive here as well. He doesn't just point out that we died to sin with Christ. He points out that we're now alive with Christ to God. Christ was raised from the dead. You one day will be raised from death if you trust in Him.

[23:49] And so while we might live in a body that decays, it gets old, we feel that. In reality, we're actually more alive than we've ever been. In some ways, we're getting more alive as we get closer to that final day.

[24:03] We're getting more alive than we'll ever be. So live like somebody who's truly alive, Paul says. Live for God. I must be honest, I get grumpy about a lot of things the older I get.

[24:15] But one of the things I get a little bit grumpy about on social media is when I see Christians post things like YOLO. You know who YOLO is? You only live once. Or post a little stuff on the Instagram account like, life is short, make the most of it.

[24:29] Because I think that sort of an attitude is completely antithetical to the Christian teaching of new life in Jesus. See, YOLO makes your life as fulfilling, this whole idea of make your life as fulfilling as you can now, before the seconds tick down and it's all over.

[24:50] I think that sort of approach has to make you supremely selfish. How can it not? Even the good that you do in that sort of a life is towards the end of fulfilling yourself, making the most of your life.

[25:01] The Bible says, no, no, no, no, your life will be fulfilled completely when you at the end of your life are raised with Jesus Christ. Completely fulfilled. You will be completely fulfilled in God's holy presence.

[25:16] And you will, actually when you're in that moment, you will come to understand just how beautiful, how thrilling, how satisfying holiness actually is. And so that's your future.

[25:29] Well, why wouldn't you start to live for it now? Why wouldn't you start living for that now? Live in holiness and obedience to God, in service of other people. Why? Because you're united to Christ, and because you're united to Christ, you will be raised to that final reality.

[25:46] There is no clock. There's no clock that is ticking down on your satisfaction and fulfillment. Where it's all going to come to an end.

[25:58] And like, oh, what's done now? I hope you made the most of it. There's no clock doing that. There is only one clock ticking down, clicking down, towards your full moment of satisfaction and fulfillment being fully realized in the new heavens and the new earth with your Lord.

[26:14] Why wait for that clock to get to the end? Why wait for it to finish ticking down? Just start that journey now. Live alive to God in Christ Jesus now.

[26:28] Christ died to sin. Christ was raised to life. Christians then, this is Paul's argument, who are united to Christ in faith have also died to sin, and they will be raised to new life.

[26:39] That's his argument from grace. Now here's the last part. The outworking of grace. Look down at verse 11. Paul says, In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

[26:55] Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.

[27:12] For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace. Paul says, You've got to take all this whole argument that I've just made, you've got to factor this into your reality, and then you've got to stop sinning.

[27:27] That's what he says. Now he's not calling for perfection. We know that's impossible, but he is calling for progress. He is saying there should be change. You should be getting better and better at this over time, at not sinning.

[27:41] Friends, if you don't think that the Christian life is a massive fight and struggle with sin, in some senses, from now until when Jesus comes back again, then I think you've got a very distorted, unbiblical view of what it is to be a Christian.

[27:55] In fact, if your day-to-day experience is not one of resting against sin, fighting off temptation, putting to death negative impulses and desires, repeated repentance, and turning back to the grace of Jesus, then you might not actually be embracing historical Christianity.

[28:13] It starts, though, in this whole fight, according to Paul, it starts with counting yourself dead to sin and alive to God. It's a mental reckoning.

[28:25] It's what you're doing. There's something that is objectively true about you as a result of grace. It happened in history. History passed through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and you need to now start telling your heart that it's true.

[28:39] Have a conversation with your inner person and say, this has happened. This is what's true. It's because the struggle against sin, it's hard, and it's messy. It's brutal.

[28:49] And when you are up to your eyeballs in that particular struggle, and you're facing temptation from all sorts of places, you can begin to doubt that you actually are saved, that you actually have died to sin, that you actually will be given this new resurrection life.

[29:02] And so Paul says, count yourself dead to sin and now alive. Reckon with yourself, he says. Reckon with yourself dead to sin and now alive.

[29:14] Nowadays, we pass around all sorts of memes, little video memes to each other, like super quick. You can just send them on Instagram. My husbands and wives will sit on two couches in the lounge and send memes to each other. We don't do that, but other people do that.

[29:26] And so we were sending these videos all the time, but I'm old enough to remember when it was really rare to find videos that you could send to each other. And we would send each other email videos. Like it would take a while to download it, and then you get this funny video, and then everyone in the office would kind of laugh at this funny video.

[29:42] But the funniest one that I ever received, and I still giggle a little bit when I think about it now, is the trust fall. Trust fall gone wrong. There's really nothing funnier than that. You know what a trust fall is, right?

[29:53] It's when a person stands behind, and you close your eyes, and then you just fall into their arms. But there's one where there, I think it's a father and a daughter, and his daughter's in front, and they do the countdown.

[30:04] One, two, three, four, and instead of falling backwards, she falls forward onto her face, and I just found that hilarious. But you know what actually happens when you do a trust fall right?

[30:16] When you do a trust fall, the way it's supposed to be done, is you close your eyes, and you consciously reckon to yourself that the person who's behind you is trustworthy and will catch you and save you from harm.

[30:30] Now you do that. You fall back, even though multiple other signals and impulses are coming to your brain at that point in time, and they're saying, don't fall back, don't fall back. This is a dumb idea. Don't fall back.

[30:40] You go against those impulses, and you reckon, no, this person will catch me, and you fall back. You reckon in your mind that you're safe and you fall back. Paul is saying, go there mentally.

[30:55] Do that mentally. Reckon that you are dead to sin and alive to God, even though temptations and other desires and circumstances around you are trying to dissuade you of that objective truth.

[31:08] Count yourself dead to sin and alive to God, Paul says. But it's an objective truth. Something actually happened. Something actually really happened when you believe.

[31:20] This is not just you willing yourself against sin. It is based in concrete reality. That's actually why the trust fall is not a perfect analogy. Because there, in the trust fall scenario, you're still trusting in a fallible, weak human being to catch you.

[31:38] And you're hoping future that he will catch you. It's a future expectation. It's not a perfect analogy because with grace, we have something bigger. We have something so, so much better.

[31:51] We have the infallible, powerful Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, in history past. And the tense makes all the difference here.

[32:03] In history past, he died. He was crucified. He was raised to life. So we're not sitting here wondering, will he save us? Is he going to do it? Will he be faithful?

[32:14] Will he turn out to be trustworthy? Can I bank my life upon him? We're not wondering that because we've already seen him save us. We've already seen him save us in the past.

[32:26] We've already seen the nails. We've already seen the tears. We've already seen the cries of despair. We've seen the crown of thorns. We've seen the spear in his side. We've seen him die.

[32:38] And in fact, more than that, we've seen the empty tomb. We've seen the stone rolled away. We've seen the angel saying, he is not here like he said.

[32:49] We've seen Thomas placing his fingers in his hands and in his side. We've seen him resurrected. Christ has died for us.

[33:03] If you are united to him by faith, then you too have died to sin. Tell yourself that. Tell your heart that in the face of raging temptation, in the face of deep struggle, as the opportunity to sin presents itself, tell your heart that you have died with Christ and that you no longer need to sin.

[33:22] And then more than that, tell yourself that you're alive. Tell yourself that you will one day be raised with Christ. And then give yourself to holiness, to obedient living, to the glory and the joy of godliness of that resurrection life.

[33:42] Offer yourself to the cause of righteousness. Plunge into that newness of life. The great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon describes this resurrection life in one of his sermons on the subject as plunging into a cold, refreshing water.

[34:03] This is what he says and I'll close with this. He says, I've seen boys swimming in a river in the morning. One of them has just dipped his toes in the water and he cries out as he shivers, oh it's so cold.

[34:17] Another has gone in up to his ankles and he also declares that it's fearfully chilly but see, another runs to the bank and takes a header.

[34:28] He rises in a glow. All his blood is circulating and he cries, delicious, what a beautiful morning. I am all in glow. The water is splendid. That is the boy for enjoying a swim.

[34:43] You Christian people who are paddling about in the shallows of religion and just dipping your toes into it, you stand shivering in the cold air of the world which you're afraid to leave. Oh that you would plunge into the river of life.

[34:56] How it would brace you. What tone it would give you. In for it young man, in for it. Be a Christian out and out. Serve the Lord with your whole being.

[35:07] Give yourself wholly to him who bought you with his blood. Plunge into the sacred flood of grace and you will exclaim, oh this is life, oh this is joy, my God to find thee so, thy face to see, thy voice to hear, and all thy love to know.

[35:28] If you've trusted in our Lord Jesus Christ, if you've received salvation by grace through faith, then you're dead to sin and you are alive to new life.

[35:40] Plunge into that new life, plunge into that resurrection life this morning. Let's pray. Pray. Pray. our gracious God and heavenly Father, won't you impress these realities.

[35:57] That's what we need. We need you to impress these realities upon us because we forget them. We forget to go through this mental reckoning that we need to. we forget to tell ourselves these truths.

[36:10] We forget to come to worship and have these truths impressed upon us over and over again. And so we ask by your Holy Spirit to impress them upon us now that we will know our deadness to sin and we will know that we are alive to resurrection life, Lord.

[36:31] Father, I pray for any person here who has never trusted in Jesus, who has never come and received that grace, I pray that you would help them to see the depth of their sin and to see their need for a saving and that they would repent and trust in Jesus today.

[36:46] Lord, help us to be people of resurrection life, Lord. That when people come to this church, when they engage with our people, they don't find perfect people, but they find people who are truly alive, who have been made alive in Jesus.

[37:00]  Make us that kind of a church, we pray, and we ask this for Christ's sake and his glory. Amen.