You're an Eagle not a Chicken

Romans 6:1-14

Introduction
An American Indian tells about a brave who found an eagle’s egg and put it into the next of a prairie chicken. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life, the changeling eagle, thinking he was a prairie chicken, did what the prairie chickens did. He scratched in the dirt for seeds and insects to eat. He clucked and he cackled. And he flew in a brief thrashing of wings and flurry of feathers no more than a few feet off of the ground. After all, that’s how prairie chickens were supposed to fly.
Years passed. And the changeling eagle grew very old. One day, he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky. Hanging with graceful majesty on the powerful wind currents, it soared with a beat of its strong golden wings.
“What a beautiful bird!” said the changeling eagle to his neighbor. “What is it?”
“That’s an eagle—the chief of the birds,” the neighbor clucked. “But don’t give it a second thought. You could never be like him.”
So the changeling eagle never gave it another thought. And it died thinking it was a prairie chicken.
That story really conveys what it is like to be a child of God. We belong to the skies! God has given us wings to soar like eagles, but we’ve learned the ways of the prairie chickens and confined ourselves to live as one of them.
We would really need to read chapters 3-7 to get a good overview of our struggle with sin, but for the sake of time, let’s look now to what Paul writes in Romans 6. And what we find is that the believer is delivered from sin. We have a choice! We don’t have to do the wrong thing.

I. SYMBOLISM-
When we were baptized, we were making a public commitment to live for God
At the point of salvation there was a transformation and a reassignment
Colossians 1:13 Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:
By reenacting the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus we declared ourselves to be in sync
Likewise, baptism pictures the death of the old man and the resurrection to be a new person
Very few of us probably understood the symbolism involved at the time
God uses these pictures to help us see deep spiritual truths
Baptism won’t save us. It doesn’t remove our sins. It is figurative.
It was acting on faith that causes us to be freed from sin and dead to our old man
But baptism is a snapshot of what God has done in making us new in Christ
To that end, as baptized believers, we should walk in newness of life
Our lives should not be governed any longer by the sin nature but by the spiritual nature
Just as Jesus was different after His resurrection, we should be different as well
We need to live up to the ideal portrayed by baptism

II. SERVICE-
That difference deals with who will be the Master exercising dominion over us
To whom will we yield our service? Who will have our allegiance and loyalty?
Similar to what Jesus said in Matthew 6, our actions will tell the tale
Jesus taught that what we value will have our heart and our treasures
Paul is teaching us that we give devotion to the master we have chosen
We were slaves to sin and we didn’t have any other options, and sin is a brutal master
Romans