RECONSIDERING YOUR LIFE
What’s Holding You Back? – Part 1
June 26, 2005
This morning we will be starting a new series called “What’s Holding You Back?” What is holding you back spiritually? What is preventing you from becoming all that God wants you to be and all that you know you should become? What is keeping you from making spiritual advancements in your life?
Perseveration is a brain condition that causes people to get stuck in a particular pattern of behavior. Perseveration is what led a German pilot named Manfred von Richthefen, to pursue a British pilot far beyond the limits of safe flying and prudent dogfighting. If you don’t recognize his name it is probably because you know him better by his nick name – The Red Baron. The Red Baron was a legendary World War I ace pilot. On April 21, 1918 he flew his red Fokker triplane straight into enemy airspace, allowing aircraft and ground fire to shred his plane to ribbons and kill him with a bullet to the chest.
Why was the Baron so careless on this particular occasion? For most of his career he was a careful fighter who achieved legendary status with more than 80 kills – more than any other World War I pilot. The problem began when he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a dogfight nine months before his death, and researchers now believe that this caused a dysfunction to develop.
Perseveration is a brain dysfunction that causes people to persist in a task – to carry on in a completely illogical way, even when the chosen strategy is doomed and could lead to death. Today, the Air Force would have made him DNIF – Duties Not to Include Flying. But back in 1918 his headaches, airsickness and fatigue were all ignored. And so The Red Baron kept right on flying, until that fateful day in April when he flew himself straight to his own death. “He had target fixation and a mental rigidity,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Orme. The Red Baron “flew into a shooting gallery, violating all kinds of rules of flying – rules from the manual that he himself wrote.”
Perseveration can be a problem for us as well, even without the dogfights – or catfights. Fatal fixations can pop up in our work, our parenting, our friendships and our lives, causing us to pursue strategies that are doomed and even dangerous. Fatal fixations can even cause us to violate all kinds of rules for living as found in God’s Manual for Effective Living – the Bible.
Think of parents who work like slaves to provide for their families, only to put in such long and exhausting hours that they end up with little of themselves to give to their family members. It is a fatal fixation.
Think of Christians who put such effort into being righteous that they end up being self-righteous and in so doing they turn off the very people they are trying to reach. It is a fatal fixation.
Here is a more current example of a literal fatal fixation that was reported just this week by WorldNetDaily. A twelve year old school boy from Western Russia named Sergei who was addicted to computer games died as a result of his fixation. Sergei’s parents allowed him to go to a computer club as a reward for getting good grades in school. After playing computer games for almost 12 hours straight he suddenly collapsed to the floor and began to convulse.
He was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he was diagnosed as suffering from an epileptic seizure. He had difficulty breathing and was placed on a ventilator, but eight days later he died from a stroke. Alexei Sulimov, a senior doctor said, “Brain hemorrhage took place due to sustained emotional stimulation of the brain… This was the result of emotional stress because he was obsessed with the games… He was dying but could not tear himself from the game.” (WorldNetDaily, Thursday, June 23, 2005)
Did you get that last part? The doctor said that the boy was dying but still he could not tear himself away from the game. That is a fatal fixation. How many of us are just like Sergei? We know it is wrong, but we still sin. We know that it life isn’t turning out they way we wanted but we keep on making the same mistakes and we keep on committing the same sins. We plow ahead with our fatal fixations, traveling in dangerous directions that lead to serious sinfulness.
Paul wrote in Romans 6 about some so-called Christians that were so fixated on sin that they even came up with spiritual sounding arguments to justify their continued lifestyle of sin. They said, “Let us do evil that good may result” (Romans 3:8, NIV). Does that sound crazy to you? It may surprise you to learn that their justification of their behavior was based on the scriptural teachings of the apostle Paul. Paul said, “As people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful kindness became more abundant” (Romans 5:20). So their argument went like this: “We keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness” (Romans 6:1). They also said in Romans 3:7 (TM), “If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.” They were basically saying this: When I sin grace is increased. Therefore the more I sin the more grace is increased. And since God’s glory is shown by this increased giving of His grace, my sinning is actually doing God a favor. Their motto was, “We are sinning for the glory of God.”
The bottom line is this: They were so fixated on sinning that they were willing to twist the scriptures in order to justify their deviant behavior. Many today are not all that different. We humans are very creative when it comes to justifying our misbehavior. We fall into a similar trap when we say, “I know that this is wrong, but I know that God will forgive me afterward so I’m going to do it anyway.” If that is your attitude, then you, like the ancient Romans before you, need to here what Paul has to say in today’s text.
Paul responded to these claims in Romans 6:1-2a, “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? Of course not!” Paul was clearly horrified by such an idea. This could be rendered, “Away with this notion” or “Perish the thought.” Paul goes on in this passage to teach us how we can break the power of our fatal fixations and develop a faithful fixation in its place by reconsidering our lives. He says in 6:11, “You should consider yourselves dead to sin and able to live for the glory of God through Christ Jesus.” Let’s take a closer look.
1. Consider yourself united with Christ.
3Have you forgotten that when we became Christians [we] were baptized to become one with Christ Jesus… 5We have been united with him…
At the moment of our salvation we were united with Christ just as Jesus had prayed in his Great High Priestly Prayer in John 17:22-23, “I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are – I in them and you in me, all being perfected into one.”
The phrase “united with” literally means “grown together” and virtually has the force of meaning “fused into one.” Those who have placed their faith in Christ have been fused into one with him. They have been so thoroughly united with Christ that in God’s eyes they are now inseparable from Christ, therefore as we shall see in a moment, his death is their death and his burial is their burial and his resurrection is their resurrection.
This is not something that is gradually arrived at through the self-efforts of the believer. Rather it is something that is performed by God in the moment of saving faith. It is something that is established by God and this union becomes the basis for the life of Christ to be expressed through your unique personality. This is what Paul meant when in Galatians 2:20 he said, “I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
When we realize that we have been united with Christ in this way, we realize that we cannot go on sinning at the same time. As Paul asked in 2 Corinthians 6:14-15, “How can goodness be a partner with wickedness? How can light live with darkness? What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil?” His conclusion in 2 Corinthians 7:1 is this: “Let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit. And let us work toward complete purity because we fear God.” The principle is this: Complete purity flows from complete unity. So consider yourself united with Christ.
2. Consider yourself dead to sin.
2Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? … 4For we died and were buried with Christ … 6Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. 7For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin.
To go on sinning when we have already died to sin is logically impossible. Not practically impossible, but logically impossible. What he is teaching here is not that it is impossible to commit a single act of sin, but that it is impossible to go on with a lifestyle characterized by continual sinning. “It is as contradictory for a Christian to go on sinning as it is for a dead man to go on living.” (William M. Greathouse)
But is all of this just wishful thinking on the part of the apostle? Are we just to hope that we are dead to sin? No. Paul is not calling on us to play a game of spiritual make believe. This death to sin is a definite act. It is a basic fact that is fundamental to the living out of the Christian life.
We have been so completely united with Christ that we died with Christ and we were buried with Christ. Obviously he is not talking about physical realities as none of us were nailed to a Roman cross 2,000 years ago, but of spiritual realities.
And the spiritual reality is this: In Christ my spiritual history began 2,000 years ago when Jesus took my sins upon himself and died on the cross in my place. Physically I was obviously not there. But we were there in the sense that in God’s sight we were joined to the One who actually experienced it. Just as Paul elsewhere says that we spiritually sinned along with Adam so it is possible for us to have spiritually died to that sin along with Christ.
What was it that actually died? Paul says it was “our old sinful selves” that was crucified. In other words our sinful nature. What we mean by sinful nature is simply this: We were all born into this world with a tendency to commit sin. We were all born with a tendency to rebel against God and His word. And Paul is now telling us that in the moment of our salvation that part of us that tended toward rebellion was crucified.
And yet here is the paradox. On the one hand Paul says that our old self has been crucified but on the other hand he says we still need to throw it off or put it to death. In Ephesians 4:22,24 Paul says, “Throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through… You must display a new nature because you are a new person, created in God’s likeness – righteous, holy, and true.” And in Colossians 3:5 he says, “So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you.”
So which is it? Is our old nature dead or does it need to be put to death? This question has puzzled pastors, commentators, scholars and theologians for 2,000 years. The tricky answer is both. We see a clue to this when we note that Paul says that our old sinful self was crucified. Think of what we know about Jesus’ crucifixion. We know that he was crucified around 9:00 in the morning. But did he die then? No. We know that he lived on after his crucifixion for about 6 hours and that was considered a short period of time for history records that it was not unusual for some to live for days after being crucified.
What this means is that our old sinful self has received a death blow. It has been mortally or fatally wounded and yet it lives on for some time. In its death throes it is still seeking to control and influence the new believer. Here comes the real problem. What would have happened if someone would have been able to take Jesus down from the cross before he died? He could have recovered. What happens if we let our old sinful self off the hook so to speak? It won’t die. Therefore, even though our old sinful self has been crucified we are still responsible for putting it to death. Like the Roman soldier at the cross it is our duty to see that it remains on the cross until dead.
The question remains: How then do we put it to death? Paul gives us the answer in Romans 8:13, “For if you keep on following [your sinful nature], you will perish. But if through the power of the Holy Spirit you put it and its evil deeds to death, you will live.” If for some reason you choose to continue following the sinful nature after being born again you will die spiritually. But through the power of the Holy Spirit you can put it to death instead. You need to realize that this is a spiritual life or death struggle. Your new nature and your sinful nature cannot peacefully coexist. One must die. And you must choose.
When you became a Christian you knew that you had committed acts of sin for which you felt guilty. So you came to Christ and asked him to forgive you of your sins. But now you still have the choice of who you are going to allow to control your life. It is only by yielding your life completely to God and his Holy Spirit that you can put your old self to death. Don’t even try to do it on your own strength. If you do you will find that you are no match.
Because of all this Paul says, “you should consider yourselves dead to sin.” This means that you come to the realization that “sin [has lost] its power in our lives.” It is the realization that “we are longer slaves to sin.” It is the realization that “we were set free from the power of sin.”
The Puritan theologian John Owens once wrote that his biggest challenge as a pastor was persuading non-Christians that they were slaves to sin and Christians that they weren’t slaves to sin (Timothy Peck). We need to undergo a paradigm shift in our lives – to see ourselves differently – to reconsider our lives. We need to consider ourselves united with Christ, dead to sin and …
3. Consider yourself able to live for the glory of God.
When you realize that sin has lost its power and that you have been set free you also realize that you are now able to live a life that is pleasing to God – you are “able to live for the glory of God through Christ Jesus.”
This is the understanding that when we were united with Christ we weren’t just united with him in his death and in his burial, but also in his resurrection.
4bJust as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives…5Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised as he was…8bwe know we will also share his new life. 9We are sure of this because Christ rose from the dead…
Living out this new life in the practical things of everyday life is the evidence to the world that a new kind of life has been given to the follower of Christ. This life is a distinctive kind of life that can only be realized by one who has been united with Christ.
Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:17-18, “Those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun! All this newness of life is from God…” Paul makes it very clear that this new life comes from God. It is not therefore simply a matter of having a personal change of heart or of choosing to turn over a new leaf so to speak. It is not something that we can make or manufacture on our own. Only God can unite us with Christ. Only God can crucify the old nature. And only God can bring us to new life.
There once was a man who had an old warehouse up for sale. The warehouse had been sitting empty for months and was badly in need of repairs. Gangs had damaged the doors, smashed the windows, and thrown trash everywhere.
As he showed a prospective buyer the property, he took great pains to assure the man that he would replace the broken windows, bring in a crew to correct any structural damage, and clean out the garbage.
The buyer simply smiled at this and said, “Forget about the repairs. When I buy this place, I’m going to build something completely different. I don’t want the building; I want the site.
That is exactly what Paul is telling us here. Jesus doesn’t want the building we’ve made of our lives. He wants the site. He doesn’t want our carefully constructed self-righteousness. He wants our heart. When we became Christians, Jesus started over from scratch – He rebuilt us from the ground up. That is why Paul said, “Those who become Christians become new persons.”
You are able to live for the glory of God because you are in fact a new person. The person you used to be no longer exists. Before Saint Augustine became a Christian he had a mistress. One day shortly after his conversion he was walking down the street when his mistress spotted him and began calling to him, “Augustine! Augustine! It is Claudia!” “But it is no longer Augustine,” he replied as he continued on his way.
When the things of your old sinful life come calling – and you better believe they will – how will you respond? Can you respond as Augustine did? It is no longer I. Can you say with Paul in Galatians 2:19-20, “I have been crucified with Christ. I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me. So I live my life in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
This must be your new mindset. You must consider yourself united with Christ. You must consider yourself dead to sin. And you must consider yourself able to live for the glory of God. You must become fixated on these three truths. That is a faithful fixation and it alone has the power to destroy all your fatal fixations and empower you to live a life of holiness before God.
Conclusion:
In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was proclaimed in America. The word spread from Capital Hill down into the valleys of Virginia, and the Carolinas, and even into the plantations of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. The headlines read, ‘Slavery Legally Abolished!’ However, the greater majority of slaves, in the South, went right on living as though there had been no emancipation. They went on living like they had never been set free.
In fact, when one Alabama slave was asked what he though of the Great Emancipator, whose proclamation had gone into effect, he replied, “I don’t know nothing about Abraham Lincoln except they say he set us fee. And, I don’t know nothing about that neither.” How tragic! A war was being fought. A document had been signed. The slaves had been freed. Yet most continued to live out their years without knowing anything about it. Even though legally set free they continued serving their same old masters as if nothing had changed. (Paul Berkley)
As tragic as that story is there is a story that is far more tragic. There are many Christians who say, not in so many words, but with their lifestyle: “I don’t now nothing about Jesus except they say he set us free from sin. And I don’t know nothing about that neither.” And so even though they have been set free from sin by the power of the death and resurrection of Jesus they go on living in bondage to their old master. It is all they’ve ever known and it has become a fatal fixation.
Don’t let that happen to you. You have been presented with the truth of the Word of God today – you have been presented with Jesus Christ’s emancipation proclamation. And so now you have a choice. You can choose to ignore it and going on living the way you always have. Or you can choose to change.
There was a man one day who was driving on a winding road, when he saw a Road Closed sign up ahead. Not seeing any construction taking place, he ignored the sign and drove on. He soon discovered that the construction site was just around the next bend and completely blocked off the road. So he had to turn around and go back to take the detour after all. As he approached the Road Closed sign from behind he saw a message in hand-scrawled letters: “Told you so!”
Maybe you have been like this man – so fixated on going your own way that you have chosen to ignore God’s Road Closed signs in life. It is never to late to make a U-turn.
On June 20, 2000 something almost unheard of in the airline industry occurred. A Southwest Airlines plane turned around to pick up passengers left behind! The plane was 150 miles into its flight when they were notified that three sisters had been left in Kansas City.
The girls, only 8,9 and 12 years of age, had gotten off the flight for a snack on a brief stop during their Los Angeles-to-Chicago flight and had been left behind. And the pilot, when he realized the problem, turned back.
Some of you today, realizing the sin problem in your life, know that you need to turn back – you need to turn back to God. You need to reconsider your life. Some of you today have never committed your lives to Christ. Today you can be united with Christ, set free from sin and enabled to live for the glory of God. Don’t let anything hold you back!
*If you use this message or a revision of it, please email me. Thank you!
steveamanda8297@hotmail.com
Sources:
Everett F. Harrison, “Romans,” The Expositors Bible Commentary, vol. 12.
Homiletics, “Fatal Fixation,” May-June 2005.
William M. Greathouse, Beacon Bible Expositions, vol. 6.
Study Guide:
RECONSIDERING YOUR LIFE
What’s Holding You Back? – Part 1
Romans 6:1-11
June 26, 2005
“Let us do evil that good may result.” Romans 3:8 (NIV)
“As people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful kindness became more abundant.” Romans 5:20
“We keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness.” Romans 6:1
“If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.” Romans 3:7 (TM)
1Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? 2Of course not!
11You should consider yourselves dead to sin and able to live for the glory of God through Christ Jesus.
1. Consider yourself united _________________________.
3Have you forgotten that when we became Christians [we] were baptized to become one with Christ Jesus… 5We have been united with him…
“I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are – I in them and you in me, all being perfected into one.” John 17:22-23
“I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Galatians 2:20
“How can goodness be a partner with wickedness? How can light live with darkness? What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? …Let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit. And let us work toward complete purity because we fear God.” 2 Corinthians 6:14-15; 7:1
2. Consider yourself dead ___________________________.
2Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? … 4For we died and were buried with Christ … 6Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. 7For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin.
“Throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through… You must display a new nature because you are a new person, created in God’s likeness – righteous, holy, and true.” Ephesians 4:22,24
“So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you.” Colossians 3:5
“For if you keep on following [your sinful nature], you will perish. But if through the power of the Holy Spirit you put it and its evil deeds to death, you will live.” Romans 8:13
3. Consider yourself able ___________________________.
4bJust as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives…5Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised as he was…8bwe know we will also share his new life. 9We are sure of this because Christ rose from the dead…
“Those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun! All this newness of life is from God…” 2 Corinthians 5:17-18
“I have been crucified with Christ. I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me. So I live my life in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:19-20
* All Scriptures are from the New Living Translation unless otherwise noted.
