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We long for fresh starts, yet even after coming to Christ we can feel the pull to return to the same old sins and familiar ways. Romans 6:6–9 says our old self was crucified with Christ and that death no longer rules him—so what does that new standing mean for believers still facing temptation, failure, and the daily work of living for him?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening, all. It’s good to be with you here tonight. It’s good to be back in the pulpit. Thank you, Tim, for offering me this opportunity to preach tonight. I’m rumbling a little bit, I can tell. And this is the next in the series of what’s new. Jesus brings newness to many things, and he brings newness tonight. We’re going to be talking about the new mission that each of us have once we become believers in Christ.
To start off with, it would behoove us, I love using that word, it would behoove us to read the scriptures that we’re going to be looking at tonight, hello to all of you around the world, in Romans 6, specifically verses 6 through 9. Here’s how it goes, you’ll see it on the screen as well.
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. Now if we have died with Christ, 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.
I’m going to hand this Bible off to my lovely wife, because it’s a great big volume, and there’s not much room for it on the music stand. Thank you Melanie for singing that song tonight, the Jesus song, what, did you find a name for it yet? Still kind of rough. Thank you Merlene for playing the piano, and Laura for singing so well, and Tom bringing us the, not the devotion, but the confession, the call to confession, it’s great.
Well let’s look at what’s on the music stand tonight. You know we, as human beings, seem to have a longing, and a love for the fresh start, a new beginning. When I used to bowl in a company league, somebody was always having a crummy night. The missed five pin, the gutter ball, when you were going for an easy pickup on a seven pin spare, unpickable four six bedpost splits, lift after the ball, just missed crossing over the Brooklyn side, and hit that head pin head on, leaving that four six split. Enough to make grown men weep, or at least kick the ball return, as if the fault lied somehow in the lane itself, never mind the guy in the other team who had six strikes going in a row on the same lane.
It was time for drastic action. So we’d get the score sheet, now back in those days, Jackie, the score sheet was this big plastic thing with a grease pencil that, you know, showing up on the projector, and so you would take that grease pencil and back of that frame, and you’d write, draw a big bold line in back of that. A wall, if you will, signifying a new start. A deep breath, another bite of hamburger, maybe better things on the horizon, maybe.
Musicians love to write songs and sing about new beginnings. In 1980, just before he was gunned down in New York City, John Lennon zoomed up the charts with his first single in five years, a tune called Just Like Starting Over. It’s been too long since we took the time. No one’s to blame, I know time flies so quickly, but when I see you, darling, it’s like we both are falling in love again. It’ll be just like starting over, right, Kathy? You remember that one. You remember that one.
Earlier in 1972, Johnny Nash hit gold with his song about overcoming difficulty and starting afresh. It was called I Can See Clearly Now. Went to number one in November. I can see clearly now the rain is gone. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. I messed it up. I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day. You all remember that. Some of you do. Some of you have never heard it before.
Remember the animals from 1965 with We Gotta Get Out of This Place? In this dirty old part of this city where the sun refused to shine, people tell me there ain’t no use in trying. We gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place, girl. There’s a better life for me and you. You remember that one, Laura? No. That’s okay. That’s all right.
New vistas, new horizons, a more rewarding life. That’s what we long for. That’s what we ache for. Not necessarily a life of leisure, but a life that counts, a life that matters, a life that keeps us interested, invigorated, where we wake up each day with energy and spirit and look forward to climbing new mountains, soaring to new heights, accomplishing our goals and meeting expectations. But how often does this happen really?
Sometimes we think that new companions are all we need to make us happy, and not even human companions. These days, so many people… Cookie, now close your ears. So many people would rather have a pet pooch than a baby son or daughter that the animal food companies refer to these folks as pet parents. And the pups are so cute and they do bring so much meaning to life that it’s easy to think of Fido and Fluffy as our canine kids. But you know what puppies are deep down inside? Dogs. And left to their own devices, dogs do what dogs do. They tear up the rug. They gnaw on the furniture, or else they eat things that they shouldn’t, like maybe a whole bag of Kraft caramels, a whole bag of Doritos, a toad, or something else that upsets that doggy stomach. And then what? Bleh. Puppy puke all over the floor. And if you don’t get to Fido in time, what does he do? He eats it all back up. Oh, golly.
The Bible talks about that, Proverbs 26, 11, like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. A fool who repeats his folly? Who is Solomon talking about here besides us? All of us on some level and some on spectacular levels.
Ever heard of a guy by the name of James Farthing? He’s from Lexington, Kentucky, and he made the news in 2025. He hit the Kentucky lottery and scored $167 million. Then he did what many of us would do. The next day, he went to Florida. First day he was there, he got in a fight, assaulted a police officer, and wound up in the slammer for a while. Later in the year, he was involved in a hit and run accident in Fayette County, Kentucky, and a charge of intimidation in Scott County. Finally, just a few weeks ago, he was arrested on charges of burglary. He broke into a home and tried to steal $12,000. A Powerball winner who banked $167 million just a year earlier.
Talk about a bowser returning to his barf. He had it made. He was on Easy Street. He could buy anything he wanted, and now he’s stealing $12,000? He obviously didn’t recognize the value of the gift he’d been given, and went back to a life of brawling and crime. Now I’ll cut him a little slack. I’ll cut him a little slack. Maybe the windfall was just too much for him to comprehend. Got his head in a whirl, kind of like a three-year-old who is the focus of a family birthday party. The kid is more interested in the boxes and the wrapping, and throws a fit when he or she is overwhelmed by the attention that goes along with a mountain of gifts plopped at his or her little feet. The poor little thing does not yet have an understanding of the value of the gifts they’ve been given, and can only focus on what they can comprehend, shiny ribbon, brightly colored paper, and the pressure of people pulling them in 18 different directions at the same time.
Now I think this same concept is at work in our text for tonight, Romans 6, 6-9. Our standing before God was improved infinitely by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and those that put their faith in him are heaven-bound for sure. But we may or may not fully realize the value of the gift we’ve been given. Not just the gift of having our sins canceled, but also the gift of having been called to faith in the first place. Those who believe in Christ are his elect, the one the Lord chose to save. He didn’t have to save any of us, but he approaches each one who believes individually, and calls them to faith, repentance, and salvation. He takes our crummy lives before Jesus, and makes us joint heirs with Christ. 167 million chicken feed compared to the incomparable riches that await us in heaven in the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Romans 6, 6 says this. 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. In other words, the Apostle Paul is explaining to us, as if we needed any explanation, that our bodies, before a saving encounter with Jesus, are basically sacks of sin, full of transgressions and wholly unfit for life in the presence of God.
Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. You might be saying, some people are just naturally nice, easygoing, pleasant to be around. We’re not all ax murderers or embezzlers or those who commit other heinous crimes. But, and this is probably a review to many of you in this room or watching on the interweb, even the smallest amount of sin disqualifies us from being in the presence of God.
Now Pastor Tim, back there in the corner, he’s a computer guy, so he will understand this example. I once had a gig shooting some photos inside a data center that belonged to a company here in town. It wasn’t a full-blown clean room where you had to suit up, but before going in, they made sure you were relatively clean and our clothes were tidy. We had to, of course, wipe our shoes before we went in, and then after going through the door into the room where all the servers and the data storage was, we walked across several big pads of adhesive, sticky stuff, that pulled all the grime off of the soles of our shoes. So that no little bits of stuff would be tracked into a room where they stored lots of valuable information. Even the tiniest of specks were not allowed.
Oddly enough, another place where I went and I did have to suit up before going in was a hog farm. I had a job shooting photos at several Illinois pork producers, and those piggies, stinky as they are, have to be kept free of the same viruses that can infect us. You don’t want a million-dollar herd of hogs and sows getting sick and unfit for being made into sausage biscuits and pepperoni pizza. In a similar way, the Lord cannot be in the presence of sin, which we inherently carry within us.
Thus when Paul says, the body of sin must be brought to nothing, he’s saying nothing less than this body, permanently dinged by sin, basically falls away when I put my faith in Christ. And a new me emerges as that old body falls away. But do we always feel like a new man or woman even after putting our faith in Jesus? No, because we are still dealing with the pressures and temptations that go along with living in a fallen creation. And so we need to be reminded, and this is the job of the Holy Spirit, of our new standing in Christ, a standing that is imprinted on us and will become fully visible when we die to this realm and awaken with the Lord.
Now some of you young people may not identify with this, but you older people will. Back in the days when cameras recorded images on film, photographers spoke of the latent image. When film was loaded in a camera and the shutter opened, light passing through the lens hit the film and caused a photochemical reaction that would not manifest itself until the film was processed. That is, passed through the appropriate chemistry that would wash away some of the silver halides and fix the others so that a visible image would emerge. You gotta admit, even in this digital age, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. But before processing, if you could somehow look inside that camera and see it with your eyes, it would look the same as it did before you put it in the camera. Only by the transforming power of that Kodak developer, stop bath, fixer, and hypo-clearing agent did an opaque piece of film become a negative or a slide.
And only by the transforming power of Jesus can his image of godly perfection be overlaid on our natural, very temporary human condition and this body of sin be recreated into a glorified eternal body in heaven just as Jesus is now when we join him that. Is that cool or what? Do you understand? Are you with me so far, class? Whoa, thank you.
So the transforming power of Christ essentially cuts loose our bodies of sin, which will eventually be brought to nothing. They’ll be gone. And our new Christ-like bodies will emerge that will be free of sin or, as Paul says, no longer enslaved to sin. Then in verse seven, Paul reinforces this idea by reiterating that the body bag of sin that we are zipped into as humans on this earthly side of heaven will be unzipped and therefore incapable of surrounding us anymore. He says, for the one who died has been set free of sin.
Again, the image of Christ’s perfection has been imprinted on us by virtue of A, our admission of our sin, B, belief that Jesus died for our sin, and C, our confession of Jesus as Lord and Savior. Since we are fully identified with Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, no further payment for our sin is due. We are truly free indeed.
So even though we must go through the portal of death to exit this fallen realm, the Christian existence is one that cuts us loose from our bodies of sin and opens a whole new world of possibilities. Verse eight, now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. There finally is that fresh start, an absolutely new beginning that we’ve all been longing for. We’re aliens on this earth. This earth is not our home. Jesus said in John 18, 36, my kingdom is not of this world. We’re the Lord’s children, his inheritance.
So when Paul says we will live with Christ, he means we will really live with Christ, but not here, not in this world as it is now. We will be brothers and sisters with him on a new and once again perfect earth, bubbling and brimming with excitement and satisfaction and safety, all steeped in endless praise to the Lord who made it all possible by making us, saving us, and not letting go of us as we made our way through this fallen world. He will welcome us into life on a perfect and worry-free new earth. How worry-free will it be? Totally worry-free.
Verse nine, we know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. Currently, death has dominion over each of us. Our lives on this side of heaven could end at any moment and definitely will end at some moment. But once we punch through that portal of death, smooth sailing.
Did you ever see that movie, Tom, The Right Stuff? Anybody else here see The Right Stuff or read the book? The part about Chuck Yeager and the sound barrier? 1947, Chuck Yeager was the lead test pilot in the Air Force’s pursuit of greater speed for the nation’s fighter jets. Airplanes were going faster and faster, but the scientists and engineers realized that a buildup of shockwaves against an airplane as it approached the speed of sound held it back like an invisible wall of compressed air. Some thought the speed of sound could not be breached. An airplane, they reasoned, would break apart before exceeding the speed of sound due to the extreme forces. And as Yeager pushed the big orange rocket-powered Bell X-1 closer and closer to the speed of sound, there was indeed greater turbulence. As the airspeed indicator encroached on the threshold, the X-1 would shake, tremble and threaten it seemed to come apart.
Finally on October 14th, 1947, inside the big B-29 bomber that carried the X-1 aloft, Yeager made his way into the pilot seat. The command was given to drop the X-1. Yeager lit the rocket motors and gave the X-1 the gun. It shook, it rattled, threatened to come apart, and then boom! If you’ve never experienced a sonic boom, believe me, it’s an awesome experience. Some on the ground thought the X-1 had exploded and that Yeager had bought the farm. But up at 45,000 feet in the atmosphere, Yeager calmly reported that his indicated airspeed was 700 miles per hour, 40 miles faster than the speed of sound at that altitude. His ride was now smooth, quiet, controlled, proving that once you punched through the turbulence, even with a boom, life was good and fast.
And that’s kind of the way it is while we are doing life on this side of heaven, shackled as it were by these bodies of sin that we inhabit. But a peaceful eternity awaits those who persevere and punch through all the turbulence and strife of this existence and ascend through it all to the throne room of God on the wings of Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit keeps us strong as sin and temptation buffet our natural bodies as we resist the shedding of our bodies of sin.
In Romans 6, 6-9, Paul is telling us who are still alive here on earth to take heart. The battle against sin and death is already won. It is finished, John 19-30. So for now, as we live in Christ, our mission is to persevere and await the consummation of our rebirth, which is spiritual rebirth on this side of heaven, but which will become a complete physical rebirth when we punch through and find ourselves in the presence of the Almighty.
In light of all this, our new mission once we are reborn is to wait eagerly and fearlessly for our relocation to our eternal home with Christ, serving as we wait as Jesus’ ambassadors as we spread the good news to family, friends, and even total strangers. But again, it is not always easy. We are, until our physical death to this realm, still clothed in our natural bodies, our bodies of sin, which are not only subject to decay, but also bombarded by the temptation to return to our sinful ways, just as a dog returns to his, you know what.
As mentioned earlier, we are easily distracted, and even though we say we desire fresh starts and new beginnings, we have a tendency to want to stay where we are, to do the things we know how to do in ways we’ve always done them. Now maybe not in an extreme way, like the $167 million lottery winner in Kentucky we mentioned earlier, but in subtle ways, ways that seem to us to be not so bad, but still a retreat from what the Lord would have us do, a retreat from our new mission, which is to live for Him.
For instance, the Lord called Peter away from his business, a successful business apparently as a commercial fisherman. The Lord said, Peter, come on, come on. You can still fish, but you’ve got a new mission. We’re going after a different kind of catch, not fillet of soul, but human souls. Peter left his boats and his nets immediately and followed Christ. He followed Jesus so faithfully that at one point Jesus famously told Simon, now Petros, upon this rock, I will build my church. But after three years of following Jesus, three years of witnessing the teaching of Christ, the miracles of Christ, everything that went along with being an intimate of Immanuel, Peter suddenly experienced the buffeting and turbulence that went along with Jesus’ early earthly ministry during the Passion Week.
Chuck Yeager said that on every flight of the X-1, as he got closer and closer to breaking the sound barrier, his heart was in his throat and his stomach was churning. I’m sure that with every confrontation between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees, with every run-in with those who would do Satan’s bidding and attempt to derail Jesus’ march to the cross, Peter’s heart must have been in his throat and his stomach must have churned. And at the moment of truth, when Jesus needed the love and support of his earthly team, Peter caved. Peter caved. And in the midst of weariness and confusion, Peter suddenly longed to retreat to a time before he had met Jesus, a time when the biggest problem he had was not falling overboard. I don’t know him, Peter said. No, not me, I am not one of his disciples, he protested. Don’t you get it? I don’t know him, Peter said angrily. Then Peter wept bitter tears. He knew he had failed in his new mission.
Later, a resurrected Jesus appeared to Peter and the disciples. But Peter’s relationship with Jesus was still in a sort of a state of suspended animation, although I’m sure his sense of failure hung over him like the sword of Damocles. This period must have been unbearable for Peter, the doubt, the guilt, the regret building every day, turbulence and buffeting for sure. When there was a pause in the action, Peter, man of action that he was, responded to his confusion and grief by retreating to that which he knew. He went fishing, which was probably just the opportunity that Jesus had planned to re-catch Peter and reel him in for good. To cement in Peter’s mind what his new mission was and to do so in no uncertain terms.
You know the story from John chapter 21. Peter and the boys are fishing just as they did pre-Jesus. They’re not catching anything, just as they did pre-Jesus. Jesus tells them to try tossing the net on the other side of the boat, just like he did when he called Peter the first time. The net is so full of fish that the disciples can’t haul it aboard. Peter, this time recognizing and seizing the opportunity, dives into the water and swims like a drag boat to shore to be with Jesus. Christ has breakfast prepared for the disciples and after eating, Jesus has a one-on-one with Peter, John 21 verses 15 through 19.
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, Lord, you know I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. He said to him a third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he had said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you. Jesus said to him, feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go. This he said to show what kind of death he would glorify God. And after saying this, he said to him, follow me.
Like Peter, we, as believers in Jesus, have each been given a new mission. If you, like me, are ever tempted to chuck it all and retreat, remember, you don’t find new horizons and deepen your walk with Christ by throwing things into reverse. In your earthly Christian walk, if you fall or you fail at some point, cry out to the Lord and he will, as he did with Peter, restore you to the path of righteousness. Then continue to serve, study, pray and prevail. Stay the course, finish the race and complete your new mission.
Let’s pray. Lord and Savior, you have brought us together tonight in this small room, but yet around the world, on this big planet, to worship you, to praise you, to study your word and we’re grateful that your word, even all these years after it was written, is still just as effective for our lives as it was the day it was written. Lord, you have such great patience with us. You have assigned us a new mission. You have given us the tools to accomplish it, but yet we find ways to mess it up. Forgive us, restore us, get us back on our feet, dust us off, and send us off in the right direction. Thank you, Jesus, for not giving up on us. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for continuing to talk to us, to sanctify us, to strengthen us in these sometimes difficult days. Lord, we are grateful for this church and the impact it’s making. Thank you for Tim and his leadership. And now, as we end this part of the service and we continue to worship you tonight through the study of your word, may everything we do be to your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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