Please use your browser's back arrow to return to the previous page

Buried with Christ

Romans 6: 1 – 14

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 04 Sep, 2005

FOR SOME time now, those whom I have been praying for to offer themselves for baptism have included John Bautista. God is answering that prayer today.

I want to talk about baptism today, about being buried with Christ, and about being raised with him into a redeemed, restored kind of life.

We have died to sin, we are baptised into Christ’s death; we are raised into a new life. Those are the three certainties in today’s passage.

I like Romans 6. I like it for several reasons. I like it because it reveals God’s plan for salvation so clearly. I like it because it is a key part of Paul’s most comprehensive exposition of the Christian faith. And I like it because it has memories attached to it.

When I was a teenager and young man, it was a favourite passage for many Baptist evangelists, and was often referred to in connexion with baptism. When I read it, I think of those nights when 10 or 15 people would come out the front in a Baptist service to receive Christ, sometimes every Sunday night for weeks, and then, a month or so later, most would be baptised in a glorious celebration.

But it also has another good memory attached, because one of the first baptisms I ever performed, perhaps the first, was 21 years ago, around this time of the year. And this was the passage I preached on. The young woman I baptised was named Divina Bautista.

It is great to be baptising her son today!

Let’s believe God for more baptisms, because, if we believe him for conversions, those conversions should be marked, should be landmarked, by baptisms.

Dead to sin

This is a wonderful passage. But some poorly–instructed preachers have made extreme claims about what Paul promises in this passage under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration. Be clear on what Paul is really saying.

Take in Romans 6 today; take it in carefully. But I also warn you: don’t stay in Romans 6. Move on to Romans 8 as well, then you will get a fuller picture of what it means to die to sin. But you can’t move to Romans 8 without Romans 6 and 7 first. There’s a progression here. Romans 6 deals with the principle of sin, Romans 7 deals with the psychology of sin, and Romans 8 deals with the power of sin. Romans 6 tells us where we stand in relation to the reality of sin in the world, Romans 8 tells us how to break the habits of sin.

So Paul says,

We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?

Here is the basis for new life in Christ. We are dead to sin. We have died to the old world where sin reigns.

Our elder son, Luke, visited us lately. It was nice to have him around. But he doesn’t live here anymore. He has effectively died to Australia and now lives his life in Sidcup, England.

But Luke can visit us and sort–of feel at home here. That’s not how it should be for us who are in Christ by faith. If we have died to the old realm of sin, how can we live there?

Every one of us faces temptations in life. Someone comes along and says, “I can give you what you want. I can provide what you feel you lack in everyday life. It might not be exactly moral for you to have it, but everyone else does it.”

And you will really want to do it. You will want to take what does not belong to you. You will desire to gain something at someone else’s expense. You will long for what you can only have by betraying someone else.

But all those things belong to the old world of sin, and you don’t live there any more. If you go there, you will be a ghost, a dead person returning. And the world will see it.

I read about someone who made a commitment to Christ and then slipped back to a worldly way of life. After a while one of his friends took him aside and said, “You don’t belong in this way of life. I don’t know what makes you different, but you should return to the life you belong to.”

Baptism is a symbol and a sign of death. It says, ”Once I lived in the realm where sin reigns supreme, but I belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. He died to that realm and has been raised to new life in the realm where God reigns supreme. And I share in that death and that resurrection.”

Paul puts it this way:

...the Father... has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. ¹³ For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

This is our condition before God. He has brought us to safety from out of the realm where darkness rules, and has brought us to live in the Kingdom of his Son. He has brought us out of sin through death to the realm of sin, and he has brought us into life through the risen life of Christ.

When you live in the kingdom of the Son, you may still speak with the accents of the dark world. When you have died to sin, you may still have some of the habits of thought and of action that come from that old realm. But you no longer belong there. Christ has died; and, by faith, you have died with him.

By being baptised, you have not become sinlessly perfect, but you have put on the customary dress of your new world; you are naturalised into the land where you belong.

Baptised into death.

In the early days of the Christian faith, the gospel spread quickly into the major cities of the Roman Empire. Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Athens, Ephesus... wherever there was a city, there was a gathering of believers.

But it also spread into some inhospitable regions. It spread into the deserts of Syria and across towards Afghanistan and even India. If there was no water to baptise with, sometimes they could only pour water over someone, because there were no pools deep enough. And sometimes they dug a pit for the candidate, and threw sand in — a real burial, of a sort.

The reason was that they were desperate to find a symbol of death and burial, because being baptised is a symbol of entering into and sharing in Jesus’ own death.

Do you disparage symbolism? Some people demand the real thing, and consider symbols an old fashioned idea.

I was in a retreat group once, and one participant was going through a dreadful time in one of the most isolated churches in the State.

Not only were the area’s two Protestant Evangelical churches in the grips of attacks from inside and outside which threatened to tear the churches apart, but my friend was also undergoing some devastating personal issues.

We talked to him for four days, but, at the end, he still didn’t feel supported.

Our team leader got a blanket and spread it on the floor. He told the young man to lie on it. Then he asked the rest of us to lift him off the floor.

“Do you feel supported now,” he asked.

The young man burst into tears. “Yes, now I do,” he replied.

Never underestimate the value of a symbol.

When you are baptised, you are immersed in Jesus’ death. You experience what it is, not to be in control, but to surrender to God’s loving mercy.

A friend of mine, the first time he tried to baptise anyone, used the method where the candidate is lowered down backwards. Unfortunately the man, who was 2m tall, was terrified of water. He went rigid, and his feet slipped off the baptistry floor. My friend found himself trying to hold all that weight by himself. They nearly both drowned! You’ll notice, John — and Cath — that I always baptise people forwards!

But, regardless of which direction you go in, baptism places you into someone else’s hands for a moment. You experience that sense of what it is to be in God’s hands. It is possible to think about that situation. It is possible to talk about it. It is even possible to imagine it. But you will not experience it until you actually experience it, even if that experience is only a model of the real thing.

John, when I baptised your mother, I set this out very clearly, that those early Christians knew that being baptised was an action in which each of them signed his or her own death warrant.

It hasn’t really changed — it’s just that we don’t read the fine print so much these days.

There has been a lot of talk lately about suicide bombers, and some Muslims are very proud of their so–called “martyrs.” But the real martyrs are those Christians who, out of a desire to testify to their own faith, are faithful unto death at the hands of their enemies. The real martyrs are those who refuse to return evil for evil, who deny their right to take vengeance, and who struggle to love to the end, as Jesus loved to the end.

When you are baptised, when I was baptised, we all confess in that act that our lives are no longer our own and that a death like Jesus’ death is well–and–truly possible for us.

There are two sides to responding to what Jesus did for us.

There is substitution. That means that Jesus did my dying for me. He took the penalty; he paid the price. He entered the field when I could go on no further.

The other side is identification. His death is mine; I am integrated in him and he is integrated in me.

In substitution, God says, in effect, “Your sin has created a gulf between you and me. Your rebellion means separation from me and from life itself. All that you can hope for is death and hell.”

But, as soon as I confess,

“You are righteous in all your judgments, Lord: my sin is beyond healing,” God is there. As soon as I repent, God says, “I have an answer. You deserve to die, but my one and only Son — the man in whom I have chosen to dwell — he died for you. He paid the price, he took your place.”

On the other side, he is my model and my guide. He is like a swimming coach or a dancing teacher, who holds your hands, who stands toe to toe with you, so that you learn to follow every move to the exact timing and movement of the master. The goal is complete identification, so that I become an accurate reflection of the dying and risen Lord.

In baptism, you declare both aspects. Jesus died for you; you choose to die with him.

Raised to new life

The third aspect today is being raised to new life.

Paul writes,

⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

It is incredible to me that there are still Christians around who think of eternal life as something that happens after you die. That’s a kind of semi–eternal life. It‘s eternal at the far end, but it doesn’t start being eternal straight away.

The Bible says

Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son shall not see life, but God’s wrath remains on him.

If you have Jesus Christ, God’s Son, then you have already — you have life. And, if you don’t have the Son, you also have already — you have the abiding wrath of God.

That’s the choice: salvation now or judgment now. Never think of God's wrath as being an out–of–control rage. It is precise and accurate, the exact retribution to suit our sins.

Baptism itself never gives you eternal life. Don’t misinterpret Paul here. He was never one for meaningless rituals; on the other hand, he saw the value of rituals which express and convey the full intent of what a person believes.

Baptism itself does not save you; but baptism administered to someone with a clear and personal faith expresses both the idea of dying with Christ and the idea of rising again with him. That is why I sometimes seem to harp on being baptised. If you believe and are not baptised, you are robbing yourself of something of value. You are robbing yourself of the chance to experience, in a small way, what it means to die with Christ and to rise again with him.

As I have often said, “Without baptism, faith is little more than a good idea. With baptism, you have begun to put your faith into practice.”

And, as James says,

Faith without works is dead.

Conclusion

John, you have left the realm of sin through faith in Jesus Christ our Lord. Sin no longer has dominion over you. You no longer belong in that kind of world.

It is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit to develop holiness of life within you; but it is the work of Jesus to deliver you from sin’s domain and bring you into the new realm of God’s Kingdom. Baptism declares that deliverance.

Through baptism, you are also declaring, to all who hear and see, that you are a participant in the death of Jesus; his death is yours; your death — whenever it comes — shall be part of his. You belong to him now, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. His death is effective for you, now and forever more. The price is paid: you have entered in to all that Jesus died to make our own.

And, finally, baptism declares your certain hope that you share in his resurrection. You have a new kind of life that will never end. Your body will eventually decay, because that is the lot of us all — unless Jesus comes before that time — but, in this life, you experience the beginnings of resurrection, and, on that glad and glorious Day when the dead in Christ rise, you will be there with all the redeemed of God.

Baptism lays your faith on the line. What you declare this morning as you pass through the waters you will need to live out day by day at work and at home, among your friends and when you are alone.

You are at a watershed of life. Let’s go down into the waters together.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)