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“Alive
to God”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Romans 6:1b-11
“So you also must consider
yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Dear Sisters and Brothers, this letter which the Apostle Paul wrote to
the Christians in Rome, has had as great an influence upon the church as
any other holy scripture. St.
Augustine, who is one of the greatest fathers of the church, who lived
in the late 300s, was a Greek philosopher until he read the New
Testament’s letter to the Romans.
Then he was converted into a Christian.
And, in the growth of the new church, St. Augustine was a
wonderful doctor of the church. He probably would have said that was because God spoke to him
through the book of Romans.
We as Presbyterians are known as a part of the Reformed Church, which
was not meant to protest against the Roman Catholic Church. The father of the reformation was Martin Luther, a German who
lived in the 1500s. He
discovered that the real presence of Christ is in the Word of God,
through reading and preaching, as the real presence of Christ is in the
Lord’s Supper. His desire
was to help reform the church he was in and loved.
And he was reformed himself, from and about the Word of God,
through his studying Romans.
Most of you know who my favorite theologian is; Karl Barth.
He was in the German style Presbyterian Church.
He was as brilliant in theology as Albert Einstein was in
physics. Even the Roman
Catholic Pope, in Barth’s days, Pope Pius XII said that Karl Barth was
the greatest theologian in the last 500 years.
Karl Barth did not start out as an academic theologian. His beginning ministry was as a pastor of a church about the
size of ours. The church
had a Session with about eight elders.
After a number of years, about five or six of the elders left the
church because they did not like Barth’s preaching.
Barth had been to a higher education that would probably be classified
as liberal. And all his
preaching at that time was simply about social issues.
He was not teaching and preaching the scriptures.
When he realized this, he read and wrote a commentary on Romans
that was so deep spiritually that he was then led to be a university
professor of theology. Romans
changed him. He was never
the pastor of a church again, but he did preach every Sunday at a local
prison.
Yes, my sisters and brothers, you have been given a long introduction to
the history of the epistle of Roman’s great gifts to the church of
Jesus Christ.
We are alive to God. And
Paul is sharing with us a spiritually deeper meaning than our common way
of thinking that God is up above the stars, in heaven, watching us, and
making things happen in our lives.
When the Son of God was born into the very heart of Jesus of Nazareth,
in order for God to become a human being, God united God’s being with
the very foundation of your being in such a way that you will never,
through all eternity, be separated from God.
We are dead to sin. Again,
our common way of thinking about sin is defining it as certain actions
we take which disobey the laws of God.
But Paul is showing us, by writing about being united with
Christ, that before certain actions were taken that we call sin, we were
in a state where we felt separated from God.
Before we make decisions to do, or not to do certain things, the devil
of this world can put us in a state of perception, where we feel
separated from who we really are, from others, and from God.
This is sin.
But, the greatest truth in our lives is that we are now, and forever,
dead to sin and alive to God. As
we do have faith, we still continually need to grow in understanding
more about our relationship with God.
Be still and think and meditate about God being a triune God.
God is love. God is three persons who love each other in a perfectly
divine way, and as three persons they are always united. There is no such a thing as separation in God.
Separation was started by Satan.
God is so glorious, that God can perceive and analyze the whole universe
at any time. The greatest
will and passion that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always had
together, is that they would not be God without being united to you.
The eternal decree of God is that the Son would become a human so He
could bring us back to God the Father with Him and our converted lives
will be that we are family members in God’s life forever.
This has already been accomplished.
And when this was accomplished, God had you personally and individually in God’s heart.
Okay, here is one more story. One
of greatest preachers in the 1900s was Donald Barnhouse.
He was the Pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in
Philadelphia, PA. At one
time, he decided to preach through the Book of Romans, from the first
verse to last verse. He
preached every Sunday on Romans. He
did this for five years. Donald
Barnhouse gave five years of his ministry to preach the truth of every
verse of St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome.
If this is God’s will, I am going have sermons from Romans every
Sunday that I’m here for the next three months.
We are dead to sin. We
are alive to God.
Let us pray…
Amen.
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