Sermon Title: Understanding Sin and Salvation

Scripture: Romans 6:19-23

Sermon Summary: This sermon explores the fundamental Christian concepts of sin and salvation, emphasizing the gravity of sin as separation from God and the crucial importance of Jesus' death on the cross. It addresses common misunderstandings about sin and forgiveness, explaining why God cannot simply forgive sin without consequence and why Jesus' sacrificial death was necessary for human redemption. The sermon delves into the nature of sin as enslaving and destructive, contrasting it with the freedom and life offered through Christ's atonement.

Key Points:

  • Sin is separation from God, our source of life, leading to death
  • The seriousness of sin is evident in its consequences, as seen in Genesis
  • Sin is enslaving, working like an addiction that promises good but delivers death
  • God's justice and love necessitated a solution that both punishes sin and saves sinners
  • Jesus' death on the cross serves as substitutionary atonement, taking our place and punishment
  • Christ's sacrifice provides eternal redemption and purification from sin

Transcript:

You know, sometimes Christians will use words and phrases so much that we kind of forget what they mean. We'll say things, for instance, like, all people are sinners, or Jesus died for our sins. But we may kind of lose sight of what exactly we mean by that. That can kind of become cliches. And so it's sometimes helpful for us to go back to the basics to understand what is going on behind the scenes, behind these kinds of phrases. And our epistle reading from Romans chapter 6 today is a good place to go to start with the basics. I'd like especially to highlight verse 23. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. This verse and the verses leading up to it teach us two important things. First of all, it teaches us the seriousness of sin, and secondly, the significance of Jesus' death on the cross. And these are important topics for us to talk about in today's society, because most people do not, in fact, take sin seriously. And so they don't understand the significance of Jesus' death. For instance, you'll sometimes hear people say, well, what do you Christians mean by saying Jesus died for my sins or for our sins? I mean, can't God just forgive? Everybody, can you just say, oh, well, I'll let you guys off this time. You know, he is a loving God after all, right? Well, in order to answer questions like this, let's go on a journey through Scripture so that we can better understand what our epistle reading means by saying the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life. And that we can also better explain to people why Jesus' death is so important. Let's first tackle the seriousness of sin. If you would open your Bibles. We read Genesis 2 today for our Old Testament reading. I'd like especially to turn our attention to verses 16 and 17. This is the setup for everything else in Scripture. This kind of sets the playing field, so to speak. And especially starting at verse 16, we get the foundation of being able to understand this. "And the Lord God says, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die." This maybe seems a bit strange to you. I mean, why did God give Adam the chance to screw everything up? It doesn't make that much sense. Everything in the world was perfect. Why would God leave the door open to evil to come in? Adam was immortal. Why would God leave death as a possibility? Well, it all makes sense if you remember that God is a loving God. God wanted to love mankind, to be in a relationship with mankind. But you can't have a loving relationship with a robot. A creature that just automatically does everything that God says is a robot, not a person. And so in order to love God, in order for Adam's love for God to be real, Adam had to have the ability to leave God behind. To separate himself from God. To disobey God. This, by the way, explains why death specifically is the penalty for sin. Because sin doesn't mean breaking an old-fashioned taboo. Sin doesn't mean rebelling against some random arbitrary standards or rules. Sin means separating yourself from God. And since God's the one who created and gave us life, he's the one who breathed life into us. He breathed life into the dust to make Adam a living being. When we sin, or when we separate ourselves from God, we're cutting ourselves off from our source of life. It's as if a scuba diver were to cut off the oxygen tanks. He's going to die. He's going to drown. Saying that death is the penalty for sin, or that the wages of sin is death, is really just another way of saying that we cannot have life apart from God. It's not, as some people would say, that God's some sort of whimsical or abusive tyrant who just likes torturing people, who doesn't do what he says. It's not like that at all. It's just the natural consequence of things. The scuba diver has no right to complain that he's drowning if he's the one who cut the oxygen tanks. Which then explains, when we understand all this, it explains what happens next. If you turn the pages in your Bibles to Genesis 3, verses 17-19, we see the serious consequences of what happens when Adam and Eve sin. God says to Adam, beginning verse 17, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return." So now we can see why sin is so serious. Sin separates us from God, separates us from our source of life and everything good, and so sin is the cause of all of the pain, all of the suffering, all of the hopelessness, all the death that we experience in this world, and in the world to come. For we are dust, and to dust we shall return. And if you go forward to our epistle reading, to Romans chapter 6, we get a further detail that we are slaves to sin and death. We cannot escape them. Romans 6, verses 19 through 21. "Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death."

You know, people always talk about God's commandments as if they were restricting and enslaving, and that sin is liberating and free, but it's actually the other way around, if you think about it. You see, sin works like an addiction. Addictions work by promising you something good and never fully giving it to you. You get a taste of it, but that good feeling of it goes away, and then you go through withdrawal. You get that caused by that drug of choice, and you go back to that drug of choice to overcome the pain caused by that drug of choice, and you end up in this endless cycle. It's a little bit, almost if you could imagine, imagine you saw someone up against a wall, just hitting their head against the wall, and you ask, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And they're like, well, I really like the feeling that I get when I stop hitting my head against the wall. You might think that's ridiculous. You might think they're crazy. You might say, well, you know that nice feeling you had? I feel that way all the time. But that is exactly what sin is like. Sin says that you can get good things by doing bad things. Sin never follows through, and sin just leaves you digging yourself further and further into a pit of guilt until finally it kills you. Sin's not liberating. Sin is not freedom. Sin is slavery. It's addiction to death. Which is why Jesus' death on the cross is so significant. The wages of sin is death, and since all humans have sinned, all of us are going to die. All of us are going to have to deal with the consequences of our own sin. But since we're slaves to sin, since we're slaves to sin, since we're sin addicts, that's not going to happen. That is, unless God intervenes.

You know that question we asked at the beginning, why can't God just forgive everyone's sin? I'll give you a free pass. God can't do that because He is good and because He is just. God can't pretend that sin has no real consequences. He can't pretend that evil is good or that injustice is just. But then on the flip side, why doesn't God just let everyone die? Why doesn't He just start from scratch? You know, recreate the universe. If we're such lost causes, why does He even bother? Well, He can't do that because He is loving. God couldn't just say, sit back and watch His creation go to hell in a handbag. God is both loving and just. And that means that He has to find a way to save us from sin while upholding justice. And that is why Jesus died on the cross. That's what we mean by saying that Jesus died for our sins. By becoming a man, God was able to let the consequences of our sin fall on Himself. God was able to suffer the pain of all human suffering. God was able to die our death. This, by the way, is what we call in theology substitutionary atonement. That's your $10 word for the day. In other words, it means that Christ reunited or made atonement between us and God by being our substitute, by taking the consequences of our sin, by dying in our place. This principle of substitutionary atonement was foreshadowed in the Old Testament by the animal sacrifice, where the animal would be killed in place of the people. But Christ made the ultimate sacrifice to end all sacrifices when He died on the cross. The Bible has a lot to say about this. One of the best places to go is the book of Hebrews. If you could turn in your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 9, we get a really good summary of this idea of atonement. Hebrews chapter 9, verses 11 through 14. "But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent not made with hands, that is not of this creation, He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctified the pure flesh, the pure flesh, how much more will the Holy Spirit that the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God purify our consciences from dead works to serve the living God." And so we see both why sin is so serious and why it's so important that Jesus died on the cross. Sin is a fatal addiction. It's a terminal illness that would kill us all both spiritually and physically. But by His death on the cross, by His substitutionary for us death on the cross, Christ died, in our place, died our death so that we could be reunited with God and live eternally. So when people talk about sin as that big of a deal, or when they don't understand why Christians are so obsessed with some guy getting capital punishment two thousand years ago, you can explain to them that this is the basics of what Christianity is all about.