Mindset: Where's Your Focus?
Romans 6:11–19
Romans Lesson #072
August 30, 2012
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What we see in Romans 6:11 is where Paul comes to a conclusion based on all what he has said in the previous ten verses which state the reality of what God has provided for us. Suddenly when we get to verse 11 we run into imperatives, commands. In light of what God has given us there are things we have to do in order to utilize those assets and to maximize them, and to turn them from just things that are potential to things that are actually in our lives.
As we looked at the end part of the opening section of Romans section we saw that the parallel argument in Romans 6:5–7 and then 8–10, building off of the whole concept of what happened at salvation, understanding this radical, non-experiential identification that happens at the instant of salvation where we are identified with Christ in His death. So a death occurs in us, a death to the old man. Scripture says we are dead to sin, it never says the sin nature is dead. The old man is dead but we still have to recognize that we are dead to sin. The old man is all of the things that we were before we were saved—our thoughts, our opinions, our values, our habits, etc. We are separated from them. The main idea of death is that separation. Romans 6:5 NASB “For if we have become united with {Him} in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” Identification with Christ in His death is always related to justification; identification with Christ in His resurrection is always related to sanctification, the spiritual life—we are raised to new life.
This is the same kind of thing that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15 when he talks about the resurrection of Christ. It is very important to understand that in terms of some other issues in the content of the gospel. But the content of the gospel focuses on trusting in Christ as the Messiah, the substitute, the sacrificial Lamb without spot or blemish that pays the price for our sins. That is the gospel we believe. It is important to believe the resurrection but the resurrection is not connected to justification. The resurrection is connected to new life and sanctification and spiritual growth. “… we shall also be {in the likeness} of His resurrection.” It is that new life that we have in Christ. It is a future potential that we have in 6:5, realized not after death but at the instant we are saved.
Then he uses a causal participle [v.6] “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with {Him,} in order that our body of sin [sin nature] might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” As long as we are not dealing with the sin nature in our lives we are still going to be slaves to sin, but the old means is dead and we have to die to sin. [7]”for he who has died has been declared righteous from sin.”
Then in Romans 6:8-10 we have the repetition of this in this form in applying the conclusion of 6:7 to Christ in our spiritual life: “Now if [and we have] we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” That is the abundant life. [9] “knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. [10] For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.” That last verse is important because that sets the pattern for understanding verse 11.
Romans 6:11 NASB “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” This is the analogy to what we are to do. The reality is that Christ died for sin one and for all. It was a permanent break. Now He lives to God. Then Paul is going to build on that. There are some other verses and passages of Scripture that in terms of some specific areas of the Christian life are arguably more significant. But in terms of the foundation for the spiritual life there is not a more significant passage than Romans 6:11–14. It is so foundational to understand this. It is talking about the mindset that we have to have so that that becomes something more than just something we do every now and then but most of the time we are out of fellowship rather than in fellowship. If we really are going to grow we have to capture this mental focus that is here. It is all about our mental attitude.
We see a couple of things related to the verb here, “reckon,” or in some translations “consider” or “think.” It is first of all an imperative mood verb, a command to every single believer (second person plural). So it is not an option, it is a mandate. We can’t get to what we want, which is to experience the richness, joy, happiness, blessing, everything that God promises us in this life, unless we do this. It is foundational. And so it is addressed to our volition, which means if we are not experiencing it, it is not God’s fault; it is our fault. We are not completing the task that God has given us; we are not following through on this imperative.
A second thing we need to see about this is that this is a mind-related verb, a mentality-related verb, a thought word. It is LOGIZOMAI in the Greek, and the noun LOGOS comes from the verb LOGIZOMAI. LOGIZOMAI means to think, to reason, to calculate, to utilize logic in something, to add something up and come to a conclusion. All of that is part of the meaning of this word. Even though in the English and in the Greek it is only stated one time it is the verb for both clauses of this verse. It should read: “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin but reckon yourselves alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It governs both parts of this. So it is a verb that is related to thought and it is related as such to our mental attitude.
A lot of decisions that we have made in life are decisions that we make because we are influenced somehow by what we want other people to think about us. We want to gain somebody’s approval in the sense that we want them to think well of us. So often the decisions we make are made because of how we want other people to see us and think about us.
When we look at this passage God is telling us how we are to be thinking about ourselves spiritually. Up to the point of salvation we thought of ourselves one way, whether it was conscious or not. That whole culture of our life related to the person we were before we were saved has been left behind. There is this break, this separation that has occurred here because that person has been crucified [is dead]. We are separated from that person.
Whatever our experience is, whether it is an experience of having learned discipline and self-mastery and a focused life, or an unfocused, undisciplined life that went just any direction you wanted to go in, you developed habits. And until the day that you were saved all of those habits were formed from the sin nature. That is what Paul says here. We adopted a lot of those patterns from a lot of different sources. Some of them were genetically influenced.
As we grow up we learn a lot of these different patterns and sometimes when we are not disciplined well or we just get angry we act out the lust patterns of our sin nature. Every one of us are constantly acting out those lust patterns and prior to salvation when we were totally controlled by the sin nature everything that we were acting out, good or bad, is all coming from that core root evil of that corrupt nature. And in the process of that, especially if we have a trend towards asceticism and morality, our sin nature tricks us into thinking that somehow we control it. And we still think that.
Long before anything really changed spiritually for us, i.e., long before we were ever saved, we became the master servant of the sin nature that controlled us. That is what Paul says through all this. We were slaves of the sin nature and we did what that sin nature said to do. Then one day we heard the gospel, understood it, and believed it. What the Bible tells us is all of those patterns, habits, and all of those things that made us happy and comfortable and worked for us, even though at times we think it still does, the Bible tells us that that person is dead and gone, we are separated from that person totally and completely and we have a new identity. Something radical has happened.
What God tells us in this passage is that we have to come to believe that when it says “consider yourselves dead to sin” it means we have to believe that we are dead to the sin nature. When the sin nature is wrapping its tentacles of desire around our thinking so that we really want to do or react or whatever in ways you know you shouldn’t, you can say no. We have to say, I believe that this is a promise of God that on the basis of what Christ did for me on the Cross, I don’t have to carry through as I have done in the past. If we don’t learn this principle when we are a young believer and don’t begin to put it into practice until later, which is true for most of us, then we just get more and more ingrained in those sin nature patterns. We have to learn that we have to think differently about who we are. We are to think of ourselves as a dead-to-sin kind of person, a person who has been completely separated from everything that that pre-regeneration person was.
Romans 6:19 NASB “ … For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in {further} lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.” We present ourselves for sanctification. If we want to be sanctified this section from v. 11-19 is telling us the foundational way to think, the foundational focus of our mindset so that we can be sanctified experientially. We are already sanctified positionally but we have to be sanctified experientially.
The command in verse 11 is to “reckon yourselves,” a present imperative. Present imperatives emphasize something that is a general or universal truth that should be the standard operating procedure for every believer. This is a universal absolute for every single believer. Up until the time that we get a hold of this principle in this verse we have different ways of thinking about who we are. What Paul is saying here is that we need to start thinking of ourselves as this new creature in Christ. And it is not going to change over night. We are going to easily go back to the way we used to think about ourselves because that is the default position that has been carved into our thinking through so many years of sin nature habit patterns. We have to change that habit pattern. It is not easy but it is possible.
“… to be dead to sin.” The idea there is not that we don’t exist anymore, that sin doesn’t exist anymore, but that we are separated from the sin nature. (Remember, sin in the singular in this chapter here refers to the sin nature) We are now to think of ourselves as separated from sin. The way this is expressed in the Greek if we were to translate it literally is, “You also you reckon yourselves dead to sin.” There is the insertion of the second person plural pronoun there and then the second person emphatic there for “yourselves” to emphasize the fact that it is up to the volition of each and every one of us.
On the other hand, positively, we are “alive to God in Christ Jesus.” We are not just saying we are not going to sin, it is that we are alive to God. We are replacing the negative of “I’m separated from the control of my sin nature” with the positive, “I am living for God.” We have a new identity as members of the royal family of God with new assets, new capabilities and a new identity, and we have to learn how to exploit that if we are going to have any joy and happiness in life whatsoever. That life that we have toward God is “in Christ.”
Verse 11 is the conclusion of everything that has gone before and then we have a transition paragraph in vv. 12–14 before we get into the second half of the chapter. Here Paul draws a conclusion. Romans 6:12 NASB “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts.” This isn’t legalism. Legalism is saying God blesses us because of what I do; now I do what I do because God has already blessed me with every blessing in the heavenlies. The person who is a legalist is saying he has to do these things in order to get God to bless him, rather than God has given him all of the blessings but He is not going to dole them out to him experientially until he has some maturity in order to be able to handle them. He has to develop the capacity for them.
Paul starts off with the negative: don’t let sin reign; don’t let sin have dominion in your life; don’t let sin rule your mortal body. He is talking about any kind of sin. All sin is usually expressed through our body—anger, resentment, bitterness, gossip, slander.
Romans 6:13 NASB “and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members {as} instruments of righteousness to God.” We are not supposed to let sin rule over us because we are not under law but under grace.
The first verb in v. 12, “do not let sin reign,” is the verb BASILEUO. It means to rule, to be the king, to reign. When we look at our life, does the sin nature control it? The answer to that is here: don’t let sin reign. How do we do that? That is what the tension is. Do we just prop ourselves up by our bootstraps and say we are not going to do it? That is the frustration that Paul experiences in Romans 7 because he doesn’t mention the help that we get until chapter 8:2 when he brings in the Holy Spirit. “Don’t let sin reign” is a present active imperative, which means this is to be the standard operating procedure, our code of conduct as a Christian.
“Your mortal body” – the sin nature is passed on genetically, physically. But it is through the body that we express our sin nature. The body is the tool the sin nature uses in order to bring its lusts to conclusion. Romans 8:10 NASB “If [and it is true] Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin…” What he is saying there, as we shall see, is that the body is separated from the control of the sin nature and we have got to not let our body be the instrument of the sin nature.
Then we get to the next two commands in verse 13. Both are the same verb, PARISTEMI, which means to present or to offer yourself. It is a term sometimes used in sacrifices. One is a present active indicative but it is a negative command. The idea there is if you want to be able to let sin stop ruling your life you have to do two things. They are mutually exclusive. You have to stop presenting your members as an instrument of unrighteousness, and when you do that you start presenting it to God as an instrument of righteousness. You can’t do both at the same time. You just have to say yes to God and no to the sin nature. That is how you stop letting sin govern in your life.
Another thing that is interesting in this passage is that there is a military nuance to this word of presenting yourself to something. There is a command in the military, in the arms manual, called present arms. It is a salute. It is that idea. Then there is the word “instruments,” and that also has a military sense. There are a number of people who take this and fit it into a broader context of spiritual warfare. Remember, spiritual warfare is what happens between your ears. Spiritual warfare has to do with the decisions that we make and so the idea here, translating it with that sense, is don’t present your weapons—thinking of the body as the expression of your sin nature. The body is the expression of your sin nature as it seeks to impact the world system. So if we think about it in that sense it has a little more concrete image—Quit presenting your members as weapons of unrighteousness for sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members as weapons of righteousness to God. So who are we going to serve here? That is the issue. Who do we want to be the commanding officer in our life? The sin nature or God?
Romans 6:14 NASB “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” Here we have a different word for ruling, KURIEUO which means to rule over something or to dominate it. It is a future active indicative, and future active indicatives are used to express commands. So what Paul is saying here is that the reason you are not to present your members as weapons for the sin nature but as weapons for God is because you are not to let sin have dominion over you. Why? Because you are no longer that kind of a person. That is a command, not a suggestion.
What does he mean that we are not under law but under grace? Options: What a lot of people think here, well we are not under the Mosaic Law (that is what this is referring to here) and the question we need to ask is: how is being released from the Mosaic Law free us from the experiential control of the sin nature? That is how this is usually read, and just because the Mosaic Law has been cancelled it doesn’t mean anybody is any freer. We haven’t interpreted this dispensationally. Under law refers to the dispensation of the Mosaic Law; under grace refers to the church age. Under the Mosaic Law there was no provision, no capacity for freedom from the sin nature.
How do we become free from the sin nature? When we trust Christ as savior we are identified with Christ’s crucifixion in something called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Did John the Baptist experience that? Did Moses experience that? Did Daniel experience that? No, they didn’t have that. They didn’t have their sin nature crucified with Christ. They didn’t live in a dispensation where that was a reality; they were still under sin because they were in the dispensation of the Mosaic Law. But in the church age we are not under the Mosaic Law anymore, we are in a different reality. And because we are living in a different reality we can have freedom from the sin nature. But it is not a freedom to sin; it is a freedom to not sin. That is Paul’s whole argument here.
We have something in the church age that no one has ever had before. That is the foundation of our spiritual life. That is why that the spiritual life of the church age believer is so unique; it has never been like this before. Never, before the day of Pentecost, did any believer have the power of the sin nature broken. That is the reality but we have to get that into our thinking and think of ourselves according to this new identity that we have in Christ.