Dead to Sin, Alive to God

Pastor Mark opened Memorial Day weekend by walking through the cost of American wars, from the Gulf War to the Civil War, before turning to Romans 6:1-14 and the death and resurrection language Paul uses to describe what happens when someone identifies with Christ. The sermon held those two things together: soldiers who died so others could live in freedom, and the one Hero who died so all who believe could live in freedom from sin.

What was said

The numbers Pastor Mark read before the scripture were not decoration. 294 lives in the Gulf War, 6,717 in Afghanistan and Iraq, 58,209 names on the Vietnam Wall, 750,000 in the Civil War. The point of reading them was to make the word "died" feel like what it actually is. The woman laying flowers on graves in Columbus, Mississippi in 1867, placing them on Confederate and Union graves alike, became the image he kept returning to: someone remembering the dead and what their sacrifice purchased for the living.

Before getting into Romans 6, Pastor Mark laid out a distinction he said matters a great deal: some things about the Christian life are binary and some are not. Your position before God is binary. You are either identified with Adam, which is where everyone starts, or identified with Christ. There is no middle ground there, no sliding scale. But your actual daily practice of following Christ is not binary. Nobody becomes instantly perfect the moment they believe, and Paul knows that.

He walked through a timeline drawn from 2 Thessalonians 2:13-15 and 1 Corinthians 1:18 to show where sanctification fits. You are saved at the moment of belief, positionally. But you are also being saved, in an ongoing way, as the Holy Spirit does His work. And you will be saved, completely glorified, on the day Christ returns. The trajectory should be upward, but it is a process, and the honest acknowledgment of that is part of what Paul is doing in Romans 6.

Romans 6 itself is Paul answering what he called the antinomian objection. If grace covers past, present, and future sin, why not keep sinning so that grace increases? Paul's answer in Greek is "Meganoito," which Pastor Mark translated as "may it never be," "banish the thought," "impossible." The reason it cannot be is that the person asking the question has misunderstood what happened to them when they came to Christ.

Paul's argument is that baptism, understood not just as the water ritual but as the act of identifying with Christ, is identification with His death. The Greek word "baptizo" does not just mean to dip something. It means the thing is changed by the immersion. The illustration Pastor Mark used was a cucumber left in brining solution long enough to become a pickle. The identification with Christ's death means the power of sin was broken at the cross, and the person who genuinely identifies with that death has died to sin in the same way a dead soldier is no longer doing anything. The dead are freed from what held them.

The command, when it finally comes in verse 11, is to reckon or count yourself as dead to sin and alive to God. Pastor Mark noted that "reckon" is an accounting term. It is not pretending. It is treating as true what is actually true, positionally, even when your daily practice has not fully caught up. The imperative that follows is do not let sin reign, do not present yourself as an instrument of unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as one who is alive from the dead.

The final verse, 14, shifts to a future tense for the first time in the passage: sin shall not be master over you. Pastor Mark connected that to the far end of the timeline, the ultimate glorification, the great getting-up morning. The freedom is both already true and still coming fully. That, he said, quoting 1 Timothy 3:16, is the mystery of godliness: that the binary and the non-binary are both real at once, that Christ lived in flesh, made every right choice, died, rose, and those who are changed into identification with Him will be taken up in glory with Him.