Romans 6:1-4 - Baptism - We were buried with Christ in baptism

How did you sin this morning? How did you disobey? What word did you say, what act did you perform, what thought went through your mind that was less than holy and pure? Were you too impatient with your children, your husband, your wife as you got ready for church? Were you less than eager to come and worship your Lord? Have you sung every song this morning with genuine adoration? Is there someone here in this room, someone in your life, that needs your forgiveness, and you haven’t gotten there yet? How have you sinned?

Now, we can react to this in a couple of different ways. When we start talking about the sin in our lives, we can take the easy way out and put it all in perspective. Sure, we’ve sinned. We’d never say that we were perfect, of course. But everyone sins. Nobody’s perfect, so we’re not really that bad. And scripture responds, loudly:

Or we take another easy way out, and we say that, sure, we sin. But God is gracious, He’s loving, and He doesn’t hold our sin against us. We enjoy this nice easy life of being sinners in the hand of a gracious God. We know that when we sin, that we have God’s grace to depend on, so don’t worry about sinning so much. And again, scripture yells, in verse 1 of our text:

Or we go the other way, and we carry the enormous burden of our guilt. We have sinned, and unless we feel bad about this most of the time, then we are not true Christians. The guiltier we feel, the more holy we seem. Guilt, remorse, fear, those are the marks of a true Christian. Freedom, joy, confidence before the throne of God, those are strange concepts, and probably not true. And again, Scripture screams out the truth, in Galatians 5:1

So, we don’t just blow it off, and we don’t take advantage of God’s grace, and we don’t carry the guilt around. There’s another way. It’s an effective way. It’s a Biblical way. We die. Verse 2:

We already know when we stop sinning, right? We stop sinning when we go to heaven, and we go to heaven when we die. So, if we want to stop sinning, then we need to die.

But we don’t need to wait to die until the end of our lives. Let me repeat that. We don’t have to wait to die until we get to the end of our lives. We can get our dying done early, out of the way. We don’t have to wait for freedom from sin until the end of our lives. We can be free from sin now, if we are willing to die now. Again, verse 2:

It makes logical sense. If we stop sinning when we die, then let’s die as soon as we can and be free from sin. But what does this death look like? How do we die?

Of course we’re not talking about a suicide. We’re not talking about getting to heaven by our own actions. We’re talking about joining Jesus in His death. We’re talking about joining Jesus on the cross. We’re talking about being buried with Him in the grave.

And that, and I know this sounds strange, that happens through baptism. Verse 3:

Every once in a while, we come back to our baptisms here. The Heidelberg catechism teaches that God gives us our faith and strengthens our faith through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. We hear the Word of God preached twice a week. We receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper every 8 weeks. And frequently our faith grows through baptism, the baptism of a child, or a young person, or an adult, or as we read passages like Romans 6. Romans 6 is a dense chapter with so much truth packed in. We’re going to go slow for the next three weeks and take a good look at the first 14 verses.

And in verse 3, we hear that we who were baptized into Jesus were baptized into His death. And even as we talk about baptism, we can make two mistakes. We can think of the baptism, the water, the ritual, and we can think that that ritual somehow saves our souls. That having water put on our head somehow makes us right with God.

At the same time, we can think of baptism, the water, the ritual, and we can think that the sacrament does very little for us. It’s a nice teaching tool, a grown up object lesson that only serves to teach us certain facts about the gospel.

Both extremes are dangerous. In the Protestant church, we’ve recognized the danger of one extreme. But in the Protestant church, there is a very present danger, right now, of slipping into the other. We’ve forgotten our baptisms. We’ve cheapened them until they mean nothing. We hear about Christian Reformed churches that are considering rebaptisms, second baptisms, or infant dedications instead of baptisms. We don’t condemn other churches that think differently about baptism than us, but we cherish this gift so much, along with the Lord’s Supper, along with the preaching of the Word, that we don’t want to let it go.

So we come back and take another hold on this. We joined Jesus in His death when we were baptized in Him. Think about it this way. Without faith, without God giving us that faith, that ritual, the water, the sacrament means nothing. Without God giving us faith, nothing happens in that moment. We’re okay with that, right?

But, when God gives us faith, when He plants that seed in our hearts, something does happen in the sacrament. We are saved by God’s grace, through faith. Plain and simple. And that faith makes our prayers effective. That faith is how we are able to hear the preaching of the word. That faith is how we are able to connect with Jesus through the Lord’s Supper. And that faith buries us with Jesus when we are baptized. The faith makes it real. The faith makes it effective. The faith makes us dead.

We can easily see this when people are baptized by going under the water, like when Jesus went into the Jordan River when He was baptized. Going down into the water really looks like going down into the ground, being buried with Christ in baptism. But we can see this in how we baptize, too. 1 Peter 1:2 says that we who are saved:

Blood equals death, and as we are sprinkled with water, as our baby is sprinkled with water, there is a sense that, through faith, we are bleeding with Jesus, we are dying with Him. Verse 4:

Our death at baptism was not the death where we stop breathing and our brain stops functioning. That death happened to Jesus way back there on the cross. But we share in every other part of that death. Death means we are separated from this world, and though we might not be physically separated, we are spiritually not part of this world. We don’t share the values of this world. We don’t have the same priorities. We don’t have the same likes and dislikes. Our actions, our language is different. We spend our money in different places than the rest of the world. We grow sad at the things that make the world happy, and we grow happy at the things that make the world sad. Our businesses have different goals than the world’s businesses. Everything is different. We’re separated.

We have a word for this kind of separation. We call this being holy. Holy means set apart. It means being separated out from the crowd. And the only way we are able to leave this world is, of course, by dying. Being buried with Christ in baptism moves us out of this world. This is the only way we are able to be holy. This is the only way we will stop sinning. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and the tragedy of our sin is drastic. It takes a drastic death to stop it.

This won’t make any sense to us, we will not understand this need to die with Christ, if we don’t understand just how much we fail. If we think that we can just try harder, do better, read more, have better intentions, then we’ll get to where we want to be, then all this talk about dying, the death of ourselves doesn’t make sense. It seems mysterious and a little corny.

But think of it like this. You’ve heard of the Midas touch? The king who turned everything he touched into gold? We’re the opposite of that. Everything we touch turns to dust. We are the bull in the china shop, and every word we speak and every thought we think and every act we perform breaks something. Every moment, we add to the weight of sin in the world just by breathing. We’re either doing something we shouldn’t be, or we’re not doing something we should. We call this total depravity, but it’s more serious than those words describe. We are dangerous. We must be stopped. And the only way we will be stopped from doing more damage and hurting more people is to put us down. We have to die.

We, who have been baptized, we who have received the faith that make that baptism effective, we have died. We were executed along with Jesus. Our lives ended right there at the font. We can put this into nicer language, words maybe that we are more used to. We can say that our lives are not our own, that we belong body and soul to our faithful savior Jesus Christ. But first we had to die, in our baptism, in faith.

I know that these words may sound strange to us. Maybe you’re thinking that this is some new, some strange theology. If this is strange, it’s only because we don’t talk about baptism this way very much anymore. Early on, when the church was young, Christians thought of baptism in a different way. There’s a danger today to make baptism a cute time, a nice family time with a cute baby and cute clothes.

That kind of flies out the window when we hear that this baby is being buried with Christ in this sacrament. Baptism is deadly. The water is dangerous. It kills the sin. It drowns the old nature. It’s a little scary, but it’s necessary. Because, verse 4:

We want this death because of what comes after it. We want to join Jesus in His death because after we die we get to join Jesus in His life, His eternal, powerful, beautiful life. And next week, we’re going to take a look at that life. We’re going to see the life that God has given us, through baptism, in faith.

But we can’t get to next week unless we’ve died to ourselves first. So, the question is, have you died? When you were baptized, did your sin-filled, self-centered life drop away, was it buried?

And then the next question is, did that old nature stayed buried? Did the sin remain nailed to the cross, or did we go back for more? Did we like sin too much to leave it alone? Did our sinful self stay dead? The answer, of course, is no. Our sin comes back alive.

Which means we continually have to go back and die again. Jesus died only once. We don’t need to keep crucifying Him. But we need to die continuously. We need to pick up our cross daily. And the way we do that is to go back to our baptisms. Remember, you were baptized. You died. You don’t need to sin again. You’ve left that old world. You were buried with Christ in baptism. You’re holy.

So when sin gets to be too strong, go back to your baptism. You are dead to the world. The world has no claim on you. When you are just not sure direction to take, when you want to do the right thing, you’re afraid of making the wrong decision, go back to your baptism. You’ve been buried with Christ and you are raised to glory, through faith. This if a fact. When sin has become too strong and you’ve fallen to temptation once again, go back to the beginning. Jesus died for you. You’ve joined Him in that death. Sin, and the guilt that comes from sin, that doesn’t apply to you anymore. That’s all behind you. You died already.

We live like we have to face our death some day. We live like we are still operating under the world’s rules, that sinning is inevitable, that there’s nothing we can do about it. We think that we must pay the punishment for our sin.

We don’t we got our dying done early, most of us very early, when we were baptized, through faith. Let’s live like it. We don’t have to sin anymore. We don’t have to fear the punishment. We don’t have to conform to the way everybody else thinks and acts. We’ve moved on. We were baptized, through faith. We’re dead, and now we live a new, a different, a separated, a holy life.