An Easter Meditation

This evening I was reviewing my sermon for tomorrow morning I added a few paragraphs to the sermon that really got me excited. The old Puritan preachers used to preach their sermons to themselves before they preached them to their congregation. I have done this tonight and am very excited as the Word of God has penetrated my own soul. What follows is a small excerpt from the notes I will use to preach tomorrow's Easter sermon. These words refer to Romans 6:11, which tells us to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

There is a lot in that passage that we could talk about, but the main, overall point of the passage is that we are united with Christ in all that He did.

We consider or “count” ourselves united with Christ in His death and resurrection. I love this word “consider.” I’m going to break one of my own rules of preaching here as I talk about this. My rule is that I don’t like to throw too much of the original Greek and Hebrew languages at you when I preach. For one thing, I’m not a scholar in these areas. It takes years and years of immersion into the languages before you can really know them and I haven't done that, so I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking I know more than I really do. Secondly, I don’t ever want to convey that you need to know Greek or Hebrew to know the Bible. Your English translations of the Bible are good and sufficient – if you can read English you can understand your Bible.

However, in this case, there are some nuances from the Greek that help us understand this. This word, translated “consider” or “count” yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus comes from the root word “logos.” It means “word.” It is used in John 1:1 – in the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. In John 1:1 it is used as a noun, in this passage it is used as a verb. When it used as a verb it means to reason.

It can also refer to logic. So this word is telling you to reason, and to use logic. And it is in the middle voice in this case. Stick with me for a moment. Think with me back to the good old days of grammar school – an active verb is when you are doing an action, a passive verb is when you are receiving an action. "I hit the ball" is active, "I am hit by the ball" is passive.

There is another voice which you may have forgotten. It is the middle voice. In the middle voice, you do the action but you also receive the action. In this you act upon yourself or act in your own interest.

With this verb being in the middle voice, it says that you are reasoning with yourself. When you do this, there is a sense in which you are arguing with yourself.

Now, why am I making such a big deal of this? Let me tell you why? Though you may intellectually know that Christ died and rose from the grave, one of the hardest things in life is to believe that we died with Him and rose with Him.

Oh sure, we’ll believe that Christ died and rose from the grave, but we’ll never believe that we died to sin and rose to a new way of life. After all, we’ve got the evidence – just look at our lives. You say, look at me pastor, I’ve been sinning all my life, I’ll always be the way I’ve always been. I can’t change.

David Martin Lloyd Jones is one of the greatest preachers of the last century and he wrote a book called Spiritual Depression In this book he gave some of the best counsel I have ever heard, not only for dealing with depression, but for dealing with any emotional or sin issue. He says that our greatest problem in life is that we listen to ourselves too much. Instead of listening to ourselves we ought to be talking to ourselves.

Our self tells us we are depressed, so we say “Oh, I’m depressed.” Our self tells us that we are addicted to a certain kind of sin and we listen and say “oh, I must be addicted to this thing.” Our self tells us we will never be any different than we already are, and so we believe we can never be any different than we already are.

Our self tells us that Christ died and rose from the grave and that we receive some benefits from it, but we’ll never experience the reality of dying to sin and walking in a new way of life. So, our self says "why bother?" Why struggle against sin when my self tells me that I've already lost the fight? That's the problem - your self tells you that you have lost the fight, but Jesus tells you that you have won. Who do you believe? Are you going to listen to yourself and call Jesus a liar?

We listen to ourselves and we should be talking to ourselves. What do we say to ourselves? We say what the Bible says. We say “shut up self, I’m going to talk to you now and you’re going to listen to me as I tell you what the Bible says.” "I have died to sin – I am not bound by sin, I’m not even bound by that sin that I have just committed for the twenty thousandth time." "I am risen with Christ, I don’t care what evidence you have to the contrary." "I am risen with Christ."

So, we argue ourselves into submission to the Word of God. Now, please understand I am not telling you to argue with yourself using merely human or rational arguments. I am saying that you let the word of God argue your self into submission.

I listened to an old sermon by Lloyd Jones the other day and he said that frankly, what we often need to do is just get up in the morning and remind our self that we are a new man in Christ, that the old things have passed away, behold the new has come.

I know that some of us have been listening to ourselves for so long that this is going to be difficult. But I would offer you this wise advice I once received. Someone once told me that if a lie often told is believed, how much more the truth.

Your self may not believe the Word of God the first time you talk back to it. But keep talking back to yourself and over time the Word of God will wash over your soul like a shower washes the dirt off your body. Hard, caked on dirt doesn’t come off immediately when you step into a shower, but if you stay under the water long enough, the water, being the universal solvent, will wash the dirt away.

Probably the most important thing you can ever come to know and believe is that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave. But do you know what the second most important thing you can ever come to know and believe is? It is that you died on the cross with Him, and rose to walk in newness of life with Him.

The Easter message of our union with Christ in His resurrection is not only a future reality guaranteeing that we will live with Him eternally when we die, though it is that. Our union with Christ in His resurrection is present reality for all who are in Christ.