Many years ago I read something by Miles Stanford (and I can't recall the exact wording) to the effect that "brethren think if they gather correctly they'll grow spiritually, but they have it backwards." At the time I thought that was silly, but over the last 30 years or so I've come to realize he was (at least mostly) right.
Last time we talked about "Two Lines of Truth" that underlie everything else. On the one hand, we have to recognize the truth of Romans 1–4, that God justifies the one who does not work, but believes (Romans 4:5). If we miss this, we end up putting ourselves into the worst kind of slavery: working so hard for what God has already offered for free.
On the other hand, we have to recognize that salvation is not merely justification, but is really an entirely new place where God has put us. We're no merely forgiven sinners, we're now brought into this place where we have been accepted in Christ. We learn that the rules are different here. Christ is our only righteousness, and we look to Him as our righteousness, our redemption, our sanctification, and our wisdom from God (1 Corinthians 1:30–31).
In other words, we are in a place where we are to receive from God, rather than producing for God.
But we have to deal with the terrible truth first, that a man (or woman) "in Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:42ff) can't inherit the kingdom of God. There needs to be a cutting off of what we were before we can experience and enjoy what God has for us. In Romans, that comes in Romans 6:1–13. We have died with Christ so that we're no longer the men (and women) we were. That person has died, and his death has freed us. We were once slaves to sin, but having died, we're now free from that.
It's important to realize that as far as God is concerned, we have died with Christ whether we realize it or not. But as far as our enjoyment of this new life is concerned, it's the believing and accepting what God says that makes or breaks the deal. In other words, it's our coming to see things the way God does that determines how we experience the Christian life. In fact, if we don't come to see and embrace this version of the story (God's version), then we really aren't Christian at all – we're just living like Old Testament saints.
Our experience of freedom and joy as those "in Christ" depends on our accepting what God says about us.
So everything the Pauline epistles say about how we ought to live is predicated on this one thing: that we have come to believe, accept, and count on our having died with Christ. None of exhortations in Romans 12:1ff are for people who haven't yet learned Romans 6:1–13. None of the exhortations in Colossians 3:6ff are for people who haven't learned Colossians 3:1–5. This isn't something we can skip.
The sad truth is that many (or even most) of the brethren I have met don't understand this. They know about head-coverings and not having pastors, but they really have no clue about our having died with Christ.
Sadly, they've given away (or donated or discarded) those books by Darby and Kelly that told them about life in Christ, and replaced them with newer books: the sorts of books that encourage them to "Try harder!"
It seems to me one of the things that has gone missing is the sense of our own lostness and our own guilt. We like to point to the Lord Jesus' words, "the Son of man has come to seek and to save that which is lost" (Luke 19:10). And sometimes we even get the point that the Son of man didn't come to seek and us unless we were lost. But we lose sight of that so quickly. We like (as R. A. Huebner put it) to say, "I'm lost, but not that lost!" We like to think better of ourselves than God thinks of us.
The reality is that the Gospel is for sinners – not hypothetical sinners who can repent and get their lives back on track, but real-world sinners who are slaves to sin. And unless we see ourselves like that we're not going to embrace the remedy that God offers. Instead, we'll keep trying to improve the flesh. We're all about reformation, we're not so much about replacement. But that's exactly what we need.
I'll be honest here and say the people I've met who understand they have died with Christ are generally people who have sinned in some really big ways. I don't think this is true every single time, but it seems like it takes something really big to convince us we're lost. As long as we're not brought face-to-face with what we are that we find ourselves looking for the sort of extreme measures Scripture prescribes for us.
When I listen to sermons (online or in person) and read articles from "brethren" today, that sense of lostness is missing. It wasn't always.
Darby talks about "the natural man's pretension not to be entirely lost" ("Letter on Free-will", Collected Writings, Vol. 10, p 185). He tied that into the idea of free will vs. election. I'm not saying he was wrong, I'm just pointing out what he goes on to say in that letter: that "we receive, in order to be saved, a new nature." And our enjoyment of salvation (our experience of it, really) is a result of believing God when He tells us about it.
If we don't really believe ourselves to be lost – if we allow ourselves to indulge "the natural man's pretension not to be entirely lost" – then we won't see Romans 6:1–13 as a liberation. We'll see it as an obligation. Instead of telling believers that they have died with Christ, we'll tell them they ought to live as though they had died with Him. We'll change it from a declaration of that God has done into a command we are to obey.
You can see I've learned to listen closely when people start taking Romans 6.
And of course there really is a command in Romans 6: we're commanded to think of ourselves the way God thinks of us. It should be self-evident that making our death with Christ something we need to do instead of something God already has done is decidedly not obeying that command.
Almost ten years ago I wrote about a sermon I heard on Romans 6 ("Who is on that cross?", April 2017). My concern then was that careless exposition of Romans 6:1–13 was at the root of a great deal of nonsense that is preached. My concern now is more systemic (if that's the right word): it's that underneath the careless exposition lurks a belief that we don't really need deliverance.
So if what we really need is a call to action, here's mine: read Romans 6:1–13 not as a call to live a "baptized kind of life," but as a call to believe what God has said. We don't need to die to sin, because we already have. We don't need to die with Christ, we just need to believe God when He says we already have.
Read Romans 6:1–13 for what it is: a statement that God has already accomplished what we could not.
Read Romans 6:1–13 as the reminder that we were so lost God's only solution to our lostness is to put us to death in Christ. And thank God that He has done it.
And maybe pick up one of those old books and try giving it a read before you throw it away.
