Sermon Notes — September 1, 2024
September 1, 2024
Romans 6:1-11
“God’s Wanted Poster”
Dr. Craig Goff
Back when times were simpler, I would gather once a week with my family around our black and white television set to watch Gunsmoke. Super good times; but if you are old enough to remember Gunsmoke, or have watched it all, you probably know every episode was pretty much the same. The plot did not vary all that much.
It would start out with some town way out west, like Dodge City, Kansas, or El Paso, Texas or maybe even somewhere up in Nebraska. Matt Dillon was the U.S. Marshall and chief law man over that entire region.
Like today, most of the people were good law abiding citizens. They believed in hard work and doing the right thing, but that doesn’t make for very interesting television and inevitably some bad guy would ride into town. You could always tell he was a bad guy by how he looked — all dressed in black, wearing a black hat, and riding a black horse.
Sometimes even before you could get to the first commercial, the bad guy would rob the bank or the stage coach or shoot somebody, or something like that, and then Marshall Dillon and Festus and maybe a few others would have to saddle up and start out for a long chase through the wild west.
You knew the bad guy was going to get caught, the only question was how. Would they trap him in a box canyon, would there be a big shoot out down by the river?
Sometimes, before they caught up with the bad guy, the good guys would put posters all across the country side.
They all looked the same. There was a picture of the fugitive outlaw with a caption underneath in big bold letters: Wanted — Dead or Alive. In other words, the guy was such a menace to society, he had to be stopped by any means necessary
Notice those two categories are mutually exclusive. If you brought the bad guy in dead, he is not alive. If you brought him in alive he is not dead. That is how that works.
But notice in our text today, the Apostle Paul says something that sounds a little puzzling if you really think about it….
The Marshall wants the outlaw/bad guy dead or alive, but according to the Apostle Paul, God wants us to be dead and alive.
As I mentioned in a newsletter article a week or so ago, it has been said that Romans 6 is God’s wanted poster.
Let’s look at v. 11
So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
God wants us both dead and alive.
Dead to sin, alive to God.
Dead, but a particular, specific kind of death, not death to joy, not death to true beauty, but death to sin.
So what is this sin we are supposed to be dead to?
Is it something terrible only outlaws with black hats do?
Like robbery, murder, cattle rustling skipping out on your bill at Miss Kitty’s?
Not according to Paul. According to Paul, we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God, with the exception of the one who suffered to free us from sin.
Black hat wearing people, white hat wearing people, male, female, Jew, Gentile all of us. We all struggle with sin.
I once heard a story about a couple who decided they were going to cut back on expenses to save money. But the woman came home with a new dress. Her husband said, “I didn’t think we were going to buy anything for a while.” She said, “I know but I was at the store and this dress was calling out to me, and said, ‘try me on, try me on.’ And so I tried it on and I looked in the mirror and it looked great and I couldn’t resist the temptation. Her husband said, why didn’t you say, ‘get behind me Satan?”’ She said, “I did, but he said, ‘looks pretty good from back there too.’”
So we all struggle with sin. It is something we all face.
In our current worship series we have focused on our being created for connection. Our district superintendent talked about some of those connections in his sermon last week.
We were created for a relationship with God, one another, ourselves and creation.
Sin is anything that distorts or breaks those relationships
And according to God’s wanted poster the fracturing of those relationships is a big deal.
But they can be restored as we consider ourselves dead to sin, but alive to God.
Dead to all those things which would destroy us and alive to all those things that make us truly alive. Dead and alive. Romans Six, God’s wanted poster.