Jim Van Gelderen: Now, if you’ve been on our journey with us, we’re into podcast number four on Romans chapter number six. Now, I mentioned earlier on, we’ve never done a series. Now, let me encourage you, if the series has helped you, get others to go back and listen to the other podcasts and to join us on our journey.

We’ll at least have one more podcast, maybe two. We’ll see how that comes out.

Let me encourage you to spread the word and be a part of encouraging people to live the reality of Romans six: we’re dead to sin in Jesus, and sin lost its power over us the moment we got saved because of what Jesus died on the cross. It’s the identification truth.

See, when you got saved, it’s because Jesus died for you. But the Christian life is different than that. In other words, substitution is the key for salvation, but the Christian life is identification.

I died with Christ and rose again with Him. That’s Romans 6:6. Don’t you know who you are?

You’re in Jesus, dead to sin, alive unto God. You’ve been immersed into Jesus like a sponge. Jesus is in you; you’re in Jesus like a sponge in water.

So, friends, let’s continue on our journey. We talked last week about thinking the right facts. The first two podcasts were on knowing the right facts.

Well, today we want to talk about acting on the right facts. So, the verse of Scripture we’ll deal with is verse number twelve: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.”

Now, that is what they call in the Greek language the present tense with the negative. One way that can be interpreted is ordering a cessation of action. “Love not the world” in First John is that same grammatical format.

Some people have said “stop loving the world” is the idea of the verse. So, the similar possibility is really here: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body.”

What God is saying, He’s getting up close and personal and saying, “Stop letting sin boss you around. Stop letting lust call the shots in your life. Stop letting anger rule you.

Stop letting frustration and irritation call the shots in your life. Stop it.”

That’s what He’s saying. Stop letting worry be your king. Stop letting disrespect toward your parents be that which you constantly obey.

He’s saying, stop letting sin boss you around. Don’t you know sin’s not your boss anymore? In fact, in verse number seven it says, “For he that is dead is freed from sin.”

You ever thought about the fact that dead people, when the moment they die, are freed from sin? The town drunk dies. I’ve got a question for you: do they send the sanitation department down on Saturday morning to clean up all the whiskey bottles or hard-liquor bottles around his grave?

And the answer is no. They don’t. You know why?

He’s dead. He’s freed from alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness.

What about the town gossip when she dies? Well, I’m not sure why we always use the female pronoun, but when the town gossip dies, the cell-phone company doesn’t come and try to sell her family a cell phone they can put in her grave.

Why? Because she’s not going to gossip anymore. She’s dead and she is freed from sin.

So understand, friend, based on that, sin’s not your boss anymore. So the moment you get saved, God is saying, “Listen. Stop it.”

Now, friends, I don’t know what your sin issues are, but every time you sin, God’s saying, “Why are you listening to your former boss?” He’s not your boss anymore, and you’re dead to sin in Jesus, alive unto God.

Now, that is the premise. But it brings us then to a practical application.

You say, “Well, preacher, how do I do that? How do I stop letting sin boss me around?” Great question, isn’t it?

But it’s a question, friend, I’m going to be honest with you, the next verse, verse number thirteen, answers: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin; but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead.”

Now, that’s an interesting verse. It actually has the very same grammatical phenomena: stop yielding members.

Now, what are members? They’re body parts. Now, think about this for a moment.

What is a body part? Okay, it’s your arm—you can’t steal often with an arm. You can’t look at things you shouldn’t without eyes.

You can’t hear dirty jokes without ears. In other words, it takes body parts to sin. And seriously, when body parts get damaged, sometimes there are certain sins people can’t do anymore.

Okay, so God says, stop yielding your members, your body parts, to doing unrighteous things and start yielding body parts to do the right thing as those that are alive from the dead, which we will deal with. Now, what does that mean? How do you do that?

Well, verse number nineteen gives us a little bit of a clue. It says, “I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh. For as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness, and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.”

Now, bottom line, it means this: the same way you yielded to sinful things is the same way you yield to pure things. Now, what God is simply saying is, if you want to know how to yield to righteousness, just think about when you yielded to unrighteousness and use the same progression, except now you’re yielding to what is right.

Now, let’s imagine a simple scenario. The word uncleanness, just like you yielded to uncleanness, you yield, of course, to righteousness unto holiness. But the word uncleanness is a little jarring because in the epistles it’s often talking about moral uncleanness.

So imagine this picture: you’re at a grocery store. You went there innocently, maybe to get some things for your mother. And as you’re in the checkout line, let’s imagine you didn’t go there for this, but you notice a picture on a magazine cover that’s inappropriate.

Now, hopefully you’re trained enough to look away, but at that moment, you’re at a crisis. Will you yield to the temptation of uncleanness, or will you yield to cleanness? Now, what happened when you yielded to uncleanness?

Well, you turned your neck, you focused your eye on that picture, and you yielded your brain to meditate on the filth. We call that lust.

Now, in yielding to cleanness, you would take those same neck muscles and turn away, maybe looking up at the ceiling, and take your eyes and focus somewhere on the ceiling. I think every young man ought to know what the ceiling looks like.

You might look up there: “Hey, that light’s out. Hey, they got cobwebs up there.” But the point is, then you yield your mind to purity.

You say, “What’s that?” Every word of God is pure.

Begin to learn passages of Scripture like Proverbs five, the last half of Proverbs six, and Proverbs seven that deal with the strange woman, or the woman of pornography. And that’s purity. Every word of God is clean, and meditate on cleanness.

Now, that’s it in a nutshell.

But at that moment, Christ says—you say—“I’m dead to sin in Jesus. I’m alive unto God in Jesus. I don’t have to yield back to that magazine cover.

I can yield to purity and look away and meditate on the purity of the Word of God.”

Now, we’re going to talk about this more next week and finish up our series on Romans chapter number six. But I hope you’ll join us, because this is so important as we learn how to yield to righteousness.

Well, it’s been great to have you aboard here today. Remember: total surrender to the will of God, total dependence on His grace to live His way.