Bible Text: Romans | Preacher: Lionel Letcher | Series: Spiritual Growth 2020 | Romans 6:8-14
"Grace is not an excuse to sin, but a divine enablement to reign over sin."
Healthy spiritual maturity does not come by means of meetings, nor continued exhortation.
Healthy progress is based upon the apprehension, understanding and appropriation of those truths in Christ that make for real growth.
The experiential aspect of all truth, and especially the deeper truths, is closed to all but the needy heart.
Consecration is badly misunderstood by many.
Hungry believers yearn for consecration.
Most forward growth is through the "love motive".
Andrew Murray: "Often the believer struggles hopelessly for years, until he listens to the teaching of the Spirit, as He glorifies Christ again, and reveals Christ, our Sanctification, to be appropriated by faith alone."
Philippians 2:13 "For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure".
Philippians 1:21 "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain."
J.C. Metcalfe: "The modern teaching of consecration, which is tantamount to the consecration of the 'old man,' seeks to bypass the death sentence and, therefore, only leads to frustration and failure. When, however, you and I are prepared, in simple humility, to make the FACT of our death with Christ..."
Q. Are we to consecrate the "old self-life" or the "new Christ-life"?
Roman 6:13 "... and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God."
Yielding is about surrender.
Roman 6:11 "Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus."
Only those who are alive to God can present their members to be consecrated.
"God asks us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to Him (Rm 12:1), Until we have done this, there is nothing else we can do. Notice this exhortation comes after Romans sin. There is a reason for this order -- crucifixion comes...
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DeVerne Fromke: "The sixth of Romans is not an aspect of the truth, but the foundation truth upon which every believer must stand to know anything about victory."
DeVerne Fromke: "A careful study of all the Epistles of Paul will show that they are written on the basis of the cross set forth in Romans six: the fact that God consigns the old fallen Adam-life to the cross, and has nothing to say to it. God deals with all believers on the ground of "in Christ you died.' But the Church of Christ, as a whole, ignores this fact. It treats the fallen creation (self-life) as capable of improvement, and the meaning of the cross bringing to death the old Adam race as fallen beyond repair, is thus nullified."
Q. Do you desire consecration?
Credit: Adapted from Miles J. Stanford's The Complete Green Letters
