Reckoning Yourself Dead to Sin: Romans 6 Preached
The Anchor Text · Romans 6:4 (ESV)
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Key terms: περιπατήσωμεν (peripatēsōmen, “we might walk,” aorist active subjunctive, hortatory) and ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς (en kainotēti zōēs, “in newness of life”). καινότης (kainotēs) denotes newness of kind, not merely of time — a new order of existence, lived out as a manner of walking.
CENTRAL TRUTH
The antidote to both antinomian presumption and defeated striving is the same: grasp who you now are in Christ — a new man, dead to sin’s reign and alive to God — and reckon it true by faith before attempting to live it out.
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The Author
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) was a Welsh physician who left a promising medical career to preach. For thirty years he was minister of Westminster Chapel, London (1938–1968), and became the leading expository preacher of twentieth-century Britain. Broadly Reformed and firmly within the Nonconformist evangelical tradition, his pulpit method combined doctrinal weight with searching application.
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The Work
Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 6 — The New Man (Banner of Truth, 1972; 313 pp.) belongs to his fourteen-volume series on Romans, drawn from the Friday-evening expositions he preached at Westminster Chapel. The chapter, he held, is among the most difficult and most liberating in the New Testament.
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The Argument
Lloyd-Jones reads Romans 6 as Paul’s answer to antinomianism — the perversion that reasons, “since grace abounds, it does not matter how we live.” Paul’s reply is not “try harder” but “know” and “reckon.” The believer has been baptized into Christ’s death; the old man has been crucified; the believer is raised to newness of life; and the dominion of sin is broken. The imperative to present oneself to God rests upon this prior indicative. Characteristically, Lloyd-Jones presses his hearers to understand their union with Christ before they attempt obedience, resisting any scheme of sanctification by passive surrender and insisting instead on an active reckoning grounded in what is already true.
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Exegetical Anchor