That requires something far more potent than water. This passage is dealing, of course, with the question of how we died to sin, how we became separated from being in Adam, how we became joined in Christ. You can just see them prick up their ears, lift up their heads, and head for it. Whenever they read these passages, and see the word baptism, they smell water. You could be riding across the dry, parched plains, when suddenly he would prick up his ears, lift up his head, and quicken his pace, and you knew that he smelled water somewhere and he was heading for it. When I was a boy in Montana, I had a horse that could smell water from farther away than any animal I ever saw.
It is always interesting to me that when some people hear the word baptism they immediately smell water. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin how can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. Let's see what the apostle says about baptism in Verses 3-4. One of them is baptism and the other, which may be more difficult for you to see, is grafting - as a plant or a branch is grafted into a tree. The apostle uses two marvelous visual aids that God likes to employ to help us to understand truth. We died to sin - and this is what we are examining in this message. When you become a Christian, when you really, truly receive Jesus Christ as Lord, something happens that makes it impossible to go on living a lifestyle of evil. In Verses 3-14 (of Romans 6) we want to see how the apostle begins to unfold this conclusion so that we might understand in detail what that change means in our lives. Paul's conclusion is: "How can we go on living in it any longer?" (Romans 6:2c NIV). It is impossible, Paul says, because, as he puts it in these four little words, "We died to sin," (Romans 6:2b NIV). Can he go on in a lifestyle that is basically wrong and sinful? Can he live as an alcoholic, or a swindler, or an adulterer, or a homosexual, or a slanderer? Is it possible to maintain such a lifestyle and be a Christian? The apostle's answer - as we have already seen in the first two verses - is, "By no means!" (Romans 6:2a NIV). The opening two verses of Romans 6 make it very clear that the apostle is dealing with the question of whether the believer can go on living in sin after he has come to Christ. The book of Romans is a tremendous revelation of what happens in the believer's life when he comes to Christ.
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