“Spiritual Death & Life and the Practice of Sin”

Five Sermons on Romans 6 – Part 5: “Freedom and the Practice of Sin”

TEXT:  Romans 6:20-23

REVIEW

1.  Afraid of Grace: In Romans 6, Paul is giving some very practical advice on the fight against sin that Christians face.  The odd thing about that is that we are not yet in the Christian living part of this letter.  Paul is going to deal with Christian living beginning in Chapter 12.  So why is he talking about fighting against sin now?  The reason is that the enemies of Paul’s message regularly raise a specific objection to the good news of grace.  Paul wants to answer the objection before anyone has a chance to ask it. “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?”   Is that the question of a person who really thinks that God is going to be pleased if they sin more and more, or is it the question of Paul’s enemies who think that this message of Paul does not have enough law in it?  I think that the latter is far more likely.  Many of Paul’s hearers are afraid of grace, just as people have been afraid of grace for the last twenty centuries.  They think that if we are “right” with God strictly based on the obedience and death of Christ, then we will have no incentive to fight against sin.  They think that the unqualified message of grace is inconsistent with a call to spiritual warfare.  They do not believe that the gospel is the power of God for the fight against sin.  They believe that the message of grace is dangerous, and they are afraid of it.

2.  Weapons for the Spiritual Warrior: Paul rejects these fears.  In this chapter He shows us that grace is consistent with fighting hard against sin, and he gives five points of encouragement that make very powerful weapons for this important warfare.  1.  Your baptism is a great aid to you in the fight against sin.  You have been marked for life, not for death.  Sin makes no sense for you.  2.  The pattern of death and life for Jesus Christ is our pattern too if we are in Christ.  You have died to sin and you are alive to righteousness.  Returning to the way of death makes no sense for you.  3.  If you are in Christ, you are a servant of God.  It makes no sense for you to present yourself for service to sin any more.  4.  If God has made you His servant, then all of your bodily parts, your “members” are to be committed to righteousness.  You are not to consider any part of “you” as hopelessly stuck in sin any more.  Today we come to the final point of Paul on this topic, and we take up in our hand the weapon of true Christian freedom as vessels and vassals of the wonderful mercy of God.

TODAY’S PASSAGE:

²⁰ For when you were slaves of sin,

you were free in regard to righteousness. 

²¹ What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed?

For the end of those things is death. 

²² But now having been set free from sin,

and having become slaves of God,

you have your fruit to holiness,

and the end, everlasting life. 

²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

1.  You were slaves of sin.

            Paul writes to the church in Rome, and he tells the people there plainly that they were slaves of sin.  Their names were on the old master’s property list.  Paul continues with an amazing statement.  He says that at that time they “were free in regard to righteousness.”  They already had freedom.  The problem was that the freedom that they had back then was not the kind of freedom that you want.  They were free from God.  God did not own them.  They were free from His loving and wise use of them as His instruments of His good purposes to be expressed through the church.

            It was as if they showed up for work, and the person at the front desk said, “I’m sorry, we don’t know you here.  You don’t work here.  Don’t you work across the street?  You must have been daydreaming this morning.  Just go across the street.  You work for sin.”

            So you go back across the street to your old familiar factory, and churn out the same old ugly mess.  Have you ever worked someplace where the product that you made or sold wasn’t any good?  Did you ever work in a situation where you became ashamed of the company’s business?  That’s the illustration that Paul is using here, except for two things.  First, the product that you made was not merely shameful.  It was unsafe – so unsafe that it always led to the death of the consumer.  That’s bad.  But here’s the kicker.  You were not a free worker for the old boss.  He owned you, and there was no way out. 

            Before we move on to verse 22, I want you to see one more thing.  The text here says you “were” slaves of sin.  But if you have not yet surrendered your life to Christ, you are still today a slave of that old boss.  Christ is the only way out of this horrific slavery.  He was the true servant of the Lord.  Isaiah says this.  Imagine this, every day Jesus went to work for God, and He did all that work for you.  Then one day He went across the street to the place where you worked, and He consumed all the toxic waste that you were producing.  That’s what the cross was all about.  The true servant of God willingly took your deadly produce upon himself, so that you would have something that you could never get for yourself.  Freedom.

2.  You are set free from sin.

            We don’t understand freedom the way that we should.  Too often we think that freedom would be ours if we were the big bosses.  “If I ran this place, then I would be really free.”  But that’s not real freedom.  That’s just more of the same slavery – more of the same toxic waste that Jesus took for us.  Here’s the key: Freedom from sin is not freedom from God.  Real freedom is freedom for God – freedom to be His servant.  That’s freedom.  God told Pharaoh “Let My people go.”  Was it to make them a nation of independent people?  No.  What does the Bible say?  “Let My people go, that they may serve Me.”

            The only person who is truly free, is the one who is a slave of God.  If you refuse to serve the Lord, you are not free.  You are a slave of sin.  Do you see now why sin makes no sense for you who have true freedom by the blood of Christ?  After the Son of God has gone across the street to deal with your toxic waste that you are ashamed of, do you really want to sneak back over there after hours to make more of the stuff that sent Him to the cross?  Of course not!  You’re free from that old life under Master sin.  You’re slaves unto God.  Your life has a new purpose now.  Your name is on His list by grace, and you are a part of His team of warriors – warriors of love who bring forth new fruits of holiness from the garden of God.  The end of your old business was death.  Your new work is all about life.

3.  The wages of sin and the gift of God

            There’s one more surprising thing in this passage and it comes in verse 23.  When you worked for your old boss, you got your weekly paycheck, and it always added up to death.  Not only were you producing shameful products of death.  You were also storing up for yourself the very death that you were making.  That death came to you in the form of wages.  It was what you deserved as a servant of sin.  That’s not the surprising part.

            What is surprising is that now, as a servant of God, the life that comes to you is not a wage.  We might have thought that Paul would say something like this: “The wages of sin is death, but the wages of God is eternal life.”  Then the contrast would just be between working for sin and working for God.  One gives you wages of death.  The other gives you wages of life.  But that’s not what it says.  The life that we get is not wages.  It is a free gift to us.  The service that we render is not that of the slave in chains.  The efforts that we give are the free gifts of men who have been liberated.  We don’t work for God in order to earn life, or even to keep life.  We work for God because He has already freely given to us eternal life.  This is of utmost importance.  If the life that we have from God is a wage that we are owed, then our life is in ourselves.  But if the life that you have is a solid and certain gift from God before you ever did a moment’s work for Him, then your life is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Someone had to do the work in order to win life.  He worked.  The wages were all His.  He took away all our death by dying for us, and then He gave His wages of life to us.  Therefore our life is entirely in Him.  This is the gospel, and it is consistent with a life of service to God and a life of serious battle against your own sin.

APPLICATION:

Paul says in another place “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.”  Some of you kids may not be familiar with that way of speaking.  It means something like this:  “I am in big trouble with God if I do not preach the gospel.”  You can’t preach the gospel without preaching Christ.  If there is no Christ in the message, there is no gospel.  If I preach about sexual sin, but never present the perfect purity and love of Christ, and His death for those who have so clearly violated the seventh commandment in thought, word, and action, then I have not preached the gospel.  And if I do not preach the gospel, then woe is me.

It is very tempting to give in to fear, and to think that the work that we need to do today will be most powerfully accomplished by stern warnings and clear public pronouncements against the world around us.  But how powerless these will be in dealing with the toxic trouble that is within us.  Only the gospel will work.  We must never give up on God working through His simple means of grace in the church.  Therefore, it is not a picky thing to demand of our ministers that they preach the gospel. 

Finally, woe to you if you deny the power of the gospel by refusing to hear it with faith.  God is committed to your growth in holiness.  This will be life upon life to you, and it is all His free gift based entirely on the merits of His Son Jesus Christ.  None of it comes as wages to us.  “Shall we continue in sin?”  Of course not!  Freedom Christ has set us free.  Hear the gospel and believe.  For you have been freed from sin, and are now freed to serve with the delight of those who will enjoy God forever.