19 I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We saw in yesterday's passage that we can either be a slave to sin which leads to death, or we can be a slave to obedience to the will of God which leads to righteousness. We have to pick one. It's one or the other. It's not both. We can only have one master. If we yield to Christ, we are choosing to be obedient to Him.
When we become a Christian we are transformed! We are no longer under the lordship of Satan and the tyranny of sin, but rather we are a new creature under the lordship of Jesus Christ and ruled by righteousness.
When we were slaves to sin, we literally could do no right. Even when we did right deeds it was for the wrong motive because it wasn't to glorify God and anything less than that is sin. When we become Christians, we are free for the first time to do what's right.
MacArthur summarizes it this way...
two slaveries. And we saw their position. One begins at birth and one begins at new birth and you're either under the bondage to sin or under the bondage to righteousness. And if you're a Christian, you've been freed from sin, you no longer belong to that old master, righteousness is your master, obedience is your master, the Lord is your master and you've been creatively made to obey and are also ethically bound to obey. You can obey and you should.
Paul begins this passage in an interesting way. He basically says that we are weak in our understanding because of our humanness, our fallenness. So because of that he's going to bring this supernatural eternal miraculous truth down to a human analogy of slaves/masters so we can catch on.
He's already stated that we have a new master, he's already stated that we've been freed from the tyranny of sin, he's already stated that we are now servants of righteousness. What he says now is - act like it.
In the past, before we came to Christ, we were evil both inside and out. Both in our souls and in our bodies. Our souls and bodies were in total agreement with each other that sin was our master. But now our soul has been made new and has come under a new master - Jesus Christ. But our body is still fallen. And so we need to yield our bodies to righteousness. For the first time, we have a choice. And we need to choose not to sin, not to allow our fallenness to get in the way. We need to feed the good wolf (see Pam's story from yesterday).
Martyn Lloyd Jones, who so often captures thoughts in such a graphic way, says this, "As you go on living the righteous life and practicing it with all your might an energy and all your time and everything else, you will find that the process that went on before in which you went from bad to worse and became viler and viler is entirely reversed. You will become cleaner and cleaner and purer and purer and holier and holier and more and more conformed to the image of the Son of God,"
Nobody stands still. We are either surrendering to sin which will lead to more sin and to more sin, or we are yielding to obedience which will lead to greater purity.
We have been set free from sin not to do whatever we want, but to do what God wants - to serve and glorify Him.
Those who choose to sin, the fruit of that sin does nothing but fill us with shame and lead to death. Why would someone saved by grace ever choose to sin when all it does is result in the shame and death from which we were just delivered?! No, that would be stupid. Flat out stupid.
But when we are freed from sin, we will have the fruit of holiness which leads to everlasting life. Not just eternal life, but an abundant, amazing, supernatural life that will last forever.
Because the absolute truth is stated in v23. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
You earn death. The wages for sin, the payoff for sin, the just reward for sin is death - physical, spiritual, eternal death.
Justice is obligated to pay it or it would be defrauding the worker of his wages. When God gives eternal death to a soul, He is giving him what he's worked for, what he's earned, what he deserves, what is the divine compensation for his life.
Let me put it another way. If God didn't give him eternal hell, it would be unjust. And God can't be unjust. If you earn death by your sin, you'll get it. And those who hope for pardon and those who hope for deliverance without Christ are hoping that God would be unjust. And God would not be unjust.
But thankfully there's good news there too. Notice though how eternal life is not a wage earned. We can't earn it. It's a gift, a free gift. There is absolutely nothing we can do to earn it. It is a gift of God.
if you want what you deserve, God will give it to you. But if you want what you don't deserve, God will give that to you as well.
We deserve death. And if we choose sin, we will get what we deserve - death, and it will be just.
But if we want what we don't deserve, if we want grace, God will give us that gift. How? Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. I can't...I just...I wouldn't know what else to say to the world to offer them the gift of salvation than to just tell them what's in this chapter. It's astounding to me, to be made free from sin, to inherit eternal life, to be delivered from the bondage of sin and guilt and all those things and free to do what's right and glorify God. And instead of looking at a life with things to be ashamed, you look at a life filled with things to be thankful for. Instead of anticipating death, eternal death, you anticipate life, eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord...
the sixth chapter has taught us in the first 14 verses that we are one with Christ because we died with Him, we rose with Him and as new creations with resurrection life, we walk in newness of life. Therefore, we should yield to that new life principle, yielding our fallenness, our humanness, our mortal bodies to that new life power. And then in the second half, he uses a different analogy to say the same thing. We were slaves to sin, now we have become slaves to righteousness. So, in one sense we've died to walk in newness of life. In another sense, we have a new master. Both saying the same thing. Salvation doesn't free you to sin, it frees you from sin for the first time in your life to do what's right. Salvation takes unholy men and makes them holy. Salvation is a call from sin to holiness. And no evangelism can stand without this kind of affirmation. Anything other than this kind of presentation of evangelism, I believe, is cheap grace. I believe we have to say to people, "Look, count the cost. When you come to Jesus Christ, He's calling you from sin to holiness. And if you're not willing to come on those terms, there's no other terms available."
Jesus is not looking for people who want to add Him to their sin. He's not looking for people who want to add Him to their life style. He is calling men who want to die and rise again. He's calling men and women who want to say no to the present master and yes to a new master. Grace covers sin. That's right. But it never condones it. And further, it transforms the sinner.
Tomorrow's scripture focus: Romans 7:1-6
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