At the beginning of our current series on the book of Romans, I mentioned that one of the reasons that Paul wrote the book in the first place was to speak to some misunderstandings that had been circulating in the early church about his teachings in general.
Nowhere was Paul more misunderstood than on the topic of grace.
One of the most unique things about the Christian faith, in fact, is the Biblical idea of grace. It is also something that is frequently misunderstood.
In his book "What’s So Amazing About Grace?", Christian author Philip Yancey writes about a friend who invited him out for a cup of coffee one night. This friend, it turns out, is contemplating leaving his wife after 15 years of marriage because he’s found someone younger and prettier, someone he says makes him feel alive.
As a Christian, Yancey’s friend knows his decision will devastate his wife and permanently damage his three kids. He also knows that his relationship with God will never be the same again. Even so, the force pulling him toward this other woman was like a powerful magnet. So finally he asks Philip Yancey, "Do you think God can forgive something as awful as I’m about to do?’
Yancey’s friend was looking for assurance that he’d still be accepted by God, still under the cover of God’s grace. His dilemma was real, his confusion genuine. His ‘heart’ was pulling him in one direction, away from his family, away from the vows he had made at marriage to love, honour and cherish his wife. He knew what he wanted to do was wrong, and he wanted assurance from a Christian friend that in the end God would forgive him.
Perhaps we, too, have at times wondered about such things. Our hearts or our bodies seem to pull us in one direction, a direction which, if we can be honest with ourselves, we know is really against God’s perfect will for us.
Our faith, our convictions…all that we believe says one thing. But something else in us can seem strong too…something that tries to pull us away from living out what we believe. In a few weeks we’ll be looking at Romans 7 and going much deeper into that topic.
Now its true that one of the biggest challenges that people who love God have always faced is sin. Those who love God struggle with their sin because we know it hurts or compromises our communion with God.
If we minimize or ignore the problem of sin, we’re going to cut ourselves off from the reality of God’s love in its fullness.
We’re not going to really understand or value the most stunning truth in all of human existence: God’s love is so deep and personal and powerful that He sent His only Son into the world to rescue us from sin, from ourselves. This is huge folks. We never stop celebrating this in our songs, our sermons, the Eucharist or communion.
Just before we get into today’s passage, let’s look at one verse from last week. Romans 5:20
20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Here’s the tricky thing about grace. Paul argues in chapter 5 that the effect of the law being given was to increase our awareness of sin.
Let’s pause for a second. How would you describe sin? What is sin to you? [A good, simple definition of sin is anything that offends God]
If there wasn’t a law against coveting for example, we wouldn’t necessarily know that coveting was wrong in God’s eyes and therefore sinful. The law that tells us that coveting is wrong makes us aware that when we covet we are actually sinning.
But, says Paul, when sin increased, the result wasn’t just more punishment. No…where sin increased, grace increased all the more.
This teaching of Paul’s, which had been circulating in the ancient world and had caught the ear of the church in Rome, was being misunderstood. Some feared that this teaching on grace, or salvation by faith alone, would lead to moral irresponsibility.
Some thought that this teaching was actually about some kind of spiritual justification for sinning. Obviously people were having a hard time grasping what grace was about. Grace, in the sense of God’s grace…being given a gift that we absolutely do not deserve (in fact we deserve something awful instead)…
Grace is, except for its central presence in Christian faith, alien to human thought and alien to the realm of religion in general. Grace is huge. No wonder humans mess up when trying to grasp it.
Let’s look at today’s passage:
Romans 6:1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?
The folks that Paul is talking about here, the ones who actually believed that by increasing sinful activity people somehow increase God’s grace...this must have driven the apostle nuts.
The logic, the ’carnal logic’, here is that since God forgives sin by His grace and not through human effort, then if we sin more we give God more to do, in a sense as He extends his grace to cover more and more sin.
A word here about the interpretation of Scripture: This problem that Paul faced is a good case in point about the danger of interpreting Scripture outside the council of the body of Christ, and the importance of letting Scripture interpret Scripture.
Someone or some few people, on their own with an inflated sense of their own wisdom, decided that this ‘carnal logic’ about grace had merit. No one challenged them, it appears, until Paul.
One of the first things they teach you when being trained for leading Alpha or any Bible study for that matter is that when someone says something truly kooky, or gives a wild and inaccurate opinion or interpretation of a Scripture passage, what you say as the leader is:
“Hmm. That’s very interesting. I’ve never heard that”.
Hopefully, the person will gather that their idea was far outside the realm of sound teaching and will on their own adjust their thinking. It’s a way of correcting someone without offending them.
Paul continues to address this issue:
2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
Paul clearly rejects the idea that we should go on sinning so that grace may increase. In fact he uses the opportunity of this gross misunderstanding to exhort and encourage the Romans to a true understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.
Paul uses the sacrament of baptism, an experience that all or the majority of the Roman readers of this letter would have shared, to explain the relationship of the follower of Christ to the problem of sin.
He wants his readers to realize that since we died to sin, we cannot continue to live in sin. In the early church the event of conversion, where a person repents of their sins, believes that Jesus died for their sins and receives Jesus as His Lord and Saviour, the event of conversion was followed so closely by baptism that conversion and baptism are often referred to in Scripture as one event.
So Paul here dismisses any idea that grace somehow justifies or enables us to just keep sinning.
3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4 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.
The connection between belief and action, faith and personal conduct is what matters to Paul here. We believe as Christians that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Believing this, repenting, and receiving Jesus is HOW a person becomes a Christian.
That belief, that embracing of Jesus, that repentance is shown to be true or not true over time by HOW we choose to live our lives. Does our faith change us? Or does our faith, as in the case of those who taught such errors about grace, simply give us licence to live as we’ve always lived?
Paul expands on this by talking about our unity with Christ:
5 If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.
We are baptised into Christ’s death. We are buried with Him so that the resurrection Jesus experienced becomes the resurrection we experience.
6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin--7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Paul gets to the heart of the matter: freedom. The old self, that part of us that traces back to Adam’s original sin, what Paul calls the ‘body of sin’, was crucified with Jesus on the cross.
This was for a reason: so that we no longer be slaves to sin. God’s purpose for you and for me is that we be unfettered, uncaged, no longer enslaved.
Jesus, in dying on the cross, broke the ‘legal’ bond between the ‘old self’, that part of you and me that was in bondage to sin and that desperately wanted to do whatever it felt like.
He broke the legal bond between us and the ‘old self’, SO THAT WE SHOULD NO LONGER BE SLAVE TO SIN.
What is that slavery to sin? James describes it in chapter 1 of his letter: 14 but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
It is this cycle of sin that Jesus came to destroy, to free us from bondage to it.
Paul’s argument in vv6-7 follows the logic of v 5. Since the resurrection Jesus experienced become ours…the death Jesus died in a sense becomes our death to sin.
Baptism is a strong symbol of this. In baptism we are submerged under the water…that is a symbol of dying to our old selves, to our life of sin. And then we are raised to new life. Thanks be to God!
8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.
10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
13 Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.
The key to freedom is to be dead to sin, dead to the old ways we used to live. Paul says: “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body”. Is Paul suggesting that we, as followers of Jesus will never sin? Of course not.
He is saying that we have a choice. That choice is to “let” or “not let” sin reign in us.
When we think of something that reigns we think, as Moreen said last week, of a king or a queen who has power over and who rules over us. Paul is saying don’t let sin rule over you.
Don’t let the things that Scripture describes as sin (many are listed in the first chapter of Romans) have any power over you. Count yourself dead to those things. If you have addictions, seek help over those addictions.
If you stumble in areas of sin repeatedly, find a Christian friend you can trust to whom you can be mutually accountable for the way you live your life. Let the path your life is on be one of clearly moving away from sinful practices to a life of increasing holiness.
If you’ve ever come to me telling me you’ve cut down on smoking, you know I get excited. Someone told me recently they went from two to one packs of smokes a day.
That is awesome. Keep going! That is moving in the right direction. But it’s not just stopping doing stuff that harms you, stuff that God says is sin. It’s also DOING stuff that helps you and others.
V 13 says: Do not offer the parts of your body to sin but rather offer yourself to God. He has brought you, through the blood or Jesus, the sacrifice of His only Son, from spiritual death to spiritual life. Offer your body therefore as instruments of righteousness to God.
What does it mean to offer yourself to God? I’m asking.
[Offer yourself to God. Wake up in the morning and say: “Wow God, I get to live today. I get to breathe today. I give myself to You today. I offer my life as a blessing to You and to others. Let me see needs and respond in love. Let me comfort the broken-hearted today. Let me offer an ear to someone who needs to talk. Let me give assistance, generously, to someone…even a stranger, today, and thereby be a source of life and blessing].
We don’t need to talk in any detail about what it means to offer ourselves to sin. We are all too familiar with what that means.
When we’re clear-headed and clear-hearted, is it really even a choice? When I’m thinking clearly I think of it as the difference between drinking water and drinking tar. We’re quite capable of doing both, but it’s so obvious that one is better than the other.
14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Grace. When a person works an eight-hour day and receives a fair day’s pay for his time, that is a wage. When a person competes with an opponent and receives a trophy for his performance, that is a prize.
When a person receives appropriate recognition for his long service or high achievements, that is an award. But when a person is not capable of earning a wage, can win no prize, and deserves no award--yet receives such a gift anyway--that is a good picture of God’s unmerited favor. This is what we mean when we talk about the grace of God.
We are held by God. We are no longer under the dictates and condemnation of the law. We are under grace.
There’s a story of a pastor who was traveling on a bus down a bumpy road. Seated next to him was a college student who noticed that the minister was reading his Bible. The minister asked, “Are you spiritually ready for the temptations that you will face in college?”
"I don’t have a problem with temptation," the young man told the minister. "I have strong willpower." The minister took a pencil from his pocket and said, "I can make this pencil stand up on the cover of this Bible even though the bus ride is bumpy."
The young man said, "I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t think you can do it.""Look, I’m doing it," he replied as the young man watched. "Yeah, but you didn’t tell me you would hold the pencil up with your hand." "I didn’t have to tell you," the pastor remarked. "Have you ever seen a pencil stand up on its own without someone holding it?"
The minister then let go of the pencil, which instantly fell over. "The only reason you stand," he continued, "is because God is holding you up with His hand." If God were to remove His hand of protecting grace, where would we be? Humility is depending completely on God, realizing that He upholds us by His grace (Kent Crockett)
Let’s pray.
God, we thank you for giving us what we do not deserve. We do not deserve forgiveness, we do not deserve a fresh start, we do not deserve Your love. But somehow, somehow God You have chosen to give us in abundance what we didn’t earn. So we thank you for Jesus. We thank you that each of us are held by You God, kept in the faith, kept near to Your heart.
May this truth continuously transform us to be more and more like our Saviour Jesus, in kindness, in truthfulness, in holiness and in love. For we ask it in His glorious name. Amen.
