It just seems the holidays are meant for laziness. The week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day is meant for sleeping in and for resting. Yet, I want to challenge your message during this “week of rest” - The reality of Christmas is that God’s grace does not produce Christians who are cavalier about sin. My message in three words is simple: Don’t drift downstream. Christmas is here to stamp out sin. Jesus’ intention is to extinguish sin. The Apostle Paul’s intention is to extinguish sin. The reason God designed Christmas was to extinguish sin.
So I say again: Don’t drift downstream in your fight against sin. Instead, be vigilant. The reality of Christmas is that God’s grace does not produce Christians who are CAVALIER about sin.
Some of you are struggling with sinful habits - gambling addictions, drug addictions, alcoholism, and pornography. In 2008, five million people participated in addiction programs because of alcohol or drug abuse. Some of you battle the thoughts of giving in to materialism. Many of you want to be freed from your sinful habits. The good news of the Gospel is that Christ died to grant forgiveness to sinners. Yet, the neglected part of the Gospel is that Christ also died to deliver you from sin’s mastery over you.
Think of the Gospel in this way. The Gospel declares the good news that one day when we stand before a holy God, He will accept unholy people because of your belief in Jesus Christ. The Gospel also provides the bolt-cutters to break the power of sin’s mastery over us in this life. God begins to remove the chains of sin’s dominion over us as soon as we believe in Him … as soon as we trust in Him… as soon as we treasure Him… He begins cutting the chains then and doesn’t wait until the day we enter heaven. Believers in Christ have been given the ability to live lives that are pleasing to God and fulfilling for themselves.
Find Romans 6 with me as we are wrestling with some of Paul’s most difficult to understand teaching. Don’t just think of this as a theoretical or intellectual exercise. The Bible was not given simply to increase your knowledge but to change your conduct.
“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification” (Romans 6:14-19).
The big purpose for Romans 6 is to show why justification by faith always causes people to live more godly. Romans 6 teaches that faith alone justifies us, yet it is never alone. It always brings with it a holiness of life. Yet, my fear is that many of you are not waging war. My fear is that many of us live lives seeking only to enjoy the quiet comforts of a little more convenience and a little more luxury. The church is weak because we are not convinced that there is a war. Conflict and Battle are not words that are foreign to modern-day Western Christians. Unless you believe that life is war – that the stakes are your soul – you will probably just play at Christianity. We must remember this: there is no standing still in the Christian life. Either you are advancing toward salvation, or you are drifting away to destruction.
So how do you battle sin?
1. Does Christmas Encourage Sin?
Verse fifteen is a question: “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15a) It just about the same question as Paul entertained back in verse one. Both verses one and verse fifteen ask, “Doesn’t the grace that Christ offers encourage people to continue to sin?” Some hear the Gospel and respond, “If God loves me unconditionally regardless of my behavior, then I’m free to live as I please.” The question of verse fifteen arises because of Paul’s statement in verse fourteen.
“Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 5:20-21)
1. The Law Incites Sin
The Bible tells us that the law actually incites sin: “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead” (Romans 7:8). You know how this works, you see a sign that says, “Don’t Touch. Wet Paint,” and all you want to do is touch is to see if this is true.
Now, the Majority of People believe they can climb a moral ladder to heaven. Christmas is not about your moral performance.
1.2 Grace Outlaws Sin
You don’t have to live a sin-dominated life. Christmas grace has come and transforms you. Christmas grace has come and empowers you. Christmas grace has come and you have the ability to do good.
Sin will not master true believers. Does sin master you? If so, you are not a believer. Now, I didn’t say, “Do you sin?” because “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Instead, I asked you, “Does sin master you?”
Keep this in mind: not every person is tempted in the same way. Instead, Satan customizes your temptation to your constitution. Satan doesn’t send everyone the same temptation. Sin is more heinous than you think. Sin’s effect on you is more powerful than you realize. Sin is deceptive. It lulls you to sleep. It causes you to think on Monday that heaven and hell are not the most pressing realities at hand. Again, sin is deceptive. It causes you to think the most important things are self-indulgence and self-satisfaction. It makes you think that because you have broken some forms of sin, you’re ok.
Sin is deceptive as it comes to us like Judas with a kiss. Sin is deceptive as it deceives Eve into taking the forbidden fruit that seemed good and desirable. Sin seems harmless like it did to King David who walked the roof of his palace but it ended in adultery and murder.
Yet, for many of you, there is one sin that dominates you. It doesn’t matter what sinful habit dominates you, it only matters that you are in bondage. Does sin rule you? Is it your temper? Is it lust? Is it jealousy? Is it your pride?
English author H. G. Wells was famous for science fiction novels like The War of the Worlds. Wells once wrote a short story called “The Country of the Blind.” It’s about an inaccessible, luxurious valley in Ecuador where, due to a strange disease, everyone is blind. After fifteen generations of this blindness, there was no recollection of sight or color or the outside world at all. Finally a man from the outside—a man who could see—literally fell into their midst. He had fallen off a high cliff and survived, only to stumble into their forgotten country. He tried at first to tell them of the world of sight. Yet, they wouldn’t believe him and thought he was crazy. The man fell in love with a girl there in the valley of the blind. The girl’s father went to talk to the doctor about the young man who loved his daughter. The doctor told the girls’ father that he could cure him with a simple surgery – they just needed to remove his eyes. Jesus said, “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.”
Yet, grace outlaws sin. Grace is unlike the law. Grace guarantees sin will not master you. Why?
Let me off you three quick reasons why sin doesn’t master believers.
1.2.1 Because the Wrath of God is Entirely Removed from You
All of God’s actions toward you are merciful. He does not punish you. Therefore He is for us and not against us: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things” (Romans 8:31-32)? Being “under grace” means being out from under God’s wrath. All of His power stands to aid us in His mercy.
1.2.2 Because Guilt Doesn’t Need to Paralyze You
Because you are “under grace,” you are no longer a slave to sin. Many of you are still enslaved to sin because you feel so hopeless. You feel hopeless against your sinful habits, therefore you will not even make an effort to change. Yet, the reality for believers is that you are justified by faith alone. Because faith in the death of Christ justifies you, you are forgiven of your sins… and you are delivered from sin’s mastery over you. Your situation isn’t hopeless. Because you are in Christ, you will see victory over sin.
The third reason why Grace Outlaws Sin is…
1.2.3 God is at Work in You
“for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed…” (Romans 6:17). God is being thanked in verse seventeen because of obedience. And it’s not mechanical obedience but “from the heart.”
Notice verse eighteen: “and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Romans 6:18). Here again, God is at work. God has freed you from sin. God has enslaved you to righteousness. God is working inside of us to do His will.
2. Desire Matters More than Decision
Sin carries its war by entangling your desires and drawing your wants and desires with itself. Passions have a way of enslaving us: “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness” (Romans 6:16)? The word “slaves” is used six times in this passage. Paul sees our passions as potential slave masters.
In order to defeat sinful habits, you must get behind them to the desires that cause them: “Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin’” (John 8:34). And your desires will cause you to be enslaved to something… Either you will be slaves to sin or you’ll be set free from sin by Christ and then you’ll become slaves to righteousness (verses 17 and 18).
This is a battle for your passion, for your desires. Sin attempts to come into your life and turn your God-given passions around in order to defeat you. Think of your body as a castle. Sin comes into your castle in the hopes of commandeers your desires against you. Your desires are like canons pointing out from your castle in order to defeat the enemy, sin. Yet, sin finds a back entrance in your castle, where it commandeers your “passions” for its own purposes.
Your desires and your “passions” are not bad. They’re neutral. You have a passion for sleep and to eat and for sex. None of these “passions” are bad. Yet, sin comes in to commandeer them where sleep turns into laziness. And your desire to eat becomes gluttony. And your desire for drink becomes drunkenness. And your desire for sex becomes fornication or adultery or pornography. And this where Christmas becomes obscured – where Jesus Christ comes simply to bring greater pleasure to a darkened heart. Sinful passions attempt to enslave us.
