Rom 6:12-23 - Who has mastery over us?
Old Horror Movie – “The Hand”
Regardless of what they did to this hand it kept coming back to haunt them
Background So Far
God has had to deal with two problems – sin, and our sinful nature
In the first part of this chapter we talked about killing off that sinful nature
Jesus cut us off from the life support machine of sin and hooked us up to the God machine
God’s Wanted Poster – Wanted – Dead and Alive
A "funeral" has taken place – and we were the guest of honor!
But we were raised with Christ as a new creation
Christians have two-part biographies. Vol. 1: The Old Man in Sin; Vol. 2: The New Man in Christ.
Vol. 1 ended with a death and burial. Vol. 2 begins with a resurrection
In our new life we are to live for God just as Christ did
Paul continues it this same vein about the way we are to conduct ourselves now that we are a new creation – Vol 2
God does not take away our freewill and our ability to choose
He asks us to make a choice as to whom we will allow to be master of this new creation
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
Do you want to now go back and unbaptise yourself
Do you want to go back and hook yourself back up to the sin machine
13Do 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.
Notice the choice. We can yield our bodies to sin or to God
Depending on our choice they will be used as instruments of wickedness or instruments of righteousness
In the same way a hammer can be used to build or to smash and destroy, it becomes an instruments in the hands of the one who controls it
14For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Implication here is while we strive for perfection under the law, sin is our master
But the grace of God has set us free from the mastery of sin
Our new Godly genes implanted in us when we are Born Again determine our new fruits/actions
Realise it is a process and at times there will be failures but over a period of time under the control of the Holy Spirit, we will bring old habits and patterns of thinking under the control of the new master
Paul argues, If Christ truly lives in us, then just as we could not evade sin because we were in Adam, so in Christ we cannot evade righteousness
15What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
Asks the same question he asked at the beginning of the chapter, and gives the same answer
Now he introduces the analogy of slavery
His first century readers would have easily related to this terminology
16Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey--whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?
He asks, your ownership has just been transferred to a new master, whose rules do you follow, the old master or the new master
You have to choose
17But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. 18You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Go back to the first verse in this book. What does Paul call himself? “I Paul, a bondservant of Christ.”
What does Paul mean when he uses the term bondservant?
Exodus 21:5-6 “But if the servant plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ “then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever
A bondservant is one who has been granted their freedom, but because of his love for his master, he voluntarily chooses to remain and serve him
The piercing was an outward sign to all that he was, by free will, a servant to the master he loved so much
Paul like us has been freed from the shackles of sin, but now that he is free, he voluntarily shackles himself to his new master
Unhook the chain from “sin” and attach to “Grace”
And how long was this commitment for - and he shall serve him forever
A servant would have to think long and hard about making this decision
Putting ourselves in voluntarily slavery isn’t very popular in this day and age of personal freedom and independence
Bu not all slavery is necessarily bad – take marriage for instance – bad analogy
When you’re single, you can up an go, do what you like without worrying about anyone else
David decided to go with a couple of mates and sleep out on some mountain Thursday night
But most of us willingly trade that freedom for other overriding benefits when we enter a marriage covenant
My decisions now have to take into account Susan, David and Shannon
Not sure what Susan’s reaction would be if I decided to up and go and sleep on a mountain on a cold winters night – on the other hand she might encourage me to go
But, and I have to say this, that loss of freedom was worth it.
The benefits I gained far outweighed the loss
It’s the same with coming under the Lordship of Jesus Christ – being a bond servant of Jesus Christ is a wonderful privilege, what we gain far outweighs what we lose
19I 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.
Before you were weak in your natural selves, but now you are strong in your new godly selves
Besides the freedom you enjoyed wasn’t real freedom – the slavery to sin led to ever increasing wickedness
The Prodigal son thought his freedom would lead to freedom
Instead it led him to slavery – literally under the control of another feeding pigs
What he thought was freedom turned out to be the worst kind of slavery.
It was only when he returned home and yielded to his father that he found true freedom.
The freedom the world offers is not all its cracked up to be
Besides all of these things we want to hang onto are worthless in God’s eyes anyway
Power, ambition, wealth, illegitimate sensual pleasures, our rights, our time, our money
Neither choice by the way brings us personal freedom
If we choose the way of sin there is the renewed bondage to wickedness
If we choose righteousness there comes the imperative to obey and be holy
But your new slavery to righteousness leads to holiness
20When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
Sure, in your old lifestyle, you had your freedom, but what was the benefit you reaped
21What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22But 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.
One choice leads to sin and death
The other leads to holiness and eternal life
Paul gives one final contrast of the slave/master relationship.
23For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[2] Christ Jesus our Lord.
Remember the audience here are believers
And although the final outcome is spiritual death or Eternal life, he is also speaking about the here and now
You will receive wages for the choice you make in this life
The prodigal son received the wages of his choice
So Paul is saying, if you hook back up to sin, you can expect to experience a defeated, barren, empty and worthless life
On the other hand if you hook up to “grace” the gift of God, you will experience a full, vital and victorious life
Chaining ourselves to grace brings a power with it, the power to overcome
That’s one of the problems of a law and works mentality. The law can tell us we’re sinners, but it does not give us the power to overcome
However if we choose Christ in our struggles, we are relying on his power, his glory, and the strength of his life to make us stronger and stronger in our daily lives
So Paul is again asking us to choose between two masters and the resulting consequences
We can’t vacillate between the two – there is no middle ground
Matt 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.”
There is an old story about the Indian who became a Christian and was giving his testimony about what his Christian life was like. He said, "You know, since me become Christian, me find have two dogs inside: One big black dog, all time bad, all time fight; and one big white dog, all time good. And these dogs fight all the time." And someone said, "Which one wins?" And he said, "Whichever one I say ’sic-em’ to!"
Paul is calling us to choose…who we obey we end up serving
Charles Spurgeon put it this way, "An unchanged life is the mark of an unchanged heart, and an unchanged heart is a sign of an unregenerate life."
As far as God is concerned, there are only two types of lives – the Adam life and the Christ life
The underlying truth of this passage is that man is made with a need to be mastered by something
We are going to feel empty, deprived and hopeless until we have a master
And as far as God is concerned there are only two possible masters - either Christ or self
Everything we do relates to one or the other -- Christ or self.
Before our conversion, we only had one master, the self - that was Volume One
we loved ourselves
We lived for ourselves,
we promoted ourselves.
we fought to protect ourselves.
we hated rivals to ourselves.
we loved only those who catered to ourselves.
That is the way we lived
Then we found a new master, or rather he found us
That’s the start of Volume Two of the biography
But this new master will not tolerate any other masters – That’s why he is called “Lord” and we aren’t
And even though we are born again, he has left a remnant of the old self in this physical body for two reasons:
first, for us to demonstrate to God who we will allow to be Lord of our lives, and
second, to show his devastating power over the sin in our lives as he transforms us into his likeness
He doesn’t call us to be overcomers without giving us the wherewithal to overcome
Too often we underestimate the power of the new life within us
Instead of believing “we are more than overcomers,”(Rom 8:37), we believe we are wet noodle Christians with no backbone
We have to give all of our old life up to our Lord
We can’t compromise with the old man
We can’t give up lust, but keep ambition
We can’t give up drunkenness, but keep worry
We can’t give up lying, but keep self pity
We can’t deny hate, but excuse fear,
We can’t refuse jealousy, but remain impatience
Otherwise we are giving in to the old self
If we are willing to give all of the old man to Jesus
When we do guess what he does with it
he simply calls it up before him, sentences it to death, takes it out, executes it, and dumps it in the grave
because that where the old man belongs
we were supposed to leave it there at baptism
when we give in to self, its like resurrecting the old man from the grave
like that old horror movie of the hand always coming back
except we’re the one’s digging it up
That’s the reality of what happens – when we harbor part of the old man
Christianity is not just a nice theory, it a living reality
Grace is a living reality
It plays out this way
We simply go before God with our problem – gossip, anger, pornography
And say, “God I’ve got this problem with anger. I know it is part of the old man and it belongs in the grave but I have allowed it back into my life, please forgive me for my sin and for not living the reality of my new life in you. Please take my anger, execute it and dump it back in the grave where it belongs”
Then we can forget about it, its Jesus’ problem, we have surrendered it to him
Too often we think its our problem and try to defeat sin by our own strength
Its Christ’s problem, its his battle. He died to defeat sin, and he rose to defeat the sinful nature
And he is the only One who can
Conclusion
So when Paul says we’re no longer under law but under grace, what he means we no longer live under the old regime of the law; that is part of the old creation, the old self, joined to Adam, slaves of sin
Instead we’ve been brought into a new reality, the grace reality, a new creation, a new self, joined to Christ, slaves of righteousness
And because we’ve changed kingdoms, we’ve also changed masters.
So what effect should this new reality of Grace have on us
Well as Paul says, it doesn’t give us an excuse to sin or a license to do what we please
If that’s what we think then we’ve entirely misunderstood what grace means
We’ve not understood how we’ve passed from one reality to another, from one kingdom to another, from one master to another.
God’s grace changes us, because when we encounter it, we die to our old way of life in Adam, we are introduced to a new way of living in Jesus, and we offer ourselves to a new master.
And by believing and living that reality, we can achieve the victorious life over sin and death
