Who Will You Allow To Be Your Master?

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