ROMANS 6: 12-18
12 12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Should we 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, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. †
The Law is a Bad Diet
How should Christians think about sin?
I’ve used the analogy of WWII soldiers making way from Normandy toward Berlin—D-day to V-day—and it seems appropriate to the Church as well. We live in between the triumph of Christ on the cross and the final consummation of His kingdom. Sin is still very much in evidence all around us. We have been forgiven and we celebrate the grace of God through Christ, but we still walk in sin, like soldiers wading ankle-deep through mud and grime.
Paul addresses this directly, telling us that we should not allow to let sin have dominion over our bodies. How does sin have dominion over our bodies?
I think we all know. As we prepare ourselves for Lent 2020, it is right that we should seek to increase our self-awareness as to what moves and motivates us from day to day. We can proclaim high ideals and commit ourselves to biblical morality, but at the level of immediacy—where we live, minute by minute—we find ourselves not only susceptible to sin but prone to it.
Why does dieting not work? I mean patently does not work? Okay, it might work a little. I have lost weight on almost every diet I’ve tried, so I should say that dieting works quite well. But it’s sticking with the diet that’s out of our nature.
Of the top 200 diets in America, none work, according to the AMA. What? How can they not work? What’s wrong? Dieting is like moralism—it doesn’t work because the diets themselves are not the real solution to the problem. The real problem is self-control or the lack thereof.
Sin has a kind of natural dominion over us—our bodies have needs and drives of their own which serve our survival—including our fears, anxieties, and our imagination of the future. We live in this world competing against nature for our survival.
What? Mother Nature is not our friend?
To some degree, yes, but unless we labor for food, shelter, and the feeding and sheltering of others, we all end up sleeping on the streets in the cold. Nature doesn’t care for us in that way. Mother Nature is indifferent to your survival and mine. She would be just as happy for a consuming, deadly virus to thrive as you or me. So yes, to a major degree, we survive up and against nature.
It is this basic competition against the elements that is our source of fear, anxiety, and over-eating. Psychologically, at levels beneath our good intentions, our bodies are driven to maximize calorie density and secure self against danger and want. And to reproduce, which gives us our sexuality issues.
But this is not what Paul is talking about. When Paul speaks of sin having dominion over us, he is speaking of something deeper. He tells us not to “present our members” to sin as instruments of wickedness. How is this different? It is different as we willingly commit ourselves to something greater than mere survival.
Paul, like Jesus, discourages the Children of God from making the things of this world the focus of their service. In other words, we are not to settle with materialism—the life of worrying about what we shall eat, what shall we wear, and what shall happen to me.
We do not present our bodies to our fears, anxieties, and appetites. Rather, we present our bodies to serve God’s Kingdom. We trust in God’s promises and thereby renounce our natural obsession with self-preservation.
We are to live “as those who have been brought from death to life,” meaning that we commit ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s promises and not to the fears, anxieties, and appetites of the body.
We have a new life and a new identity in Christ. Therefore we have a new diet with new hungers and different gratifications than the life committed to this world alone.
The Law Creates Sin?
The problem is that the Law reveals sin, but you could almost say it creates sin. When God tells Adam not to touch the forbidden fruit, He has made that fruit the most interesting thing in the world. Or maybe it wasn’t before the fall, but since the fall, it is clearly the center of our interest.
When my nephew Eric was a toddler, he had pretty much free run of the house, but at Christmastime, there came a hard and fast rule: You shall not touch the ornaments on the Christmas tree! Guess what? What was the center of his little world? The ornaments. A whole house to play in, and there he is, quietly gazing at the shiny, red bulb at eye-level.
There was an iPhone app in the early days called “Do not press the red button.” That was it—a nice, shiny, red button with the commandment “Do not press.” Really, who could resist? We were made to push that button.
There is no such thing as a psychological negative. If I were to say, “Whatever else you do, do not think about your left eyebrow!” or “Do not imagine a pink elephant!” You see the point.
But Paul says we are under grace, not under the Law.
Under Grace, Not Law
The New RULER—grace, not the Law. The new ruler is the new means of measuring righteousness. How do we measure who is righteous and who is not? Merely by grace. By grace, Christ has put sin and death into the grave. We are freed from death and therefore free from the wages of sin.
Grace is the new rule, so sin will have no dominion over those who are in Christ because we under grace, not under the law. There is no judgment to be had for those united in Christ’s death and resurrection. We need to quit using the law to measure others and instead use Grace. Grace for sin is the gospel—grace accomplished by Christ and given to us as a free gift.
The New Kingdom—the kingdom of Christ’s reign—is one ruled by grace, not the law. We begin to live out that new reality here and now. We are called to live as Christ’s kingdom would demand, and that means living by grace and not by law.
To serve Grace means we are through measuring sin and righteousness. We should no longer be counting sins and good deeds as part of our religious duty. We are called to use a different lens.
That lens is viewing the world through grace—seeing and proclaiming that the righteousness of Christ is reaching all people.
Mercy abounds where sin once abounded.
What should we say of sin?
•It is the remnant of the old life.
•It is the lingering stink of a fire that has been put out.
•Sin has no future. Only God’s future will endure.
But sin is in evidence! It’s everywhere! Wars abound. The greedy prosper and sexual confusion is the norm. Injustice, anger, and the passions of the flesh dominate today as much as ever; so how can we not see sin?
That is the worldly view, the worldly proclamation.
Our proclamation is that no matter how broad and prevalent sin may be, grace in Jesus Christ is broader, wider, deeper, and the higher power. The world is moving toward greater grace, not greater sin.
Sin no longer has dominion. Sin will not win. Grace will win.
Christ is the evidence, and we are here to proclaim it, to point to it, and to call all people to free from sin and place their trust in Jesus who is the source of all grace.
We are under grace.
Freed from/Freed For
We are freed from sin which means we are freed for a new kind of life. Freed from equal freed for.
We must quit seeing ourselves and our moral lives as strategies to win God’s favor, and must see that God has accomplished it all! Our moral life is nothing but a grateful response. The lives we live now stand on higher ground, new territory, the level of the redeemed and no longer the level of those seeking to get themselves into God’s good favor.
It is done. We are His children and inheritors of His Kingdom. There is nothing for us to do to accomplish it; it is accomplished. The burden is lifted.
Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” but it seems our human penchant for idolatry keeps us turning His grace into new burdens—Now that you’re a Christian, ya gotta do this or that…” In our sinfulness, we re-create the Law, albeit very modern and church-flavored. We must abandon all the false props and pillars that we are prone to create in order to make us feel good about ourselves and our faith—abandon them all with ruthless efficiency in order that we would remain in that place where we must simply trust in Jesus, trust in Jesus, trust in Jesus.
The Bible uses a special word for this departure from obligation to the old law: Freedom.
We are freed from bondage and thereby free to serve. It is because we are free that we can serve.
The one who is bound MUST serve.
The one who is free MAY serve.
Our service is given in freedom, for we are not bound.
This is obedience from the heart.
Obedience from the Heart
Henri Nouwen gives us the example of the the Balance Beam. Imagine a balance beam that is extended between what were the twin towers of New York City. Impossibly high and terrifying. Imagine you have to walk that beam. How would you walk? With terror, not doubt, and your body would be wracked with anxiety as you fought yourself at every precarious step. Nouwen says what we need is someone (like a preacher, perhaps, wink wink) to come push you off that beam.
Once pushed, what you find is that all that space beneath you has been filled. The work of Christ upon the cross as filled the fall so that your beam is just like a practice beam, a mere 8 inches from the floor. Christ has filled the gap.
How then, would you walk now? With utter confidence! Time to try the cartwheel, right? This is how Christ completes the Law. We are freed to practice the Law, but all the danger has been removed.
It’s like one of my old seminary friends, who played high school football in Washington, D.C. “Hell week” took place in August, so it was brutal and grueling—hot and humid. The players worked out all week in the heat and prepped themselves for the new season.
The coach, to make Hell week a bit more Hellish, constructed a difficult obstacle course for his team. They had to scale walls, crawl on their bellies, leap, jump, lift, and roll their way through these torments.
At the end of the week, the players were splayed out on the grass, wet with sweat, listening to their coach, who told them they were the best team he had ever seen—their attitude and persistence were unprecedented. He said, “Even if we were to lose every game of this season, I couldn’t be more proud of you! You are the best group I’ve ever worked with!” Then he dismissed them to the showers and a much needed meal. The players trotted off to the showers with as much hustle as they could muster, except for my friend, who stood there—inspired by the coach’s speech—and looked him in the eye with pride and esteem.
“Jamie?” said the coach, “You okay?”
Without a word, Jamie, with the coach watching, went back to the obstacle course and went through the whole thing in reverse, just to please the coach.
Can you imagine how that coach felt? “That’s my boy! That’s my Jamie!”
That is you and me when it comes to the law. The job is done; it has been fulfilled by Christ. We are not obligated to fulfill righteousness, but we are free to practice it simply because we love, honor, and respect our Coach and want to please Him. Our sole motivation is gratitude. This is obedience from the heart, and we ought never to return to mere behavior of the hands—merely behavioral obedience.
We have the Holy Spirit in us. That Spirit is author of the Law. We must trust the Spirit to lead us in our obedience rather than seizing it for ourselves and succumbing to our predilection for idolatry—which is re-creating the law.
What do we HAVE to do? Nothing.
Those who are called and justified have been brought from death to life.
Our lives are now shaped by our witness to God’s good news of the free gift of grace through Jesus.
The New Life is Like…
What does the life look like that is given to witnessing to Grace?
It does NOT look like a life given to sin. Sin no longer gratifies the heart that is filled with the Holy Spirit. We walk amidst sin and slip into it regularly, but it is neither the goal of our hearts nor a terror to our salvation.
It does NOT look like a life given to the Law. Moralism is also idolatry, because it is a wheel upon which we keep our own hands fixed and steering, rather than trusting in God’s grace through Christ. The law is idolatry.
It does NOT look like a life given to the flesh. We live in this world, but nor for the ends of this world. We live for the Kingdom and reign of Christ. This world cannot satisfy the hunger of our hearts as they are continuously shaped and formed by the Holy Spirit.
It does NOT look like a life unaware of Grace. Without Christ, there is only shallowness, hedonism, and ultimately the absolute despair of death. The life that is grace-aware lives above and beyond all materialism.
We are freed from death, Hell, and the pointlessness of nihilism. We are freed for life—life eternal—which shapes our present witness. Our witness is the new life:
—The self-emptied life
—The dangerous, risky life
—The life of the irrational:
not fearing death
willfully surrendering advantage
forgiving
loving enemies. †