November 12, 2023
Unshackled: Choose Life
Romans 6:12-23
Last week we looked at our relationship with sin by looking at what Paul wrote in Romans 6. We saw that our relationship with sin had changed at the moment of salvation because our relationship with God had changed. It was at that moment we were no longer slaves to sin, but rather we were free from the captivity of sin by the blood of Jesus Christ. We are now dead tosin and we have victory over sin because of Jesus, but Paul doesn’t stop there when it comes to our relationship with sin. He continues this chapter by explaining what we are to do with the freedom that was given to us through faith in Jesus Christ.
Romans 6:12-23
Do not let sin control the way you live; do not give in to sinful desires. Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. Instead, you live under the freedom of God’s grace. Well then, since God’s grace has set us free from the law, does that mean we can go on sinning? Of course not! Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the obligation to do right. And what was the result? You are now ashamed of the things you used to do, things that end in eternal doom. But now you are free from the power of sin and have become slaves of God. Now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul starts out by reminding us that although we have freedom from sin, sin is still going to be present in our lives and it will be a choice we have to make. We have been given freedom from the control of sin, but we are not excluded from sin, so we must make a conscious choice to make sure sin does not still rule in our lives since such a costly price was paid for our freedom. This isn’t just a generalized call not to continue in sin. Paul is very specific when he tells us not to let any part of our bodies be an instrument of evil. That means what our mouth says, what our eyes see, what our ears hear, what our brains think, and that means where our feet take us. It means that the smallest of disobedient pleasures we indulge in needs to be watched and brought under control because it's these seemingly small sins that our enemies can use and grow into weapons of evil and destruction. Remember back before you were saved? Re member how the sins that you struggled with caused so much destruction and brokenness in your lives and in the lives of the ones that you loved? Even after salvation, sin can still have this effect in our lives if we let it. We have been set free from sin’s control and instead of having to obey our sinful nature, we can now make choices. We have a choice to continue in our old sinful ways of life or we can yield to the God who saved us.
How do we yield to God instead of to sin in our lives? Paul says it’s got to be through total surrender. It’s an all or nothing thing when it comes to living a life committed to God. This shouldn’t be a foreign concept to us. We have these types of relationships all throughout our lives. Marriage is a perfect example because it takes total commitment. You can’t be 95% committed and faithful to your spouse and think you have a healthy relationship with them. The same goes with our relationship with God. It's 100% or it’s not obedient to what God wants for our relationship with Him. Partial obedience is always disobedience in our relationship with God. Paul will come back to the idea of surrendering everything to God as an act of worship in Romans chapter 12, but here in verse 13 Paul reminds us we have to make these decisions because we are dead to that way of life. He tells us that when we do surrender everything to God, we are offering ourselves to be used in the exact opposite way that sin likes to control and lead and that is always to destruction. When we surrender and our total selves are given to God and His Glory we are letting our bodies be a weapon for righteousness and good. Do you remember what damage you did when you tried things your way when you were a slave to sin? Paul is calling us to imagine what would happen for good when you give yourself 100% to God. It should be a proposal that excites every Christian.
Paul then shifts to getting Christians excited about the prospects of being 100% sold out to God to speaking about our freedom again. He states that not only are we free from sin, but we are also free from the law. When the law was given it was never to save us (nor did it ever have the power to). It was only to show us the sin that was in our lives (Romans 3:20), so when we are under the law we are in a prison that there is no escape from. That’s when grace and faith come in. Galatians 2:16 tells us that “Even so, we know we cannot become right with God by obeying the Law. A man is made right with God by putting his trust in Jesus Christ. For that reason, we have put our trust in Jesus Christ also. We have been made right with God because of our faith in Christ and not by obeying the Law. No man can be made right with God by obeying the Law.” It’s God’s grace that saves us through faith and that’s where freedom is found. It’s freedom from the slavery of sin and freedom from the law. Remember last week when we spoke about the two responses to justification by faith? This is Paul addressing the legalistic response to that initial question. We don’t have a set of laws that we must follow any more, but instead we love and our actions come from love that God first showed us on the cross. Paul then phrases another question that comes from the idea that we are no longer under the law, “So the amazing grace of God has set us free from the law, that means we can do what we want?” Of course not, if that’s your response you still don’t understand the reality of grace in the life of a believer and Paul wants to make sure we have an understanding of that reality.
Everyone serves something. That’s the truth Paul is speaking of in verse 16. The only difference is now we can choose what we serve. We can choose to serve sin in our lives and fall back into the lifestyle which we died to that Paul tells us leads to death, or we can choose the path that leads to life. We have no other options, we can follow God or not. Those are the only two choices. Wait a second - how can a Christian's sin still lead to death? It’s not in the eternal sense because we know from Scripture that when we are saved nothing can take us out of God’s hand (John 10:28). Instead this death comes in the present life. It’s a death that can lead to our fruitlessness to God and can even lead to our physical death. Think about King David, a man after God’s own heart, who conquered the giant Goliath, but made many sinful choices and couldn’t conquer his temptation with Bathsheba. Those choices led to many problems and death in his life and in the lives of those who were around him. We must make sure we are constantly making good choices in all parts of our lives no matter how small and inconsequential they may seem to us and choose the life that is only found in God and His ways. This response to choosing life is a natural response when we understand the Gospel. Once we understand what God has done for us through Jesus then we want to listen and obey. We want to follow Him. We want a deeper relationship with Him and we want what He wants for us because we know of the incredible love He has and has demonstrated this to us. Moses called the children of Israel to make this same choice as they were starting into the promised land in Deuteronomy 30:19-20. It was a call to make the choice between life and death and he pleaded for them to choose life. Paul is doing the same here. He chose to explain the relationship to sin as slavery, because it is that serious in the life of believers and non-believers alike.
He finishes off chapter 6 by finishing up his plea to choose life by speaking about fruit in the life of a believer. He reminded the believers of the fruit in their lives during their slavery to sin, the shame, the pain, the brokenness and the separation from God. It was a last appeal for them to submit themselves fully to God so they would not go back to those old ways of life because it would only lead to more of the same. He tells them that when you present yourself to be a weapon of righteousness, there is fruit that will be produced there too - fruit you cannot and will never produce on your own. These things can only be done through the Gospel - living it and sharing it. He finishes off the chapter with one of the most iconic and alarming verses in all of Scripture about sin and the Gospel. It’s the summation of how we should look at our freedom from and relationship to sin. We are free. We need to pursue the things of God in our lives and slowly the sanctification process will begin. It all starts with a change in how we view sin in our lives.
Since our relationship with sin has changed, we changed. When we change we now have a decision to make with every action and interaction we have during our day. We can pursue the way things once were in our attitude, our words, and our actions, or we can pursue life by following God’s ways. Choose life!
