Become Slaves of God

Paul reminded us that “sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace” (6:14).  Set free, thank God Almighty!  We should sit with that blessed realization for a few minutes: we are now, in Christ, under grace, and sin shall no longer be our master.  Amen.  Again, Paul alludes to that baffling bond between sin and the law.  In Christ, we are on a journey that will alter our mindset and revise our values.  God is at work; He does not give up on us.  To give up on us would be to give up on the promise He made to Himself to be glorified in and through us.  God always follows through on His promises.

Our ongoing trouble is and will always be sin; we already know that.  The only reason to talk about sin is so that we can talk soberly, meaningfully, and joyfully about grace.  Grace is not a free pass to sin, as if we can or should sin like mad and then, at the end, whip out the golden Get Out of Hell Free card of grace.  We will not choose sin, immerse ourselves in it, keep with it, allowing temptation to persuade us again that grace will cover it.  No Christian says, well, I’m just going to sin, and God will just have to forgive.  Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11).  He tells the man whom he healed, who had gone thirty-eight years without true help, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you” (Jn 5:14).  Paul reminds us that, in Christ who died then arose, we truly have died to sin.  Amen, amen.

But we still trespass, transgress; we still offend God.  Paul has spent much time and will spend more praying over this problem.  We stumble, too often willingly.  We can’t say to the other person, or to our Enemy: you’re forcing me to sin!  At heart, sin pulls us out of vital relationship with God.  Predators pull the prey away from the group.  Sin means to devour us, if we’ll let it.  The way to evade the predator is not to let it sink its teeth into us.  Be alert; respond quickly, decisively.  Don’t just stand there, hoping it won’t see you.

The former law has been fulfilled and set aside for us in Christ; there is a law that remains, always there, with requirements, expectations, and standards.  It is the true law, the first and only law: the law of love.  Not love as the world all confusedly and fallenly argues about it, but God’s love, taught us in God’s Word.  Christians practice love the way God teaches.  Christians believe what God teaches about love; Christians reject what the world wants to teach about love, especially when the world tries to use God’s Word contrary to God’s Word to teach love the world’s way.  Christians become better able, by the Spirit, to discern, to discriminate, between love after the world’s ways and love after God’s own heart.  There is a real difference, though we wobble and grope through places where that can seem difficult for us to see.

Love after the world’s ways will always try to mimic aspects and qualities of love after God’s own heart so that love after the world’s ways can pull the prey away to devour.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that technique, that camouflage, cheap grace: “doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit.  It is grace without a price, without cost[,]” “a cheap cover-up for its sins, for which it shows no remorse and from which it has even less desire to be free.  Cheap grace is, thus, denial of God’s living Word, denial of the incarnation of the word of God.”[1]  Christ is the Word Incarnate, and Christ alive in us is making us incarnations of God’s living Word, alive in us for life.  And Christ says go and sin no more.  In contrast, “Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ.”[2]  Cheap grace is no grace; it is the love of this world, with a Jesus glaze.  Cheap grace drugs the guilty conscience, saying there is no guilt.  This is how wickedness works.  Wickedness is a predator.  The enemy is a predator; the enemy’s dominant sin, his fundamental spiritual disorder, is pride, and pride is a predator.

Paul asks us to remember: “when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness” (6:16).  Slave is a loaded term, as Paul was well aware.  I’m nobody’s slave!  Said the slave.  There is a dominant, guiding force in each person’s life.  No one can serve two: one will always have precedence.  No one can have righteousness while voluntarily, mendaciously keeping their sin—a little select reserve, a curated private stash.  Hypocrisy isn’t to behave contrary to your professed beliefs: that’s just being weak and temptable, and we all are.  Hypocrisy is not actually having the beliefs you profess.

Obedience comes from the power of grace, operating and effective in those whom God claims: this is righteousness.  It is not a long course of obedience that makes us righteous.  It is righteousness—Christ’s life, in us—that decisively leads to fuller obedience.  I know I’ve been talking lately a lot about sin—the problem looms large in the first half of Romans!  Over these past months, the brilliant, divine response to our shared, human problem has been and remains righteousness as vital relationship.  Are we not there yet?  Where obedience is feeble, or lacking, does that mean there is no vital relationship?  When do we get to the vital relationship?  When we get to obedience?

Beloved, only remember, relationship must grow.  No relationship begins as a vital relationship: it becomes so, over time, the further we go, together.  No one starts out perfectly obedient; we will not depart this life perfectly obedient.  We become more obedient as we grow into this vital relationship.  As we do, the obedience is no longer an unpleasant chore but a source of joy and peace—a habit, what we do without even needing to think about it, deliberate, or decide.  We start choosing the right way; we start staying on it: this, also, is grace, the hand of God, guiding, the heart of God, bearing us along.

If, however, we continue in whatever sticky sin, as each of us may have done for a season, we will think less and less about it—our hearts are already stained with it, tangled up in it, for many reasons.  And we become what we do.  In the case of sin, we will only be experiencing more and more the fullness of the tyrannical sin nature we already have.  While we were not created for sin, sinfulness is our natural state because humanity is fallen.  Sinfulness isn’t doing whatever wickedness we want—that’s the effect.  Sinfulness is doing whatever without reference to God.  Sin deliberately sets God aside, leaves Him out of the equation, as Paul explained at the start of Romans.  The only reason to leave God out is to set aside the standard of God’s love, the standard of God’s Word.  That’s what this cheap grace Bonhoeffer criticized— condemned really—is: setting aside God’s love for a fallen fantasy of love, setting aside God’s standard for a fallen fantasy of God’s standard.  It’s claiming the love without offering the commitment, the personal cost of commitment, our daily sacrifice.  Christians don’t get to do just anything, whatever we want.  Oh, the desire can be strong: I know!  Our conscience, now, is bound to Christ.  That will lead to what at first will feel like tough choices, even impossible choices—but who is telling us they’re impossible?  With God, all things are possible.

Who is perfectly obedient?  The answer is not nobody.  The answer is Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, through whom you and I now have life, on God’s terms, God’s way.  “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”  Sin is to reject God’s Word, His love, power, and salvation.  And we may think to ourselves, well, who really rejects all that?  Who is doing that?  Then we begin to look around.  People may indeed say God is real, but for whom is He really real?  And we may say, well, that’s not our concern, but I’m not so certain of that.

Joyfully, gratefully, Paul writes, “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance.  You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (6:17-18).  We’ve become slaves, yay.  No one wants to think of him or herself as a slave to sin—what could be more hopeless!?  So, people don’t call it sin.  People don’t call it slavery, but changing the words does not change the truth.  Sin works by claiming our allegiance; to do so, it presents itself as what people deeply need or what we cannot possibly fight against; again, hopeless.  People learn to sin; we are taught to sin.  That’s a bit terrifying.  People get better at it, go deeper in it; sin claims more and more of our allegiance, and whereas before a man or a woman just sort of dallied with it in an amateur way, over time he or she becomes a professional devotee.  A pattern of teaching sets a pattern of thought, a pattern of values, a way of seeing and thinking that governs us.  What we obey from the heart, we cannot really think of as evil.  The Tempter understands all this, thoroughly.  So does God.

God gave us His Word, then at the appointed time sent His Living Word to us, for a pattern of right teaching, to claim all our allegiance, so that we will more and more obey from all our heart.  Paul isn’t speaking only of the seat of emotion.  Being very biblical, Paul is speaking of the heart as the seat of decision, will, vision, hope, drive, and commitment.  In Scripture, it’s never the head that governs the heart, but always the heart that governs the head; so it matters—tremendously, infinitely and eternally—who, what, is on the throne of the heart.

Paul is writing primarily to those who came to faith in Christ as adults, already after a lot of life—like some of us here today.  Many of us would say we’ve been Christians as long as we can remember.  So, when Paul writes of those who “used to be slaves of sin,” we don’t think of ourselves.  And there’s our problem.  We’re always being surprised by sin.  It should be no surprise at all.  As faithful disciples of Jesus, we more and more want to live with him according to his pattern.  Our lingering, chronic inability to do so should come as no surprise.  God is patient.  Our lingering lack of enthusiasm for righteousness should come as no surprise.  God is compassionate.  The inability and lack of enthusiasm are the residual traces of sin, our sin nature, the call of the evil desires—that doesn’t mean only or even primarily sexual immorality.  The root of the sin nature is pride, self first, not caring what others call truth if it isn’t my truth: the truth that matters must conform to my truth.  People don’t put it like that, but they live that way.  This is how sinfulness thinks: what is true must be true for me; if it is not true for me, it is not true.  In other words, if I do not accept it, then it isn’t true.  I decide what is and is not true.  That’s an old, old gesture—reaching for the fruit.  God is most familiar with it in His dealings with us.  Let us bless God for His mercy.

Faith happens for us: maybe in some moment of being caught up by glory; maybe after an intense period that left us crumpled and bloody on our faces in the dust; maybe as a slow, gradually building process over years of our lives.  We “come to obey from [our] heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed [our] allegiance” (6:17).  We’re getting faith by heart—that’s grace.  If God has claimed our allegiance now, in Christ, it is because, by grace, Christ has become supremely lovely for us and God has finally, truly become really real.  Christ came to die and to rise for us; Christ came also to give us a pattern of teaching, a way, a life through this world.

We know the way is love, thank God!  We’re all about love.  Love is great; let’s love one another.  But Christ’s love is far richer, fuller, than the limp permissiveness and fickle infatuations the world continually conditions us to regard as “love, sweet love.”  Why do we let the world sway us, when we have God’s Word?  Why do we make the world the measure of God’s Word?  What made Christ’s love effective for us was obedience: his was a love that obeyed, and our love will be Christ’s love when we begin obeying, too.  It isn’t the head that needs to be converted, not the mind that needs to be convinced.  It is the heart that needs to be converted because the heart governs the head.  No atheist becomes an atheist through the head.  Every atheist becomes an atheist through the heart.  The atheist wants no God, is revolted and made positively livid by the idea of any god.  No God, no sin: problem solved.

No God, no righteousness; no righteousness, sin abounds—problem not solved.  It is not by ceasing to use the term that we are set free from sin.  The way to be set free from the domination of sin—I don’t say free from the effects of sin—is to have another master.  Slaves are captured, seized; in other cases they are purchased—that was the civilized way.  Christ came, our gentle lamb, our lovely dove, to seize us; he purchased us—at such cost!  So, you and I, captivated by the Word, now belong to God.  Christ laid hold of us and pulled us out, lifted us up.  We have “become slaves to righteousness” (6:18).  Well, we really do not like this word, slave—servant, maybe is okay.  What we live for is our master.  Our obedience, our devotion, our active daily commitment—it all goes to what we live for, and what we live for shows.

Christ came to set us free from sin; he has freed us.  He freed us to claim us.  We’re God’s or we’re the world’s; we are never our own.  Paul brings in a telling example, one that the believers gathered there in Rome would have understood, and felt: “I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations.  Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness” (6:19).  Impurity and ever-increasing wickedness—yes, thought many there, yes . . . but we didn’t call it that: all our zeal, our enthusiasm, our excitement, was for the next round, the next thrill, the new thrill, the new high, so much better than the old, tired, worn out thrills—we used to do a little, but a little didn’t do it, so a little got more and more.  We know the pattern; the pattern doesn’t change, but God, by grace through faith, changes the direction, redirects the pattern to righteousness leading to holiness, and holiness leads to God because God is holy.

Christ caused a change in ownership, which causes a growing change in desire.  Oh, the old desires are all still there—God help us!—and there are now also new desires, better: desires for righteousness, for holiness, the desire for God.  We offer ourselves to what we desire.  We need good desires, new desires, better desires—this is why we have the Spirit with us, applying Christ to us, applying grace to us, reshaping, reforming, restoring us, to the glory of God.  The Sacrament we receive and make part of us is a blessed reminder.

Slaves of God.  How have we become slaves of God?  By freely offering ourselves to God, through grace, without which we could not and would never want to.  Because God chose you and me, we now rejoice in our choice for God.  The Spirit who sits with us, listens, and watches, also counsels us, whispers to us, calls to us, continues to draw us near; the Spirit always with us offers us true food and true drink, true forgiveness, true love; the Spirit offers us true life because He is the Spirit of Truth.  And the truth shall set us free.

The notion of behaving ourselves in order to get our prize seems rather juvenile to us, now.  Holiness—righteousness—is its own reward: the taste of true freedom, God quenching our thirst for Him.  The benefit of this freedom, God’s freedom, true and only freedom, is “holiness, and the result is eternal life” (6:22).  This table is here to tell us, remind and invite us.  “[T]he wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:23).  We get Jesus.  Hallelujah.

[1] 40 Day Journey with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Day 17; https://www.biblegateway.com/devotionals/40-day-journey-dietrich-bonhoeffer/2026/01/18

[2] Same as above.