Instruments of Righteousness

Paul and Peter both speak of sin as evil desire.  What is evil is contrary to God, in a special sense a negation, a denial of God.  Sin not only obscures God but in a particular sense shuts God out, refusing Him access—God not allowed, here.  Not as if God had no power to prevent it, no power to assert Himself.  Sin blinds people to God, hardens hearts against God, closes minds to God, stops ears.  Whatever hardens our hearts against God’s Word, whatever closes off our minds to God’s Word (won’t even think about it!), whatever stops our ears to God’s Word (refuse to listen!) this is, ipso facto, evil.  It is sin.  And God allows it, in part at least, so that when His grace manifests in the life of a sinner, His glory shines all the brighter.  If you’d like to get a further glimpse of that light, and the lightness that comes with it, recall that God has claimed you for His own: He has indeed forgiven you, and has fully committed His life to save you.

If you’ve gathered nothing else about me by now, you will at least, I suspect, have figured out that I regard myself as a sinner—in recovery, yes; redeemed, how I love to proclaim it, hallelujah, amen.  A torn, stained, beat up mess . . . clothed with Christ.  That I regard myself this way doesn’t mean I hate myself, but it does mean I am coming more and more to hate the sin in me still.  Hate is a powerful word, as we know.  We’re told and taught to love, and love, God’s love, hates one thing: sin.  And it is there, in me, still.  God is also there.  To be sinful is to be entirely unable to turn to God, unable to love God apart from God taking the initiative, intervening, and constantly upholding us.  It’s only God who can cause sinners to love Him.  And He does.  Those with no sense of themselves as sinful will be unable to have the sense of the glory, the love, and the grace that God means for all of us to know, rely upon and rejoice in, always, forever.  Christ did not come for the righteous, beloved.

I don’t doubt that there are men and women in almost any church who just cannot recall a single evil desire that has ever crossed his or her mind, darkened his or her heart.  Maybe our sisters more than our brothers.  Guys, if your heart is at all like mine, you know enough already of evil desires, and the ongoing war against them.  There is lust, always lurking, as advertising and the internet reminds us—all those online lures, men, they’re a trap, and yes, it’s diabolical.  I’ve heard a few people freaking out that demons are snaring hapless people through AI, chatbots and the like; friends, it’s even worse: all AI does is reflect yourself back to you.  All AI shows you is what’s already inside you.  The demons—the dark places—aren’t in the AI.

It’s not all, only, lust.  That’s just an obvious, too common example.  The evil desires aren’t always so blatant.  I get solicitations from charities, worthy charities, that have like a penny, or three pennies, or a nickel glued onto the letter.  The letter tells me that this piddling amount can actually feed a starving child for a day.  I take the coin, throw away the solicitation, and go about my business.  I don’t have the money to send to all these organizations!  And I’d be ashamed to send like only five dollars, although, apparently, if the charity is telling me the truth, even five dollars could provide one hundred meals . . . Impossible!  A fool and his money . . .

I suppose the biggest sin is the sin that says there is no sin: nothing to see, here!  That’s the sin of pride.  Pride doesn’t always or only express itself as smug superiority to others; pride expresses itself as superiority to God’s Word—smarter than, wiser than, too sophisticated for all that primitive superstition, all that unenlightened bigotry.  A bishop in one of the many declining mainline denominations, the UCC—all that’s left, now, of the Puritans—recently called for a “third testament,” as the previous two had become, in her words, “problematic.”  We can guess why bishop Yvette Flunder has called for a kinder, gentler, diverse testament, and we wouldn’t be wrong.  Pride comes in many forms and manifests itself the same way: rejection of biblical teaching, especially when God comes across as too vigorous, too clear, and too holy.  The Bible is not primarily about science, history, or ethics.  The Bible is about holiness—life God’s way.

Jesus told us no one could obey two masters.  Joshua had insisted that the people decide which god they would serve—they had options!  Hundreds of years after, Elijah asked the people how long they would waver . . . worshiping God when it seemed like He was coming through for them, worshiping Baal when it seemed like he was coming through for them: whoever, whatever, gives us what we want, that one we will worship and obey, today!  The Old Testament cries out, repeatedly: there is only one God, and it is Him we must worship and serve.  Not to worship God is not to worship nothing.  Not to worship God is to worship death.  Only God can give us life; this is demonstrated conclusively, compellingly, in Christ, risen from the dead through the glory of the Father.

No one is serving the true, living God by allowing sin to reign in them, obeying “its evil desires” (6:12).  The sin is in us.  In Christ, the sin no longer reigns in us.  As human beings, we have desires, drives, appetites, in common with the other animals.  In themselves, none of these are evil; evil makes them evil.  As human beings, we have plans, goals, hopes, dreams . . . some of these we play with for a season, others matter to us, greatly; we cling to them, tenaciously.  God wants us to get our desires and dreams in line with His Word; He wants us to allow His Word to shape our appetites and develop our dreams.  He knows we cannot do that without His intervention and constant presence.  Grace, in other words.  He knows that, even with this constant encouraging presence, we still pull this way, plunge that way.  Desires are hard to subject, evil desires the hardest.  Evil isn’t so obvious, so extreme, as Charles Manson or Adolf Hitler; to say that we are all of us sinners does not mean we are all therefore on par with such monsters; no, the evil that Paul and Peter mean, the evil Jesus spoke about, was a heart always inclined to go its own way rather than God’s way, a heart always ready to claim it’s way was God’s way, also a God-honoring way.  I love the Lord, even if my behavior flies in the face of God’s Word!  And there’s our common dilemma.  We, especially, must be honest with ourselves; the Spirit we have received is the Spirit of truth.

We have entrenched desires—they can even feel like needs—that pull us away from God.  That will not change.  Shall we act on these desires that feel almost like needs, indulge them, serve them?  There is something that can be done about that, by grace, by spending time in the Word, spending time in prayer, contemplation, seeking spiritual simplicity, re-connection with God’s good creation.  Beloved, we are to be transformed.  We are being transformed, conformed to the image and likeness of Jesus Christ, our Savior—praise God; and our Lord—thank God.  Not to be conformed to Christ is to be conformed to what is not Christ.  Christ is the one who lives.  What is not Christ is dead, spiritually.  Addicts already know this, but they become hopeless or they stop caring; Satan is satisfied with either.

There are fellow disciples who drift, then fall away.  Christ can lift them, again.  You and I can try to help, but they don’t seem to want our help, only our affirmation or at least our silence.  But let’s not stop praying for them.  Sometimes, our prayer lists become rather long.  Just consider Christ’s prayer list.

Paul urges us: “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness” (6:13).  As if anybody did!  There were those at the time who believed that, since salvation was for the soul, what was done with the body was really of no great significance; we hear Paul’s criticism of this sort of thinking all over his letters, as well as those of James, John, and Jude.  Those in the church who held to this notion of the insignificance of the body must have believed soul and body have no contact, are in no way interwoven.  It seems to me (I believe Scripture verifies it) that there is a very close connection between body and soul: when our soul is sad, it manifests in the body, and when we treat our bodies badly—in ways that fail to honor God’s good gift of the body—this abuse begins to show in the soul.  Paul elsewhere tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us.  Life puts tremendous wear and tear on body and soul, as we know.  And choices we make, even choices that seem harmless at the time, end up harming and haunting us.  Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are not always lifestyle illnesses; in many instances, they are.  It’s what we’ve done to ourselves.  And not doing the things that contribute to these is not really so easy, for several reasons, as we know.  Sin intends to break us.

I’m not suggesting that crunching on some Doritos or sipping a Pepsi is wicked; it’s not sinful, but I have to say, I’m really becoming convinced, that it is harmful; and others also seem to be coming around to this way of thinking, yet we aren’t stopping.  When we don’t stop doing what we know is harmful . . . I put it to you that this is a problem.  Sin works the same way.

Paul, though, was writing about wickedness, imploring the faithful not to offer any part of themselves as an instrument of wickedness.  What did he have in mind?  Wicked feels like a strong word, and we may not be able to think of anything we’ve ever seen, experienced, or done that would count as wicked.  We live good, decent, clean Christian lives, after all.  Clearly, Paul would have in mind worship directed to idols rather than to the living God.  He would have in mind worshiping what the world worships: wealth, youth, physical beauty, physical stimulation, food, drink, drugs—my satisfaction, my pleasure, my happiness, my truth: a flesh-saturated life.  As for wickedness, Paul would also point to sexual immorality, but we no longer seem able to know what that could possibly mean.

Well, what’s an idol?  Something big, toward which we direct our attention, our excitement, our resources; something that we feel or believe can satisfy us in some way, give us what we want, what we’re looking for.  But, like all idols, the things toward which time, devotion, and resources get directed have a way of undermining their devotees.  Sin will always present itself as harmless and fun.  Or maybe not harmless exactly, but definitely fun.  Or maybe not really super fun, even, but really basically harmless.  It isn’t far in or long after that sin starts assuring us, in our sin-intoxicated state, that what we are doing under the influence is our only greatest comfort and true lifeline, and that we would be so deeply miserable without it.  Alice Cooper has spoken of how alcohol came to be his medicine.  It doesn’t have to be narcotics or alcohol.  So, sin—that into which our enemy is ever enticing us—mimics the moves of God, apart from whom we are truly miserable, without whom we have no real comfort and no lifeline.  Idolatry is never really so very far from us.  It is not merely some curious artifact of ancient history.  Whatever becomes larger in our lives than God—never in principle, of course, but in practice—that is an idol.  God is there—thank God!  Might we at least confess that He isn’t always the one seated securely on the throne of our heart?

There is no harmless sin.  Sin’s very nature is to harm.  Sin harms us, harms others around us, harms relationships.  Whatever erodes, dissolves a healthy relationship—you’ll find sin, there.  So, where is our help?  Jesus regularly called his followers to vigilance, watchfulness.  There are several ways of practicing such watchfulness, putting vigilance into action.  If sin involves giving ourselves to what is not God, not of God and always less than God, the antidote, as Paul tells us, requires that we “offer [ourselves] to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness” (6:13).  The spiritually dead, spiritually inert, have no ability to be other than or do other than dead.  But God makes alive.  That’s the thought with which Paul began his letter: God is the Creator; God makes alive; God has the power of life; God is power for life and demonstrates it, time and again.  God sent Christ Jesus so that we could be brought from death (spiritually, and physically) to life (spiritually, and physically).  The restored spiritual life we can enjoy in Christ has consequences for our physical life in this world such as it is, because soul and body are not unrelated, not unconnected.  The new spiritual life we have in Christ will, in God’s own time, also result in a new physical life, glorified, at the resurrection.  God didn’t create us to be done with us.  Let us, of all people, never subscribe to the philosophy that this life is it, this is all; make it a good run and be done.  No indeed—the best blessing is still to come.

So, as those who through Christ have gone through death—Christ’s death—and who now have life—Christ’s life, “offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness” (6:13).  Every part, every aspect and dimension—surrender it all to God, give it all to Christ; allow him to take it, touch it, heal it, change it.  We say, well yes, please!  I surrender all.  Then we start reserving some things.  I’ll give you everything, Lord . . . but can I keep this part?  It’s so little, after all.  Surely I could just hold onto this for myself?  Why would You want it, anyway?  That harmless little abuse—give it to the Lord; your offering, your sacrifice.  We can direct ourselves to all sorts of projects: let us direct ourselves to the primary project of our relationship with God.  Let us offer every part of ourselves as an instrument of righteousness, vital relationship, God-honoring relationship.

We don’t offer any part of ourselves to wickedness, and we aren’t shocked or even surprised when the wickedness comes again, knocks again.  But we don’t offer ourselves to wickedness.  We don’t pursue the evil desires.  We pause.  We take a breath.  We take a clear-eyed look, a Christ-eyed look.  We cannot see, without light; we have light precisely for seeing, clearly.  We name the evil desires for what they are.  God teaches us their true name.  If we do not read this book, we will not learn.  So soon as you really start reading this book, you will find yourself saying, “I had no idea!”  Satan doesn’t like these ideas.  He wants to keep us filled with other ideas.  We were made, among other things, with a desire to learn: what shall we learn, and from whom?

When Paul speaks of righteousness, I take him to mean a God-inspired, God-guided, God-honoring, God-listening relationship.  People want inspiration, to be filled with a vision, a breath, the energy of love, Amen!  People will accept a certain amount of guidance, even God’s guidance.  Most people are glad for relationship—we hear all sorts of talk about being in relationships; maybe too often, the talk is about whether or not I’m getting anything out of the relationship—what’s in it for me.  The vital relationship into which God has ushered us in Christ through the Holy Spirit who works faith in us is a relationship in which I receive God’s Word, accept that Word, submit to that Word, as God fulfills the promise He made me when He vowed to be glorified despite all the sin, my sin among it, always obscuring Him.

God is helping us all more and more to give each aspect of our lives, every part, to Him, to place all of ourselves without reserve into vital relationship with God—redemptive, transformative, blessed, holy: this is righteousness.  Righteousness is the broken, being fixed, the wounded, being healed, the wicked, being purified.  There is no DIY righteousness because righteousness is entirely about relationship.  The only one with the power to fix, heal, and purify—and the love that wills to do it—is God, who is doing all this, for us, by grace, through faith.  None of us needs more faith—that’s not the answer; let us cherish and nurture the faith God has already given us.  That’s all we need; really, that’s all God asks.