Epistle for July 2, 2023

START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Romans 6:12-23
CLICK HERE TO READ SCRIPTURE ON BIBLEGATEWAY.COM

OBSERVE:

Paul continues the discussion he began in Romans 6:1-11 relating to the Christian’s death to sin and resurrection to new life.  He began this section with the question:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?  (Romans 6:1).

His answer, of course, is unequivocal:

 May it never be! (Romans 6:2)

And now he continues to explain why sin and grace are incompatible.  The point of his argument is that the salvation and grace of Jesus Christ is not only for the sake of pardon from sin, but also power over sin.

For organizational purposes, I break our current passage into four parts:

• In verses 12-14, he appeals to his readers not to let sin reign in their lives, but to yield even their very bodies to the righteousness of God.
• In verse 15, he reiterates his rhetorical question, raised in verse 1 — Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? May it never be!
• In verses 16-20, he employs the metaphor of servant and master to demonstrate that everyone inevitably serves something — either sin or righteousness.
• And in verses 21-23, Paul compares the results of sin with the results of serving God. The fruit of sin is death, and the fruit of serving God is eternal life.

Paul frames his ongoing discussion of sin and righteousness as a matter of servitude.  A person is either a servant of sin, or a servant of God.

Jesus makes a similar observation:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24).

Paul is really laying the foundation for the experience of Christian sanctification.  His logic is that sin leads to bondage and death; submission to God — as represented in baptism (Romans 6:3-4) — leads to new life in Christ, freedom from sin, and eternal life.

This section concludes with a stark description of the contrast between the life of servitude to sin vs. the life of submission to God:

 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Note that death is the wages of sin — these are wages that people earn by giving themselves over to sin.  Eternal life is not earned — it is the free gift of God through Jesus Christ.

APPLY:  

Some modern Christians have a tendency to be Gnostic when it comes to sin and righteousness — that is, we  “spiritualize” our Christian lives.  Grace and righteousness and holiness and sanctification are, to them, all a matter of how one “feels” emotionally.  They seem to think that how one lives, what one says, and what one does with one’s body are irrelevant.

That’s why we note that Paul is no Gnostic — he warns the Romans:

Therefore don’t let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. Also, do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

The New Testament view of human nature is holistic in the sense that body and soul are united — we don’t have a body as distinct from the soul, we are a body and soul.  Body, soul, spirit, mind are constituent parts of one whole.

We are reminded that we Christians speak of the resurrection of the body, not merely the immortality of the soul.  When Paul speaks of the resurrection of the dead, he says:

 The body is sown perishable; it is raised imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is also a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42-44).

But in the resurrection, there will still be a body — it will be a glorified body.

So when sin reigns in our bodies it affects our souls as well.  When we yield our members as instruments of sin there is a connection between soul and body.  C.S. Lewis once said that he knelt in prayer because where the body goes the spirit follows.  In his ingenious novel depicting the correspondence between a senior devil named Screwtape and his deputy, named Wormwood, Screwtape has this piece of advice for his “nephew” (Note that the Enemy to which Screwtape refers is God!):

One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
[Screwtape Letters]

This is why Paul later will re-emphasize this principle of complete and total surrender to God with these words:

Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service (Romans 12:1).

Faith manifests itself in the fruits of the Spirit, and fruits form our character.

RESPOND: 

Bob Dylan’s reputation as an American folk musician, protest singer, and poet is well-established, and confirmed by his recent Nobel Prize for literature in 2016.  In the late 1970’s, he experienced a conversion to Christianity, and shortly thereafter cut an album with Christian lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979).

One of his songs explores the same theme explored by the Apostle Paul — that we all serve somebody:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Dylan grasped a fundamental truth — whatever controls you is your master.   And the Christian message is that slavery to sin leads to death; submission to God leads to life.

Lord, my earnest desire is to serve you, but I know that I cannot do so in my own strength.  The bondage to sin is strong in human nature.  Where I still have chains, break them.  I pray that being made free from sin, and having become your servant, I may experience the fruit of sanctification, and the result of eternal life.  Amen.

PHOTOS:

"NOT I, BUT CHRIST Corrie ten Boom" by Corrie ten Boom Museum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.