Freed from Sin and Bondslaves to God
Romans 6:16-22 · Roger Henderson · Nov 5, 2023
Romans (2022-25), No. 048
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261933131501

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Well, good morning. It's nice to see people on both sides today. Last week, it was just this side. Sue Ellen was the only person on that side. She was guarding the door and I told her I apologize that I was giving her a hard time about guarding the door. She was doing a great job there. Anyway, so I've labeled this section.

We're finally going to end up this segment of the scripture. This is the third part of of the segment here and I call this section freed from sin and bond slave bond slaves to God and if you notice almost in every verse in this section Paul is contrasting between slavery and You're enslaved to something, but you're in slavery versus freedom is kind of the contrast. And actually that contrast is before you're saved and after you're saved. He points that out in many ways.

Hopefully we'll see that as we go through this again here. So I decided to kind of go back and do one last kind of overview. of chapter six. Mike will probably do another overview, maybe. He has one last verse to cover next week. I've done this before. This is from Macaulay. The general outline is from Macaulay.

He labels the first ten verses in chapter six as information, right? It's information about who the believer is in Jesus Christ. And just one of the many tremendous verses is 6.6. And Romans there, knowing this, so we're to know this, knowing this, that our old self, or better, our old man was crucified with him, put to death on the cross, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, or better, put offline, put in idle. so that we would no longer be slaves of sin. And the thrust of what Paul is saying, and a good part of this in most of Romans, is you've been freed from sin. You were slaves to sin, but you've now been freed from sin. So now we go to the middle part. And the middle part is an exhortation. Paul is going to tell us things that we can do based upon those first 10 verses.

And the key verse there certainly is Romans 6.11.

Even so, consider, or I like reckon, reckon yourselves to be dead, dead to sin, dead to the sin nature, but alive to God in Jesus Christ. So we have information, we've been exhorted to count upon that information, put our trust and faith and live our life based upon that information.

And then the last part, which kind of gets kind of lost, I think, but I've really appreciated the time we spent here in the last part, the last 15 through 24 in chapter 6. This is, well, what does that life look like? And Paul tries to put it in human terms, as he says. And the human terms are about slavery and freedom, and that contrast.

And the verse I chose here was in, and we'll cover this today, verse 22. and this is from the Weiss translation but now having been set free from the sinful nature and having been made bond servants to God you are having your fruit so there's fruit from that you're having your fruit resulting in holiness or sanctification and the consummation is life eternal so just a marvelous, this marvelous book And this last part is about putting it more in shoe leather and seeing what that means. And the fruit is living out your life in Christ. Fruit as you walk by faith in Jesus Christ.

Okay, so now I'm going to... That's one overview of the entire book. So now let's kind of zoom in and look at 17-22. This last section of that. And this is from Macaulay again. This is kind of his breakdown of that. And so what he's done here, he looks at this in three sections, three things that have happened in the believer's life. He calls them transformations.

So the first one is, we're back to the slavery and freedom thing, the believer's relationships. You change from a, when you put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, You were a slave to sin, but that was exchange, if you will, for slavery to Jesus Christ. And you were free from righteousness, but now you're a slave to righteousness.

So all these contrasts show up. And then the middle part, last week we covered 19 and 20, the believer's conduct and the idea of presenting yourself, that everyone is, in a sense, presenting themselves or interfacing themselves with either their sinful nature or with God's nature as a believer.

One of two places. And then lastly today we're going to talk about the benefits or the fruit of that. This transformation in terms of benefits for the believer. Or fruit, the fruit of the Spirit. Okay, so let's look at the, we'll go back and review 19 here a little bit.

So he says, I'm speaking in human terms. This is the term he uses. I like that he's speaking. He's trying to put it so we can understand it better. And it's continuous, present tense, continuous action. And it's the manner of man or the custom of man, the nature of man is what he's talking about.

The Wyss brings it across as I'm using an illustration drawn from human affairs. and so I'm speaking in human terms because of the reason he's doing this is because of the weakness of your flesh he says that your flesh is weak and it is because of that's the reason he's using this language and weakness here is frailty or general inability of the flesh or sinful nature You know, and we see that based upon two questions that were asked, and we covered them earlier, that were asked earlier in chapter 6.

The first question seems, you know, are we to continue in sin that grace may increase? That kind of indicates, you know, that's a question that, you know, why would you say that? Will we continue in sin? And of course, Paul's response is, may it never be.

God forbid. and the second question was in verse 15 shall we sin shall we sin because we're not under law but under grace and he says again he says God forbid or may it never be so he wants to speak in terms to understand so that's the beginning of verse 19 and in the middle part of 19 he sets up this contrast between he says for just as and then he's going to answer that just as with so now So just as one thing, so now another thing. So he's going to play, you know, have that kind of contrast going on. So first of all, for just as you presented, notice the Aedes, this is looking back in the past.

You presented before your believer. You presented to set before or yield or exhibit. And this is Eris, so it's an event. As an unbeliever, you did this. You presented your members and the members are your hands and your feet and even your tongue. So your members were involved in your lifestyle, if you will. And we see that, right? We see the members of our body carry out what we think and what we believe. Our hands and feet and tongue carry that out, right? It's pretty obvious. We do that because that's just how we express who we are.

So, and this is going to be a negative stance. He's going to say, this is where you were at as an unbeliever. You were slaves to impurity. And then he defines impurity as this idea of moral uncleanness, lewdness, unrestrainedness. I'm not sure that's even a word, but anyway, unrestrained. And boy, that doesn't characterize our world today.

It just seems like we're spinning out of control in that area. One uncleanness and one lewdness after another. It just keeps going. It never seems to stop. Man's fallen nature. Just think of the whole gender identity thing. It's just spun out of control. It's just totally spun out of control.

Some people will say, well, that's wonderful. You know, the unbelievers think, well, that's wonderful, we're being so tolerant. Well, God says, no, you're not. That's not tolerance, that's insanity. Anyway, and basically, he defines this impurity, this lewdness, it's one of the, what he calls the deeds of the flesh in Galatians. So this is the deeds of our sinful nature from Adam, and he has a list, and the list starts off, immorality, and then we have our word here, impurity, sensuality, and it goes on. Impurity is one of those deeds of the flesh.

And then it doesn't stop there. You go from impurity. You were slaves to impurity. And then you move on to another downward step to lawlessness. And lawlessness here is basically the negative of law. And it means basically you're violating the law. You're violating God's law, man's law. That's what the sinful nature is about. But it doesn't stop there. This is a downward spiral, or a downward trend, if you will. You go from slaves to impurity, to lawlessness, and then you go, resulting in further lawlessness.

So you think, wow. And we see that. We see exactly that today. I mean, to my mind, this is the most revealing time, at least in my lifetime, of how bad off man is. I don't know any other way to put it. so in the life of an unbeliever you went from one death of sin to another death of sin and a verse that speaks to that everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness and sin is lawlessness so we go from impurity to lawlessness to more lawlessness so that's the unbeliever that's the man and man thinks he's pretty good man thinks he's Man outside of Christ thinks he's doing a pretty good job. I'm being so tolerant. I'm being so loving.

But he doesn't, you know, he's not. He's off on this downward spiral. So Paul's going to contrast it. He says, this is where you came from. This is where the unbeliever came from. This is where you came from. He says, so now, so now in contrast, you did present your members to all these bad things, if you will, all these lewd and immoral things.

You present, eris tensis, something the believer is to do, you present, and this is God's will, imperative mode, and you do it, you present your members, these are the same members that were into bad things, if you will, can be used for God's glory, for good things, to righteousness.

And so as I mentioned last week, how do we do that? Well, to me it seems this is what the Christian life is about. If you know the Lord Jesus Christ, your desire is to present your hands, your feet, your mouth for the Lord Jesus Christ. You present it and several verses that talk about that are like, walk in the light as he is in the light. Abide in me as I abide in you. And so there's just a whole litany, if you will, of things that the believer how he's to walk, in the spirit in Christ and that's that's to involve his members and It's the same members can now be used for righteousness.

So that's Paul's contrast you came from from this where you were as an unbeliever now you can now you can walk in righteousness with the same members and This and then the result of that is and so this is this is a chain reaction to our chain going on here resulting in sanctification and So this is an increasing and deepening progression.

And we know in scripture that it talks about the fact that we're to grow. We're to grow in grace and the knowledge of Him, the Lord Jesus Christ. So in sanctification, that's the middle part. You know, if you look at the picture that many have presented, Ron Merrim presented it, phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 of salvation. In this middle part, this is a part of our entire Christian life, sanctification.

We're being delivered from the power of sin. That's what it's all about. Sanctification. It's a big word, but it has a very precise meaning. We're being delivered from the power of sin to the righteousness of God. That's what sanctification is about. And that's what God desires us to be doing in our lives. And it's to be His life, not our life.

Okay, so that's 19. So that's from last week. That's review. So today's verses and I found the 20 I mentioned last week 20 I kind of asked you last week is 20 a good thing or a bad thing and Jim actually Picked up on it. You know, it it's stating a bad thing It's something that you you scratch your head at first you read verse 20 20 says When you when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regards to righteousness You say hmm. What does that mean? I? What does that mean?

And then he goes into a therefore and a but now. You know, Paul's always doing, it was this, but now it's that. And he does exactly that. So he's going to start off with this premise in 20. He's going to say, once again, we're looking back to before you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. You were slaves of sin. And he says that you're free with regards to righteousness. So we'll think about that. We'll look through that again. Okay. So here we go.

For when you were slaves of sin, or actually the article is there, you were slaves of the sin nature. So he's speaking of the believer's past life. And he's talking about a state of being, ane. You existed in this state of being as an unbeliever. You continually existed there. And it has this tense that's not used too much in the Greek. It's called the imperfect tense. So it's continuous action in past time. So you continually were acting as a slave. You didn't pretend to be a slave. You were a slave.

And that's one of the key things, you know. People think, I'm so free. I'm whatever. I'm this, I'm that. I'm this-ism, I'm that-ism. I do this, I do that. I'm so free. I can do whatever I want. Well, the thing is, yes, you're free. But you're free of righteousness. You're free of God's righteousness. And you're a slave to sin. This is what the verse is saying. I'm so free. I'm so free. I'm free of everything that's right, is basically what you're saying.

Which is pretty sad. So the believer was then, at time and past, he was a doulos, a slave to his sin nature. So it says, For when you were a slave to the sin nature, you were free in regards to righteousness. And it uses the same verb tense, so continuous action and pastime, the same verb.

It says, now it's good to define free properly here. Freedom from restraint and obligation. Or better maybe, in this case, you had no relation to it. So you can say, you were free with respect You had no relationship to righteousness. And by implication, that's God's righteousness. You were free of God's righteousness. Well, if you're free of God's righteousness, whose righteousness do you have?

Well, there's only one other possibility. That's man's righteousness. And here's what God has to say about man's righteousness. It's not pretty. He doesn't sugarcoat it here. He doesn't say, oh, you do pretty good sometimes. Yeah, I'll give you a D minus sometimes. No, he gives you an F every time. He says, and all our righteousness are like filthy rags. And this is Isaiah speaking of a man's righteousness. And all our righteousness is like filthy rags.

So God doesn't God doesn't give you a passing grade if you will our righteousness cannot You know, it's not anywhere equivalent to God's right can never be equivalent to God's righteousness So so that that's kind of the the starting point for verse 20. You were slaves of sin and You were free from God's righteousness Okay, so now he's gonna start this contrast again. Therefore therefore based upon the fact that you you lack God's righteousness you're free of it from verse 20 that's where he starts with 21 what fruit had you then so he says you look back to that you were free of God's righteousness well what kind of fruit or what kind of benefit or what what good was that And he's going to build a case that it wasn't any good, basically.

Fruit can be thought of or translated several different ways. On a fruit tree, you can have fruit from a fruit tree. That's good. You can have fruit in the sense of works or deeds. And we call that the fruit of the spirit. You're also going to have fruit of advantage or profit. So I'm thinking he's kind of focused here on the fruit of the Spirit or deeds. When it's in terms of the Holy Spirit, it's fruit of the Spirit. Or in other cases, it could be man's own works or his own deeds.

He said, what fruit had you? Had you is another imperfect tense. You were continually having no fruit. So he says therefore based upon the fact that you were slaves of sin You were continually having no fruit. You couldn't produce fruit because you didn't have God's nature At that time so so something that therefore When you when you were a slave of the sin nature, you were disconnected from God's righteousness with no fruit so I think that's kind of that's where he's at in that first first question of 21 and Therefore, what fruit had you? He asks us a question. You had no fruit.

And he goes on. Over which things you now are ashamed? So this moves into a section, you know, I struggle a little bit with the idea of being ashamed because I, you know, I think of the verses that talk about being ashamed, but I, so see what you think here. Over which things you are now ashamed? Okay, the things here in the context, we'll go back to this idea of this false fruit, this fruit that doesn't... human righteousness fruit, if you will. There's no benefit in that. For eternity, there's no benefit, you know. It doesn't advance you to know God better. It just puffs you up, if you will.

So the things now, right now in the present time, in contrast to the past, you are now ashamed. To bring to shame. And it's actually present indicative middle. So it seems like this idea of being ashamed is to kind of give you a reflection back on where you were as an unbeliever. I was there. And so the question comes up, why is he ashamed now?

So I struggle with this and I thought about, you know, what came to mind was Zacchaeus. Everybody knows the story of Zacchaeus, right? The guy that ran up in the tree, right? To see the Lord Jesus. He ran up in the tree and he looked, and he was a short little guy like me. He couldn't look over the crowd. So he ran up in the tree and he saw Jesus, right?

And then eventually he says... It doesn't say much about how he... We would say, how did he become a believer? How did Zacchaeus become a believer? We aren't told much. But at some point he said, Lord, come to my house. Come to my house. And when he comes to his house, then we get some more insight into Zacchaeus.

So let me just read you, once he says, he came down from the tree and he received him gladly. And Zacchaeus stopped and said to the Lord, this is when they were in the house, he says, Behold Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor. And if any, if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much. And then the Lord says, today salvation has come to your house because he too is a son of Abraham.

So we're not told exactly how, but we know that there was a change in Zacchaeus' life. And it seems like, and I think that's true maybe of all of us. If we were older in life and we came to the Lord, we see things in our past life that we're ashamed of. And Zacchaeus said, I want to rectify those. And he did, right? He rectified all his things of the past.

So I kind of think that's the sense here that we see this. We're ashamed. We're ashamed of the things that we did in the past. So that's my kind of take on that. And then I actually had one other thought. And this is from Newell. Newell said there's kind of an interesting contrast here. Let me just read what Newell has to say. He says, there seems to be a grave but cutting irony. He calls it an irony.

In this, allusion to the old condition, the old life, when the only freedom that they knew in respect to righteousness, that's the only freedom they had. They had no righteousness. They were slaves of sin, had nothing to do with righteousness. A kind of irony there is that the only freedom that man has outside of Christ is that they're free, they're absolutely free of God's righteousness. That is kind of an irony. So you can say to your brother, if you don't know the Lord, I don't care how good you think you're doing, you're not doing God's righteousness, that's for sure.

Alright, so let's go on. The last part of the verse. For the result of these things, so actually, here's kind of the bottom line of that. So what are the results of man's fruits, man's efforts? What good are they? And it's a pretty sad situation for the result of these things is death. Result means ultimate, the final lot, ultimate fate, result of the things that we were now ashamed of, they were not of God's righteousness, is death.

Remember the core idea of death is separation. Think of that in terms of what God is about. Death, really, we're separated. We're separated in so many dimensions. But the key part is that we're separated from anything that has to do with God's righteousness. So Macaulay had a couple of points here I liked.

There is no fruit in sin. And he's speaking of spiritual fruit or fruit for God's glory. Certainly there's no fruit in sin. Sin has only one product, death. Death separation from God. That's what death is. You're separated from God. That's the worst part of death is being separated from God Men don't think that they want to be I want to just be annihilated. That's that's right I'll be annihilated and then I'll have to worry about anything.

Well, no that option isn't on the table Every man will live eternally either with God or without God and that's the worst thing that can happen living without God in separation from God And the last statement here, in past times, this is what, this verse is, in past times you were totally occupied with death.

That's what, that's what the reality of what he's talking, you were totally occupied with death. Now you can be totally occupied with life. And actually we see that, Ephesians talks about that a lot. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins. And that makes a contrast, it gives you the good news. But that's where you came from, you came from death. You came from separation from God, to life in God.

Okay. Now here's this contrast. So we heard the bad news, if you will. Now we have the but now. You know, it was therefore you had these things happen. But now, here's the good news. But now in contrast to the things that you were ashamed, having been freed, to make free, to be delivered from sin, And this is something that happened to you, that God did for you, an event.

This is your salvation. This is the event of salvation in a believer's life. And that wonderful verse, if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. God the Son has made made you free when you believe the gospel and again just you know the gospel so what's the gospel we can everybody should be able to repeat this what I like I like what Macaulay did I'll just tell you my this is my four statement gospel presentation there are four verbs in the gospel God died God buried God was raised God was seen God died for our sins according to the scriptures He was buried. He was raised from the third day. And men saw him.

That's the gospel. It's a simple statement. Kids can grasp that. In fact, it's so simple that Paul had to say, I'm not ashamed of it. He's not ashamed of that. But it's a power of God unto salvation. That's what changes a man from death to life. Okay. But now, having been freed from the sin nature, The sin nature.

Actually, I did a little tally. This is my count. I may, hopefully, have it right. I didn't, I was going to count it from the New American Standard. I was going to go back and count it from the Wies to make sure I had it right. So, I didn't do that. So, if you think I'm in error by a one or so, let me know.

I count 16 times he talks about. It's translated most times the sin or just the sin singular. And we'll see here in just a second. Or part of it. The sin. 16 times he mentions the sin nature in chapter 6. And then another good count to make is how many times does he talk about being freed from sin, or died to sin, or dead to sin? So this is all about we've been freed from sin, having been freed from sin. So here's the 6 occurrences. 6-2, May it never be, how shall we who died to sin, to the sin nature, still live in it? Freed from sin is freed from the sin nature Romans 6 10 for the death that he died he died to sin the sin nature once for all but the life that he lives he lives to God is it just remarkable this Romans 6 is just Every verse is about this freedom What Christ has done to free us from our sin nature is sin a problem is? It's a terrible problem. It's the biggest problem. What's the big problem in the world? What's the biggest problem? Oh, it's, you know, it's just that it's, you know, they've hundreds of thoughts. The problem is sin is the big problem.

That's, you know, chapter six tells you that in stereo. Even so, consider yourself to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6 18 having been freed from sin you became slaves of righteousness now we get into that section we're in now and then the verse we're just covering right now the two the first statement but now having been freed from sin okay so that so that's the first part So now having been freed from sin, and the second part of that is enslaved to God. It comes with the territory.

Thank you, Lord. I'm freed from sin, and now I'm enslaved to God. God didn't leave, there's no middle ground. He didn't leave you, well I get to be in this period where I have nothing. I'm neither one or the other. No, no, no, no. No. When you're freed from sin, you are now, God by His grace has enslaved you to Himself. Enslaved here you could put the verb in there having been enslaved Again as heiress as heiress passive here enslaved to God But I was going so I'm gonna do here is just briefly show you again.

Here's the cases where I How many times he talks about slavery in these 16 through 22? I'm just going to read the... slavery... we're slaves for obedience. Let me just read it. Or do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves to the one whom you obey?

Then down in 17 it says, But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient, and so on. In 18, it says, you became slaves of righteousness. So constantly through all this, as we've seen, he's contrasting slaves of sin, slaves of obedience, slaves of righteousness. And then 19 is just jam-packed, presenting our body as slaves of impurity, to lawlessness, like we talked about. And then the last part is slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were freed in regards to righteousness, and in the verse we're covering, were enslaved to God. Okay. So now, but now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefits resulting in salvation.

So I liked, I thought it was better to use the interlinear version, just because they use the word fruit, I think benefits kind of seem a little nebulous to me. You have the fruits, a little bit hard to read though unfortunately. You have the fruit, I want to make sure you got the definite article. You have the fruit of you resulting in sanctification.

You have, this is something you possess, you have it continuously. The fruit of you and I thought it was said the fruit of you and it has a definite article I thought of the fruit of the Holy Spirit love joy peace, etc. You have the fruit of you Since you were having the fruit the fruit of the Spirit you must be walking by the Spirit and it says in Galatians 6 5 16, but now I say walk by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh and So you have the fruit of you resulting in or unto sanctification.

And again, sanctification is separation from the sin nature. Separation from the power of the sin nature, excuse me. I kind of saw a contrast here. In this verse it talks about having been freed from sin and enslaved to God. That's a positional statement, right?

And then in Romans 6.11, which we saw earlier, it kind of says, based upon that, we're to consider ourselves to be dead from sin and alive to God. So you have the position and you're counting on that position in 6.11.

And the outcome, the marvelous outcome, the result of that is eternal life. The result is the idea of the end, The final lot, the ultimate fate, eternal life. So this is the climactic outcome for all believers. This is what God has promised that we will have. And eternal life starts now, if you look in John. For the believer it starts now.

This verse in Romans 5.21 kind of sums it up here. So that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord okay so all I have is one verse for final thoughts and actually Mike's going to do it next week we're going to finally wrap up chapter 6 of Romans we're still kind of thinking about how we're going to go here but I think we're Mike and I are going to talk on Tuesday here but he's going to cover this first plus others for the wages of sin is death But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Again, for the wages of sin, the just payment for sin is basically, remember death is separation from God, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So let's close. Thank you Father. Thank you so much for our time Lord. Thank you for the marvelous truths you have in In chapter 6 of Romans, Lord, we thank you for that you've given us to show us the awfulness of sin, the power that sin has over us, the power it controls in us.

How man constantly... Sin is so awful is that man thinks he's okay outside of Christ. He thinks he's fine. He thinks he's good. He's upset with people that tell him about Christ. But we pray that your Spirit would convince men and women of their need for the Savior, and they put their faith and trust in Him. We ask it in His name. Amen.