Slaves of Righteousness

We're kind of starting, actually Mike last week started a final section, or some have considered in Romans chapter 6. So with that in mind, I'm going to go back and try to put it in place, chapter 6, and kind of show you the big picture of chapter 6 and how this last section fits in.

So I've labeled this section, Slaves of Righteousness, and you'll see how that fits in as we get into the text here. So let's look. This is going to be a three-part overview of Romans chapter 6, and this is from our friend Chester McCauley. I took some liberties with it. I changed some things around a little bit, but it preserves the same thought. So he looked at Romans chapter 6 as follows.

The first section is wonderful information. We have this wonderful information we have, and actually I've counted 18 statements about who we are in Christ in those 10 verses. And we're going to go through those briefly, thankfully. We'll be here for a long time. So the first section is this wonderful information that we've gotten. Then the middle section, if you will, 11 through 14, is really exhortation. It's about you have this wonderful union with Christ. Here's how you should act based upon your union in Christ.

So we'll review that, which Jim read. And then lastly, this new section, which starts in verse 15, which Mike started last week, is what Macaulay calls explanation. That's an okay definition, I don't know. He is explaining things, but it's a lot about this picture we're going to see about slavery and the contrast between slavery to sin, the sin nature, and slavery to Christ. and just contrasting those two.

So with that in mind, we're going to do a brief review here, go through each of those three sections. Okay, so I have two charts on 1-5. I've used this before. I went through 1-10 and I kind of pulled out 18 separate statements. And I kind of highlight them with numbers, the verse numbers. So let's go. So the first one is, it starts off with a statement, and we're going to see this statement in verse 15. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be? How shall, and here's the first statement, how shall we Speaking of Paul and all believers who died to sin or these sin nature still live in it.

So that starts this wonderful list So it says or do you not know you've been baptized into Christ Jesus? And you've been baptized into his death therefore you have been buried with him through baptism into death and remember baptism is this wonderful word and It's actually a baptizo in the original.

It's immersion, placed into. We're now in union with our Savior. So all this is this wonderful information that Paul is giving us about who we are in Christ or our position in Christ. So that, as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, you too might walk in this newness of life. That's basically walking in Christ's life. So we're just getting all these wonderful things one after another. We have become united with Him in the likeness of His death. Certainly, we shall be also in the likeness of the resurrection. So we got the first eight here. Then we go on to the next ten.

Knowing this, that our old self, for old man better, was crucified with Him. In order that, with a purpose that, our body of sin might be done away with and not the best, put in idle, taken offline, and all this, you know, we can start over again on this. I was thinking on this last night, I was saying, we can start over on this again, and do this again, write through these verses again, and still have lots to say. So keep going, so that you would no longer be slaves to sin.

That's going to be very appropriate for what we're studying today. He who has died is freed from sin, now if we have died with Christ we believe we should also live with him knowing that Christ having been raised from the dead is never to die again death no longer has mastery over him and because we're in union with him it no longer has mastery over us for the death that he died he died to sin once for all but the life that he lives he lives to God Just incredible.

If you count those 18 statements about who we are in Christ, what we have, this is our resume. This is our spiritual resume of what we have in our Savior. So then what Paul does after giving us that wonderful resume, he tells us some things that we should do based upon what we have. What's in our resume?

He says we start off Even so, consider or reckon yourselves to be dead to thee, thee sin nature, but alive to God. On one hand, you reckon yourself dead. On the other hand, you reckon, and actually by the context, you could put that word reckon in front of but alive to God or consider yourself alive to God in Christ Jesus.

And he goes on. Do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, but you should obey its lust. Do not Go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.

So here's these morose exhortations. So now we have the last half of this epistle starting in verse 15 and I'm going to talk about that but but this last at 15 through 20 23 is the last half and it has some interesting at first you look at and you say it seems a little confusing and it was confusing to me but the more you look the more you kind of dig in it made sense okay so we see it and Mike pointed this out last week we see a comparison between verse 1 in chapter 6 and verse 15 So verse 1 says, what shall we say then?

Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? And Paul's response to this is, and it will be in both cases, may it never be. And here he's speaking of, you look at the tense, it's continual, habitual sin. You know, and this is kind of a question that seems like he's answering from an audience, if you will. They say, well, you know, if grace is so marvelous, if God's grace is so abounding, I can just sin as much as I want. I can just go on and the more I sin, the more grace I'll have, so why not do it?

And so that seems to be the idea here. But the point we come away with after looking at those 18 statements We've now been separated from our sin nature. So why in the world will we ever want to go back and sin? Why would we ever want to do that? We wouldn't want to do that.

Then we come along with verse 15 that we're starting with. It says very similar phraseology. What then? Shall we sin? Because we're not under law but under grace. And the same response, may it never be. But in this case we're talking about an act of sin, a particular sin that may occur in your life, whereas the other one was a practice, if you will, a habitual nature. So we're going to see in 16 and following, how we expand on this idea. Why is grace, not living under law, but living under grace so marvelous?

Why is that the case? And so just to kind of put that in context, you know, the question comes up, And I listened to what Mike did last week, and I listened to Macaulay a little bit. The question about this in the forefront is, how are we going to control sin? That's kind of the question underlying this. And these answers that Paul gave are kind of, people are saying, well, we don't need to control sin, because grace is just going to cover it, and I'm good. And grace is kind of downplayed or made to be foolish.

I had a friend at my work many years ago. He was actually a Jewish guy. I had come back from overseas, and I had believed in the Lord Jesus Christ at that point, and I shared my faith with him. He says, well, you're all about that free grace stuff. You just want all that free grace. And he kind of belittles it. He makes it small, makes it of no value. Well, that's kind of these questions.

But grace is this marvelous thing. So Paul's going to show us why his grace is so marvelous in these verses. And he's going to do it under the picture of slavery. Slavery to sin and slavery to the Lord Jesus Christ. So I was thinking about, and Mike did this last week, how does man control sin? Well, Mike points out, and I think others have pointed out, you put a stop sign at every intersection, you put a policeman at every intersection. Well, folks, I have some groundbreaking news. I live in this subdivision called Antelope. I know Phil's been looking out in that area too. He's looking for a place. So, Ann Lopez has solved this problem.

What they've done is, they've controlled the speeding sin nature. So what they've done is, they've put in speed bumps. So there are between, I live a quarter of a mile from Arapahoe Road to my house. Within that quarter mile, there's one stop sign and three speed bumps. So they've controlled They've controlled this in nature. And they have a sign that says 25 miles an hour. So they've controlled this in nature. So that's kind of where Paul is leading to.

Law is not going to cut it. You can have all the laws. You can just go crazy. And my subdivision and Lopez solved it. They think they've solved the problem. There's still people that still come over the speed bumps. They'll just go fast and launch their car. But they just keep on going. So what Paul wants to show us, he wants to show us that grace is the way to do it. It makes a difference.

And the other picture is by the slavery. Slavery is a master. And so we have two masters. We have the mastery of sin, the sin nature, and the mastery of the Holy Spirit. or of Christ, however you want to look at it. We have Christ as our master, or our sin nature as our master.

And he's going to spend a lot of time talking about that contrast as we go through here. Okay, so let's start off here. I'm going to go back and review this verse again, because it's so important to start this section. So he starts out, Paul often does this, he'll say, do you not know? And what he's saying is, you do know. You know this, guys. You know this, right? You know it. You know this.

And the phraseology here, it seems kind of strange, because the idea of presenting yourself, I think of, I'm presenting myself right now, I'm doing a presentation, right? Well this talks about presenting yourself as a slave. And you think, well, boy, slavery sounds kind of, not like a lot of fun, right? But what he's saying is, You do this whether you realize it or not. You present yourself as a slave for obedience in one of two ways.

And he's going to explain that as we go through this. So this word for you know is oida, which is one of the couple words that is oida in Gnosko. So this is something that you know inherently. You knew it in the past. It's a perfect tense. You knew it in the past. You continue to know it into the present.

You know this, that you present yourselves, present tense, continuous action, Slaves resulting in obedience so that that's that what you present yourself to will be controlling you so the believer is pictured here as a slave rendering obedience and We're going to see this word obedience in this text. Here is this great word to listen under and boy that certainly helps me when I think about I Obedience, you know, I think about obedience in terms of my children and how I was a child and if I was an obedient child I did what my parents said, but it but this is so much more personal to me. This is listening under I'm listening under what God has to say I'm listening to what he has to say and when he says it and I believe it it's wonderful. It's not a it's not a burden.

And our Savior had that same view, right? He says, I always do what I hear the Father saying, what the Father tells me. There never was a dissonance. He listened unto His Father. He was obedient to His Father. But what's interesting is, the word obedient, I haven't found that When I look through the interchange between the Lord Jesus and the Father, He doesn't use the word obedience. He says, I always do what the Father is doing.

I always listen to the Father. That's a phraseology. So the idea of obedience is listening under is just a wonderful thing. So we listen under. We listen under one of two masters. So let's go into that. And you show the master you show, I can't read that right, you show you're a master by whom you obey, by whom you listen under.

Okay, so the middle part, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, as I said. A couple points here, a slave is one who must be obedient to his master, by definition, we're going to define it in a little bit, and Mike defined it really well last week. A slave is one who has no choice in the matter.

And you might chafe a little bit at that, but here's a verse for you right here, Jesus answered and said to them truly truly I say to you everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin Think about that and then we'll go on here, but the believer we know is that we're a willing slave right we willingly trusted Christ But here's a verse that kind of speaks to that but as slaves to Christ Doing the will of God from the heart and this wonderful thing about listening under being willing to listen to what our Savior has to say but you but the wonderful part you become a slave to Jesus Christ and that's a wonderful sense of that okay so let's go on here so let's look at the two choices here you are slaves of the one you obey either on one side either of the sin the sin nature resulting in death or obedience I put in Christ there resulting in righteousness so under the of death resulting in sin, the sin nature is the master.

The result of this master, right, is death, as the verse says, or separation. And we're going to say at the very last, the summary verse at the end of this chapter is, for the wages of sin is death. That's the first part of that verse. On the obedience side to Christ, Christ is the master. The result of this Master is righteousness, and in Philippians it tells us, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith. Our righteousness comes, it's Christ's righteousness, the way we've gotten that is by faith, by trusting Him as our Savior. So there's the two choices, the two directions we can go here. So now we go on to today's verses. So I'm just going to cover two verses today and we're going to see how this fits in. Let me just read them again. But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin you became obedient from the heart to the form of teaching which you were committed and having been freed from sin you became slaves of righteousness.

So this actually starts another and Macaulay pointed this out which I thought was his His outlining abilities in scripture are just outstanding. So here's how he approached starting in 17 to the end of the chapter. Here's how he kind of approached that. He approached it with three sections. So I'm going to call it a subsection.

And it's about something that's taken place. Something has changed in the believer's life. Based upon those wonderful truths we've studied in the first part of Romans, that you've been separated from your sin nature. The ball game has changed, so to speak. So we're going to see that three transformations have taken place. Three distinct ones, as mentioned in 17 through 22. 17 and 18 talk about a transformation in relationship.

And let's see if I can talk about that. The idea is, we once were that. And what we are now. We once were this. We once were a slave to the sin nature, right? And now we're a slave to Christ. And I'm just going to say that instead of getting ahead of myself here. You were slaves of sin. And what the verse says, we just read, you were slaves of sin versus you became slaves of righteousness. So that's what we're going to see. We're going to see that tracks through. There are two other parts to this we're going to cover in the coming weeks. But that's for today.

You were slaves of sin. You became slaves of righteousness. okay so he starts off so what's neat is you know we've had all this wonderful information and we see that that our slavery to sin and he's so he starts off with just thanking God for that he's going to thank God just for what what has transpired what God has done for the believer but thanks be to God and be supplied so that's the verb in this sentence here but but thanks be to God So Paul uses this term many times. One of the cases is in Corinthians where he says, but thanks be to God who leads us in triumph in Christ Jesus. So the rest of this verse is going to kind of be why he's thanking God or the rationale for thanking God the rest of this verse and actually into the next verse. So this is one long sentence, 17 and 18 are one extended sentence. that though you were slaves of these sin or these sin nature that were though though you were is actually it could be translated you used to be this is he's going to describe where you came from this is where you came from and then he's going to tell us where where we are now so you used to be Amy and that's that's in this tense not used too often it's the imperfect tense It's continuous action and pastime.

So in pastime, you are continually in this state as a slave of sin. And that's actually a wonderful part. Once we become a believer, we realize that. It's getting our unbelieving friends to realize that they're in this state of continual slavery to sin.

They're there whether they feel like they're the freest person in the world. I'm free as a bird. I can do whatever I want. They may seem that way, but you're not. Scripture says absolutely not. You're a slave of your sin nature. And this is a cool verse to point that out. It kind of buried in the rest of these verses. So you're a slave. You were. That's where you were. And you do loss.

Mike defined it several times. I like the one from Vine here. One who gives himself up to the will of another. So it's easy to see in the Lord Jesus Christ, we say, wow, that's just wonderful. We've given ourselves up to our Savior. We're now His slave. We're willing and His slave. In terms of the sin nature, it's not as pretty or it's not as... it's certainly not comforting. It's, you know, it's disgusting.

Many times you say, here, I did it again, right? I did it again. Why did I do that? Anyway, why did I keep my mouth shut? That's my problem, many times. Keep my mouth shut, I'd be a lot better off. But you've got to say something. You can't just never say it. So you've got to say, Lord, tame my mouth.

Anyway, so doulos, slavery identifies who the believer was. This is who you were before you were saved. This is who you were. And you were a slave of the sin nature. That's where you were. And here's what happened. You became obedient You became obedient, and it says from the heart. So obedient is the idea, and this is my favorite word here.

It's a compound Greek word. It's to under, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hypo, hy It's in the Aorist tense, so this is just really cool. Aorist tense means it speaks of an event.

So this is speaking of this wonderful event in the believer's life. Indicative is it's a fact or reality. Active, you performed the action, you trusted, you believed. So this is talking about as a person you put your faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and his work on the cross. And it was from the heart. It says you became obedient from the heart isn't interesting and I we noticed this in I think it was in Hebrews who might can correct me here, but About the heart you know the heart is so linked with how you believe in Scripture And I I mean I can't think exactly what the things we did in Hebrews there, but it kind of struck me that the heart Okay, it's Eck out out of or out A beautiful verse here in Romans 10 10 for with the heart a person believes Resulting in righteousness, and it goes on but the first part with the heart a person believes Resulting in righteousness so the scripture talks about our heart You know it's it's a metaphor you know Speaking about that's the center.

That's what we believe with our heart, and we use that expression many times in that person doesn't have their heart in it or that's a heartfelt whatever we use that terminology a lot but scripture says we believe with our heart so we became obedient we listen under God's word from the heart to the form of teaching so this is this word tupos form representative or pattern of something and it's of teaching It could be some translated doctrine, act of teaching or instruction. So the idea here is that the form of teaching, and the form of teaching Paul had in mind was the teaching that the Lord Jesus had and his disciples had. That form of teaching. That tupos of teaching.

To which you were committed. Committed is the idea delivered orally or by written. And Weiss points out here that the Greek text could be translated form of doctrine or teaching into which you were delivered and you were delivered but that form of teaching that was a gospel you could say that that form of teaching or doctrine delivered you into salvation you believe that and you were saved.

And the last part I'm going to do the verse reads and having been freed from sin the sin nature you became obedient You became slaves of righteousness. So if you look at the way that's structured, you'll see that the first part kind of gives us the key part. You became slaves of righteousness. And once again, notice all these verbs are something that's happened in the past. You became something. You did something and it resulted in this. In this case, you became a slave. You do loss again.

And this is Aorist tense. Again, it's going to be the same set of Aorist tense. Indicative. So it's an event. It's reality. But in this case, this is a work that God did in you. The subject receives the action. You received something from God based upon your faith. And it happened at the moment of salvation. You received righteousness. Not your righteousness, but Christ's righteousness.

Ephesians 6 6 kind of talks to this Not by way of eye service as men pleasers, but as slaves of Christ So that terminology of slaves of Christ or slaves of righteousness Doing the will of God from the heart again the hearts, you know intimately involved in our belief Okay, then the last part of the verse or the first part of this Having been freed from sin and we this has been the recurrent theme through all Just a tremendous part of Romans here.

Having been free to make free. Use of deliverance. And this happens to be a participle. Eris participle. I believe the same kind of idea in the moment of salvation is in view here. From the sin or the sin nature. So we're going to see this verse coming up in a couple weeks, but now, having been freed from the sin, the sin nature, and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit resulting in sanctification. Sanctification and the outcome, eternal life.

Okay, to kind of finish up here, I just thought I'd give you where we're headed. So let me show you that. Okay. So, as I pointed out, the last section, there's really three parts. The first section we just talked about. The second and third section, verse 19 and 20, talk about transformation of conduct. And the idea here is that you once, this is all about this change in a believer's life because of coming to know Christ. You used to do this once, but now you do this. And you used to be slaves to impurity, but now you're slaves to righteousness. So that's kind of the 19 and 20 talk about that. Then 21 and 22 talk about benefits. He uses the word benefit in that. What is the benefit of going one way versus the benefit of going another way? And we see that in this phrase.

Things of which you are ashamed He talks about in 2021, you were ashamed of this, but now things that result in your sanctification, that's that big word for the Christian life, you were ashamed of, now the things that you you do as a result of walking with the Lord and knowing Christ. So that's where we're headed in the next couple weeks.

That's all I have right now, so let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. We thank you for the blessings we have in our Savior, Lord. We thank you for the book of Romans, especially this chapter 6, Lord, that shows us the wonderful things that have happened to every believer, whether he realizes them or he knows them. And you desire that we count upon them and walk in those truths, Father. In Christ's name, Amen.