Romans 6:19-23 "I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
All of us are by nature enslaved to sin – we don't rule sin; sin rules us.
Verse 20: "For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness." Notice, Paul lumps us all together in this. We were all once slaves of sin. Not some of us. All of us. That is, we were not neutral, self-determining creatures standing before sin and righteousness, able to make our sovereign choice. We were slaves to sin from the beginning. Sin was master; we were not. Our wills were in bondage to the allurements of sin. Because of our corruption – the distortion of our values – we saw sin as more attractive than righteousness. So we were free, Paul says, in regard to righteousness. That is, it had no power to sway us. Righteousness didn't look attractive or rewarding. And so its appeals were powerless. That's the first point, and Paul will confirm it in verse 22 when he speaks of being "freed from sin and enslaved to God."
God alone is the decisive deliverer from this slavery, and our part – which is real and crucial – is dependent on his.
The second point is that God alone is the decisive deliverer from this slavery, and our part – which is real and crucial – is dependent on his. You can see this in verse 22 when Paul says, "But having been freed from sin and enslaved to God . . ." Notice, ultimately we don't free ourselves; we have "been freed." And ultimately we don't make ourselves slaves of God, we have been "enslaved" to God. Behind these passive verbs, as we saw last week, is the work of God. This is what happens "under grace." When Christ is our righteousness by faith, the grace of God enters us mightily, and breaks the power of cancelled sin, and transforms us in the renewing of our minds, and writes the law upon our hearts, and gives us a new spirit, and inclines us to the Word of God, and causes us to see the beauty of Christ and his ways as the treasure of our lives.
Slavery in Romans 6:6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22 does not imply mainly being forced against our will to do something. It mainly implies that our wills are enslaved. They are bound to do sin or bound to do righteousness because by nature we either see the rewards of sin or the beauty of righteousness as more attractive. So in both cases we do what we want most to do. (This is true, we will see, even though chapter 7 will reveal that we can have a divided will, sometimes doing what we don't want to do.) But we are bound to do it – enslaved to do it – because our hearts are either so corrupt or so renewed in Christ that we see sin or righteousness as compelling. We are either enslaved to sin or enslaved to God in that sense.
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord: When you work for sin, your wages are death. When we serve God we get no pay - but He freely gives us the best benefit package imaginable.
Wages of sin: "Every sinner earns this by long, sore, and painful service. O! What pains do men take to get to hell! Early and late they toil at sin; and would not Divine justice be in their debt, if it did not pay them their due wages?" (Clarke)
Answering his question from Romans 6:15, Paul has made it clear: As believers, we have a change of ownership. The Christian is to fight against even occasional sin because we need to work for and under our new Master. It isn't appropriate for us to work for our old master.
Dear God, Thank you for saving me from my sin! I gladly accept you as my new master and consider myself a slave to you!
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