Recap and Background

Welcome to Episode 4 of Series 2. Paul in this particular series is explaining how to live the Christian life successfully - something that is important for all of us. He spent time in Series 1 explaining the gospel and why it is important, why people fail to respond to God’s revelations of creation, conscience, and through the Old Testament and Law.

He is addressing believers. In the first three episodes we have seen Paul explaining very clearly our new status in Christ. Something changed fundamentally when you believed in Christ. It wasn’t a superficial change; it wasn’t a moral improvement; it wasn’t to make you feel better; it wasn’t just joining the church community; it wasn’t just trying to do good works. It was a fundamental change ‘we became the righteousness of God’; we became put right with God; we received access to his grace and his forgiveness, we received the presence of the Holy Spirit into our lives. Paul has mentioned all these things in Romans 5 and then coming to Romans 6, he is helping us with thinking and acting correctly.

In the last episode, he spent time particularly focusing on how we think about ourselves. It is well known in the Christian world that, how you think about things influences how you live your life, and we have lots of battles with our thinking.

Paul expressed this very powerfully in the last episode. I want to start this episode by going back to the last episode, to Romans 6: 11, ‘In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus’. This is a calculation in your mind. This is a way of thinking where you fundamentally decide that your past life is behind you. It isn’t your real life anymore. A new life has come. Paul wanted all his followers and disciples that he was teaching about the Christian faith, to become aware of the fact that they didn’t need to be controlled by what they had been before, or what people told them about the evil life they had lived before. They now lived in the grace of God.

I mentioned the story last time of the young boy who was a very talented footballer and he played in his school team very successfully and then transferred to another school, in another part of the city. He ended up playing against his old school. In his mind, he wondered if he could go back and play for them because all his friends were there. But no, he is in a new team now. You can’t go back; you can’t be more than one person at the same time. If you are a Christian, it is your whole life that has come under the authority of God. Therefore, Paul encourages people to really live like that. In this episode, he will make a similar point but using another way of explaining what he explained in the last episode.

Slaves to Sin

“What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!”

Romans 6:15, NIV

He challenges the view that Christianity is just about receiving God’s forgiveness and doing what you like. That is how some people live. They think that God’s forgiveness comes to them at no cost to themselves. But Paul says that we are now giving our loyalty to somebody else - rather than ourselves and sin, we are going to give our loyalty to God, to serve him. He explains this by using a very important image.

“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one you obey - whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your hearts the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”

Romans 6:16-18, NIV

Paul uses the image of slavery. This really meant something to those who were

listening to him. In the city of Rome, in the time of Paul, probably twenty percent of the people were slaves. In the Roman Empire, slavery was very common and widespread. What did Paul have in mind when he described people as being slaves to sin? In the time of the Roman Empire, you could become a slave for many different reasons. Very commonly, if you fought against the Romans as a soldier, in another army for another country and you were captured, you would be made a slave; other prisoners of war were frequently made slaves; if you got yourself into serious debt and you couldn’t repay your creditors you would be made a slave; if you had been involved in criminal activity, you may not be sent to prison, you may be condemned to be a slave. There were many reasons why people became slaves. People were slaves from all sorts of different ethnic groups. It wasn’t a question of one ethnic group enslaving another. This was all nations who could become slaves.

If you had the status of a slave, and that was what had been designated for you, the most likely thing that would happen to you would be that you would be sent to the marketplace in your town or city. Usually in most cities and towns there was a day a week, or one or two days a month, that were slave trading days. Buyers would come to the market. Slaves would be in chains, or sometimes handcuffed; sometimes they were stripped naked, or semi-naked and sometimes have a label around their neck to say something about them. People would come and literally inspect them, ask questions about them, look at their physical appearance, their age, and their capabilities, and then offer a price to the slave owner to have this slave to come into their household. It was a place of complete humiliation. You had lost control of your life.

What did slaves do? Many of them ended up in people’s homes; particularly richer people had slaves as domestic servants. Some went into farming, some were put in the ships that travelled around the Mediterranean that were powered by rowing, and they became oarsmen. Some went into factories. Some went underground into mining, in very dangerous occupations. They had no rights at all. Slaves did what they were told and were subjected to whatever treatment they had. Some people were kind to their slaves and some slaves were very well-respected members of their family. Some became well-educated. But the majority of slaves were heavily exploited; female slaves were often sexually exploited and male slaves often pushed very hard in terms of the physical labour. There was no escape from slavery. Almost nobody could get out of slavery unless, by some miracle, someone gave you a large amount of money and you could buy yourself out of slavery. That was very unusual. Almost all slaves would remain slaves until the day they died. Their life expectancy was not long; they weren’t always well cared for, they were worked very hard and they would die younger than most of the general population. It was a terrible life and there was no escape. Once you were sold as a slave you were always under the power of your owners.

This is what Paul has in mind when he describes sin as a form of slavery, verse 16, ‘slaves to sin’. That is the power of sin. You cannot escape. It will always control you in one way or another. That is how Paul understood people outside of Christ. They cannot escape the power of sin and they can’t escape the consequences of disobeying God.

Slaves to Righteousness

Paul encourages people that they have escaped from that slavery through Christ, but they haven’t escaped from that slavery in order to do their own thing. They have escaped slavery in order to obey God. We may now imagine the gospel like this: Imagine you are a slave in the marketplace and you fearfully await to see who is going to buy you, and what form of slavery you are going to enter into, what conditions you are going to live in, and where you are going to live - a terrifying prospect. Imagine somebody comes to the slave market and says to your owner, ‘I’ll have that one. I’ll buy him or her, off you. Here is the market price’. This person takes you away from the market and tells you, “I am going to set you free. I will take you home, give you some money and clothes, and you can be free; you can go and get a job, and make your own life, and live as an independent person.” That is the power of the gospel, in Paul’s mind and in his imagination, as he talks about slavery. You are being set free but the gratitude that comes from being set free from slavery, would often lead people to say, “I don’t want to go free and do my own thing, I want to serve you. You have been kind to me; you have set me free, I want to serve in your household, freely, not because you are forcing me to, but because I really love you. I really appreciate what you have done. I am grateful for the incredible gift of life that you have given me.” Paul wants Christians to think about the grace of God in Christ Jesus, not as a gift that has been given which you can just ignore the giver, but something so profound and so life-changing that what else would you want to do but to serve that kind person, that generous God, who has gone to such lengths to set you free - through no self-interest, but just because he loved you? The man who came to the marketplace and pointed to you and set you free out of sheer kindness, out of love, out of compassion, for somebody who was totally in bondage and suffering terribly.

That is what Paul has in mind when he uses this idea of slavery. Paul says, surely we should serve God even as slaves, voluntary slaves of God, because of what he has done for us. We become, in Paul’s way of thinking, ‘slaves of righteousness’. We have a new master, Jesus Christ; we have a new lifestyle, the Christian lifestyle. Paul says we owe it, out of love to God, to give total commitment to him. Let us become his followers. This is Paul’s way of imagining the path of discipleship. He wants people to see the enormity of what has happened. A huge change has taken place. God has dug deep into his own capacity of love and sacrifice, through Jesus Christ, to pay the price for us. Paul thinks that we should be forever grateful for what he has done.

Death - The Wages of Sin

“I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have becomes slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 6:19-23, NIV

Paul uses an example from everyday life, the example of slavery, because he can’t think of a better way of describing this incredible change that takes place as we become Christians. The result of slavery was totally negative in the experience of the slaves of the Roman Empire. There were millions of those slaves. For the most part, they had a terrible life - absolutely under the total control of people who could abuse them in terrible ways. They had no power to stand against them, and if they ran away as slaves and they were found, they would be brutally tortured, or executed immediately, or severely punished over the long term. There was no escape. Paul says that the punishment of sin is always death. He comes back to this theme of death, which we have discussed in several episodes. It goes right the way back to the beginning, when Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and they ate from the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Death was the penalty for them. What does Paul mean by death? - Separation, not only physical death but particularly spiritual death. Death means separation in spiritual terms. In Ephesians 2, Paul makes it clear that we were ‘dead in our trespasses and sins’ without Christ. If we die physically, having not received Christ, then comes what the book of Revelation describes as the second death, the final and ultimate separation from God.

Paul’s important conclusion, at the end of Romans 6: 23,

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is internal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 6:23, NIV

Paul wants us to think of the Christian life as a radical change. He is aware that if people think of the Christian life in any other way, then they are going to be ineffective in their Christian discipleship. He is making this point very firmly, all the way through these last few episodes in chapters 5 and 6

This reminds me of a story of an event that happened in my own life when I was about 12 years old. I remember very vividly a sudden change that took place in the life of my eldest brother. I was about 12, and he was in his early twenties. He started out on a business career, buying and selling. I remember that he used to drink quite a lot and his friends would come round. They smoked a lot, they would be doing deals; he lived a very casual life trying to make money. Then one day he announced, quite by surprise, that he had decided to change his career. He was going to join the military; to join the Air Force and train to be a helicopter pilot. I was intrigued by this change. I noticed so many big differences: he stood up straight, he cut his hair shorter, he started dressing smartly, he wore a very smart military uniform. The military authorities created a completely new discipline - the drinking became less and the whole order of his life changed fundamentally. In fact, he was much happier and he never looked back. He spent many years in military service in the UK Armed Forces. A decision and a total change. The old lifestyle fell away and a new lifestyle came - a new lifestyle following somebody else. Rather than following money, he was now following the military authorities, who always had things for him to do.

It is like that with the Christian faith. We now follow a new master. He has things for us to do. We become slaves to God in a sense, by our own choice. We have to make the choice that we want to follow him and be wholehearted.

Reflections

We come to think about the impact of this teaching, and reflect on what we have learned. In this episode and in the previous one, we face a difficult question, why is it, if all this is true, that some Christians slip away from active faith? They were in church five or ten years ago, but they are not there now. They were witnessing for Christ when they were young and enthusiastic Christians, but they no longer share their faith. They have drifted back to the old ways of living; their sexual morality does not follow Christian sexual morality. What has happened in that particular situation? Paul was very aware of that, because he experienced in all the churches that he started, people who slipped away from their faith. This teaching was partly put here because he is aware that we need to think clearly about the significance of becoming Christians, in order to keep going in the faith. Why is it that some people slip away from active faith? This is one of the most pressing and urgent questions that we face in the Church. One of the greatest disappointments to many Christians, is to see their friends drift away from the faith. Why is it that this happens? For a number of reasons: sometimes we are not thankful enough to God for what he has done for us. We don’t realise we have been taken from this slavery of sin that we have been talking about. Without real thankfulness and worship to God, we become absorbed in our own interests. Another reason is that, sometimes people allow a part of their life to exist outside of Christianity. Paul spoke in the last episode about submitting your whole body, all the parts of your body, as instruments of God, in other words having no part of your life that is separated from faith. Sometimes people like to have a private part of their life which God doesn’t control. That will lead eventually to them giving up being actively involved in Christian life. We stop thinking correctly about what has happened when we become believers: ‘count yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus’, Romans 6: 11.

Maybe some people listening to this episode have been through that experience, or are having that experience now, where you have drifted away, and somehow you have come to listen to this episode, and you are listening to the words of Paul, and they are challenging you. Can I encourage you, now is the time to come back to an active commitment to Jesus Christ?

Paul has left us in Romans 6 with two very powerful symbols - on the negative side: slavery. We were once slaves to sin, even if we didn’t feel it. On the positive side: baptism. Baptism is a tremendously powerful symbol of what the Christian faith is all about. Keep those two in mind as you think about this subject.

I conclude by mentioning the fact that Paul has not yet fully explained the work of the Holy Spirit that helps us to live this Christian life effectively. It is not just that you need to think in the right way, but you need to plug into the right power source - the Holy Spirit, who has been mentioned in passing in chapter 5, but when we get to chapter 8, we will find Paul explaining very fully - how the Holy Spirit is the driving force and the energy for an effective Christian life.

Hope to see you in the next episode.