Freed from Sin to Serve Righteousness

I want to continue with this solemn call from the apostle Paul to a life of holiness. In our last message, we saw how Paul calls us to present our bodies, and we took time to develop this idea so that we might live a holy life.

And I cannot leave this idea without touching on one more verse to reinforce it in our minds, because it can be very illuminating, can't it? And this call to a life of holiness is so important. In verse 5 of chapter 12 of Romans, the apostle Paul says: “While we were in the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members, bearing fruit for death. But now we are free from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we may live under the new order of the Spirit and not under the old order of the letter.”

You see this idea again. One of the things that is mysterious is understanding that under the law of the Old Testament, what God did was establish a plan in which salvation had to come through works, through human actions; people were saved by their good actions and lost through their bad actions, and there was a very complicated plan of sacrifices and a great many rituals that had to be performed to obtain justification from God. And clearly, attaining that was impossible.

So what God did under the old plan of the law was, in a sense, to trap us and establish the natural way in which people might attain a relationship with Him and please Him, and to teach humanity that, in reality, it was impossible to please the Lord that way. He established, as it were, a legal precedent before then bringing humanity to the true plan He had always intended: salvation through Grace, through the Work of Christ Jesus, through the Work of the Holy Spirit in us. As the Spirit works in our hearts, our minds, our bodies, the members of our biological being, God can then bring us to that life of holiness, that life pleasing to the Lord.

And even then, we could never behave perfectly; instead, we would always have to depend on Grace, which always comes through Christ Jesus. Sooner or later, we would have to come before Jesus so that He might purify us and settle the account, so to speak, that we could not pay ourselves.

That is why he says here that formerly the passions of sin were at work through the law, because the law made humanity’s sinfulness clear. No one could be saved through the law, so sin stood out all the more, because the more people tried to please God through their own works, rituals, and sacrifices, the more entangled they became in their own sin and the more they realized that they could never please God.

And then Paul says: But now, do you know what? Now you have died to that. It is a rather emphatic declaration: before God, you are dead, and you must live that way with respect to your former way of existing. And now you are under the new order of the Spirit; that Spirit deals with you, perfects you, works on you so that you can become what God wants you to be.

Then, in verse 18 of chapter 6 of Romans, Paul says: “And having been set free from sin, you became servants of righteousness.” In other words, now, as children of God, we no longer serve sin, we do not serve unrighteousness, we do not serve our own bodies and our own biology. Instead, we are now servants—yes, still servants, but servants of righteousness.

And then he says something very beautiful in verse 19 as well. He says: “So now present your members to serve righteousness, leading to sanctification.” Do you see, once again, this idea of presenting our physical and mental faculties to the Lord so that He may take them and sanctify them, and then use them for the glory and honor of His Name?

How lovely! In verse 22 of Romans 6, he also says: “But now that you have been set free from sin and made a servant of God, you have sanctification as your fruit and eternal life as your end.” In other words, God has set us free from sin. He has set us free from bondage to the law, which could not cleanse our conscience but, on the contrary, made us feel increasingly sinful as we became more aware that we could not truly satisfy God’s justice. But God has now set us free from that through Christ Jesus, through the Spirit, through His Grace, which has now been set free through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross of Calvary.

So before, we served sin; now we serve something else, we serve another person. We serve another Kingdom, other principles: the principles of righteousness and holiness. We have been made servants of God, and the fruit of that service is sanctification. And do you know what the end of all that is, what the final result is, as he says? Eternal life.

How interesting that Paul says here that there are two kinds of payment we can receive for our actions. He goes on to say, speaking of eternal life as the end of sanctification: because there are two things you can receive as payment. You can receive either the wages of sin, which is death, or the gift of God—in other words, the result of serving God—which is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There will always be two outcomes, and there will always be two masters whom we can serve. You can serve the flesh, serve sin, serve the devil, serve hell, and receive eternal death and eternal condemnation as the result of it all; or you can choose to serve God, submit to Him, accept the lordship of Christ in your life, and then receive a different outcome: eternal life.

Which of the two are we going to choose? Clearly, there is no contest. We must choose the life of holiness, because it alone produces joy, peace, reconciliation with God, the knowledge that we are right before our God, and eternal life as the final result. May God grant that we always choose that way of living, that life of deep intimacy with God through sanctification and holiness. May the Lord bless us, and we will continue our meditation in our upcoming messages. God bless you.