Saved By Grace Through Faith -- for Living as God's People
Text: Romans 6:12-23
Grace and peace from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, AMEN
Last Sunday, as we looked into the first 11 verses of Romans 6, we heard above all that Christ died for our sins, and that, now that He is risen from the grave, death no longer has dominion over Him. In other words, by His atoning sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, Jesus has defeated the twin powers that hold all humankind in bondage: sin and death. What’s more, He did this, not for Himself, but for us, as a supreme act of self-giving love. This love lives on in a constant and eternal three-fold communion among the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and we continue to be the objects of that love. In fact, as we are baptized into the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we are embraced by that everlasting Love that is God Himself, and we are made (as St. Peter calls us) “partakers of the divine nature” insofar as we share in that transforming love within the Church and toward the world. As St. John says, “We love because He first loved us.”
Today’s passage from Romans continues with the basic theme from last week: You have been baptized into Christ, and are justified by faith; now, here is what that means, and how you live it out day by day. There are two sets of opposites that Paul is seeking to steer us past, like a ship passing between two huge icebergs on either side. On the one side is the danger of belittling Baptism, of making it in our minds far, far less than what it truly is – as if it were our own work rather than the work and gift of God, as if it were mere water rather than water comprehended in God’s Word and command, and to which God has attached His gracious promises. The danger on the other side is that of making far, far more of Baptism, as if it were some sort of a magical act that bestows salvation forever whether or not a person comes to faith in Christ or lives as a child of God. Both icebergs are equally dangerous, just in different ways. But St. Paul reminds us that a living faith is the normal result of Baptism, and discipleship is the normal result of faith, according to God’s intention.
No one could speak more powerfully in support and defense of grace than the Apostle Paul. Grace was his theme every time he sat down to write or stood up to speak. Remember that grace is God’s free and unmerited love and favor toward us sinners, for Jesus’ sake. It translates directly into the forgiveness of sins. Paul proclaimed, the only way to be saved is purely by God’s grace alone, and the only way to receive that salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ alone. Salvation and forgiveness of sins do not come to us as a result of our good deeds, our merit or effort or worthiness, but solely as the free gift of the good and gracious God Whom we know in Jesus Christ.
But there were those then, as now, who took the message of grace and twisted it into a cheap cover-up for sin, an excuse for disobedience to God and self-centered rebellion against God’s standards. How many of you know, God never has canceled the Ten Commandments? Jesus our Savior has never said, “Thanks to Me, you’re now free to defy or ignore My Father.” Instead, in Matt. 5:19 He says, “…whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.” If anything, Jesus intensifies the divine Law by showing us the true depth of its meaning – that we are to love God with all our being, and our neighbor as ourselves. If the neighbor is a brother or sister in the Faith, then we are to love just as Jesus Himself has loved us. “If you love Me,” the Savior says, “you will keep My commandments.” And St. Paul writes in Rom. 13:10, “Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.”
Yet in today’s reading (and in last week’s) the same Apostle tells us that, as baptized believers in Jesus Christ, we are not under law, but under grace. The whole point of the passage is to sketch for us, in broad strokes, just what that means. How does having died to sin in Baptism affect how we live each day? How is being under grace different from being under law when we decide priorities, when we make moral and ethical choices? What does being justified by grace through faith actually have to do with my relationship with God and with other people day by day? St. Paul’s answer to these questions is actually rather shocking, because it’s the exact opposite of what the teachers and practitioners of cheap grace would have us believe. They say, “Hooray! We’re under grace now, and no longer under the law! That means we can sin all we want and still have it forgiven. We can do whatever we like, however we like, and with whomever we like, and it won’t matter one bit to God, or make any difference in regard to salvation! After all, Jesus died for our sins, and we’ve been baptized, and we’re promised God’s forgiveness; so we simply don’t have to worry about whether we’re sinning or not. No matter what we do, or how persistently we do it, or how much we in fact enjoy doing it, everything is okay, all is forgiven, all is forgiven. Even before we sin it’s either already forgiven, or just as good as already forgiven, because we know it will be forgiven.” My beloved friends, I tell you (to again borrow a couple of phrases from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship): There is no cheaper commodity on the face of the earth than the kind of “cheap grace” I just described for you. It does nothing, it effects nothing, it changes nothing, it challenges nothing; it is nothing — in the sense that there is no such thing as a true grace of God that works that way. There is in fact no God Who acts that way, or Who would give such a gift to human beings!
To cheapen God’s costly and infinitely precious grace in that way is to get clobbered and sunk by a huge iceberg on the left. It magnifies grace beyond what Holy Scripture says about it, and is a twin iceberg with the one that treats Baptism like some kind of all-encompassing magical spell. Some people who do this honestly think that they are exalting God’s grace, when what they’re really doing is making a travesty of it. Others buy into this way of thinking simply because it lets them have their own way and do their own thing, without ever having to deal with their sinful nature. Such thinking downplays the real seriousness of sin.
The iceberg on the right is just as deadly to the ship of true faith, for it magnifies human works and righteousness, and so detracts from the glory of God and leads astray from the true course of salvation into self-interest, self-absorption, self-aggrandizement – and all in the pious-sounding name of “holiness.” For this error is to attribute far too much to the human will and effort, to our struggle to be righteous and good, and far too little to God’s true grace and the power of His Holy Spirit. People who always want to turn in this direction always want everybody else to go with them; without intending to, they make superlative Pharisees. For they are filled with trepidation regarding the Evil One, and they issue dire warnings about the slipperiness and tenacity of sin; they actually make sin far greater and more powerful than it really is. And at the same time, they are always calling forth the Christian troops into combat against sin, with appeals to honor and nobility – rather like Commander of the Alamo William B. Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword and asking which ones of the 300-plus men there would like to stay on and tackle Santa Anna’s 15,000 troops the next morning. It is a noble cause, but, frankly, there aren’t any prospects for victory! The message sort of boils down to, “God will help us with His grace, but the fight is really up to you and me, and we have a snowball’s chance in San Antonio of winning!” Not terribly inspiring. To go back to our iceberg analogy: Thinking in this way (pictorially speaking) leaves us stranded in a little lifeboat, holding toothpicks to attack a whole Antarctica of sin.
St. Paul tells us straightforwardly: THE MAIN RESULT OF BEING UNDER GRACE INSTEAD OF BEING UNDER LAW, IS NOT THAT YOU CAN NOW SIN ALL YOU WANT TO, NOR IS IT THAT YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HARDER AGAINST SIN AND EXPECT LESS SUCCESS; BUT IT IS THAT SIN HAS NO DOMINION OVER YOU. Sin has been conquered and dethroned – by the Lord Jesus Christ. Its stranglehold on your soul, its control over your thoughts and imagination, sin’s power over your body and all of its members (including the sexual ones) – all have been abolished when you died, were buried, and were raised again with Christ in your Baptism – and as you renew your Baptism by repentance and faith in Jesus every day of your life. The Good News that is the Gospel says that in His supreme act of infinite love, Christ carried all our sins in His own body upon the Cross, and there our sin was paid for, covered, and destroyed by His sacred Blood. The triumph He achieved was attested by His Resurrection from the dead. This victory is applied and promised to us individually in our Baptism – again, a gift of pure grace. When we are old or wise enough to hear the Gospel and believe God’s truth for ourselves, then we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, still not by anything we are or do, but by grace alone.
Participation by Baptism and living faith in the saving mystery of Jesus Christ makes us to cease being slaves of sin and to become instead slaves of righteousness. The whole concept of slavery has deeply negative connotations for us modern Americans. It seems unreal that the despicable institution of human slavery was practiced in our nation only 135 years ago. Even in everyday speech, the word has a derogatory meaning, as when we say of someone, “He’s a slave to alcohol – or to drugs – or to his boss – or to a career – or even to his own possessions.” St. Paul’s world was filled with every conceivable kind of slavery, but he wanted to highlight just two in our text. The first is the most horrible and loathsome slavery of all: slavery to sin. It’s slavery to a power that is alien to God, hideous and hateful in His sight, and almost infinitely destructive. In just this short passage Paul tells us an awful lot about sin and what slavery to sin means: it makes us obey the passions of our mortal bodies, our bodily members become instruments of wickedness; slavery to sin leads inevitably to death, and on the way there to greater impurity and greater iniquity, and always into shame, once we have seen the truth. Sin pays a wage, and it always is death – the physical death of the body, the eternal death of the soul.
Now, what Paul contrasts with slavery to sin is another kind of slavery – which he calls slavery to righteousness, or, in v.22, being enslaved to God. Our antipathy to slavery is so deep, and our commitment to personal freedom is so strong, even the idea of slavery to a loving and gracious God may grate uncomfortably against our consciousness. But we need to hear the Bible’s message clearly here. The point is, you and I are slaves, whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, slaves of someone or of something. If I am enslaved to anyone or anything that is not God – and that definitely includes my self – then I am engaged in idolatry and am thereby enslaved to sin. It’s unavoidable. The only way to be set free from slavery to sin, as Paul puts it, is to be enslaved to God. And that’s precisely the same thing as being slaves of righteousness, since God alone is truly and totally righteous.
People may ask, “Isn’t it demeaning to be told that you must be enslaved to God?” Paul would reply, “Only if, for some odd reason, you want to retain the ‘freedom’ to choose hell – eternal separation from God – for yourself. But such a ‘freedom’ isn’t really freedom at all; it’s actually the very worst kind of bondage there is, because it locks you into sin and into sin’s consequences for ever and ever. On the contrary, being enslaved to God is not demeaning in the slightest, because we were created for this purpose, and we never discover the full joy and meaning of our existence until we are grasped by grace and surrender to the Spirit of the living God, and place our trust in Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father. And besides, God’s free gift to all those who belong to Him is eternal life!”
The way this theological truth is realized in daily life and decision-making is twofold, according to this passage in Romans 6. Verse 11 that ended our reading last Sunday says, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” This is the first part: a mindset which receives as true and real what God has done for us in Christ. If in any situation I consider myself alive to sin, chances are that I’m going to be alive to sin; whereas, if I consider myself dead to sin before the temptation or the opportunity even happens – well, sin just has no appeal to a dead person, now, does it? And if I go all the way that God’s Word here recommends, and consider myself not only dead to sin but alive to God in any situation, then I’ve completed Phase One of faithfulness in that situation. And remember that this isn’t something we can do by any natural power or capability; it’s possible for us only because we’ve been regenerated – reborn in Baptism (or conversion), and we have a new self that’s joined to an infinite power supply: the Holy Spirit!
Then comes the Second Phase, which Paul tells us about today: “Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.” Some other English translations render the word “present” as yield or offer. They all capture some of the flavor of the Greek. It means a complete self-donation, almost in a military sense, as one would “present oneself” before a commanding officer, ready to obey and carry out whatever the officer commands. In the language of mystical experience it would mean something like, “I yield myself utterly and completely to You, O lord, and to Your will.” The relationship of mutual love is paramount; the Lover’s will is important, not because of rank or power or authority, but because the Lover is the Beloved.
It’s in this deep sense that we Christians are not under law any more, but wholly under grace. We know ourselves to be the objects of God’s wondrous grace and forgiveness. We are accepted despite what we know to be our unacceptability, loved despite our unloveliness. We relate primarily to God not as Lawgiver or Judge, but as Lover, Father, Giver of the grace and truth that shine upon us in His Son, Jesus Christ. God’s will is important to us because we know we are important to God, that He loves and cares for us. So we seek to do His bidding, not because of fear, but because of love; not because it is commanded, but because the One Who commands it is Love. We are enslaved, not to the arbitrary and capricious whims of an awesome but unknowable Supreme Being, but to the Father of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ; to Jesus Christ Himself; and to the Spirit of them both, yet Who remains Himself. Our “slavery to God” means being ‘sentenced’ to explore and experience the wondrous and limitless depths of that Unity in Trinity for all time and beyond. It means being enslaved to forgiveness of sins, newness of life, empowerment for goodness, love for truth, immersion in joy, and life everlasting. May God, in His mercy, grant such enslavement to us all, now and for ever.
AMEN.
