Freedom to NOT Sin; Romans 6:14-23

Let's turn in our bibles to Romans, chapter 6. I think I got just about this far last time and I wanted to stop here and talk a little more about what's going on. In this section of Romans Paul is really laying down for us the foundation for the spiritual life. This is something that I find a lot of people, a lot of churches, don't really spend a lot of time thinking about. We're so concerned about doing the right thing and having the right code of conduct externally that we don't teach the real abstract foundation for why we can live the Christian way of life which is what Paul does. Especially in these first fourteen verses of Romans 6, he is grounding his argument in the baptism by the Holy Spirit, the one-time event that takes place at the instant anyone believes in Christ. We don't feel anything, we don't experience anything, but it's one of any number of things that God does for us at the moment of salvation.

Lewis Sperry Chafer said there were 32 things God did for us at the point of salvation. Later that was expanded to 36, 38, 39, or 40. Some people have taken all the sub-points of some because Chafer would have like seven works of the Holy Spirit, so some individuals have 80, 90, or 100. I don't get caught up in the numbers. There's a lot of things that God did for us, simultaneously, and instantly, at the point of salvation.

One of the things that happens as we studied in the first part of Romans was that we were declared just. At the instant that we trust in Christ as Savior, God the Father imputes to us the perfect righteousness of Christ. We don't feel anything but we are given new righteousness. At the same instant that all of this takes place, simultaneously, we are regenerated. We're given a new nature. We move from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive.

At that same instant we are also adopted into God's royal family so we have a new identity. We are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit, and at that same time identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. That identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection is the topic of verses 2-6 in Romans 6. In the identification with Christ's death everything that we were prior to salvation is crucified and is dead and is identified with that death of Christ on the cross, which is the foundation. That has to die, just like a seed has to die before new life come out. That real death occurs, and real death is a separation from all that we were before we were saved. Real death occurs so we can realize the potential of our new life in Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says that "we have become new creatures in Christ. Old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new." That's the foundation.

Understanding this is why Paul can say now that you know this reckon or consider or think or yourselves as dead indeed to sin. So it's not that the sin nature is dead but that we are dead or separated from its tyrannical powers. Something has radically changed there and so, prior to salvation, all we could do was follow the dictates of that sin nature. After salvation, after we trust in Christ as Savior, that tyranny is broken and we are free not to sin. That's really the focus of the next part of the second half of this chapter from verses 15-23, is that we are free not to sin.

It's funny how people get the idea, "Well, we're free; we're free from the Law." Can we sin with impunity? No, we're not free so we can sin. That's actually what the licentious position is, "Oh, goody, we have grace so we're free to sin." No, we're free not to sin. So this is what develops in this second half of Romans, chapter 6.

So just to bring us back to where I ended the last time, Paul draws this conclusion in verses 12-14 from what he has said in the first eleven verses in the chapter. He says therefore, because this has happened, because this break occurs between the person you were before you were saved and the new person you are now with all the potential you and I have in Christ, because you're this new person in Christ, don't let sin reign, dominate, control your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts. So he's basically saying, quit sinning. I don't know how else he could say it. He's just saying quit, quit sinning. You no longer have to sin.

Our problem is that we will never realize perfection because we will always, to some degree, succumb to the sin nature but we don't have to. That's the challenge. Then in verse 13, he adds to this command, don't let sin dominate your life. The circles there indicate the conjunctions which help us understand his argument. This is in addition to not letting sin dominate your life. He says, don't present your members as instruments of unrighteousness. Members refer to our entire body. Don't let it be the tool of your sin nature. This involves everything. Don't let our feet run to mischief, not letting our hands do evil things, not letting our tongues gossip and slander, all of the different sins we can commit overtly. The body is not to be an instrument or a tool or a weapon of unrighteousness for the purpose of leading to sin. Instead, we are present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead. So the pattern again is that in resurrection life we are alive; we have this new life.

On this chart I emphasize the basic commands. Don't let sin reign, dominate, or control. Don't present your members as instruments of unrighteousness. In other words, this is something you need to stop doing so that you can start presenting yourselves to God as being alive from the dead. These two words are the same words in the Greek. The first is a present tense imperative with a negative which may imply stop doing something you're doing. It's that we can't present ourselves to two masters at the same time. You can't serve the sin nature and God at the same time. You have to stop one in order to do the other. It's a very simple idea. You have to stop one so you can do the other.

We have to realize that we are now alive from the dead and we are to present our members as instruments or tools or weapons of righteousness to God. That's our task as believers. That's our mission. And then he explains, one more time, the principle in verse 14, "For sin shall not... [this is a command and he's really saying for sin shall not have dominion over you.]" You shall not let sin rule over you. He's just repeating the same command of verse 12. He uses a different word but it's the same command. He uses a synonym that we're not to let sin have dominion over us.

And then that phrase that I ended on last time which is kind of a new thought for most of us, "...for you are not under law but under grace". Now that is an extremely interesting concept and a difficult phrase to understand And the reason is because for many people the way that we often heard this taught is that we're not under the Mosaic Law any more but we're under grace. And that's sort of true; it's sort of like the ball is in play but it's just going down the foul line. It's partially true but it hasn't really captured the essence of the significance of what Paul is implying by this concept of being under law and now being under grace. In what sense, should we ask, is that if we are no longer under the Mosaic Law that we're somehow free from the sin nature? How does removing the commandments of the Mosaic Law as a mandate for our life give us freedom from the control of the sin nature?

All that the Law does, according to Romans 7, is exacerbate and highlight our sinfulness. The law wasn't given to Israel so that they would have a way to get to heaven but to expose the fact that sin pervades everything in our life and we can't save ourselves. It's impossible. No one can live a sinless, perfect life. Nobody can obey the Law. The Mosaic Law, by its simple removal, doesn't free us from the sin nature. It might free us from the exposure of more elements of the sin nature but it doesn't free us from the dominion of the sin nature. So how can that be the main idea here?

Another idea, though, is possible by this phrase that I think makes sense. I've come back and put together a rudimentary chart here that would get his point across. This is a dispensational chart on how God administers the ages. Now there are some things that are the same in every age. That is, that God is the one who provides salvation, and salvation is always provided on the basis of faith alone in the promise of God. Now in the Old Testament the promise of God was unfulfilled. It was in the future. The promise was that a Messiah would come. God would provide a deliverer who would take care of the sins of the word. And this is pictured in numerous ways, the most clear of which would be the sacrificial lambs. The Passover lamb, the goat at the Day of Atonement, the substitutionary sacrifices all make it very clear that a substitute was necessary; a death was necessary in order to provide salvation.

Now we look back. In the Old Testament period they looked forward to a future solution, a future redemption. When Jesus came He fulfilled all those types and all those pictures and all the prophecies. He was indeed the promised Messiah, the redeemer for Israel. He went to the Cross as a lamb without spot or blemish. As John the Baptist called him, "He was the lamb of God who took away the sins of the world." Once that perfect sacrifice took place on the Cross, now we look back to that event and again we believe the promise of God. It's not the same promise, though. The promise in the Old Testament was: I will, in the future, provide a Savior. That promise now is: Jesus is the Messiah. If you believe on Him, you will have eternal life. It's still the principle of faith alone in the promise of God. So God doesn't change the basic nature of salvation. It's still by faith alone. It is by grace through faith.

There were also other expectations that God had for people on the earth but there were different circumstances. Generally speaking, the bottom line refers to large time periods that I refer to as ages based on the Greek term aion [a)iwn]. These are the large Ages of the Gentiles which are really sub-divided into three Dispensations as the original Creation Covenant was modified. You have the Dispensation of Innocence, which is really an appropriate term because man was judicially innocent before God. He was not guilty of sin. He wasn't just not guilty; he was truly innocent. There was no sin yet.

When Adam sinned (Genesis 3) there's a modification of the original Creation Covenant and this is usually referred to as the Adamic Covenant now. That introduced a new dispensation, usually called the Dispensation of Human Conscience. That ended at the Flood. There's another covenant at the end of the Flood, a covenant with Noah which brought in the Dispensation of Human Government. These three dispensations make up the Age of the Gentiles because there's no special people of God in terms of the Jewish people yet.

With the failure of the Tower of Babel, God called out Abram. Abram is the father of the Jewish people and from the moment that God called out Abram in Genesis 12:1, God is no longer working as a whole through the whole human race. He is working specifically through the Jewish people. God has chosen and revealed to us that He would bless all the people, all of mankind, only through the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham Isaac, and Jacob. So the Dispensation of the Patriarchs is a dispensation in the Age of Israel because Israel begins with the call of Abraham. After the Exodus event at Mount Sinai, God gives a new covenant to the Jewish people and this is the Mosaic covenant and that introduces the dispensation of the Law.

This is what dominates until Christ comes and then we're told in Romans that Christ's death is the end of the Law. The Law goes from Mt. Sinai to Golgotha. At Golgotha we have the end of the Law. Then we have a new dispensation starting with the day of Pentecost. The new dispensation is co-terminus or identical with the Church Age or the dispensation of Grace. We are now under grace.

Let me ask you a question? Was there grace in the Old Testament? Of course, there was. Again and again and again, you have grace in the Old Testament. Is there Law in the New Testament? Of course, there is. There are hundreds and hundreds of imperative mood verbs and hundreds and hundreds of other ways of expressing the imperative concept in the New Testament. So there are commands in the New Testament, even though its the Age of Grace. There's grace in the Old Testament, even though its the Dispensation of Law. So what are we getting at here? What is the essential difference here? I believe, based on this passage, that it has to do with the whole issue of the slavery to the sin nature.

Remember what Paul's foundational argument is? His foundational argument is that the way we recognize that the sin nature is no longer in control is because the old man has been crucified with Christ, and that has broken the power of the sin nature. With the old man crucified, the body of sin (verse 6) might be done away with. So the power of the sin nature is broken at the cross. Was there anything comparable to that in the Old Testament? Nothing. Not one thing comparable to that in the Old Testament because they didn't have the baptism by the Holy Spirit. The first time that happens is on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church.

There's no freedom from the sin nature in the Old Testament. I don't know about you but that's been around the edges of my thinking for a long time. To really come to grips and think about that makes us realize how radically different the spiritual life that we have is from the spiritual life that Moses, Noah, Abraham, David, and everybody else in the Old Testament had even including John the Baptist. That's why Jesus said that John the Baptist is the greatest of Old Testament saints but he is much less than anyone in the Church Age because we have been given so much. We have true, genuine freedom from the sin nature, which nobody had in the Old Testament because they didn't have this baptism by the Holy Spirit, which breaks the power of the sin nature. The hymn, "Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" with its line, "breaking the power of cancelled sin" is excellent verbiage because it was written by John or Charles Wesley and he says, "It breaks the power of cancelled sin." Breaking the power is in the present tense but he uses the past tense with the word "cancelled" to indicate that the sin was already cancelled at the Cross. That's Col. 2: 13-15. The certificate of death was wiped out at the Cross but it is only when we trust in Christ that that power of the sin nature is broken. The sin has been cancelled so that's great doctrinal terminology in that hymn.

So we have the two dispensations in focus here: the Law and Grace. Under Law there is not a dynamic, there is not a methodology, there is not the indwelling of the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit, the baptism by the Spirit. There is nothing related to God the Holy Spirit. In fact, He is promised to Israel as part of the New covenant when God brings the nation to its final redemption at the time of the Millennial Kingdom. But that's only future. There's no reality there.

I want to go back now and read through those passages in Jeremiah 31 and the corollary passages dealing with the New Covenant because in those passages there's a realization of the actual hopelessness that Israel had in terms of being able to deal with sin. The hope is in the future promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Now we have something similar but its not that same thing because that that's tied to that New Covenant doesn't come into effect into God restores the Jewish people to the land at the end of the Tribulation and at that time the New covenant goes into effect for the Jewish people.

We have something similar but distinct in the Church Age now. So this breaks this down for us and the more we think about this we more it should awaken us to the absolutely profound nature of this new life that we have in Christ. Paul ends this section talking about the fact that we have this new life and we're no longer under the dominion of sin and why. Because we're not under Law. We're not living in the dispensation of the Law. We're now living in the dispensation of Grace.

Then in verse 15 he asks the question, What then? What's the big deal? Why is this so important that I understand this really abstract thing called baptism of the Holy Spirit? After all, I went to a Baptist Church or a Methodist Church or an Episcopalian Church or whatever kind of church most of my life and they never even talked about it. Of course, if you went to a charismatic church, they talked about it all the time but they didn't get it right either. Why is this so important? That is what Paul says. So what?

Should we sin now because we are not under Law but under grace? Now that we understand what Law and Grace describe under these two dispensations we can understand Paul's question a little more clearly. He says now that we're not under the Mosaic Law, we're not in bondage to the Mosaic Law, our sins are paid for, the power of the sin nature is broken, the old unregenerate person that we were is crucified. We're separated from him and that person is gone. We are locked into a new life, a new identity, new provisions and new powers by God the Holy Spirit.

Now that we have all this, wow, this is great. Can we just go on sinning? "Shall we sin because we're not under Law, but under grace? NO! Not at all. See, we're not saved or given freedom so that we could sin. We're given freedom so that we won't sin. Not that we can't sin or don't sin but so that we won't sin. We now have an ability to say no to the sin nature. And then he asks the next question which is a long, multi-parted question. Do you think Paul would have a convoluted sentence? He says, Do you not know? He uses a perfect tense verb to say this is something they already know. He's sort of referring to a general principle taken from an analogy with life. The analogy is one with slavery.

Now slavery doesn't communicate well with us because we live in a post-slavery world. Yet it communicated very well to a person living in the first century. He uses this verb here, a different verb from back when he says "do you not know". Here he's saying do you not know in the sense that this is something you should know because its evident from our culture, everything around us that when you present yourself as a slave to somebody to obey them that you are that one's slave whom you obey.

Now stop a minute and think about that. Any time we give ourselves over to follow the lusts of the sin nature we're basically saying I'm going to let the sin nature dominate and control and tyrannize my life. Any time you let someone else control you, you're letting them control you and you are essentially making yourself a slave to them. This often happens in a lot of relationships, where you think that having someone respond to you in a certain way is essential for your happiness. What you've just said is that how that person responds to me determines whether or not I'm happy. So you become a slave to someone else's opinion of you. One day they're in a good mood and they like you and you feel great. The next day they're in a bad mood and they don't like you and now you're in the dumps because you've tied your emotional well-being to how someone else views you.

We do that with our circumstances. If things are going the way you think they should go you're happy. You've just made yourself a slave to whatever the circumstances are: your job, your friend, your social life, your romantic life, whatever it might be. You've just made yourself a slave to those circumstances. You think, if the circumstances are positive, then I'm happy. If the circumstances are negative, then I'm sad and so we put ourselves on an emotional rollercoaster because we've tied our emotional well being to something that is always in flux.

We can only have perfect stability in our emotions if we connect our emotions to something that can never change. There's only one circumstances that never changes. That's the immutability of God. Because God is immutable and never changes, when our emotional well-being is locked onto the glory of God, then the circumstances can change from extremely negative to extremely positive but our stability and emotional well-being never changes because its locked into God. It's locked onto His character. So whenever we focus on something as the one in control, and we can place circumstances or people in control or the sin nature in control, we basically enslave ourselves to them. They're the one who hold all the reins and we can do the same thing with our sin nature.

Paul alludes to this common situation that if you present yourself as a slave to obey someone then you're the slave to that person you're obeying. Today it might be one person in one area. Tomorrow it might be another person. Today if you're obedient to the sin nature then you're enslaving yourself to your lust pattern. Tomorrow you decide, well I'm going to walk with the Lord so then you enslave yourself to the Lord but you're always a slave. That's one thing you should get out of this whole picture here. You only have two options. We're either going to be a slave to the sin nature or we're going to be a slave to God.

We're either slave to our own arrogant self-absorption and all the lust patterns of our sin nature, or we are a slave to God. There's no third option. So Paul says don't you know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death (when we sin, it leads to death). Now to whom is he talking here? Is he talking to believers, to Christians, or is he talking to unbelievers, non-Christians. Who is he talking to? He's talking to believers.

So the sin leading to death here isn't eternal death in the Lake of Fire. It is carnal death, it is experiencing the death-like consequences of living on the basis of the corruption of the sin nature. If we're going to sit down in the house of corruption and the sin nature and live as a slave to the corrupting sin nature then we're going to experience all the death-like traits as if we were spiritually dead. We may be saved and our eternal destiny is Heaven but our experience in life isn't going to be any better than the unbeliever that is spiritually dead and experiencing all that corruption.

So we have two options there. In this slide I've highlighted those present words again. In verse 16 you're a slave to whom you present yourself to obey and then its used again in the indicative verb in verse 19 and it comes down to the last verb in verse 19. He once again refers to the aorist imperative "so now present your members as slaves of righteousness." If you take out everything from about the middle of verse 19 through verses 14 and 15 then you just come right back to everything in between which is just explaining what he says in verse 13 where he says we are to present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead and presenting ourselves as members of righteousness to God. Everything in between explains that and he comes back there and says "See, now that you understand this you are to go on presenting yourselves as slaves of righteousness for holiness."

That's the King James version but the best translation is "for sanctification" or to bring it down even more "for spiritual growth". So that's the key to spiritual growth: presenting ourselves as obedient to God as slaves of righteousness. So the issue: the question he asks is shall we continue in sin? He answers it, "do you not know?" We have to understand and know and make a part of our thinking the things that happened at salvation. We didn't experience them and we're so used to basing our opinions and actions on things we experience that this runs counter to that. It's faith. God says, "this is what happened. You didn't feel it, you didn't experience it, you were regenerated and you were given new life. You're a new person in Christ with new capabilities and potentials and you need to live on that basis.

This is the principle: if you let the sin nature run your life then you are willingly enslaving yourself to the sin nature. It's your volition; it's your responsibility. You may end up destroying yourself. You may end up with a lot of self-induced misery. You may end up neurotic. You may end up psychotic. You may end up completely removed from reality and in an insane asylum. Isn't it interesting that the Bible never talks about being crazy? Why? Because everything that led to being crazy is a result of your volition. So craziness and insanity are not options that get you a "get-out-of-jail-free card", like our legal system says. You're nuts; you're crazy; you're psychotic, because it's the result of hundreds if not thousands of small bad decisions. After a while it snowballs into the fact that you have so fragmented your soul and so destroyed yourself that you can't deal with reality anymore. That was all your choice to do that. So it all comes down to this issue of knowledge.

Notice what Paul does in verse 16. He says, "we are the slave of the one we obey, whether of sin...[notice its that singular of the word sin indicating the sin nature]...sin leading to death." Okay, that's the top line. Notice what he does here. He says whether we're presenting ourselves to the sin nature and that results in death, or to obedience. Notice obedience is in contrast to the sin nature. He uses a figure of speech here to refer to the ultimate cause of sin as disobedience.

The ultimate cause of leading the Christian life is obedience. So the contrast is between sin which is a result of disobedience versus obedience. But instead of saying disobedience versus obedience he's saying sin versus obedience. Sin produces death, but notice obedience doesn't produce life. He's talking about that which is the foundation of life, which is righteousness. We don't have the kind of life God talks about in Scripture apart from righteousness. You can't have the kind of life God offers on the basis of unrighteousness and immorality.

You can only have it on the basis of spirituality and the virtues produced in a believer's life by God the Holy Spirit. So he is saying you're going to go one of two ways. You're either going to obey your sin nature and enslave yourself to your sin nature but the end result of that is the corrupting influence of the sin nature on your life and you're going to be the walking dead. Or you're going to obey God, and the result of that is that experiential righteousness is developed in your life, which leads to real, substantive life, the life that Christ promised. Not the imputed righteousness which leads to justification; this is the righteousness that is the result of someone living out the consequences of their justification.

Before we go any further, I want to show you this distinction. Let's go over to James 2. James talks about the fact there are two types of righteousness. We have to understand that there is a righteousness that is the righteousness of Christ that is credited or imputed to us at the instant of salvation. God sees that in us and declares us righteous. We're still fallen; we're still sinners, but we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, as it were. On that basis, not on the righteousness we have done, but on the basis of His character we're declared righteous.

In this discourse on faith and works in James 2:21, he asks the question: what's the relationship of faith to works? The basic conclusion of James is that there's not a relationship. I know that may surprise you because it seems that's what he's trying to say. But what he's saying is that there's not necessarily a relationship between being saved and producing experiential righteousness.

In vs. 21 he says, "Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works when he offered Isaac, his son, on the altar?" Now remember, when this episode occurs in Genesis 22, Abraham is an old man. Isaac has grown to maturity. He's either a late teenager or a grown man in his 20's or 30's, somewhere in that time frame. He was the promise that God made to Abraham back in Genesis 12 that "through you I will make you the father of many nations." Then he adds to this promise that this seed is going to come through him and Sarah.

Abraham is saying, "Look, I'm an old man. I'm way past the years of child bearing and Sarah's an old woman and she's way past the age of child bearing." God says, "That's why I've waited so long; basically so a miracle can take place. But you had to learn to trust me that I would fulfill the promise." That happens when Abraham is a hundred years old.

Now Abraham is about 120 to 130 years of age and he had to learn to trust God. God had promised him a seed. He gave him Isaac as a son. There have been numerous threats to Isaac's life but in the meantime, God has protected him and provided for him and now God's going to see if he had learned all his lessons and he really did trust Him to preserve Isaac. Now when was Abraham originally justified or saved? Before Genesis 12, in Genesis 6, before Isaac was born, it says remember that Abraham was justified by faith and not by works. He was justified by faith alone. So that's when he's declared righteous.

He had to grow and mature to realize or to let that justification produce experiential righteousness. He's declared righteous on the basis of his first faith in God but then he's given new life and he begins to grow, and we see the maturity of that in Genesis 22. That's the justification that James is talking about here when he says, "wasn't Abraham justified by works?" He's not talking about being justified before God but he's talking about the justification which he already had which is coming to maturity because in the next verse James says, "do you see that faith was working together with his works and by his works, that is, by his obedience to God, faith was made, not made perfect but brought to completion.

See his justification had started but he had to come to maturity. That idea, TELEIOS [teleioj] means has to come to maturity. Then the next verse says, "And the Scripture was fulfilled or brought to completion that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness." That's Genesis 15:6. He believes God; it's accounted to him for righteousness when he's first saved but all he has at that point is the imputed righteousness of Christ. To grow to maturity, he has to obey God and that's the growth of experiential righteousness.

So we see these two categories of righteousness in Abraham in James 2. Let's go back to Romans 6. Romans 6 is talking about the same thing. Romans 3 and 4 talks about how we acquire the righteousness of God. It's by faith. But now what Paul is talking about is not imputed righteousness but experiential righteousness. It's how do we realize this in our own lives so that we can realize not just this eternal life, which is unending life with God in heaven, but that fullness of life, that abundance of life, that quality of life which God has for us. So in verse 17, Paul says, "Let God be thanked because you were slaves of sin but you obeyed from the heart." So it makes that contrast.

It's very strong in the Greek. God be thanked because you were slaves of sin but you obeyed, that is, you responded by faith and you obeyed the teaching that you were given and as a result of that you started growing to maturity. Verse 18 says, "Having been freed from sin... [actually this is an aorist passive participle that's temporal; it should be "when you were set free from sin.] When were we set free from sin? We are set free from the power of the sin nature at salvation. "When you were set free from sin you became..." The word there indicates you became something you weren't before, "you became a slave of righteousness."

The point he's making is that when you and I trusted in Christ as our Savior, at that instant, we quit being a slave to the sin nature in terms of our position, and in terms of our identity, and in terms of legal ownership and we became the legal property of God. But we still like to run away from God and go back to our old master. The point he's making here is that when you were set free from sin which is when you trusted in Christ as your Savior, you became a slave of righteousness. When you become a new creature in Christ, part of that is you become a slave of righteousness. Now he says in verse 19, "I'm speaking in terms of..." What he means is that he's using a human analogy from our common experience to try to help understand this difficult concept. So he just says, "I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh."

Then he explains this a little further by saying, "For just as you presented your members (your body) as slaves of uncleanness...." That's just another term for talking about the works of the sin nature. "Just as you offered your body as slaves of uncleanness and lawlessness...which led to more lawlessness, that's as an unbeliever, so he says, "Now present your members as slaves of righteousness for sanctification." So a change has taken place because now we're a new creature in Christ rather than making a decision to let the sin nature control us, we have to make a decision to not let the sin nature control us.

There's more to it than that. We have to be empowered by the Holy Spirit. That doesn't come in until Romans 8. Here in Romans 6, he's laying the foundation so we understand the whole transformation that's taken place from the moment of our salvation. Then he lays it out in the last four verses of the chapter. He says, "For when you were slaves of sin..." That is, when you were an unbeliever you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What that means is, you were independent of righteousness. In other words, when you were a sinner, there's no righteousness in your life. That's Isaiah 64:6 "All our righteousness is as filthy rags." Isaiah 53. "All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way." We're all sinners so when you were a slave to sin, an unbeliever, you were free. In other words, there was no righteousness in your life.

Notice how he explains this. I've circled "for" as an explanation and then there's a question at the beginning of verse 21 and he answers it "for the end of those things is death but...[contrast]. Then a last explanation stated in verse 23. The goal of all this is the idea of fruit of holiness. Remember the last part of verse 19 says we're to be slaves of righteousness for holiness, or sanctification. We're to be producing fruit for sanctification. Let's go to verse 20, "For when you were free from sin, you were slaves to righteousness." Now in verse 21, he asks the question, "What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now saying?" What was the production?

Fruit is the end result of a growing plant. It's the production, so he says, what was the production, what was the end result of all those things you did as an unbeliever, under the power of the sin nature, of which you're now ashamed? For the end result of that, he says, is death. For the unbeliever living under the power of the sin nature just produces corruption. It just produces death. Everything is negative.

The contrast in verse 22 is, "having now been set free from sin...that is, set free from the control of the sin nature...and having become slaves of God, you have fruit or production to holiness or to sanctification and the end is everlasting life." Now, wait a minute, you say. Didn't we get eternal life when we were justified. Well, yes. That's just life without end with God. Here, because the topic starting in the middle of chapter 5 was no longer how to get to heaven or how to be justified, it's how does a justified person experience the fullness of life.

Now we see that he has shifted and he's clearly talking about how we experience sanctification which brings us the fullness of everlasting life. Not just quantity but quality. And so I've charted this this way that sin produces death. That's the end result of living as either an unbeliever under the power of the sin nature or as a believer under the sin nature. The end result is corruption and death and destruction.

But obedience produces the fruit of righteousness which brings with it sanctification, or spiritual growth, and the experience of eternal life. Now this righteousness here that comes from obedience isn't the righteousness of justification because that's by faith. This is by obedience. This is the experiential righteousness that comes with spiritual growth. So the righteousness here is experiential which means the sanctification is experiential and the eternal life is experiential.

He's not talking about what happens after we die here. He's talking about happens between now and the time we die. Between now and the time we die physically, we can grow and the Holy Spirit produces genuine righteousness, experiential righteousness in our life. This is sanctification and spiritual growth and its eternal life that we can enjoy right now.

Well, how do we do that? This is the big struggle for the Apostle Paul in the next chapter. How do we do that? Do we just go out and make ourselves be obedient? And the answer, of course, we know to that is that just doesn't work. So chapter 7 to me is one of the dark chapters in the Bible because it's a hopeless chapter. It's Paul trying to fulfill Romans 6 without the Holy Spirit, just on the basis of his own morality, just on the basis of his own will and he ends up just absolutely, totally frustrated and depressed because he can't do it.

Then we get into Romans 8 which is the high point because in Romans 8 we learn it has to be done through the power of God the Holy Spirit. So we'll come back next time to get into chapter 7. But just as we close, and this makes it clear, that the fruit we're talking about in verse 22 to sanctification is to everlasting life. That's not what happens after you die but before you die. That means when you get to Romans 6:23, the gift of God is eternal life, that's not talking about the life after we die. In context, it's got to be the life before you die. "The wages of sin...."

He's explaining the principle so it has application to the unbeliever because he's stating a universal principle because the payment, what you earn from sin, is death. Whether you're an unbeliever living totally under the power of the sin nature, you earn what you get paid... it's death. It's temporal but for the unbeliever that ends up in eternal death. For the believer, because sanctification is by grace just like salvation is, it's that free gift of the abundant life we have, the potential of which was given us at the instant of salvation.

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