[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, here is the situation that Paul wants to set before us this morning in the Epistle lesson. He talks about what it is to be a slave, either of sin or of righteousness. Those are really the only two options.
And here’s the idea. Ever since the fall, Adam and Eve in the garden, when they took the fruit and they ate it, they corrupted human nature, and we have inherited that corrupt nature. One of the marks, maybe even the chief mark of that corrupt nature is that we want the wrong things. We desire the wrong things. We long for sinful stuff. It happened with Adam and Eve in the garden where the devil convinced Adam and Eve that they should take from the fruit and eat it rather than rejecting it and coming to the tree and worshiping God and believing the Word and not grabbing a hold of the fruit. But since they grabbed a hold of that fruit, that is now our nature, our sinful nature, that we are grasping and longing for the things that God has forbidden.
The word in the Greek, in the Epistle lesson is epithumi, which is sometimes translated desire or lust. We want to… because we normally think of lust in terms of the sixth commandment, you shall not commit adultery, but we want to recognize that there is lust that in fact lives in every one of the commandments. The things that every single commandment forbids, you and I want. Your sinful flesh and my sinful flesh want.
We want, according to the fourth commandment, honor your father and mother. We want to be rebellious and rebel against our parents and other authorities. According to the fifth commandment, you shall not murder. We want to be angry. According to the sixth commandment, you shall not commit adultery. We want to be unchaste and sexually immoral. According to the seventh commandment, you shall not steal. We are greedy. We want to have the things that we’re not supposed to have. The Eighth Commandment, you shall not bear false witness that we are bitter and we want to exalt ourselves among the people around us.
We want to sin. This desire to sin, by the way, is called by the theologians concupiscence, and it’s one of those big theological words that’s important for us to know, this innate desire or inclination to sin. It’s like if you’re driving the car and it always turns to the left. Or I was thinking about it might be, I don’t know if this is a good picture, but it’s like you get in the car and you press the gas and instead of going forward it goes backwards. It’s always going off the track. It’s always going the wrong direction. And that, even that desire to sin is already sin itself. It’s already guilt. The fact that you want the wrong thing means that you’re guilty.
So, this is the situation in which we find ourselves, that we according to our sinful nature want the wrong things. In fact, we, you know, oftentimes in the church we’re talking about the bondage of the will, which is true. Our will cannot choose or decide to follow Jesus, choose or decide to be a believer and so forth. So, we confess the bondage of the will, but we also confess the bondage of the want, the corruption of the desires that we have.
And this means, now watch what happens, that the devil has a particular argument that he can make for each one of us that’s very difficult to resist, and it happens like this. The devil comes along and he sees the things that you want to do that God has forbidden, and the devil exploits that difference, that you want to take what doesn’t belong to you, or you want to say what you’re not authorized to say, or do what God has forbidden, or whatever it is, there’s the thing that you want to do and God doesn’t want you to do it, and the devil comes along next to you and he says, “Hey, you see that thing that you want to do?”
Yeah. He says, “I think you should do it.” And you say, “Well, but God told me not to.” And the devil says, “God, he’s always trying to take away your joy, he’s always trying to take away your fun, he’s always trying to take away your freedom, he’s trying to put you in bondage, he’s trying to enslave you. He’s trying to get you to do what he wants you to do. I, the devil, I want you to do what you want to do. God wants you to do what he wants you to do, so you should reject his commandments and live free.”
Now you see the argument there; the devil wants to make this argument, and I hope you can recognize this in your own life. I’m pretty sure it’s not just me, that the devil wants us to believe that doing what we want is living in freedom. Choosing to do what you desire is living free from bondage. The devil wants us to think that the Ten Commandments are what put us in bondage and that our sinful choices are what cause us to live free. Do you see?
Now the Bible teaches us the exact opposite. Paul says in the Epistle that whatever you give your members to, that you are a slave to. Jesus says it like this, whoever commits a sin is a slave to sin. And Paul is explicit about this, that if we simply do what we want to do, and we simply chase after our own desires, that is not living free, but is in fact a matter of slavery. We are enslaved to our lust, we are enslaved to our desires, we are enslaved to our corruption.
And it is Jesus who comes to set us free, but the devil lies to us. The devil tells us that freedom is found in disobedience and in doing what we want to do.
Now, here’s the first thing that we have to recognize. This is not just in the Bible; this is also in all of the old philosophers. Aristotle saw it and all the old Greek philosophers saw the same thing. That if you just live how you want to live, if you just chase after your desires, if you live your life to maximize your own pleasure, which is called hedonism, if you live a life like that, you will not be happy. You will be sad and you will die, and you’ll die sad.
In other words, chasing after your desires is not freedom but slavery. Now, this is a thing that probably our culture needs to learn. I mean, every few generations cultures forget this, and our culture is forgetting it. So this is probably the big cultural conversation, is that people want to be free to chase after their own desires, and anybody who would stand in the way of that is repressive or an enemy of freedom.
In fact, we… I mean, now we’re living at the end, I hope, of this great sexual revolution, and even the language that people use to describe it is in terms of liberty, that people are chasing after sexual liberation as if doing what you want to do is freedom. No, that is in fact slavery. So that people are fighting to preserve their right to be enslaved to their own lusts, and when we come along with the message of freedom from those lusts, we are understood to be those who are putting them back into slavery.
It’s all upside down, topsy-turvy and messed up. So we want people to be free from sin. And that’s what Paul wants; that’s what he desires. But here’s the point, that even the philosophers could see it. Even the old Greek pagans could see that if you just do whatever you want to do, you’re gonna kill yourself or end up miserable. That doesn’t work.
But what the philosophers didn’t have is any way out. Even the greatest ethicists of the ancient world could see that if you just chased after your own desires, you would end up in corruption, but they couldn’t see a way to get out of it. They would have to confess, like we confessed at the beginning of the service, that I cannot free myself from my sinful condition.
Even though I know if I just do what I want to do, it will wreck my life and wreck everything that is important to me. Even though I can see it, I can’t help myself. Who can, this is how St. Paul says it in Romans, who can deliver us from this body of death?
And this is the good news of what Paul is preaching. Paul says that Christ Jesus, God in the flesh, who has taken on our sin and died in our place, now forgives us all of our sins, and He sets us free from the slavery to sin into which we were born. He sets us free from serving as obedient slaves our lusts and desires. You have a different Lord, and that Lord is not your belly.
Like Paul says, remember their God is their belly, their end is destruction. Your Lord is not your belly. Your Lord is not your lusts. Your Lord is not your rebellion. Your Lord is not your greed. Your Lord is not your sinful nature. You are not the servant of your corruption. No, your Lord is Jesus, and He has sent the Holy Spirit into your heart and into mine, and one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is this freedom to serve Him instead of your sinful flesh.
Listen, listen now. Paul says, “Let therefore not sin reign in your mortal bodies to make you obey their passions. Don’t present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as those who have been brought from death to life. Present your members to God as instruments for righteousness, for sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.”
You see, sin is not just in the biblical picture; it’s not just something that you accomplish, it’s something—sin is a tyrant that rules over you. But that sin that rules over you has been overthrown by the death and resurrection of Jesus. And now you are free. You are free to want things that are holy, to think things that are holy, to do things that are holy. You are free to love God and your neighbor.
Do you know that if you present yourself to anyone as obedient slaves, you’re slaves to the one you obey, either of sin, which will lead to death, or of obedience which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.
You no longer belong to your lust. You no longer are defined by your corruption. You are no longer under the dominion of death. You are free. You belong to Jesus. This is a freedom that the world cannot know but it needs desperately to have, and the Lord sends us out as ambassadors to this freedom, to those who are fighting to remain slaves of their own lusts and desires.
But we have to know at first and rejoice in it first that your Lord is Jesus who lives, the righteous one who delights in you and will delight in you forever.
So listen to how Paul ends. This is verse 20: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time for the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit that you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
You belong to Jesus, and the reward that He gives to you is life eternal. God be praised. Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.