I’m not really all that interested in criminology but as I was putting together today’s message I thought, how can I illustrate what Paul is telling us in the second half of Chapter 6 of the book of Romans? And it seemed appropriate to me to think about the effect of being imprisoned and then suddenly and unexpectedly being released from prison.
So I did a Google search on the word “recidivism.” Recidivism indicates going back to prison again after serving a prison term and being released. To be honest with you I don’t even know why I know that, but I do. I actually found a shocking statistic that in California 70% of released prisoners return to prison within 3 years of being set free.[1]
I am no expert on this but I did a little research and I found out that most people who return to prison do so because they go back to the kind of life they led before they went to prison. They do not see a need to lead a different kind of life than the one they led before they were locked up. They re-enter the same environment, fall back into old patterns, and end up back in jail. Those people who succeed at remaining free after release are those who see the need for and are committed to a fundamental change in their lives.
So you might ask why I suddenly became interested in criminals and the answer is that we are all in the same boat. So far in Romans we have seen how Paul made the case that left to our own devices we are hopeless sinners, deserving of and receiving God’s wrath. Then we saw how suddenly, unexpectedly, we received a reprieve. We were set free, not because we had paid the penalty for our crimes, but because Jesus had paid the penalty for our crimes.
But then we saw that some of the newly freed prisoners were not well-equipped to handle their new found freedom. We have seen so far that Paul has argued against two separate wrong ideas about what it means to be Christian. On the one hand he has argued against legalism, the idea that I can earn my way to justification (remember we said that means being declared “not guilty”) by following the law.
The Jewish Christians of Paul’s time insisted that you could not be a Christian unless you meticulously kept the requirements of the Law handed down to Moses, including circumcision, the ceremonial calendar, and the dietary laws. In our time there are still plenty of people who believe in the principle of legalism: you have to be good to earn God’s favor, even though they may have dismissed the Mosaic Law. For them, being good means being religious.
The other wrong idea that Paul argued against, which we talked about last week, was what’s called antinomianism. Remember that we said that the core of that word is the Greek word nomos which means law. Antinomianism doesn’t mean saying that it’s OK to break the law, it means saying that the law doesn’t apply to me anymore. The idea behind antinomianism is that since I have been saved by grace and not by anything I did, it doesn’t matter if I break the law, it doesn’t matter if I sin, because I’m already saved, so I might as well just do it.
Last week we saw how Paul said this idea was wrong because if we have truly become identified with Christ, we are not able to continue to live in sin. Not that we can’t sin, but that we can’t live in sin. We will be convicted by the Spirit within us, and eventually we will have to give it up, or die. Really. Literally. The change within us is as profound as the change of a cucumber into a pickle. Once the cucumber is pickled, it can never go back to being a cucumber.
Today we are going to see how Paul makes his case against antinomianism, lawlessness, in a different way, by pointing out that our freedom isn’t from bondage to sin to no bondage, but from one kind of bondage to another. From bondage to sin to bondage to Christ.
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! 16 Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. 18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
19 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. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15-23 NIV)
The Doctrine of the Two Ways
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to you that the New Testament understanding of reality is marked by two co-existing but completely separate and contradictory realities. This idea, like pretty much everything else I talk about from up here, has a fancy theological name; in this case it is called “The Doctrine of the Two Ways.”
This doctrine essentially puts forward the notion that everything has to be considered in the context of two opposing realities. One is the reality of God’s perfect love, and the other is the reality of man’s rebellion. God and Satan, Light and dark, Good and Evil, Life and Death, Spirit and Flesh, Redemption and Sin, Christ and Adam; we are all familiar with these great opposing realities. And, according to the New Testament writers, we are all in one or the other of these realms, but never outside or in between.
This doctrine is what is underneath Paul’s message about slavery. We saw last week that before Jesus set us free, we were slaves to sin. Now we are not. But what Paul is telling the Romans, and us, today is that we are not free from bondage. We have moved from the one reality: bondage to sin, to the other reality: bondage to Christ. There is no state of being in which we can think of ourselves as free from bondage. There is no “third way.”
Now, we hate this. We look upon slavery as something that is absolutely evil. And we should. When we think about slavery, as Americans we think about the brutality of the system chattel slavery of the antebellum South. This is why there is a debate among biblical scholars over whether the word that signifies slavery in Greek should be translated as “slave” or “bondservant.” Because the word slave has a certain connotation for modern Americans that it would not have had for ancient Romans.
As a historian I can tell you that for most of human history most people in the world have thought of slavery as normal. There are even cases where being a slave would have brought about certain advantages to the individual they might not otherwise be able to achieve. In the book of Acts the Apostle Philip evangelized the Ethiopian Eunuch. (Acts 8:26-40). In fact a eunuch was a slave, but a slave that had a high position in the Kingdom as a servant of the King. Not all slaves were forced into brutal captivity.
But even in Roman times, for most people slavery would not have been your first career choice. You were still not free. You still were at the mercy of the person who owned you. I think that’s why Paul uses this image of slavery to illustrate his point about sin. Sin is a cruel and ruthless master; slavery was not something you would normally aspire to.
But then Paul tells us in today’s message that when it comes to the spiritual life you can never be free. You must always be a slave. And there is no way to deny it. Whether we like it or not, no matter what our historical memory tells us about slavery, when it comes to spirit, we are all slaves.
Free to Love
So what about all of this talk about freedom in Christ? The problem is, I think, that we have a wrong definition of freedom. We are pretty clear on the definition of slavery, but we have a skewed understanding about what it means to be free. As we talked about last week and even today, we think that to be free means to “just do it!” Let yourself go wild. Do whatever you want. But in most cases when we do that, we are really not free, but still slaves to the cruel taskmaster sin. Because we know that sin isn’t harmless fun, it’s terrible and destructive.
Again, we can see this in the place where sin entered history, in the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree in order to keep them free from death. But Satan lied to Eve.
[3:1] Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” [2] And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, [3] but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” [4] But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. [5] For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-5 ESV)
We can learn so much from the Bible if we pay close attention to what it says. What do we see happening here? Satan lied and promised Eve freedom. He told her “You will not surely die.” And he promised her something really cool, being like God. Of course one of the problems was that they were already like God. They were created in the image of God. But the other problem was that eating the fruit, far from making her free, would make her a slave to death. And this is exactly the way sin works. It promises us something really cool. But it gives us something really terrible.
So what is freedom? Real freedom, just like this story shows us, involves obedience to God. Think about what Adam and Eve had to give up when they chose to disobey. They had to give up perfect freedom under God’s care. And for what? Sin, and death, and corruption. That was not a good bargain.
So we can see clearly illustrated here in the Garden of Eden the truth of our bondage. We are either bound to obey God, which gives us true freedom, or we are bound to serve ourselves, and die in our sin. There is no third way.
Like those prisoners I talked about at the beginning of today’s message, they thought they were free, but really they just went back to their old ways, and they ended up with the same result: prison. The ones who were able to stay out of prison were the ones who became obedient to the law. By making themselves subservient to the law, they were able to remain free.
How Do I “Just Do It!”
All of this is really heavy, isn’t it? Some of you might be thinking, “Oh come on Pastor! I don’t want to think about all of this deep theological stuff. I just want to be mildly entertained and marginally inspired and go get some lunch!” But that is a perilous thought, because the stakes here are enormous.
If we have been touched by Christ we are free to choose whether we will be obedient to him or whether we will continue to obey our passions and the call of the world around us. We know what it looks like to be obedient to the world, and it ain’t pretty. How do we obey Jesus?
We looked a little bit at that last week. I mentioned then that there are two aspects of obedience: one negative and one positive; one that tells us what not to do, and one that tells us what to do. The not to do part is, don’t sin. Resist sin. The to do part is, live righteously. It’s simple. Don’t sin; live righteously. But it’s not very satisfying is it? Because the call of the world is so loud, and it seems that God’s voice is so faint. No matter how much we want to resist sin and live righteously, we just feel so overwhelmed. And we fail. And sometimes our failure just makes us want to give up.
We’re not alone. Let me read to you something from a book titled Making All Things New by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen was a twentieth-century spiritual writer and theologian who wrestled with the meaning of what it means to be obedient to Christ. Here’s what he writes:
A spiritual life without discipline is impossible.... it is clear that we are usually surrounded by so much inner and outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God when he is speaking to us. We have often become deaf, unable to know when God calls us and unable to understand in which direction he calls us. Thus our lives have become absurd. In the word absurd we find the Latin word surdus, which means “deaf.” A spiritual life requires discipline because we need to learn to listen to God, who constantly speaks but whom we seldom hear. When, however, we learn to listen, our lives become obedient lives. The word obedient comes from the Latin word audire, which means “listening.” A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move slowly from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow his guidance. Jesus’ life was a life of obedience. He was always listening to the Father, always attentive to his voice, always alert for his directions. Jesus was “all ear.”
From my own experience, I know that Nouwen is really on to something here. If we just go about our business as if we had never met Jesus, as if we could live like we did before, like everyone else around us seems to live, we will never experience the freedom of being “in Christ.” We will not be able to hear God. We will remain deaf to his voice, living absurd lives.
We don’t want to do that. We want to obey. But if obedience means listening, how can we listen if we are deaf to God’s voice? And the answer is just what Nouwen is pointing to here: discipline.
Now here’s another thing we don’t like very much, discipline. Because when we think of discipline we think of punishment, the consequence of doing something wrong. We’re late for class, and we’re disciplined by getting detention. We run a red light or get caught speeding, and we’re disciplined by having to pay fines. If we do it enough we are disciplined by going to jail. This is the way we have come to think of the word, but this is not what it means.
Jesus had disciples. Disciple comes from the same root as discipline. Were Jesus’ disciples people Jesus constantly punished? Of course not! They were people who followed the teachings of Jesus. If we follow the teachings of Jesus, we are his disciples. So in one sense discipline means learning to follow the path that Jesus laid out for us.
When Nouwen talks about discipline in the quote I just read you, he means spiritual discipline. A spiritual discipline is something we do on a regular basis. It really means setting aside time on a daily basis so that we can learn from Jesus. It means making a new habit. It means changing our lives from the habit of listening to the world and following our baser passions to the habit of listening to Jesus and doing what he tells us.
When I told you before that I know from experience what Nouwen is talking about here, I meant it. I used to be like most other people, getting up in the morning and stumbling into the day doing the next thing that popped up in from of me. But when I became a Christian, I found myself confronted with the dilemma that I knew that my life was supposed to change, but that it was not changing. I knew that I was supposed to live differently, but I wasn’t. I kept doing the same old sinful things over and over again as if I had not been redeemed by Jesus. The only thing that was different was that now I felt guilty about it.
Why? It was because even though I knew I needed to listen to God’s voice, I couldn’t hear it. I needed to make space in my life to listen. And so I learned that I had to set aside some time every day just to listen to God. When I developed the habit of listening to God, it became easier to resist sin and live righteously. I cannot overemphasize to you how important this is. A spiritual life without discipline is impossible.
Now how do learn to listen? That’s what a spiritual discipline is. It means prayer and meditation. I have to set aside time every day to pray and to meditate. And I do. Every morning before I do anything else I spend time reading the Bible and praying and meditating. Meditating in the Christian sense means listening to the Spirit, not like in the eastern sense of trying to empty my mind or anything like that.
And it has made a difference in my life. I used to dread spending time in prayer and meditation, now I miss it if I don’t. And because I have learned to listen, I can more easily obey. And so I am more free than I was. And this will happen to you too, if you begin the practice of spiritual discipline.
You might be thinking, well that’s OK for you Pastor because you’re the preacher after all and you’re supposed to do that but I’m just not that religious. Really? I’m not different from you, and like it or not, if you’re a Christian you’re not that different from me. You know that you are faithful. Just like Paul tells us in today’s reading. You are either faithful to your sin nature and the call of the world, or you are faithful to the commands of Jesus. There is no third way.
So if you’re not making time to listen, let me offer some suggestions for getting started. You don’t have to do anything elaborate. Set aside a time in your calendar and a physical space where you can be alone and quiet. It doesn’t have to be a long time. Five or ten minutes is OK for a start, the main thing is to be consistent. Do it every day. When your mind starts telling you all the reason you can’t, just tell it to shut up and do it anyway.
Read the bible every day. There are a lot of Bible reading plans. It’s not important how much you read, but it is important that that you do it every day.
There are a number of different devotionals, little books that contain inspirational writings and sometimes prayer and scripture. There is a whole cottage industry that has grown up around these. Some are really good, and some not so good. Some of the best ones are free online of you have access to a computer. Others are really inexpensive. I bought a copy of Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest, one of the best evangelical devotionals in print, for $5.00. That’s less than you spend on a trip to Starbucks.
Take time to listen. Just quiet your mind and listen to what the Spirit is saying to you. Do this every day. I have compiled links to a number of resources that you can take advantage of that are free and freely available and I have place a link to them on our Facebook page. And I would be happy to spend time with anyone who wants to learn more about spiritual discipline.
Some helpful links for Spiritual Disciplines
Conclusion
In the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament we read the story of how the Israelites were able to end their wanderings in the desert and finally enter the Promised Land. Just before he died, Joshua called the people together to give them his final blessings. At that time Joshua spoke for the Lord and described how the Israelites’ ancestors had been brought through disappointments and trials to the Promised Land through faith in the mighty hand of the one God. He spoke of how God was completely intolerant of idolatry and demanded the full devotion of those he called his own. When we hear about idols we often think of bowing down to tiki gods and that sort of thing. But really, idolatry is putting anything ahead of God. Joshua urged the people to renew their commitment to God:
14 “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:14-15 NIV)
I will serve the Lord. Even though I may stumble, I will serve the Lord. Even though I sometimes fall prey to the temptations of the world, I will serve the Lord. Even though imperfectly. I will serve the Lord with all my strength, and all my heart, and all my will. I will serve the Lord.
Who will you serve? You cannot serve two masters. You will be a slave to sin, or a slave to Christ. Who will you serve? If you will serve the Lord, make time to listen to his voice.
[1] Clipped on 17-August-2012, 9:57 AM from 70% of state’s released inmates return to prison, but San Mateo County program combats stat « Frontpage Featured « Peninsula Press
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