Or, Obedience as the Lagging Measure of Our Hearts
Scripture: Romans 6:15-18
Date: June 19, 2022
Speaker: Sean Higgins
Jesus reproved religious people who claimed that they were free when their behavior proved otherwise:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” (John 8:34, ESV)
The point of this principle is that what we do shows our hearts better than what we say is in our hearts. As it’s been said, your talk talks and your walk talks but your walk talks a whole lot louder than your talk talks.
What if we connected this to some other ideas that we often don’t connect with our religious language, but perhaps should. For example, I’ve read, and I agree that, our outcomes are a lagging measure of our habits.
”Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat. (James Clear, Atomic Habits, Location 274)
Most of the current habit talk relates to productivity, on how to stack your tasks and repeat them into habits for sake of being a better you. But we might miss the relationship to spiritual disciplines and the spiritual habits, what has been called habitus, a disposition toward and acquired virtue of righteousness. We think of our daily habits as better or bad, but not as signs of what’s really deep down in our hearts, and certainly not as signs of slavery. But obedience is a life, a set of habits in heart and all our members, and obedience/disobedience is a lagging measure of our righteousness.
Obedience is not a means to salvation, it is a measure of it. That difference is critical; one is gospel and the other is from, and a road to, hell and a hellish time spent with one’s conscience. We’re either saved by grace alone or saved because of good works we’ve done. The dead can’t give themselves life, but when the dead are brought to life they breath. The spiritually living behave a certain way, they are committed to it.
The gospel of God’s grace is really great, and greatly misrepresented by some. In Romans 6 Paul responds to an out of bounds response to grace. He had said that where sin increased, grace increased even more (Romans 5:21). What a comfort to the guilty soul! And what a cover for possible moral license with the language of worship. “Let us keep on sinning for sake of showing off more grace!” That is a failure to understand the basic reality of grace and our baptism into Christ (Romans 6:1-4).
We are to know that we’ve died with Christ and been raised with Him. We are to reckon it so. We are to yield our members to serve righteousness (Romans 6:5-11).
The final reason given for this life of habit is that we are not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14). In Romans 6:15 through the end of the chapter, and spilling over into chapter 7, Paul has a new possible misunderstanding to clarify.
In verses 15-16 there are two questions. The first is the objection, the second is the principle.
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! (Romans 6:15, ESV)
There is obvious similarity to verse 1. Both verses start with a What then? Both verses end with By no means! Both verses have central question dealing with sin.
Verse 1 stresses a pattern; the idea is more about continuing in sin, a word choice and a verb tense (the present tense) that stresses ongoing action. The motive in verse 1 is ostensibly proactively virtuous. Who wouldn’t want God’s grace to be glorified? “Hey, look at me showing off God’s grace by my sin.”
Verse 15 stresses a particular; the idea is more concerned with even one sin, with a verb tense (the aorist tense) that accents a case by case basis. The motive in verse 15 is ostensibly passively virtuous. If it’s not about law, then what does it matter? “Hey, look at me at least not being a legalistic Pharisee.”
This is yet again a proof of not understanding what grace really is. Such a suggestion is backward and upside-down. “May it never be!”
Whether we like what it says or not, it is obvious. The truth is that the law doesn’t curse us any more, but that doesn’t mean that the requirements of the law are irrelevant. This is truth that Christians should know.
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? (Romans 6:16, ESV)
Paul pulls the present idea forward from verse 13; there it was our individual members, here it is ourselves with all members accounted for. As often as we make a choice we are showing our allegiance. There are only two ultimate options.
We are always slaves, and never not slaves. Our conduct makes clear who we serve, and our conduct inevitably shows trajectory. Either the end is death or the end is righteousness which also belongs with life.
As we know, reckon, and yield, any given moment’s choice of yielding to sin should not be on the table for disciples of Christ. We experience the temptation, sometimes severe, as the second half of Romans 7 seems to picture. But the team we’re on should be as obvious as which gender we are. When they film the documentary “What is a Christian?” the obedience of faith should take center stage.
The description slaves to obedience is maybe unexpected. The analogy of being slaves would be easy to understand though probably not tasteful; Paul clarifies his use of the illustration in verse 19. But the more surprising part is the master. It’s not Jesus, though it is Jesus and “God” in verse 22, the baptized serve obedience . #WWOW - What Would Obedience Want.
How do you know what Obedience wants? Where can you find the will of Obedience? The only ones who can find it are those who are under grace not law, and then, not coincidentally, they can see what loving behavior looks like from the law.
The righteousness that results is not the justifying before God kind, it is a justifying before men kind as well as a likeness to God kind.
When God saves a man He saves him by grace through faith to teaching for God’s glory.
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, have become slaves of righteousness. (Romans 6:17-18, ESV)
Thank God for your salvation, beloved. Thanks be to God for your brother’s salvation. God is to be credited for every testimony of deliverance; no sinner has ever willed himself out of slavery to sin, because no sinner has every wanted out of slavery to sin apart from sovereign grace. We don’t thank the man when he prays the prayer.
When grace enters it unites a man to the death and resurrection of Jesus and it hands that man over to a form of teaching. His freedom comes with a new standard.
There is a standard of teaching , a “form” or even a “type” of teaching (τύπον διδαχῆς). Just in chapter 6 alone Paul has depended on what they should know. They learned it from teaching. It was doctrine.
So, Christianity is not less than teaching.
It continues to be provocative that doctrine belongs with obedience. Sound doctrine includes obedience (Titus 2:1, followed by verses 2-10). Jesus connected teaching with obedience (Matthew 28:20). The gospel frees the whole man, it doesn’t just give him new information. The gospel is more like a defibrillator than a dictionary; it makes his heart alive to obey not just aware of what obedience means. These are things we learn, but it’s like being committed to the parachute after you’ve been pushed out of the plane.
The teaching to which you were committed means someone else committed you. We don’t commit, God commits us. The teaching isn’t something the believer chooses to identify with. The passive voice and meaning of the word describe how God turns us over to the teaching. We’er committed to it, like a doctor commits an ER patient to the hospital.
Which does have an affect on what the man wants. The obedience is from the heart . God changes hearts, that is the power of the gospel, and because we want it it may seem that God responded to our want. As we become more familiar with the teaching we realize that we responded with want to God’s initiation.
More passives in verse 18 highlight God’s activity: having been set free from sin and have (been made) slaves of righteousness .
Against the ESV, it’s reasonable to start a new paragraph in verse 19. There is still more teaching on our slavery to righteousness.
It is no virtue to be passive about righteousness. That is no way to exalt grace. Obedience is a lagging measure of our hearts. Application is everywhere, for individuals and peoples.
Christianity’s calling was to proclaim this double credo among the nations: first, that there is no liberation of the nations without moral liberation from sin; and second, that the liberation from sin is found nowhere else than in Christ our Lord. (Kuyper)
This is true for our nation, politics and economics. This is true for our homes, between spouses and as parents.
No one escapes this antithesis. You serve either the seed of the woman or the seed of the serpent, and no one can serve two masters. Either we are productive in the name of disobedience or we are productive in the name of obedience. There is no neutrality.
Thanks be to God that He has committed you to His love, to the truth, to obedience. Thanks be to God that He has pointed you toward a new week in which you must be productive for obedience. Serve the Lord with gladness!
[M]ay the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. (1 Thessalonians 3:12–13, ESV)