SIN AND THE BELIEVER
Opening thoughts
Over the past four weeks, what I’ve found to be one of the most difficult aspects of this job is the slow process of adapting to it. Like everyone else, whenever I start a new job it takes me a few weeks to acclimate; I need to get to know the people I’m working with and be in the work environment on a regular basis for a while before I feel comfortable. When I started preaching at Gibault it was a little bit of an easier transition. I’d been there for two years by the time I took over and I was a regular part of the kid’s lives for at least five days a week.
However, with this job, I only see you all once a week and my best opportunity to speak with you and get comfortable is the half-hour or so after the service when I may or may not be able to strike upon a conversation. I hope, overtime, some means of remedying this situation will present itself, but for now it produces only one result: we don’t know each other very well yet.
That being the case, when I tell you that this week the Lord put something on my heart to speak to you all about, you don’t know that saying “the Lord laid this on my heart this week” is an uncommon practice for me. I don’t often talk about God putting things on my heart, not because I don’t believe that sort of thing happens, I do; instead, it is because the times when I’ve known for certain that He was doing so have been few and far between and because, usually, I’m cautious about trusting my emotions as a guide in this area.
Maybe I’m the only one who’s ever experienced this, but early on in my walk with the Lord, I occasionally would feel that God had put something to me, only to find out later that perhaps this was not the case. I would then begin to wonder, was that really what God was saying, or was my own voice mixed in there somewhere, too. Case in point: being here serving you all. I’ve known for certain, since I was a teenager, that I was called to some sort of Christian ministry. Now, when I first started heading in that direction, I was absolutely certain that it was pastoral ministry that I was called to.
Of course, at the time, pastoral ministry was the only type of ministry I was really aware of, apart from missions. Over time, a number of developments have come up which have caused me to waiver back and forth in that conviction. This, in part, is actually why I accepted this position when Rev. Purvis suggested it; I hope that, when I reach the end of my time here, I will have some sort of audible confirmation, either from you all, the superintendent, or whatever committees I have to meet with through this candidacy process, that others either see or don’t see this same calling as well.
And, while struggling with this tension of wanting hear some sort of clear confirmation, or dissuasion, between us, in this gulf of unfamiliarity, there also lies the question of what I believe. What is my theology? Interestingly enough, except for a few short minutes in conversation with Rev. Purvis when discussing my denominational history (a story unto itself), my theological views haven’t come up much during this whole process so far. And while I’m fairly certain that over time my sermons will speak for themselves with regards to my theological views, I’m worried that some of the things that I’ve said already from the pulpit may have given cause for concern, or that they may have been misleading.
One of those areas, and the one which I felt particularly moved to speak about to you this morning, is the role of sin in the life of the believer. As you know by this point, I have no qualms about calling myself and everyone else a sinner. Sometimes, unfortunately, this has the effect of rubbing people the wrong way. It brings up questions about lifestyle (i.e. does he think it’s ok to be a sinner?) as well as questions about holiness (i.e. aren’t we supposed to “pursue holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord”? *Hebrews). It all comes back to anthropology.
As you already know, of course, anthropology is the “study of man,” or the study of what makes us who we are. Its history, in a sense, is as old as mankind itself; we’ve always been trying to figure out what makes a human a human. However, the term anthropology only goes back as far as 1501 and the earliest works under the category of “anthropology” were done by philosophers; but that quickly evolved into the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, which then in turn produced neurosciences as well as various comparative studies.
This, to me, seems important, because I live in a world saturated by the effects of psychology and neuroscience. My view is perhaps a little skewed, given where I work. During a typical workday, 90% of the people I talk to are on some kind of psychotropic medication. I think of it like a deranged Dr. Seuss poem, you know “one pill to make you happy, two pills to make you sad; three pills to make you a good boy, four pills to make you bad.” One of the scariest aspects of it is that the people prescribing the pills don’t even know exactly what they do, they just know that if you take a certain amount of this one and a smaller amount of that one you stop hitting people when you get angry; until your body adjusts to the dosage that is.
The reason I find this significant is because it ties into what you might call Biblical, or Christian, Anthropology. If a pill can make you a better person, at least for a little while, then what does that say about our fallen nature and its connection to God, holiness, et cetera? Can a pill make you more holy? If you commit a sin, was that really your decision, or was it merely the result of low serotonin levels and a diminished frontal lobe? What does the Bible say about what makes a human being a human being?
If you ever read any theology and you come across someone discussing the topic of anthropology, they tend to treat it more as a “view of man” rather than a study of man. They tend to categorize themselves as having either a “high” or “low” view of humanity. To say you have a “high anthropology,” theologically speaking, then, means that you have a high view of humanity. Such people are often called, in Church History and in Theology, Pelagians or Semi-Pelagians, after the Pelagian heresy.
Such people tend to believe that human beings are born inclined towards goodness, but become evil because of the examples set before them and their decisions, and that nothing coercively impedes their freewill. Biblically, they tend to point out that in the Old Testament there’s nothing which indicates that a sinful-nature has been passed down from Adam and Eve and that such a concept is often based upon biblical passages which were meant to be understood as being hyperbolic or exaggerations. This category is populated by Christians from the Restoration Movement (i.e. Churches of Christ), Liberal Theologians, and some Eastern Orthodox theologians.
People with a low view of humanity, a low anthropology, are often called “Augustinians,” or “Semi-Augustinians” after St. Augustine, the theologian chiefly responsible for the doctrine of original sin. They tend to believe that, after the fall, the human heart is essentially evil and can do nothing good in and of itself unless directly acted upon by the grace of God. They point to a long list of passages, but here are some of the key ones: "Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins." (Ecclesiastes 7:20) "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9) "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God." (Romans 3:10-11). This category is populated by Calvinists and most Lutherans, people who believe in predestination, on the strictly “Augustinian” side, and people such as ourselves, the Methodists, Roman Catholics, some Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans, some Lutherans, as well as the broad Tradition of the Church throughout the ages, on the “Semi-Augustinian” side.
So, if we believe that human beings are born “sinful,” what role does sin play in a person’s life after they come to faith? That’s the question our passage for today addresses:
Commentary
12Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
“Do not let it reign.” That’s an interesting way of putting things. It’s as if sin remains a constant “potential usurper,” a potential challenger to the focus of our souls. One of my professors in college was fond of a particular quote, but I don’t remember who the original author is; he would say “keep your focus on God, but keep an eye on the devil.”
Paul is telling us to keep it in check. Why? He tells us in the next verse.
13Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.
It is because, though you were once dead, spiritually unable to do the works of God, you have now been brought to life. You have been enabled to do those things which God intends to work in you. Offer yourselves to Him and He will use them. And I find that an important distinction- He will use them as His instruments. It isn’t you going out and doing great things, now, but it is God at work in you, doing these things through you, as His instrument.
14For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Now, how is it that by not being under the law, sin thus is not your master? Here’s one of the keys to how Justification and Sanctification interplay. It seems to me that Paul understands the law and sin to be two sides of the same coin. The grace which enables you to trust in Christ and not your own works for your salvation, also now frees you from that sinful nature; it enables you to trust God not only to free you from the guilt of your sins, but free you from sin itself.
Conversely, to follow sin requires a lack of faith in God in your daily life, and likewise to return to the law requires a lack of faith in God for your justification before Him. And in both cases faith is a gift of grace, God’s graciousness to us which we remain under. This clearly is highlighted by the next two verses.
15What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?
To offer yourselves as slaves to sin, to return to following it, would violate the very nature of grace, the very nature of faith, and because of this, it would inevitably lead to a loss of faith, or a return to death. Instead, to remain in the faith, to be faithful, to be obedient as God has now enabled you to be, ends in eternal life, God’s gift of righteousness given to us in His Son Jesus Christ.
I find it interesting that he says one leads to death, the other leads to righteousness. Too often we forget our justification, our righteousness by faith and not by works, and think that the individual sin, the individual slip-up, somehow instantly causes a sort of death, a sort of separation from God. But this, again, is a lack of faith, a return to the law; it compounds the individual sin already committed with a further lack of faith in God.
Paul continues:
17But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. 18You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Though you were spiritually dead, as Paul says elsewhere, you were enabled to trust God, to “obey the form of teaching.” You were set free from sin by the power of grace and have been made obedient, slaves, to the one who works in you.
19I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.
I want to focus in on the first part of this verse, the “I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves,” bit. First, what are you talking about Paul? Is there some other terms that he potentially could’ve put this in other than human ones? That’s kind of interesting. But no, what I want to focus on is that part about us being “weak in our natural selves.” And here comes, not my excuse, but my explanation of why I continue to refer to myself as a sinner.
You see, even though under grace God works in us to put to death the deeds of the flesh, the flesh is not yet entirely dead. We are still in the body. And, as Paul says in Galatians “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.”
We are still weak, we still slip up. As St. John tells us in his first letter “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, He who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Each of those verbs are, as best I understand (which isn’t much), in the continual sense. Thus it could read “If we continue to say that we do not continue to have sin, we continue to deceive ourselves, but if we continue to confess our sins, He who is faithful and just will continue to forgive us our sins and continue to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
But though we continue to be in the flesh, though we continue to make mistakes and sin in ignorance or weakness, we are not slaves to our sinful nature, bound to do whatever it wills. Rather, we know what that life is like, we know the road it leads down, as Paul says next
20When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death!
The things which are done in the sinful nature are the things which embarrass us, which kill us, which destroy the very things worth protecting. That is because they go against the way God intended for life to be, the way we now have begun to operate by faith, the way we will continue in (by His grace) until He brings the work He began in us to completion.
22But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[a] Christ Jesus our Lord.
We have been set free by His work. We are the benefactors, not the earners. In the weakness of our flesh, if we were to reject the grace of God, then we would earn, but only death. Rather, we receive the gift, God’s graciousness to us, His gift of eternal life because of the already accomplished work of our savior Jesus Christ. It is by faith, both in our standing before Him, and in our daily lives, that God gives both to us.
Hey Scott. I reallly liked this one.
ReplyDeletethanks buddy.
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