Romans 6:8-15
I talked with a friend this week who used to play rugby. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, there are two kinds of rugby: rugby and rugby league. Here is a quote I found that will help you to see the difference. Football (soccer) is a gentleman’s game played by thugs. Rugby is a thugs’ game played by gentlemen. Rugby League is a thugs’ game played by thugs. This friend played rugby league and in the process he had multiple injuries. Now as he is firmly in middle age, he faces the prospect of knee and ankle replacement surgeries.
Another friend just returned to Morocco after being away and told me of fracturing a bone in his back and damaging his neck when he was skiing down a slope in excess of 120 kph. He is a young man and will pay for his injury when he gets older.
How do you tell someone when they are young not to do something because when they are older they will regret it? How do you tell a teenager not to crack the knuckles in their hand because they will have arthritis in those finger joints when they are 50 years old. Forever to a teenager is 35 years old. 50 is so far away it is unthinkable. 80 or 90 is unimaginable. To talk of “the end of your life” makes no sense at all because young people think they are immortal.
It is difficult not to do something when the consequences seem so remote.
This is the problem with holy living. Sin presents itself and it seems so good. It seems so exciting. It seems so right. If someone comes along and says not to do that because you will regret it later, the temptation is so present and so strong it is difficult to see the longer term, negative consequences.
Tell someone, for example, not to have a free sex life with multiple sexual partners because of the danger of sexual diseases or because of the longer-term emotional damage it causes or because what is really wanted deep down is an intimacy that cannot come from these multiple relationships – tell someone this and it does not penetrate. As humans we are geared to the present and have difficulty living for the future.
Why is it that in a credit card world like the US that so many people are deep in credit card debt? It is because the temptation to have what they want now is so strong they cannot think of the future consequences of having to pay back the credit card debt that keeps increasing because of the finance charges that are added.
How many times have you heard someone say or read in an interview that they regretted choices they had made when they were younger? How many times have you heard a businessman say he regretted not having spent more time with his children?
The problem is that sin is so enticing. It lures us in with such wonderful promises.
I heard a story about a man who lived a moral life but one day was hit by a car and went to the gates of heaven. The angels were surprised at his arrival and said he was not due for another twenty years. But because they were sorry for this mistake, he could have a tour of heaven if he wanted. They showed him around and he saw peaceful gardens with lovely flowers and relaxing hammocks. “This is very nice,” he said, “but out of curiosity, could you also show me hell?”
They took him to the door of hell where the devil greeted him in a nice suit. He showed him around and it was astounding. He saw beautiful women who eagerly greeted him. He saw wonderful parties where everyone was having the time of their life. He saw incredible concerts with great music. He saw a fabulous buffet with the most delicious food imaginable.
He thanked the devil for the tour and left hell to return to earth.
For the next twenty years he cheated, stole, took advantage of old ladies, he did all the bad things he could imagine so he could be sure that when he died he would go to hell.
When he arrived he could scarcely contain his glee and went straight to the door of hell. The devil opened the door and dragged him inside and he was horrified. He saw pits of burning oil with men and women screaming in pain and all around him was suffering and eternal torment.
He said to the devil, “This is not what you showed me twenty years ago.” “Yes,” said the devil, “but then you were a prospect and now you are a customer.”
There is a lie presented to us when temptation comes our way. The lie promises all good things and in the end it bites us and we see the lie for what it was.
Proverbs 23 describes the folly of getting drunk and warns us:
Do not gaze at wine when it is red,
when it sparkles in the cup,
when it goes down smoothly!
32 In the end it bites like a snake
and poisons like a viper.
This comes back to the problem: how do you help someone see the lie in the temptation that is presented so they can avoid the eventual, inevitable disappointment that will come?
Turn in your Bibles or the bulletin where this passage is printed, to Genesis 3:1-5. It is here that the vision of sin is portrayed.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 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.”
The devil told Eve, “You will not surely die. You will be wise. You will know good and evil, just like God.” The devil presented the choice to Eve as a positive, attractive choice.
CS Lewis wrote a science fiction trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perlandra and That Hideous Strength. In Perlandra, an agent of the devil and an agent of God are sent from earth to a new planet where the Adam and Eve of that planet live on floating islands. There are also fixed islands, but God had told them that while they are free to visit these fixed islands, they are not to sleep overnight on them.
The agent of the devil begins to try to convince Eve that the reason God had told her not to sleep overnight on the fixed islands is because he wanted her to choose for herself to do so. God was interested in her growing and learning and this was one of the things he wanted her to learn. He tried to convince her to do what God had told her not to do saying this would make her stronger and wiser, just what God wanted her to be.
This is what the devil always does. He holds out the temptation and paints a beautiful picture of what it can do for you. He is like a fisherman who dangles a hook covered with a delicious looking worm (at least the fish thinks so). The fish will not come to a bare hook but when the fish sees the worm, it bites and then has to face the consequence.
This is the vision of sin. But now we come to Romans 6 where we receive the corrective vision. Romans 6 is like a new pair of glasses that clears up the fuzziness and helps to see things more clearly. With Romans 6 as our corrective glasses we can see the truth about sin.
Sin paints the picture of delicious, wonderful, delightful, sensual freedom and then when you bite, the hook is in and you discover you have not gained freedom but you have lost it. The line is pulled in, the hook digs in deeper and deeper and you are no longer master. Sin is now your master and you are being pulled where you no longer want to go.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do 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. 14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Sin is never satisfied. It pulls you in deeper and deeper. If you lie once, that lie demands a second and then a third lie. “Did you take my wallet?” You lie and say no. But then you are asked where you got the money to pay for the new CD player. “A friend had an extra one and gave it to me,” you lie a second time. “Which friend is this?” And then comes the third lie, “Oh it’s someone you don’t know.”
We lie because we don’t want to face up to the truth. We don’t want to admit we have done something. We lie because we want to impress someone and make up a story that is not true or embellish a story to make it more impressive and then we have to live with the consequences of that lie and it gets deeper and deeper as we go along.
Building upon a lie is not easy. Ask any fiction writer how difficult it is to build a world that makes sense and does not have inconsistencies in it. Mark Twain complained about all the amateur liars when the art of a lie demanded a professional.
Regularly in the US a politician is exposed for having lied about their career. It starts when a politician puts a spin on their past to make them a more attractive candidate. They want to be perceived as being smarter or braver or whatever. So in their brief biography it will say they graduated cum laude from a certain university. After research is done the truth comes out and it turns out they never even graduated from that university. Or it might be that they say they participated in some military campaign and received medals for bravery and when the truth finally comes out, they had little to do with the military campaign and did not receive any medals at all. Lies lead to more lies. Little lies need to become bigger lies to cover up for the first lie.
Sin is never satisfied. It pulls you in deeper and deeper. The thrill you receive when you first take a hit of cocaine or watch pornography is exciting. But then you need to take more and more cocaine to get close to that initial euphoria. As pornography pulls you in you need to watch harder core pornography and eventually it is not enough to just watch and you have to begin to practice what you have been seeing.
Frederick Buechner defines lust as the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst. Sin pulls us into what does not and never will satisfy. A little is not enough and we get pulled in deeper and deeper. We start off experimenting and end up being a slave to what is now our master.
Sin is never satisfied. It pulls you in deeper and deeper. And secondly, sin branches out to other sins.
Take the example I gave of someone stealing a wallet. You coveted what was not yours. You stole the money and then you had to lie to cover up the theft.
In the US in politics this happens quite often. Someone does something they should not have done but do not want to admit they did it. So they lie to cover up what they did and as the lies build, they are eventually uncovered and this is what brings people down. It was not Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky that caused him to be impeached, it was his saying under oath that “I did not have sex with that woman.”
We lie because we did something we do not want to admit to doing. When someone comes along and questions us about what happened we resent their questions. As they persist and we feel threatened, we begin to hate them for what they are doing to us.
When sin becomes your master, it pulls you into the company of other sins.
Sin is never satisfied. It pulls you in deeper and deeper. Sin branches out to other sins. And thirdly, sin erodes and transforms who you are.
When we sin we step into darkness. As the sin pulls us deeper into sin, it begins to shape us. It shapes our thoughts, our actions, our personality.
We have in our congregation many who are trying illegally to get into Spain. Over my six years, mostly in my first three years, I have spent a lot of time with this community of people. If you have been here for some time, you will know that I am opposed to this illegal migration.
Why, you might ask, am I opposed? Over the years I have heard from many people and learned a lot about the journey that is taken. The journey starts when someone working in an aluminum factory sees someone come back from having worked in Europe. They see that this person has enough money to pay for a car, buy a house and start a business. So they ask themselves, “Why should we work for the little money we get here when we could make lots of money in Europe?”
In some cases a family gets together or a church and they pick someone they think can be successful and send them on their way with the expectation that this person will send money back to the family or church to help support them.
So the trip is started with money gathered from family and friends. As they make their way to Mali and then cross the Sahara Desert, bribes have to be paid to get a ride on a truck or to get past certain borders. It takes more money than was expected and there are gangs along the way who rob the migrants making their way. So more money needs to be found to continue the voyage.
So now these migrants are stuck. They are en route and do not have enough money to continue the trip. What do they do? Men who never thought they would do anything illegal get involved in theft and smuggling. Women who set out with the dream of making money by being maids and helping to care for children discover that they need to prostitute themselves in order to get the money they need to continue.
When they make their way to Oujda and then to Casablanca or Rabat or Tangier, more money needs to be collected to make the passage across the Mediterranean Sea to Spain. Lies are told to try to collect money from people. Among the migrants gangs operate who are ruthless and are involved in all kinds of illegal activity. I had a friendship with a man, a good man who was brought up in a Christian family and who set out determined to be faithful to God. He died here in Rabat and when I collected his papers I discovered he had been making money by finding customers to bring to a pimp and his stable of prostitutes.
Men and women who set off with good moral values see themselves gradually transformed by the lies and deceit and compromises that need to be made to make the trip to Morocco.
The decision to set out and break the law by making an illegal passage leads to other sins. Lies, theft, sexual immorality come along with the decision to make this illegal passage and it has a destructive effect on those making the journey.
I am opposed to this illegal migration because it is a physically, emotionally and spiritually destructive journey. It is not about economic betterment, it is about turning from God and choosing a life of sin that is destructive.
One sin leads to another and to another. And this is the way of sin. Sin does not build up. It destroys. What seemed so positive when you set out is now revealed to be a destructive decision.
When you choose the vision of sin, you are dragged down into the world of broken dreams, unmet expectations, unfulfilled desires and unsatisfying relationships.
How do you tell someone who is setting out on a course of disobedience that they will regret this in the future? How do you make the choice to resist temptation that offers such wonderful things to you and then viciously bites you in the end?
Paul shows us where our hope lies in verse 14:
For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Grace is God giving us what we do not deserve and it is only the grace of God in your life that allows you to make good choices. We have looked at the vision of sin in Genesis 3 and the corrective vision of the true picture of sin in Romans 6. Now in II Peter 1:3-4 we see the vision of hope, our way out of the sin in which we are trapped.
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
How do you step back from the temptation that pulls you into sin that will be a destructive influence on your life? Draw close to Jesus and rely on his grace in your life.
In Jesus you have everything you need for life and godliness. You are not trapped in your sin with no hope of escape. You are not stuck in despair because you have set out on a course of behavior that keeps pulling you deeper and deeper into sin. There is no reason to give up and give in to the sin that is holding on to you. With Jesus you have all the power needed to step out and away from the sin that holds and entangles you.
You can escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. The Holy Spirit is at work in you to help you escape. You need to make the effort to cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s work so you can be set free.
How can you escape? See the lie that sin holds out to you. See it for the deceitful fraud it is. The wine that goes down so smoothly will bite in the end like a viper. Make a choice to turn from the sin that entangles and cry out to God for his help to sustain you as you set a new course of action. Hold on with desperation to the promises of God that will sustain you in your new course of obedience.
Whatever you do, do not hold on to the promises of God to keep you on your present course of disobedience. I do not mean to focus too much on this, but there are many in our church who have set their heart on making an illegal voyage to Spain. You make a mockery of God when you use your devotion to God as a tool to get God to help you get to Spain. This is a violation of the second and third commandments.
The devil is using sin to destroy us. In the supernatural world there is a battle taking place between God and the devil and we are being used by the devil as easily expendable pawns.
Turn away from your sin. Stop cooperating with the devil and turn to God who can and will rescue you from your sin.
What are the areas of your slavery to sin? The Holy Spirit convicts us of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgement. Let the Holy Spirit work in your life. Let the Holy Spirit open up the doors of your life so you can see clearly the sin that needs to be cleansed.
The Holy Spirit is at work in you. Cooperate with his work by turning away from the sinful behaviors that have trapped you.
You may be feeling that you are trapped and without hope but I stand here this morning to tell you that you have the power of God at work in you and because of this you have great hope.
Make good choices with the help of God and you, in the words of Peter in 1:11,
will never fall, 11 and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
