“I am using a human analogy because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you offered the parts of yourselves as slaves to impurity, and to greater and greater lawlessness, so now offer them as slaves to righteousness, which results in sanctification.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Welcome back! I know there was a post yesterday, but I wrote that one almost two weeks ago. Today we’re back to our normal, day-of-posting writing. It was a good week away, but I’m glad to be back with you digging into the Scriptures together. Trying to get our minds around what it looks like to live the new life in Christ isn’t easy. What Paul offers here is a bit of an explanation. It’s about not doing one thing, and committing ourselves actively to do another. Let’s explore what he has to say as we continue our Romans journey today.
“What then? Should we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Absolutely not! Don’t you know that if you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of that one you obey – either of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? But thank God that, although you used to be slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were handed over, and having been set free from sin, you became enslaved to righteousness.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Freedom beats at the heart of every person. This has always been the case. Freedom hasn’t always been as widely available in the world as it is today, but the freest people have always been the envy of the rest. In the ancient world, some longed for it but assumed they weren’t made for it. Today, there are occasionally national revolutions to obtain it, even as rulers try to deny it every way they can because they understand that the freer people are, the less power the ruling class has. But our longing is freedom. So, why would anyone want to follow a religion that calls its devotees to slaves? Let’s explore this today in one more post that is a repeat of one I made several years ago. Also, this will be the last post, with the exception of Sunday’s sermon, for the next week. It’s Spring Break in my world. I’ll see you Monday and then not until the following Monday. That being said, let’s dive in.
“What should we say then? Should we continue in sin so that grace may multiply? Absolutely not! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (CSB – Read the chapter)
When you write a lot of things, you occasionally find when you go to write something new that you’ve written it before. That happened a couple of weeks ago as I was starting to studying Romans 6 in preparation for writing about it as we continue our journey. More specifically, I discovered that I had written about these two verses before. I also found myself agreeing with what I said then. So, with some updates after six years, and for the first time ever in nearly eight years of writing this blog, here’s a repeat of an old post.
What should be the relationship of a follower of Jesus to sin? Obviously we shouldn’t do it, but let’s be honest: a simple “ought not” isn’t usually sufficient to keep us from it. We need to understand the why behind the ought before we’re going to wrap our hearts and minds around it to a sufficient degree that it begins to have the kind of power in our lives it needs to have. Here in beginning of Romans 6, after Paul has just been telling us about the power of grace in light of the power of sin, the apostle explores this very idea. His treatment may not be exhaustive, but it is powerful. Let’s start unpacking this today, and continue with Paul on the idea over the next several days.
When life gets hard, we often want to know where God is. When we hurt, we want to know why God didn’t stop it. When circumstances threaten to completely overwhelm us, we want to know if God is big enough to really help. As we continue our journey through the seven signs the apostle John identifies in his Gospel as helping us to better understand who Jesus is, we are looking today at a sign that didn’t seem to benefit anybody when it happened. But when we look past the miracle itself to the thing at which it is pointing, we find reason for great hope in hard times. Let’s dive in and see what happens next.
Bigger
About fifty years ago, a man named Harold Kushner lost his fourteen-year-old son to a rare disease. It was a tragedy. All such losses are tragic. Parents should never have to bury their children. That they do is a symptom of the brokenness of sin in the world. Kushner happened to be a Jewish rabbi. As part of his efforts to deal with his grief, he channeled his emotions into writing a book. The book, released in 1981, had a major and immediate cultural impact. The title promised an insightful look into a challenging question that people have been asking for a very long time. It was called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The question of course is why. Why do bad things happen to good people? We’ve all seen it happen. We’ve seen people who seem to us to be good and faithful, kind and generous with others, conscientious citizens, and so on and so forth, but who nonetheless face tragic situations that their character seems like it should preclude as far as we reckon such things. How can there be a good and just God presiding over creation if things like this happen to people like that?
In the superlatively successful Broadway show, Hamilton, the Founding Father’s greatest weakness is that he is never satisfied with what he has. He is always reaching and stretching for something more. When pointed in the right direction, this resulted in incredible success and achievement. When pointed in the wrong direction, though, ruin for himself and others. We all have desires that we long to have satisfied. For some of these desires, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything in this world that can do the trick. As we continue in our series, All Signs Point to Jesus, this week we are looking at a sign that points us toward His ability to satisfy all of our desires. Let’s explore the Scriptures together.
Satisfied
When was the last time you felt really and truly satisfied? What was it that gave you that feeling? Maybe it was finishing a really big project and having your contributions graciously recognized by others. It could have been working with another person, teaching them to do something, and then seeing them succeed wildly. Perhaps it was just a really good meal. There are lots of things that might satisfy us in this life. The thing about getting satisfied in this life, though, is that whatever desire it is that was satisfied has a tendency to return. You ate that great meal, but then you were hungry again. In fact, you were probably hungry again by the time the next mealtime rolled around. You finished that one project, but then there was another one behind it. And if there wasn’t, you went looking for one. That one student succeeded, but then there was another student who needed help. And when those desires returned, sometimes the same things satisfied them again, but sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes you needed more. It’s almost like underneath these more common, daily desires we have there are deeper longings that cry out for satisfaction. Yet try as we might, getting these addressed often seems to be just beyond our reach.
The Nexus 