Tag: sin

When You Offer …

March 14th, 2017

Romans 6:16 Don’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 leds to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness.

“I am not anyone’s slave!” Really? That’s what we say, what we think. But we are all slave to something / someone.

Slaves – doulos = servant, slave – (Lexham Theological Wordbook) a doulos is someone who is a slave and obeys the commands of his or her master. Like Matthew 8:9 “I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go’, and he goes, and that one, ‘Come’, and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it.”

The one to whom we respond when they say ‘go’, ‘do’, ‘come’ that is the one to whom we are a slave.

Lexham says the idea of a slave carries the sense of belonging. For Paul “Christ has bought him and owns him”.

so, this doesn’t happen by accident v16 says “when we offer”. – Then we find ourselves slaves to a master we don’t want, perhaps we even loathe, and we ask, “how did this happen?” It happened at a moment in time, a moment when …. “when we offer”. Paristemi = to make available, to provide, to present to (Greek English Lexicon) without necessarily involving actual change of ownership. Oh sometimes we have offered ourselves to one to whom we don’t even belong. Oh somebody …

And there it is. It is when we make ourselves available, when we come near, we offer, yield, say “here I am”, when we offer ourselves to someone to obey – hypakoe = to obey, listen to, to heed, to obey

Then you are a slave / servant

Regardless of the master, good or bad. Regardless of the outcome, holy or sinful. Regardless of the timetable, eternal or temporal. In that instant we are slaves to a master.

Whether slaves to sin or slaves to obedience. It is an interesting choice of words that the Holy Spirit inspires in Paul, the one we obey is either sin or obedience.

Wait, I thought who I obey is what determines. Yes … but if we obey sin, then we are in actuality slaves to DISobedience. We are obeying disobedience. “Sin” is the word hamartia which means to “miss the mark” like an arrow missing a target. So, when we become slaves to sin, we are committed to disobedience, we are committed to missing the target. And Romans 6:23 says that the wage of missing the target is death. So here it says sin “leads” – eis = markers of a change of state.

“Don’t you know” v 16 begins … this is not inconsequential. When we offer ourselves to someone it is a marker leading to a change of state from … to … to … for .

Sin will seek to lead us from freedom to bondage, and from bondage to death. James says that temptation leads to sin, and sin when fully grown gives birth to death.

Oh but Jesus says “But I came (Hallelujah) that you might have LIFE”!

WOW, let me stop and shout for a moment! YES LORD!

But if we reject the master that leads us to miss the mark. If we commit to obedience, to hitting the mark, which is only found in surrender to the justification of Jesus (Rom 3:24) Then Obedience, hearing, listening, taking captive every thought and making it obedient to Christ (2Cor 10:5-6), then we CAN demolish ever pretense, every argument that comes against the knowledge of truth. Oh satan is a conman. He will lie to you, offer you 1000s of arguments, and alternate realities, counterfeits, but they are all ways that are committed to missing the target, and they lead to death!

But in Him, Christ, is life and that life is the light of the world. Walk not in darkness and death. Walk in the light as he is in the light and we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his son, purifies us from all sin … if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 Jn 1:7,9)

So vv17-18 “But thanks be to God that, though we used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

When we offer … this moment … “Here I am Lord, reveal the righteousness that you have placed within me.”
The Real Struggle

October 6th, 2015

Romans 5:12 (NIV84)
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—

When Adam surrendered to Eve’s suggestion of the forbidden fruit, after Eve surrendered to the suggestion of the serpent … the struggle with sin began.
But what was the “Real Struggle”? I once had a man, well meaning, come into my office in St. Louis and say “Pastor, you don’t preach about ‘sin’ enough.” I looked at him in disbelief and asked what he meant. He repeated his desire again for me to speak more about ‘sin’. Well, I manuscript all of my messages and I was preaching through the book of Romans. So, I pulled out my previous few messages and referred to some things about sin and pointed to a section and said “that’s sin”, and another section and said “that’s sin”. But he said, “no, ‘sin’, like lying and immorality, and murder, and abortion …” and he just had a long list. I redirected and said “Oh, I thought you were talking about sin.” (He looked confused) And I continued, “you are talking about sins”, and he said “yeah, ‘sin’”.
And there is often the problem. We don’t focus on the Real Struggle. When Adam and Eve sinned, they opened the door to sin. The world wasn’t full of all the evil ‘sins’ we know today, nor even the ‘less than evil’ sins. I don’t know how long Adam and Eve lived in the world before that fateful day, but there was NO sin, and so no sins. So that day when they sinned, the issue was and remains, who will be ‘god’? Oswald Chambers in my utmost for his highest says “the disposition is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the dispostion of self-realization – I am my own god.”
You see before that act, there was only The Lord as God. The very thought that we could even do differently than he had instructed had not entered into our consciousness. But the Serpent planted a seed of doubt and possibility that we could be god. satan always called into question the goodness of God and the Word of God. He said to Eve “Did God say that you couldn’t eat from any tree.” “No just this one tree, if we eat IT we will die” … But satan countered “you won’t die, you will become like god.” And there it was. The ONLY act at his point that was possible to be called sin, was the act of taking up the role of determining right and wrong, taking up the role of lord, and deciding for myself what I will do.
So, both Adam and Eve, instead of putting to death that thought, they gave it life and found “yes, I CAN become my own lord, i can be my own god.” But Oh the consequences when we take that road.
So it is for us the daily struggle, the Real Struggle is not with actions that we call sins, but it is an attitude of rebellion or an attitude that acquiesces, that is accepts, even reluctantly, the rule of Jehovah God as Lord.
It is as I am crucified with Christ that I no longer live, but Christ lives in me … then and only then, I find that the life I live is lived by faith in the goodness of the Song of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
It is in coming after him (Luke 9:23) in denial to self,to the way that I want to go, that I take up the cross and follow him. Taking up the cross is not about suffering and sacrifice, though that often comes with it. No, taking up the cross is about surrendering to HIS will, HIS way, HIS plan, HIS purpose.
The Real Struggle is in putting my hand to the plow and not looking back (Luke 9:62)
Eve and then Adam followed their own desire instead of the will of God and so the Real Struggle allowed every other sinful action to enter the real of possibility in life. Praise Go that He didn’t leave us to the consequence of that one sin though.
Romans 5:18–21 (NIV84)
18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. 20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

the Real Struggle, moment by moment is about Lordship, who will be God?
It is about surrender
It is about the salute to the higher rank and authority
It is doing an “about face” to follow the plan of God

When once that decision is made, when that conflict is settled, obedience leads to life and peace with God.
Peace with God over lordship, leads to victory over the sins that so easily entangle us

Tag: sin

When You Offer …

The Real Struggle