Scripture Daily

Context No. 515 of 4322 · Romans

Context · Reflection

Romans 6:12-18: in context

12Therefore don’t let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. 13Also, do not present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14For sin will not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. 15What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! 16Don’t you know that when you present yourselves as servants and obey someone, you are the servants of whomever you obey, whether of sin to death, or of obedience to righteousness? 17But thanks be to God that, whereas you were bondservants of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were delivered. 18Being made free from sin, you became bondservants of righteousness.

Paul is answering a question people were evidently asking: if we are saved by grace and not by keeping the law, then does it matter how we live? Can we just keep sinning, since grace covers it? His answer is a horrified no, and the reason he gives reframes the whole idea of freedom. Do you not know, he asks, that when you offer yourselves to obey someone, you are the slaves of the one you obey, whether of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? There is no third option in which I belong to no one and am simply free. Everyone is a servant of something. The only question is which master.

That cuts against the way I usually imagine freedom, as the absence of any master, doing whatever I want with no one owning me. Paul says that picture is an illusion. When I do whatever I want, following my impulses and appetites wherever they lead, I am not free; I am the slave of those appetites, obeying sin, and the wage it pays is death. Real freedom is not being without a master; it is being freed from that slavery in order to belong to a good one. Thanks be to God, Paul says, that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart, and having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. He is not describing an escape from all service. He is describing a change of ownership, out from under a master that kills into the service of one that gives life.

That clarifies a confusion I live in. I tend to think the goal is to answer to no one, and I resent obedience itself as a loss of freedom. Paul says I will serve something regardless; the appetite I indulge in the name of freedom is simply a cruel master wearing freedom's mask. The real choice is not between being owned and being free, but between two owners. Which master am I actually serving right now, the sin that pays in death, or the God whose service is the only real freedom, and am I offering myself, day by day, to the one I claim to have chosen?

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