For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness.
But what profit did you get then
from the things of which you are now ashamed?
Sin promises so much but delivers so little. The awareness of the discontent sin produces in us can become a strong motivation to help us commit to avoiding it in the future. We need this awareness because, to one degree or another, we have all presented our bodies as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness. We have, for instance, used our words as weapons to tear others down. We have made a prideful display of our own accomplishments. We have gazed with envy on the blessings of others or with judgment upon their failings. Why do we do such things? It is always because there is some imagined profit, even some legitimate but lesser good, that we choose over and against the greater goods of love of God and neighbor.
For the end of those things is death.
We may manage to make ourselves ignore the stink of death on our sinful behavior at the time, but it is difficult to completely dull our consciences to the fact that we are heading in the wrong direction. Often we don't know how to respond to the absence of peace and contentment we feel and choose to double down on sin rather than to seek another way. Other times we try to change and find that we have in fact become "slaves to impurity", addicted to sin, and unable to make a clean break on our own.
But now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God,
the benefit that you have leads to sanctification,
and its end is eternal life.
As a species were too invested in sin to get free on our own. We needed one who was already free to come and to set us free. Only Jesus himself could do this. Once he came and we were set free by grace we received the ability to commit ourselves to becoming "slaves of God", to following his ways exactly. Yet this new slavery was not like the old. It was to be chosen and embraced because it delivered on the promise that stood behind it. With it there was not the sort of base compulsion that drew us against our own better judgment back to addictive behaviors again and again. We could be happy to be slaves of God, to delight in it, because we could see all too well how we failed in our attempts to be the masters of our own lives.
For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
What sorts of things do we believe we need and deserve to make us happy apart from the will of the Lord for us? Do we insist on being the lords of our own lives at times to protect these goods when we know God is calling us to something better? Let us come away from any remnants of sin to which we still cling. Let us remember that they have never brought us true peace or joy before. But the gift of God never fails to deliver. It is sanctification leading toward eternal life, a genuine process process of growth in the resurrection life of Christ, which is also life in the Holy Spirit, even as we progress through this earthly pilgrimage.
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
Jesus came with to set the earth on fire with his Holy Spirit. The division he created was with the sword of the Word of God which made it possible for those who received it to have malignant areas of sin within their hearts removed. At a larger scale it necessarily divided those who would embrace it from those who would continue to prefer the false promises of addiction and sin. What Jesus would not do was free those who did not want to be free, for that would be a contradiction. Hence division, though not preferable, was and continues to be necessary.
From now on a household of five will be divided,
three against two and two against three;
In spite of appearances of immobility and rigidity, in spite of the tribalism we find all around us, it is nevertheless the case that those who are now against us may yet be for us, just as those ways in which we are not yet for God may by his grace one day be so. Just because people are on the road that leads to death does not mean they must stay on that road. Our own experiences with the way that sin leaves us empty should give us the empathy we need to continue to reach out, to love even our enemies, just as Jesus commanded. We should desire for them the same thing that we desire for ourselves, for the hope of those who hope in the Lord is very great indeed.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
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