Romans 6:15–7:6 tackles a lingering accusation against the gospel of grace: if our inheritance is secure and we are no longer under the Law, why not sin freely? In this episode, we walk through Paul’s answer that there is still a powerful incentive to avoid sin—death in our present experience—and that the Law was never able to produce holiness in the first place. Instead, in Christ we are freed from sin’s mastery and from the Old Covenant, so that we can belong to God and bear real fruit for life.
In this week’s episode, we explore:
- How the question “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” exposes a misunderstanding of both grace and motivation
- Paul’s image of slavery: why the master you obey—sin or righteousness—inevitably shapes the quality and direction of your life
- What “death” means as the wages of sin in our present experience: decay, breakdown, and relational and spiritual entropy, not just final judgment
- Why forgiveness in Christ does not cancel the painful consequences of sin, even though it secures our inheritance
- How our longing to be free from shame, emptiness, and moral exhaustion is itself part of what drove us to seek God in the first place
- Paul’s sobering reminder that the old life of sin never produced anything but regret and death, while slavery to God leads to holiness and the “life of the age to come”
- The marriage analogy in Romans 7: how the Law once bound us to our “old self,” enslaved to sin, and why that “marriage” had to end
- In what sense believers have “died to the Law,” and how this releases us from self-powered righteousness into a new covenant of grace
- The difference between serving God “in the oldness of the letter” and “in the newness of the Spirit,” with all of God’s resources now at work in us
By the end of the episode, listeners will see that grace is not a license to drift back into the very death they longed to escape. You’ll be invited to take seriously both the real consequences of sin and the solid hope the gospel offers: freedom from sin’s mastery, release from the crushing demands of the Law, and a new life in the Spirit that leads steadily toward holiness and the rich, enduring life God has promised.
When my first child was born, I joined a support group for parents of children ages birth to 3, hoping to find friends with newborns (and to learn something about parenting, since they neglected to give me a manual when I left the hospital).
At my first meeting a guest speaker — a psychologist straight of out psych school with no children of her own –spoke on teaching toddlers “healthy attitudes toward food.” She maintained that children covet dessert rather than vegetables because we teach them dessert is special. Her premise was that using dessert as a reward teaches children to value dessert over meat and vegetables.
Her advice to us eager new moms was serve dessert during the meal right along side the green beans. AND, like magic, our children would naturally choose some of each when they were old enough to eat at the table.
While I never tried this advice with my children, I always wondered what happened when she had kids of her own.
“Choosing dessert first” is the central question Romans 6:15-7:6.
Objection:
If I am no longer under the threat of the law, then I have no incentive not to sin? So, if I have no threat of punishment, why can’t I “eat dessert first?”
Answer:
There may no longer be eternal punishment for eating dessert first, but you will still get fat.
Explanation:
Romans 6 is part of the “Q&A” following the Paul’s presentation of the gospel in Romans 1-5.
In Romans 6:1-11, Paul answered the first question: Should we pursue sin so that God has more to forgive and God will be more glorified? Paul says no because grace includes more than forgiveness. Grace includes breaking the power of sin in our lives and giving us the hope of the glory of God (holiness). To pursue sin would make a mockery of God’s grace.
Romans 6:15 asks the second challenge to the gospel. “All right, Paul, we will grant you that we should not pursue sin. But your gospel does not provide any incentive to avoid sin. Your gospel eliminates the one effective incentive we have: punishment. The law clearly spells how ‘do this & live, don’t do this and die.’ This incentive is explicit in the Law but removed by your gospel. Thus your gospel is a license to sin.”
Paul’s answer: Under the gospel, there is still an incentive to avoid sin: death. When we sin, we experience death (Romans 6:16-23). For most of us, our weariness of the death in our lives drove us to God in the first place and it still provides the incentive not to sin.
Furthermore, the Law was never an effective deterrent to sin, because under Law, we had no resources (other than our own broken sinfulness) to fulfill the Law. Thus, rather than eliminating our sin, it promoted our sinfulness (Romans 7:1-6).
For more detail and explanation, please listen to the podcast.
Next: 10 Romans 7:7-25 Law and Sin
Previous: 08 Romans 6:1-14 Grace and Slavery to Sin
Series: Romans: Justification by Faith
Study: Romans Resources
Season 2, Episode 9
Page Views: 1,448