Choose Your Service

 Romans 6:19-23

I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.  For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.  Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death.  But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity                                      8/03/25

Choose Your Service

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Our text today is a classic text for understanding the condition of man.  Luther used it in explaining the bondage of the human will when he was debating the issue in print with Erasmus of Rotterdam.  Erasmus believed, as do so many today, that mankind possesses a free will, particularly in regards to religion.  Luther followed the Scriptures and taught that man was never truly free.  He merely seemed to be, or felt that was.  The truth is that man is always enslaved to someone or something.  He either serves God and righteousness, or he serves sin and Satan.  St. Paul gives us this spiritual information, and then challenges us, by implication, to choose your service.  And so, that is our theme, today, "Choose Your Service".

The Biblical witness is that we are always slaves.  Even our freedom in the Gospel is a form of slavery.  While we are free from sin, we are slaves to righteousness and to God.  If we set ourselves free from God and righteousness we must inevitably become slaves to sin and Satan.  We are never absolutely free - nor should that bother us.  In one sense, we are not slaves, but free children of God.  Yet, in another sense, we Christians are not free.  We are not free to think just whatever we want.  We are not free to do just whatever enters our minds to do.  We are perfectly free to live as God's servants – slaves.  To do anything else is to make ourselves God and do things our way, instead of His, which is sin – and the agenda of the devil.

Paul writes in our text, "I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh."  If he were writing today in our modern idiom, he might have written that sentence like this, "I know that this is difficult to understand, so let me put this in familiar human terms."  He is using picture language to help us understand the spiritual reality of our condition.

Life has only two possibilities: holy or profane, righteous or sinful, good or evil.  There are no actual shades of gray.  We see shades of gray because we are sinful by nature and live in a world dominated by evil.  We can see the difference between a little white lie and outrageous fraud.  We mark the difference between inadvertently taking something, even something insignificant, and grand larceny.  But, if we are honest, both the little white lie and the outrageous fraud are lies, and both the accidental walking away with something that does not belong to you and the deliberate theft of precious commodities are stealing.  It is just that we live in a world where absolute good is rare, impossible actually, and we often measure between one evil and another to find the lesser of two evils.

God doesn't.  He is absolutely good.  Sin is sin, and evil is evil, and there are no gray areas with Him at all.  Oh, yes, He recognizes the difference between one evil, seemingly insignificant, and another evil, one that is tremendously destructive.  Old Testament Law addresses some of those distinctions.  All evil is not the same - but it is all evil.  God sees evil for what it is, truly evil.  But He also marks the difference between one evil and another, just as you can clearly see the difference between absolute darkness, and a dark room with a dim light shining somewhere in it.  

God is not unreasonable, He is perfect.  That seems unreasonable to us, but we measure by ourselves, and by our sinful standards.  When we measure ourselves and our righteousness by God's Law, God wants us to know that His basic standard is perfect holiness.  Everything else has missed the mark, fallen short, and demonstrates a predilection, that is to say, a helpless slavery to sin.

That is, in fact, why the Gospel is about the free gift of God in Christ Jesus.  God knows full well that we are capable of no pure good holiness.  We have been corrupted and enslaved to sin by our very nature.  It is, in fact, in our blood.  We inherited it from the first two people, Adam and Eve.  The sinful world tries to glorify sin, because the world around us does not accept God or understand the truth about sin and death and hell – and does not want to.   The world has chosen its service.  

The sinful world tries to make holiness sound like some awful bondage and limitation on our spirit, Our sinful flesh judges the ability to freely choose to be wicked to one degree or another, or embracing an evil choice deliberately, as a marvelous freedom which empowers people to be truly human, and makes this world so fascinating, and gives true depth of meaning to our lives and all of human existence.  You hear it in the movies.  You read about it in the best novels.  That is their choice of service.  People who resist the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word cry out this twisted world-view when pressed to explain how they can turn away from so marvelous a gift as everlasting life and salvation.

If you listen, and think about it, you can see that the world also teaches that we are always slaves.  They simply refuse to describe their bondage as "slavery".  No!  They are free, and we are slaves!  We contend that they are slaves of sin, and we are free.  St. Paul tries to answer the debate by saying that both of us are right– just looking at it from opposite perspectives.  They are slaves of sin and free in regard to righteousness, and we are slaves of righteousness, and free in regards to sin!

Then he asks us, which slavery do we prefer?  Which outcome is more inviting to us?  In short, "Choose Your Service."  Do you want to be free from God and His nagging interference in your life and your choices?  You can be, at least as long as this life endures.  But the end of that life of slavery is death, and He is pointing to something deeper than the grave - and consequences more horrible to contemplate.  The result of doing sin and serving evil is more sin and greater evil – and lawlessness – living without regard for the will of God.  Paul tells us, the outcome of those things is death.  That death to which he refers is hell, eternal death, separation from Him who is life, and eternal torment and misery of both body and soul.

The other slavery, which some of us are loathe to call "slavery," results in our sanctification, and ultimately life everlasting which transcends the grave, and knows no pain, or sorrow, or sickness, or regret, or any more death.  

Righteousness feels good, and feels like freedom, because it is – freedom from sin.  But if you live in righteousness as the chosen child of God, from the perspective of sin, you have no other choice.  You cannot choose the evil path.  

You cannot choose the perspectives of the devil.  You cannot choose to obey your lusts, or the temptations of the world, or choose to succumb to the seductions of the devil.  Your flesh will want to, and you will need to fight it.  You will not be perfectly successful, but, as a faithful servant, you will fight it and struggle to obey Him who has bought you with such a terrible price.  You will seek to stay on the roster, so to speak, of the slaves of God who have all that good, and only good, to look forward to as the outcome of their slavery.  You will fight with all of your wit and intelligence and values and energy to remain faithful.  Anything else is unfaithful, as a slave, and unthinkably unfortunate in outcome.

One struggles to be a faithful servant because he or she is a faithful servant.  The struggle and the works accomplished are not what makes one His slave, they exist and they are done because one is His slave by God's own choice and doing.  And He promises to help you in the fight and give you the power and the wisdom for the struggle.

  But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.  Note well that you have been freed – you did not free yourself, and you derive a benefit, you do not earn something.  It is a gift.  And the first benefit is sanctification.  You are made holy.  It isn't an work of yours, it is the gift of God through Jesus Christ.  You are given His holiness.  You are declared righteous before God because of what Jesus Christ has done.

His death on the cross was your death.  He did it for you, that you might be redeemed and rescued.  He died to take the penalty you have so richly earned by sin, and then He rose from the grave to proclaim His victory and tell you that it worked!  Your sins are forgiven!  God loves you, and you will live forever, even if you die – for you will rise from your grave unto eternal life in glory with Him.  Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted.   But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.

So, having been cleansed and forgiven, having been made righteous and given a holiness which you did not work out but received by grace through faith, what do you want to do with it?  That is where our theme comes in: Choose Your Service.  Do you want to walk away from this sanctification, and serve sin?  Do you want to sully this gift of holiness and smear the filth of more sins on it?

Of course not!  You desire to remain holy.  You want to live out that good will of God in your life that the good will of God for you might finally come to pass.  And what is that good will of God for you?

And so you are a slave.  You are a slave of God and of righteousness, but not unwillingly.  You are slaves who willingly present your bodies as instruments of righteousness, freely – serving the One who gives you both the will and the power to do so.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

ark those works well.  You earn and deserve death with sin.  Sin pays wages.  But your righteousness is a gift, and your holiness is a gift, and your life in Jesus Christ is a gift.  Not a bad reward for a slave.

But you are a slave, ALWAYS.  Either you are a slave of sins and Satan and you earn and deserve death and hell, or you are a slave of God and righteousness and He gives you holiness and life everlasting.  The free gift of God (we call that "grace"), is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

So, Paul tells you that you have a choice.  You can accept what God has already given you, and be His slave, or you can walk away from Him and become the slave of death and hell.  But one way or another, you are always a slave and you must choose your service.  Paul also makes the explicit appeal later in Romans, and I close with his words from Romans 12:

I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.  And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

(Let the people say Amen)