Yes, Slaves!

We’ve come this morning in our study of Romans 6 to the 19th verse,

Romans 6:19 LSB

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, leading to further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.

This concept of slavery has permeated Paul’s answer to the question presented in verse 15, asking “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” And yet, this concept of being a “slave to righteousness” is not popular in today’s Christian thinking.

There are people, whom I am sure you have encountered, who will look at this argument unfolding before us, and repudiate and deny this idea that just as we were slaves of sin, even so we are now slaves of righteousness. These people declare that our thinking is all wrong, that all this talk about slavery was “just an analogy”, which Paul apologizes for in this opening statement of verse 19, in which Paul says “I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh”. No, they exclaim! It’s just because of your limited understanding that Paul is just creating an analogy for us, and here he apologizes for that image which must have shocked the Roman church just as it shocks us today. There is no slavery here in the Christian life, they claim – it is all just an analogy that we today can shake off, just as we shook off the yoke of slavery throughout the civilized world in these past few centuries.

Are these people right? Is this just an analogy which we’ve taken too far? Let’s open up God’s word, and see what it says about the matter! I’d like to start by reminding ourselves of Paul’s full argument:

Romans 6:15–23 LSB

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you go on presenting yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were given over, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. 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, leading to further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then having from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you have your benefit, leading to sanctification, and the end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Clearly, slavery does play an integral part of Paul’s entire argument as to why we should not sin simply because we’re no under law.

So when he seems to interject in verse 19, “I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh”, there is no tone of apology here, nor does he discard the concept of slavery as he continues his thinking.

Why?

Because it is fundamentally right to think of ourselves as slaves of Christ Jesus. It is for this reason that Paul opens this letter to the saints at Rome saying “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus”. This is more than a mere illustration – something Paul never does, not even here. And when we realize just how much this idea of being a slave of Christ permeates the breadth of Paul’s other inspired writings, such as “you were bought with a price” in 1 Cor 7:23, “we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus” in 2 Cor 4:5, “If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a slave of Christ” in Gal 1:10, “you are slave of Christ” in Eph 6:6, “Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus” in Phil 1:1, “Paul, a slave of God” in Titus 1:1, and more.

The fact that Paul time and again comes back to this same theme indicates to us the great importance and emphasis he places on the reality of being a slave of Christ Jesus.

And it is only here in this one verse, Romans 6:19, in which Paul appears to hedge against this idea, saying:

Romans 6:19 LSB

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, leading to further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.

And so, this statement of his warrants our utmost attention, for there is a grave possibility, just as Peter warned in at the close of his second epistle, of the untaught and the unstable distorting what Paul writes here regarding being a slave to Jesus Christ the Righteous to their own destruction.

Paul here declares that he speaks like this due to “the weakness of our flesh.” There is a limit to our understanding, our comprehension is flawed – not by our intellect or our education, not by our society, not even by the state of technology or the developments of science. No, these combatting these things are the world’s poor attempts at tackling what even it knows of its limitations. For the faculties of our bodies – which include our mind and our intellect, but also our emotions and our feelings and our innermost thinking – have been misused, they have been perverted and dominated and abused by Sin; no amount of advancement in science or social awareness or education can overcome this weakness we have, because it is inherent to the fallen nature of our flesh, something not even a believer is immune to.

If we look for a moment at 1 Corinthians 3:1-3, I think it will help us understand perhaps a bit better.

“And I, brothers, was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able to receive it. Indeed, even now you are still not able, for you are still fleshly. For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like mere men?”

In other words, on account of our flesh, we at times need the full and complete truth to be somewhat distilled down to its more elementary principles, so that we are capable of understanding it. At times, as in the case of the Corinthians, it needs to be distilled down to the most easily-digestible elementary principles; other times such as to these more mature Romans, it must be distilled simply because our fallen nature is such that even we who are in Christ are all incapable of grasping this idea without great assistance. It’s not even a matter of God not providing us the language necessary to understand it, since He is the one who created language in the first place, and when John 1:1 starts that gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Communication is a part of the very essence of God, and so it is certain that if a word could exist which perfectly described what Paul is trying to convey, it would exist.

And so Paul does use the perfect word to describe our one-time relationship with Sin, and our new relationship with Christ Jesus, with righteousness, with that perfect word as far as men can speak. But what Paul is saying is that our ability to comprehend the entirety of the concept falls far short, Paul’s writing in Romans 11:33 helps frame this in for us: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”

You see, far from saying that the Romans were infantile or deficient in their intellect or in their spirituality, Paul thought highly of these Romans, even saying in Rom 15:14, “But I myself am also convinced about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, having been filled with all knowledge and being able also to admonish one another.” And so he is pointing out here in verse 19, “I am speaking in human terms; it’s rather simplistic, it’s rather limited, yet because of our fundamentally impaired nature as a result of Sin’s presence, it is also completely necessary that we relate this great truth to something that you know and understand!”

For this is a doctrine which is indeed difficult, and people do take this teaching wrongly, saying that our slavery to righteousness is just like the slavery to sin, it is independent of our will, it is coerced, it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, that’s what you will do. If we press this too far, too absolutely, our thinking will go beyond what Paul is saying here, we’ll be thinking of this the slavery to righteousness in the wrong manner. One modern example of this today is in that form of “hyper-Calvinism” which is a distortion of the sovereignty of God, which says there’s no need or rightness to evangelize the lost, under-emphasizing the responsibility of Man in salvation due to the over-developed concept of election which is placed above its place in Scripture.

But that is not a proper description of our enslavement to righteousness. It is, mind you, an apt and appropriate description of human slavery. Quite often we find slaves chaffing under their bondage; perhaps the slave was once a free man who found himself in great debt, and the only way to pay off that debt was to sell himself as a slave – the proceeds of selling himself would cover the debt, but now he no longer has the freedom to do as he wills and pleases he once enjoyed, and so he chafes at his new bondage, unaccustomed to doing the will of another, and despairs of the fact that he will no longer have that freedom he once had.

We today in our society hate this idea of slavery, it is so abhorrent to us, so contrary to our way of thinking that we, and other nations, have outlawed it, even shunning the memory of it. And in truth, although it was so very prevalent even in the days of Rome that as many as one-third of the people in the Empire were slaves, considered as property with no ability to do their own will, even then the concept of being a slave was looked down on.

In other words, there is this distaste of enslavement, and a fear of the institution itself which carries enormous baggage. We viscerally hate being made to do the will of another.

And yet, Paul is saying here that on account of our fundamentally flawed and impaired nature, he is compelled to demand we see ourselves as a slave, rather than as anything less, rather than anything short of one who is owned.

Now to be sure, he will go on in Romans 8:15, in which he says “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry out, “Abba! Father!”” We will be more than a slave, we have that promise! We do have the Spirit of adoption as sons. We don’t have a spirit of slavery leading to fear. But at the same time, if we are in Christ, we are slaves to righteousness.

And yet, unlike the unwilling and unhappy slave who longs for the day when he may do his own will, we are willing and joyful slaves of Jesus Christ. This is why we read in 1 John 2:5, “but whoever keeps His word, truly in him the love of God has been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him.” We are obedient to righteousness not only because we are enslaved to it, but also because we are ready and willing slaves who love our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

And I must be reminded of that enslavement on a regular basis. Why? Because sin wants to reign in my mortal body. Because the lusts which my body of sin yearns to follow must be restrained, and it is vital that I remind my flesh that it is not my master, the Lord Jesus Christ is my master, I have recognized and submitted to His authority over me as being right and lawful and good.

In other words, rather than apologizing for using an illustration, as so many try to twist Paul’s words to mean, Paul is instead saying that even we who are in Christ Jesus can’t understand the nature of our former relationship to sin and our present relationship to righteousness without thinking of it in the human terms of enslavement! It is fundamentally necessary that we consider ourselves slaves of righteousness, rejecting the notion of negotiating for what we want, but rather embracing an absolute submission to our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, immediate and unconditional obedience to His will, and total allegiance to His purposes. Being in Christ Jesus is more than simple slavery, but it is enslavement nonetheless.

And nothing less will suffice!

There are those today who deny this teaching, saying that you can be let out of slavery to sin by a simple belief in Jesus Christ, but continue to deny His Lordship. That this first step is what saves a person through simply believing in Jesus, becoming a true Christian, and then as some possible but not required later additional step in faith, then commit to Jesus Christ as Lord.

But what Paul has been telling us here in Romans 6:17-18, is that is simply not the case:

Romans 6:17–18 LSB

But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were given over, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

The very moment you are converted to Christ, you are immediately led out of one slavery, and into a new slavery to Jesus Christ. Paul cements this idea for us later in Romans 10:9, saying “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;” explaining this necessary and sequential relationship in Rom 10:10, “for with the heart a person believes, leading to righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, leading to salvation.” Both believing God’s confirmation of Jesus’ claims to be God by raising Him from the dead, and confessing Jesus as Lord, to be God, to be the One who has the absolute right of ownership, yields this change in our lives. One without the other doesn’t cut it!

But when that change occurs, this transfer of ownership Paul describes here in verse 18 occurs!

And so, now we can go on to that last half of Romans 6:19 in order to read the resulting command based on this great exposition of what is now true of us:

Romans 6:19 LSB

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, leading to further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.

What I hope you will at once notice is that this is now an intensely personal command involving your members, much like verse 13 above. We have one set of members, which we may choose how to use.

How we formerly used our members only resulted in us going from bad to worse. We presented these our members, our faculties, our reason, our personality, our likes and dislikes, to impurity and lawlessness.

And it’s important that we realize this was no idle, passive thing. We did not simply sigh tiredly in a whimpering surrender over to sin, resigning ourselves and giving up without a fight.

No! We presented our members, what we did, we did with our full heart in it! We were active in it, purposefully engaging in whatever it was we wanted to do with gusto. We were intentionally sinning, and we spared no part of our life in pursuing our every desire.

It’s important that we really think about this. Consider your life before Christ; how did you spend you time? Not just your work hours, but consider how you spent your leisure time, making way for your every whim or desire; think of your energy, what did you focus your efforts on, what did you spend your resources on? What did you do on your evenings, your weekends?

And what did us having our own way result in? Each time we devolved into yet further lawlessness, continually spiraling downward, as it were, each step taking us further away from God as we rejected Him more and more. We listened to, we obeyed, we defiled ourselves ever more as we continued seeking our own way.

And so, we are finally given a command on account of this monumental change of ownership which came with us obeying from the heart that pattern of teaching to which we were given over, having been freed from sin, and becoming slaves of righteousness.

Just as we once obeyed sin, in the same manner, with the same effort, with the same focus, even so now we are commanded to present our members as slaves to righteousness.

This is no idle encouragement, this is no wishful thought. This is a command which we are given by none other than God Himself. And while the person outside of this union with Christ Jesus is still in his and can do no righteousness, try as hard as they might, we who are now in Christ are enabled and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit are now for the first time in our lives, free to present our members as slaves to righteousness.

Praise be to God!