The Shame of Sin

One of the things that I enjoy so much about Paul’s writing, is that there is never anything he writes that simply says “do this”, or “do that”. There is never a lone command just set off somewhere with no relation at all to the subject he is speaking of.

Instead, he holds firmly to that same principle which our Lord revealed in Mark 7:20, in which Jesus declared to his disciples, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man.” Righteousness, like unrighteousness, cannot start on the outside, rather this fundamental flaw comes from the inside of man, from his thoughts and from his heart.

Accordingly, the commands which Paul gives us are never some isolated thing we are meant to do as simple automatons; he refuses to treat us as if we were line workers in some factory, just doing what we are told repeatedly with no real thought ever put to the task.

No, the life of the believer always of necessity involves the whole man, it involves the heart and the mind and the body; man being created in the image of God is far different from the animals, possessing a mind and intellect and emotions and having a spiritual soul, having the breath of life from God Himself put into us, far removed from a simple animal with its simple basic instincts and needs which alone shape its life.

And so, understanding this, Paul in his writings demands that we engage him with our full selves, with all of our faculties, able to be aware of not just this present moment, but able to think and analyze history, able to consider our present circumstances beyond the obvious, and also able to consider our future.

In other words, Paul’s commands are ever and always given on the basis of the doctrine he teaches us. What we do, he affirms, is done as a result of how we think. And this teaching now here in Romans 6 is no different.

He has laid out for us both our past and our present, as well as our future in Rom 6:19 in saying, “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 now he demands that we actually stop, and truly consider our personal past as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness in Romans 6:20-21, writing...

Romans 6:20–21 LSB

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.

Now it is important that we realize that what Paul is describing in these verses is a person who is still in sin, still bound to it; they remain in obedience to sin, and are truly not under grace at this point. In other words, this is the description of every man, woman, and child who is not saved. It describes the world, it describes the Christian even, prior to their salvation.

A striking thing about these people is how very seldom they realize they are slaves! And yet, they are slaves nonetheless. That is what Paul has been telling us – in verse 16, because they obey sin, they are slaves of sin; in verse 17 and 18 they are slaves of sin, they’ve not been freed from it but remain in it, in verse 19 they present their members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness.

In fact, we find just as John Calvin did in times past, that the greater their enslavement to sin, the more they will argue that they more than others are free; truly, their eyes are blinded by the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air. For, in the depths of their sin, they often can only see the shackles in enslavement to true righteousness, they look upon it and abhor it, they shudder at the thought of living under such conditions.

And this itself is proof-positive of what the apostle is declaring here in verse 20, that such people are “free in regard to righteousness.” They have absolutely no relationship to it; a person who remains a slave of sin is nothing less than a total stranger to Righteousness. Oh, such a person in bondage to sin may recognize Righteousness, just as one recognizes a stranger from another race in the distance, but there is no true relationship, no true description may be accurately given, for there is no relationship at all!

Consider this carefully! For there are many people who are moral, who are well-mannered, who treat others decently, who give to charities and champion causes, who speak in somber tones of religious things. And yet, they are no different from the Jews Paul describes at the first part of Romans 10,

Romans 10:2–3 LSB

For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.

Those who are slaves of sin, just like the Jews of whom Paul wrote, refuse to subject themselves to the righteousness of God; they reject what He declares is right, and just as Satan try to establish their own definition of righteousness.

And yet any such attempt is fundamentally flawed! Man’s definition of righteousness can never withstand the test of time, it must be continually adjusted and fixed and corrected with each subsequent theory which comes along, each new sin which man finds acceptable! Why? For they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” just as Romans 1:18 exclaims, they set God’s righteousness aside and reject it in order to call their own version “righteousness”. They can’t have His definition competing with their own, for the two can never peacefully coexist, being entirely and forever at odds with one another!

And it is not a matter of zeal, it’s not a matter about how much and how hard and how loudly and excitedly they claim and even desire to be right with God! They even at times will admit that He exists, invoking His name and even quote His word!

This is the danger we have in simply saying “ah, he is so very excited, you can tell that he feels what he believes, for he’s so very earnest about it! Therefore it must be true!”

Rubbish! We are exhorted to test the spirits in 1 John 4:1, for these people who are so often extremely excited, and even have a zeal for God, have in reality rejected a true knowledge of Him, they have rejected the truth which He has revealed in His word! They refuse to subject themselves, to submit themselves to the plain truth of Scripture, they refuse to knowingly and purposefully place themselves under the authority of the righteousness of God!

They are neither governed by it, nor are they slaves of it. Indeed, they are completely incapable of obeying it, since they have nothing to do with it at all!

But we can’t simply stop here; to stop at this would not be the full council of God! Think for a moment about this life spent rejecting the righteousness of God, think about the life of those who seek to establish their own form of righteousness. What happens to those who are free with regards to the righteousness of God?

Do they not experience shame, and guilt? Of course they do. That is why they scream all the louder their own form of righteousness! Such a thing is not by happenstance, it’s no mere coincidence! Just like a child, screaming to their parent they are not tired, they are drowning men thrashing about, trying to grab hold of anyone and anything they think will save them!

They are driven mad by the guilt their have before God, and are unable to come to terms with it. God says, “this is sin, you must not do it!” But they love it, they love it more than they are even willing to admit to themselves!

And so, unwilling to turn from their sin, they begin to speak louder and louder as they try to convince not only those around them, but they themselves, that this evil is good. And to do so, they must drown out the holy words of God.

And you notice, they do so ever more, these days are not so very different than that first century after Christ walked this earth. They try to drown out and deny God’s declaration in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”

Yet they think themselves wise. “We are so very much better; we,” they declare, “think that this god is just like us.” Romans 1:25 declares of those in sin, “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”

Why? Because they are free in regard to righteousness. Isaiah 64:6 describes it this way, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment”.

The things they do, fail to produce the results that are intended! They intended their actions to serve them well! They intended that their words and their deeds to benefit their lives here and now!

But did they? Did these actions, words, and deeds succeed at what we wanted? Of course they didn’t!

But what they did produce is shame. It was never enough, it was never sufficient. The guilt would mount, the high would subside, and the only thing to do was to make this twisted righteousness a little bit louder, and a little bit worse.

And so, rather than doing these things in the dark, it is promoted and glorified, it is exalted and called “normal”, so that which was once understood as evil may now be done openly, in the light of day, put on display so that evil may be called good.

For in their hearts, they know it to be evil by this standard they have worked so very hard to silence through their cacophony of noise, as they try ever harder to sear their conscience, to inoculate and de-sensitize themselves from the shame they feel when confronted by the truth of God’s word!

It is no wonder that the world hates us! Our very existence serves as a repudiation, a declaration of their wrong-ness and wrong-headed-ness, and the message we carry, of God’s holiness and righteousness, even more so. To accept our message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is to renounce their own behavior!

The glorious truth, however, is that we were once a part of them.

1 Corinthians 6:11 puts it this way, “And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

Every single one of us, myself included, were like this! We were slaves to sin, we were free in regard to righteousness, we had absolutely no relationship to righteousness, and on account of having no relationship with it, anything we did which we called “righteous”, was done according to our own definition of righteousness, which stood at odds with God’s definition of righteousness.

And yet, God in His great mercy, not only provided us a way of escape, but did all the work necessary to draw us to Himself! Romans 3:21-22 declares, “But now apart from the Law, the righteousness of God has been manifested (being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets) even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction;” Everyone fell short, even us, but God acted where we could not, God provided redemption in Christ Jesus! He foreknew us, He predestined us, He called us, He justified us, He glorified us; an unbroken and unbreakable chain of what God has done for those whom He chose out for Himself before the foundation of the world.

We understood then Jesus’ declaration in Luke 16:15 “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts, for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.”

We understood, then, that our notion of righteousness, our ever-changing idea of goodness, was abhorrent to God. He doesn’t care what my definition is; if it’s not His definition of “good”, it is all wrong, it is unacceptable to Him! If it’s not His definition of “righteous”, it is all wrong, it is unacceptable to Him!

Romans 6:20–21 LSB

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.

And so, in turning to God’s definition of righteousness, I must of necessity recognize the abhorrent nature of my former notion of righteousness! I must see it in it’s stark defiance against God and repent of disparaging His righteousness by promoting my own lie in exchange for His truth as I sought to worship the creature rather than the Creator.

What benefit did I have?

I could only go from sin, to ever more sin. My obedience to impurity and to lawlessness didn’t get me anywhere I wanted to go, instead I simply became worse and worse, heaping shame upon shame.

Oh, we experienced shame then. We tried to mask it, we tried to deny it. When that didn’t work, we tried to point out how good we were compared to everyone else. We may have attended church, we may have lived a good life in front of men. Or, we may have simply ran from church, attending less and less, if we went at all, desiring nothing to do with this message from God about sin and wrath.

But now, all we can do, what we must do if we are in Christ Jesus, is to see how very shameful that life we once lived was, when we “enjoy[ed] the passing pleasures of sin” (if I may reference Heb 11:25).

1 Corinthians 6:11 declares “...but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

We now recognize that not only was that former life one of emptiness, but with Paul we count those things as loss, as the rubbish of the dung-heap (ref Phil 3:7-8). The things we did, far from benefitting us, far from producing within us something good, only produced the pungency of death. Romans 5:12 declared “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned...”

Far from being truly free and able to do as we liked without any care in the world, we were enslaved to Sin, and excluded from true righteousness. The only true thing that it produced within us was shame and death; both physical death and spiritual death.

In other words, far from benefitting us, these things we did harmed us.

And so now, we are in a position to realize just how abhorrent of an idea it is to ask if it’s okay to sin because we are no longer law but under grace!

Now there is something key here which we must not overlook: if you look back on your life, on your prior years, and know nothing of this shame which Paul describes, you have every reason to worry, my friend.

There are teachings today which Paul would never abide, on one hand, there is a trend that we should “just preach Christ”, and nothing but Christ. That we can forgo this talk of holy living, that if we simply let go of our past, to “let go and let God”, to mindlessly bask in the presence of Christ... to say a prayer of simple belief in Jesus, that we will be saved, nothing else is necessary, we may go on living as we did before.

And yet, that is not the way the apostles taught! “Repent!” says Peter to the 3,000 at Pentecost (Acts 2:38). “Repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away” he says again to the crowd before him in Solomon’s portico (Acts 3:19). “Having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now commanding men that everyone everywhere should repent” Paul declared in the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17:29). “Confess your sins”, declared John (1 Jn 1:9).

No, my friends! If we cannot look back on our lives and experience shame at the way we once thought, at the hurt we levied against God by rejecting His righteousness for so very long, we have good reason to doubt if we are a Christian at all. For such a life is indeed a shameful rebuke which denies the sovereignty and lordship of Jesus Christ, the end result, Paul wrote in the last verse of chapter 1, is that those who do those things are worthy of death!

And so repentance for this sin we once did, seeing it as abhorrent and repenting from the heart for what we once did is part and parcel with salvation itself!

There is no justification, there is no salvation, without a corresponding change toward sanctification, a changed life marked by holiness.

What Paul is essentially saying, is, “Why would you ever consider going back to that manner of life that now causes revulsion and shame? It caused you shame and death while you were in that life, and now you are ashamed of that life and all that it stood for! Don’t go back to those things, set them aside, put them away from you, have nothing to do with them!”

Those things we once did only ended in death, why would we ever want to pick them up once more, to knowingly do those things of which we are now ashamed?

The good news, is that this is the way to fight against sin and the devil, the way to deliverance from sin’s beckoning gaze toward our bodies, and our bodies’ lusts for sin. We must remind ourselves, declares Paul, of the great guilt and the shame we once caused by our former manner of life, to bring to mind not only it’s utter fruitlessness for any benefit, but the death which those things bring.

It’s not enough to simply consider what Christ did for us, but also to realize just how badly we needed Him.

And knowing this, how can we possibly consider continuing to sin a moment longer.

Let us Pray!