Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning everyone,

I’m so glad that you were able to make it here to join us for worship.

I hope you are as excited as I am to come together into the presence of our Lord to lift up his praises.

I want to welcome our visitors and returning guests.

We feel privileged to have you with us.

If you haven’t already, please take a moment to fill out our guest cards that are out on the table in the hallway.

And please let us know if there’s any way that we can stand with you to help you in your journey to Christ.

When you’ve filled those cards out, please return them to me after service so I can say hi!

Challenge

Our challenge this month is to make ourselves accessible to our community.

When Jesus commissioned his kingdom to take his good news into the world, he necessarily altered our focus from being exclusively about ourselves and our own families, as is the case with the world, and refocused our attention outwardly on others.

This challenge is about conforming our thinking and way of life to Jesus!

Assignments

Your reading assignments for next week to help cultivate your minds for God’s word is Romans 6:5-11.

Now if you will open your Bibles to Romans 6:1-4.

Pause to go live > > >

Should We Sin Because Grace Abounds?

Everybody knows Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son.

If you don’t, or you need a refresher, you can read the story in Luke 15:11–32.

The younger son twists his father’s arm for his share of the property, goes off and spends it all, and comes home, as he thinks, in utter disgrace.

But, to his astonishment, he finds his father running down the road to meet him, and throwing a huge party in his honor.

He’s welcomed back as a son, even though he doesn’t deserve it.

Now let’s play the story forward a few years and imagine a thought stealing unbidden into the young man’s mind: life has settled back down into its numbingly humdrum existence again.

His older brother tolerates having him around, more or less; his father is getting older.

He longingly remembers the joy, excitement, and festivities of the day he came down the road and his father came running up to greet him.

So he thinks, “supposing I did it again?

Why not help myself to enough things to survive, run away for a few weeks, and then play the penitent and come back again?

Maybe I’ll get another party!”

Absurd?

Unthinkable?

Don’t you believe it.

It’s exactly what a great many people think.

"God will forgive me; that’s his job!" Indeed, a great many people today seem to believe that the only message the church has for anyone is the message of forgiveness.

Today’s sermon challenges this thought in order to intercept and dismiss the terrible tragedy that will come if this thought is acted upon.

I expect that I will be more misunderstood in this sermon than any other that I have ever preached because I must necessarily begin some thoughts at the beginning that can only be finished at the end of the sermon.

So let me ask for your patience, especially those listening to us online, in hearing me out to the end before you render your final judgments about what I’m saying.

Now for some observations that should help make this easier.

Exegesis

Paul just introduced a series of closely related concepts like “sin”, “death”, “the Law vs. grace”, “life”, and so on, as he began to contrast the story of Adam with the new man in 5:12–21.

So now, in chapters 6–7, Paul must address a series of questions that arise out of these comparisons.

For this reason, the stories of Adam (and those in him), and Christ (and those in him), continue to undergird and carry this discussion forward to chapter 8.

This point must not be missed because the “death” he speaks of here is just as much the death of Adam as the “new life” he speaks of here is also the new life of Christ.

This means that chapters 6–7 “digress”, or draw back, to answer and clarify the dramatic narrative that Paul has just told, before finally moving forward, in chapter 8, to provide God’s solution to the dilemma of this human drama.

Therefore, chapters 6–7 proceed on the basis of 5:12-21 and form one large argument, composed of four parts and seven rhetorical questions.

This argument deals with human fallenness in light of the cross.

And in it, Paul moves from solution to plight.

So the four parts to this argument are:

6:1-15

6:15-7:6

7:7-13

7:14-25

The seven rhetorical questions are:

6:1–3; 5. 7:1

6:15; 6. 7: 13

6:16; 7. 7:24

6:21

You’ll notice that the four questions in verses 1-3 are being treated as one.

I suspect the reason why will be self-evident after today, but the third and fourth questions really just serve to expand the point of the second question, which is the first of seven implications of the first question.

I also want to point out that the deliberative tone and structured progression of Paul’s argument is characteristic of what the rhetorical handbooks of his day called “conversational reasoning”, which uses dialectical reasoning to engage controversial subjects in order to make one’s argument appear “self-evident”.

And “dialectical reasoning” refers to the process of arriving at truth by comparing and contrasting various solutions.

In other words, Paul is reasoning with them based on the implications of Christ’s story to help them discover for themselves God’s solution to our dilemma by contrasting the nature of Adam with Christ.

This means that if read correctly, chapter 8 should not come as a surprise, but should crystallize the answer one is already beginning to see.

So, as Paul anticipates seven questions that are likely to arise from 5:12–21, he uses these questions to prepare the readers to more clearly see Christ’s solution to the human dilemma that is going to be presented in chapter 8.

And the first of these questions is whether or not grace enables sin.

An astute reader will notice that the definitive answer to this question does not come until 8:12–13, further showing why any attempt to treat chapters 6–8 as isolated theological topics is so misleading.

Instead, they should be read as the outworking of 5:12-21.

“What should we say then?” (v.

1): Paul’s intent to carry the narrative of 5:12-21 forward is understood by this question.

This question’s purpose is to force the reader to stop here and reflect in their mind on the things just taught.

How are we freed from the reign of death through grace?

What does it mean for my life that I receive the gift of righteousness through Jesus’ obedience?

These are the kinds of thoughts that should be going through the reader’s mind after completing this section.

So Paul necessarily has to intercept some dangerous “wrong answers”.

“Should we continue in sin so that grace may multiply?”

(v.

1): This is the first of seven rhetorical questions that arise from Paul’s prior narrative.

In reflecting on these stories, one might ask “how are we freed from the reign of death through grace?”

Or one might ask “what does it mean for my life that I receive the gift of righteousness through Jesus’ obedience?”

Consider this:

One might reasonably conclude from this that because sin multiplied grace, the effect of Jesus’ salvation on our life is that we are free from all moral constraints.

In fact, this thought might linger in one’s mind throughout chapter six as one reads things like “you are not under the law but under grace” (v.

14).

So it’s imperative that Paul intercept this thought before it takes root and bears its tragic fruit.

Like a weed that sprouts up in a garden and quickly chokes out all the good plants, this conception of grace is catastrophic to the Christian life.

And nothing could simultaneously be more foreign to Paul’s thought and yet be more commonly misunderstood.

And this is why we’re taking the time to correctly interpret Paul’s writings.

What this means is that “grace” should not be understood simply as a covering for sin.

In fact, as we will see going forward, Paul views grace as the means by which sin’s reign over our lives is actually broken!

In other words, grace is transformative.

And that is why grace is the means by which Christians overcome sin in the world as the Lord’s ambassadors of grace.

“Absolutely note!” (v.

2): All too often this is presented as the short answer to the question.

But this is far more than just Paul’s short answer.

English readers will notice the exclamation mark in this clause.

Whenever you see an exclamation mark you need to pay attention because that is how translators often translate grammatical force that English cannot otherwise convey.

Another example:

The exclamation mark in “that’s enough!” translates the force of Jesus’ answer.

Jesus was not saying two swords were sufficient for what he was telling them to do, he was expressing his frustration at how dull their understanding was that they did not understand what he was saying.

“μὴ γένοιτο”: Back to our clause, Paul isn’t simply answering “no way Jose”, he’s demonstrating how flawed this answer is by expressing the appropriate repulsion to this conclusion.

The Greek phrase “μὴ γένοιτο” is one that expresses disgust and extreme disapproval.

In other words, “how could you possibly think that?”

This is the very same response all of us should have felt in our opening illustration when we carried the prodigal-son’s story out a few years and proposed his thought that he might run away again to experience the rush of acceptance and joy when he returns.

The idea that grace is meant to simply cover sin is manifestly preposterous.

“How can we who died to sin still live in it?”

(v.

2): The third question expands the scope of the second question by calling the readers attention to the means of grace, which is the death of Jesus upon the cross.

But it does this in an unexpected way.

Up until this point, it may not have been entirely clear that in the same way that all humanity shares in death through Adam’s sin (and actively participates with Adam in sin), so the redeemed share in life through Jesus’ obedience (and actively participates with Jesus in his death and resurrection).