Sin.....distance yourself from it. Romans 6.12-23

“God’s great love and purposes for us are worked out in the messes, storms and sins, blue skies, daily work, and dreams of our common lives, working with us as we are and not as we should be.”2

And yet…he doesn’t want us to be dragged down by sin…Paul finishes out Romans chapter 6--

(You are dead to sin, and alive to God) That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don't give it the time of day. Don't even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you've been raised from the dead!—into God's way of doing things. Sin can't tell you how to live. After all, you're not living under that old tyranny any longer. You're living in the freedom of God.   

 So, since we're out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we're free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you've let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom! 

 I'm using this freedom language because it's easy to picture. You can readily recall, can't you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God's freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness? 

 As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. 

 But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.  Romans 6.12-23

Let’s paint a clear picture of the ravages of sin, using addiction as an example.  Addiction is one of the clearest forms of being ensnared by the tyranny of sin, isn’t it?  Take drug addiction (something that probably won’t hit too close to home for most of us, so it’s ‘safe’ to discuss here, eh?)  From the outside, we can see so clearly the bondage that drug addiction causes. And there is the trail of destruction it leaves behind—from rotten teeth to broken relationships and a life of shameful guilt.  That is not what God had in mind for his children--rather, we were created for free living.  Let’s go back to the Garden of Eden … after all, that is where God meant for us to live.  Man was free – totally free, unencumbered by cares or burdens, neither enslaved nor ensnared by anything, indeed, hampered by nothing, including clothing!  Until he compromised.

No one sets out on a given day to become a heroin addict, (though this drug has made a huge, lethal comeback in our youth today); unfortunately, he doesn’t count addiction as a possibility—just doesn’t see that far down the road.  But it seems like he failed to take into account the potential for greater temptation when he partook of those first illicit drugs, whatever they were.  Truth: Sin has the power to entice.

Dabbling in sin has the power to entrap … so the best policy is to endeavor to distance yourself from it.

Christine

podcast:

1 Eugene Peterson

2 ibid