Dear Friends,
We hope this week's devotional will encourage you in your spiritual walk. We give thanks to Rev Roland Hearn, Field Strategy Coordinator for the Australia and New Zealand field in the Church of the Nazarene, for writing this devotional.
You are welcome to share this and include it in your church newsletters if you wish; we just ask that you please give credit to NTC and the author. Thank you!
Romans 6:12-23
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you obey their desires. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms because of your limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to even more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 So what fruit did you then gain from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the fruit you have leads to sanctification, and the end is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Reflection: A Slave to Love
I am sitting this morning writing as General Assembly draws to a close. It has been a wonderful time together with brothers and sisters from around the world. We have been drawn to this place with the not insignificant task of ensuring that the church continues its mission to see God’s love transforming the world. Last Sunday morning our General Superintendent, Dr David Graves, preached a classic Nazarene message that focused on the abundant love of God. A love that God lavishes on his children. It was such a wonderful blessing to hear again that challenging and overwhelming truth. This truth is easy to forget in the midst of our struggles to adequately do the work of the church.
In the passage under consideration Paul speaks a great deal about the issue of sin. When we think of sin we are often drawn to the idea of evil or wicked deeds. While sin definitely includes those things, it is not limited to such expressions. To really understand what sin is we have to understand the reality of human brokenness. We are born apart from the love of God, as a result of being born human in the line of Adam. And so, our very understanding of ourselves, others, and the world we are living in is shaped by that resultant brokenness. Our existence is permeated by a deep-down motivation to fill that emptiness that is defined by that brokenness. Sin has much more to do with the focus, attitudes, desires, and passions of the life that is desperate to fill a void that only God’s love can fill. That motivation can and does lead to doing things that are clearly inappropriate and sinful.
As a result, we should understand sin as all that we do that is not in accordance with love. Sin is motivated by our desire to satisfy our deepest need to be loved, but do it with the compulsions of the distortion of brokenness. Paul suggests there is but one adequate response: that is to become people set free by the power of God’s grace from the struggle and drives of that distortion. Because grace is always adequate to respond to our sin and brokenness he asks, almost comically, shall we keep on sinning because we are not controlled by the law, but by grace? The point being that the legal and moral codes by which we operate, and at the time in question it was the Jewish religious codes, are no longer what corrects us in our brokenness, but that role is performed by the grace of God. If codes are no longer the centre of our moral allegiance then we are able to sin, if sin is simply breaking moral codes. His answer is basically that such thoughts are non-sensical because sin is what flows from our motivation, or as he suggests: that to which we are slaves.
Sin is not simply disobedience to codes, it is the very core of who we are being lived out in daily expression of pain and distortion. We sin when we are slaves to our brokenness. And that is the miracle of grace. When we are touched by grace God transforms our hearts and lives and we become slaves to righteousness. He even suggests that he writes with this kind of language because of the limitations of his readers. He wants the reader to understand that righteousness and sin are not primarily about actions but they are about our core identity. Who we really are. If we are sinning our lives are driven by a deep distortion of who we are and what we are worth. There is a result of such a drive – it is death. Death is the ultimate product of brokenness. In that sense, it is what we deserve. Our lives have been solely motivated by our brokenness up until the time we surrender to love. The truth is, however, at the point we begin to allow grace to work in our lives we are set free from the domination of self-motivated effort and receive the gracious gift of eternal life. This wonderful gift comes to us, not because of what we have done, but because as the children of God we are the recipients of his bountiful love. His love declares that we are valuable. His gift of grace and life transforms us into children overwhelmed by love.
Prayer:
God of all grace and love, we acknowledge our need of transformation. Transformation of heart, transformation of desire, transformation of fidelity. May we be willing to receive the gift of grace in our lives and by the power of the Holy Spirit within us may we be transformed evermore into the likeness of Christ to whom we give our allegiance. Jesus is Lord. Amen.