In this section, Dr. Sproul explains that the wages of sin is death and this is covered in chapters 1-3 of Romans and that the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord represents chapters 4-6.

We will continue now with our study of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, and we are still in the sixth chapter. I am going to begin reading at verse 12 and read through the end of the chapter:

Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Word of God for you. You may be seated. Let us pray.

Our God, we ask for Your help as we seek to understand this teaching that is so important to our growth as Christians, to our progress in sanctification. We pray that in the understanding of Your Word we may be convicted by the power of Your Spirit to do what this Word enjoins. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Spiritually Dead

I am going to go back and look briefly at verses 12 and following, because Paul has already spoken and we have already examined the idea that we ought to consider ourselves dead to sin, having been crucified with Christ. We explored that idea in our last time together. Then Paul continues beyond that with a conclusion. I remind you to be alert every time you see the word “therefore” in the text because that always links together a previous argument that is now being taken to its conclusion.

Listen to the conclusion that the Apostle wants us to hear: “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.” Think about that particular mandate. The conclusion of our reckoning of ourselves dead with Christ in His crucifixion is that we are called negatively not to allow ourselves to be under the domination or the dominion of sin. We are called not to allow sin to rule over us in our mortal bodies.

Let us backtrack a moment. We have already seen on more than one occasion what the Apostle sets forth regarding the serious degree of our fallenness and our natural condition of being in the state of original sin. I have labored the point with you that original sin is described by two basic metaphors in the New Testament. One is that of death. In our original sin, by nature we are dead in our sins, spiritually. We are biologically alive. Though we are born in a hospital or at home and we let out our first cry and take our first breath in, as vital as our signs may be in that first moment of life in this world, we still remember that we arrive on this planet DOA. We are dead on arrival spiritually, even though we are alive on arrival biologically.

So, that very strong metaphor is used to describe our natural condition where we have no life with respect to the things of God, no vitality whatsoever. But the other metaphor is the one that Paul is really developing here in this sixth chapter, and that is the metaphor of slavery and of bondage.

Bondage to Sin

We are, by nature, in bondage to sin. As I have said before, we have to be very careful when we read the New Testament that we try to read it with virgin ears. We do not bring to the text all the baggage of the ideas that we have learned from the secular culture all around us.

One of the most destructive ideas we tend to bring to Scripture is the humanist, pagan notion that our free will is such that we are not bent in one direction or the other, but every time we have an option before us of a moral issue, we have the moral power to say yes or no, and the will is basically in a state of indifference by nature. That idea is as American as apple pie, Chevrolet, and baseball, and it is as heretical as it can be. It is positively not just unbiblical but anti-biblical because that notion of freedom can be found nowhere in sacred Scripture.

You are free in the sense that you have a will and the power of volition. By nature, you still have the capacity to make choices according to your desires. In that sense we are still free. The problem is that the desires of our heart by nature are only wicked continually. By nature, we have no disposition or inclination towards the things of God. Therefore, as Augustine argued against Pelagius, we are in a state of moral inability when it comes to doing the things of God.

This was the essence of Martin Luther’s most important work, in which he responded to the diatribe of Erasmus of Rotterdam with his book entitled De Servo Arbitrio, that is, On the Bondage of the Will. It is a book that every Christian has the capacity to read and understand. You do not have to have a PhD in theology to understand Luther’s text on that point. It is a Christian classic, and I would urge everyone who has not read On the Bondage of the Will to read it. Then you can go to graduate school and read Jonathan Edwards’ The Freedom of the Will, which I have to warn you in advance may require a PhD in theology to wade through. If you want a shortcut, you can read my book, Willing to Believe, and it will cover all of these things as a kind of primer for you.

In any case, we must get the idea out of our heads that we have the moral power by nature to incline ourselves to the things of God. Jesus clearly told Nicodemus that unless a man is born again, he cannot even see the kingdom of God, let alone take steps to enter it. Rather, the metaphor Paul uses is one of slavery. By nature, prior to our rebirth by the work of the Holy Ghost, we are in prison through our sinful impulses. If the Bible did not teach it, you would have to invent that idea just by looking at your own heart and seeing the universality of sin in this world.

Do Not Let Sin Reign

Paul says in verse 11 that now, we have been made alive. Paul is addressing believers, people who have been set free from that prison of sin, who have been made alive by the power of the Holy Ghost, who are not in their natural state of original sin, people who have been raised from the dead and set free from that bondage and slavery. That is the condition of believers now.

As believers, when we sin now, even though the freedom that we have from sin and from bondage is real and the power of the Holy Spirit is there, we still struggle, we still battle, and we still have to go through this conflict until the day we die. In fact, Paul speaks in other places about the intense warfare that continues between the old man, who was completely flesh, and the new man, who now has the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling and enabling him to move to the things of God.

But here is the difference: We still sin when we are Christians. But we do not have to. We no longer sin because we are enslaved by the power of sin. As Christians, every time that we are presented with a temptation, God gives us a way out, and He promises us the present power of the Holy Spirit if we will simply cooperate. This is where the work of the Christian life is synergistic and not monergistic. I have labored those terms before with you. Your regeneration, your rebirth, was the work of God alone. It was not a joint venture. It was not part your effort and part the effort of God. It was purely monergistic, with just one individual working: God. But the moment you take your first breath of spiritual life in your regeneration, from there on, the rest of the way, it is a joint effort.

That is why the Apostle elsewhere will say, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to do” (Eph. 2:12–13). It is a joint venture. God is working, and you have to work.

In Romans 6:11, Paul is speaking to people who are now out of prison. He says: “You’re free. God has regenerated you.” We are still tempted. We are still enticed. We still have weaknesses. We bring baggage into the Christian life and patterns of behavior that are sinful. They do not disappear overnight. What disappears is the bondage.

We now have the responsibility to cooperate with the grace that God makes available to us, to make diligent use of the means of grace, to make sure that our souls are being fed regularly by the Word of God, to make sure that we are on our faces before God earnestly on a regular basis, to make it a matter of principle to never, ever miss the corporate worship of the people of God unless we are absolutely indisposed. God has given us these means of grace to help us in our pilgrimage, to help us in this conflict, to help us in this battle. We are to feed the new man and starve the old man.

Paul says, “Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body.” If sin is reigning in your mortal body and you are a Christian, it is because you let it reign. But you do not have to let it reign. You cannot use the excuse, “The devil made me do it,” unless, indeed, you are unregenerate. In that case, it is still no excuse.

“Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body”—that is, do not allow it to have dominion—“that you should obey it in its lusts.” Do not obey sin anymore. Notice that Paul personifies sin as if sin itself had an individual existence. He knows that it does not. But he describes sin as if it were a tyrant that could try to enslave us again, and he says, “Do not let that happen.”

Present Yourselves as Alive

Paul continues, “And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin.” That is not simply a sexual reference; it refers to every aspect of your human life. Do not let your mind be an instrument of sin. Do not let your legs be instruments of sin. Do not be swift to shed blood. Do not let your lips be instruments of sin. Guard your tongue. Do not allow yourself to be enslaved once again to these sinful patterns, “but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead.”

Paul essentially says: “Present yourselves to God as resurrected people and your members as instruments of righteousness to God so that your whole person—your mind, your mouth, your ears, your eyes, your hands—all these things are to be used as tools in your toolkit for offering your whole person to God.” Later in this epistle, Paul will say, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice . . . which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1).

In the ancient world, instruments or tools, were means by which certain works were accomplished, just as they are today. The sculptor has his chisel by which he creates the statue. The painter has his brushes and paint, and the brushes are the instruments that he uses. The pool player has the cue stick. The baseball player has the bat. All of these different tools or instruments are used to bring about a desired effect. You can use these tools for good or for evil. You can use your mind for sin or for righteousness. You can use your speech to blaspheme or to praise. You can use your legs to walk in sin or to walk in righteousness.

Under Grace

Paul says the whole person has been raised from spiritual death and is now called to a new kind of slavery, and he continues this metaphor and calls us to be slaves of righteousness—not servants of Satan, but servants of Christ. That is the difference between the old life and the new life. He says in verse 14: “For sin shall not have dominion over you.” That is a promise. It is in the indicative, not the imperative.

Earlier Paul said this in the imperative: “Don’t let sin have dominion over you.” But now Paul speaks in the indicative, and he is saying, “This is your state of affairs now: Sin will not have dominion over you.” Its dominion is gone. It is history. You cannot be brought back again into absolute bondage to sin as you once were.

Then Paul gives this statement: “For you are not under law but under grace.” What does that mean? I think one of the hardest things to do in dealing with Paul, as I have told you already, is to understand how he references the law, because he does not always refer to the law in the same way. This has vexed the best minds of Christendom for two thousand years. When Paul says, “You’re not under the law,” what does he mean?

Some people look at that and say, as I mentioned before: “This is a license to sin; we are no longer under any obligation to keep the law of God. We passed from law to grace. Law was Moses; grace is Jesus, and so we are free from the law.” As I said, the great hymn of the antinomian is, “Free from the law, oh blessed condition; I can sin all I want and still have remission.” I do not think that is what Paul means in this text. Rather, he is saying that we are no longer under the law in the sense of being underneath the awesome, weighty, burden of the law.

I do not think that Paul is referring simply to the law of Moses, because earlier, in chapter 5, he pointed out that the law was in the world even before Sinai. God reveals His law in nature and in the conscience of human beings. We cannot just restrict law to the laws of Moses or to the Ten Commandments. From the beginning of our sinfulness, we have been under the dreadful burden of the law because the law condemns us. The law reveals our disobedience, and the law cannot possibly be the means by which we will be saved. As debtors to the law, we are debtors who can never, ever pay our debt.

Paul essentially says, “But you are not in that condition anymore, being crushed under the weight of the law, being oppressed by the burden of guilt and of judgment from the law. You are now under grace.” As he says in Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.”

Paul has to keep repeating this for Christians. He says: “Now that you have been freed from that burden of the law, are you going to go back? Are you going to go back to Egypt? Now that you know you’ve been justified by faith and by faith alone, are you going to try to return to justifying yourself through your works?” No, you move from grace to grace, from faith to faith. Grace does not end at your justification, but grace is ever present in the process and progress of your sanctification. You are sanctified as much by grace as you are justified by grace.

The Assurance of Grace

I heard myself today on a tape. My wife has been telling me that I should teach a certain series at a certain venue next year, and I have been disagreeing with her. I said, “I don’t want to teach that series.” She said, “You need to teach that series again.” I said, “No, I don’t think so.” So, then she came with the CD, saying, “I want you to listen to this.” I had to listen to myself teaching about sanctification. I was thinking, “Woops, that hurt”—you know, you can be your own worst critic. In the portion of the CD I was listening to, I mentioned a moment that took place in my life about twenty-five years ago. I will never forget it.

I was walking down the hall of our lecture house back at the study center in western Pennsylvania, and I had one of those sudden, sovereign, existential moments of self-awareness where out of the blue I became acutely conscious of something. It was like I stood out of myself and looked at myself, and this idea came into my head: “R.C., what if you’re not really saved? What if your destiny is hell?”

Instantly a chill went from the top of my head all the way down my spine to my feet, and I was frozen in that spot in absolute terror. I thought: “I realize that I can fool myself. I can pass an exam in theology and think that I’m in a state of grace when I’m not.” It is in moments like that Satan comes to you and says, “If you’re a Christian, then why did you do this, and why did you do that, and why did you fail there, and why did you not keep your promise here?” I felt more and more shame, more and more uncertainty.

I ran to my study and picked up my Bible. Suddenly, I was reading the gospel again for all I was worth. I was on my face before God, and I said: “God, maybe I’m not in a state of grace. Maybe I’m not regenerate. Maybe I’m kidding myself. O Lord, I don’t have anything else to hold on to but the gospel. I have nothing to bring for You in my hands except Christ and His righteousness. The only way I can have any assurance of my salvation is not by looking at my performance or my achievement but by looking again at grace.”

That is why I often say that I have to get justification by faith in my bloodstream every minute of the day. Every day of my life I have to keep coming back to the ground of my justification: His righteousness and His righteousness alone. It is grace. It is sola gratia, by grace alone. The law slays me. The law kills me. The law is a mirror of my sin. It drives me to the cross. It drives me to grace. That is what Paul is saying here. You are not under law; you are under grace.

Slaves of Righteousness

Paul comes right at us again with another rhetorical question: “What then?” He doesn’t say, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” That was how chapter six began, but look at what he says here: “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” It is the same question. He gives the same answer. It is emphatic. It is abhorrent to him: “Certainly not! By no means. God forbid.” Then he says, “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey . . . ?” Is that not an interesting way of putting it?

We must understand something about indentured servitude. Usually when we think of slaves, we think of the slave trade in the West in more recent centuries that involves man-stealing, where people went to Africa and kidnapped young men and women, brought them across the ocean, took them to the auction block, and sold them into slavery. It was not like those natives came to America on their own, presented themselves at the slave auction, and said: “Buy me. I’m cheap.”

But in the ancient world, the number one reason for slavery was indentured servitude. This happened when a person had a debt he could not pay and said: “I can’t pay you, so I’ll serve you. I present myself as a slave.” As ironic and as much of an oxymoron as it sounds, it was voluntary servitude by which people presented themselves into slavery.

Paul says, “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey . . . ?” He is saying that if you present yourself again to sin as a slave to sin, it leads to death. If you obey sin as a slave, the only outcome is death. But if you present yourself as a slave of obedience, then the end is righteousness.

“But God be thanked”—here is the doxology—“that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered”—to the gospel. He continues, “And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.”

The Quest for Righteousness

As I said a few moments ago, we need come to the text with virgin eyes and virgin ears. There is a word Paul uses in this text that has almost disappeared from Christian vocabulary. Do you recognize it? Did you see what an oddity it was? It is a word that has all but been banished from the life of the Christian community. It is the word “righteousness.”

If I were to give a seminar on spiritual growth, people would flock to it. If I gave them five keys to spirituality, they would sign up. But if I gave a seminar on how to become a righteous person, no one would come, because that is not the goal of today’s Christian. The Christian wants to be spiritual, or the Christian wants to be pious, or the Christian wants to be moral. But God forbid that anyone ever accuse us of righteousness. Righteousness is so closely linked to the idea of self-righteousness that we want to distance ourselves as far as we can from the very idea. We know we cannot be saved by our own righteousness, so we do not want to think of righteousness as having any part in our quest for sanctification. Never mind that Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matt. 6:33).

Do you realize, beloved, that the number one business of the Christian life is the quest for righteousness? Jesus said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). Never? What did He mean? I am not sure. Maybe Jesus was simply saying, “The only righteousness that will get you into the kingdom of God is a righteousness that is greater than that of Pharisees—namely Mine.” He might have been giving a cryptic, thinly veiled lesson on justification by faith alone. Maybe, but I do not think so.

I think Jesus really meant what He said, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, you will never make it. Again, you are not going to make it on the basis of your righteousness, but only on the basis of faith. But if the faith is genuine, if it is the real article, the fruit of that faith will be real righteousness. We need to remember that.

A Righteousness that Exceeds the Pharisees

You might be thinking: “It’s no big deal to exceed the Pharisees. After all, they were the worst criminals of all time. They were the ones who killed Jesus. They were the hypocrites, the ones that provoked Jesus’ wrath when He said, ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!’” Yes, Jesus did come down hard on them.

Why were they called “Pharisees”? They were that group of people who were tired of the secularism of the Jews. They were the conservatives. They were the evangelicals. They were the ones that wanted to restore covenant purity to Israel. They called themselves “the set apart ones” and set themselves apart for the singular pursuit of righteousness.

Though Jesus roundly and soundly condemned the Pharisees, He would from time to time say things like: “You tithe your mint and your cumin. You do well, but you omit the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy. You don’t care about justice. You don’t care about mercy, but at least you tithe.” How many of you tithe? The polls show that 4 percent of professing evangelical Christians tithe their goods and their services to the Lord. The other 96 percent systematically, routinely, day after day rob God of what He calls us to give to Him for the building of His kingdom. That is a very serious matter. At least the Pharisees were tithers.

Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures thinking that in them you have life.” They did search the Scriptures; they did not have life. Do you search the Scriptures? I will say that the majority of people who have been Christians for ten years have never read the whole Bible. The Pharisees beat us there. Apparently their prayers were motivated by pomp and outward displays of piety when they would pray in the marketplace to be seen by men and all that, but at least they prayed.

Jesus said to them: “O, woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, you go over land and sea to make one convert. Once you’ve made him, you make him twice the child of hell than you are yourselves.” It’s not very complimentary to them that He called them children of hell, right? But how committed were they to evangelism? How committed were they to missions? It was hard to travel in those days. They went over land and sea for one convert. When God wants me to go to California to speak, I first have questions: “How many people are going to be there?” What if they said, “Come on out and we’ll have an audience of one for you”? I am glad that I have a speaking committee who makes those decisions. They are not going to send me over land and sea to make one convert.

Do you see on how many points the scribes and Pharisees surpass us? Jesus says that unless our righteousness exceeds theirs, we will never enter into the kingdom of God.

The Wages of Sin

Paul continues: “And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.”

Look at what Paul says next in verse 20: “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard”—you were free with respect—“to righteousness.” In other words, Paul says: “You did not have any righteousness. When you were under slavery and the dominion of sin, you were completely free from righteousness.”

He goes on: “What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now” you have had your exodus. You have “been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life.” Freedom from sin means freedom of righteousness, freedom for righteousness, and freedom for eternal life.

Paul then closes this section with this famous passage in verse 23: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The wages of sin. What is the pay scale? What is the payoff? What does sin earn? What is its basic wage? The more you sin, the more you earn, but what you earn is death: “The wages of sin is death.” There is the payoff.

“‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). In other words, He is saying: “I will repay. If you’re a slave to sin, you earn demerits, you earn My wrath. If I didn’t pay you what you earn, I would be unjust. The wages of sin is death.”

The Gift of Eternal Life

In stark contrast to “the wages of sin is death” is the good news, “but the gift of God . . . ” Do you see the contrast? Wages are something you earn; a gift is something you cannot possibly earn. Wages are something you merit; the gift, on the other hand, is free. It is gratuitous. Paul says, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” All the way through this section, Paul has been dealing with contrasts: slavery to sin and slavery to righteousness, the wages of death and the gift of eternal life. We now have experienced grace.

I have mentioned this before and will mention it again. When I was in graduate school, Professor Berkouwer once made this observation: “Gentlemen, the essence of Christian theology is grace, and the essence of Christian ethics is gratitude.” Paul is going to develop that idea. This is what John Piper speaks about when he talks about what draws us to obedience. What draws us to righteousness is not duty; it is love. It is gratitude. Once we have received the grace of eternal life in Jesus Christ, we should be willing to crawl over glass to honor and praise Him for that grace. Let us pray.

Father, do not allow us to give ourselves again to sin that it might have dominion over us. By the power of Thy Spirit, help us to preserve our liberty, to walk in that liberty by which we have been freed by the Holy Spirit, and by Thy grace help us to make the seeking of righteousness the main business of our lives—not to merit salvation, which we could not possibly do, but to show forth our praise and our gratitude to You. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.