Romans 6:15-19

Slaves to Righteousness
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! 16 Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. 18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

19 I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness.


Dig Deeper
In my last year of coaching high school basketball, I had one of the best all-around players that I had coached in my many years of coaching at that school. What was unique about this player was that he was a good athlete but not the best I’d ever had. He was fast but not the fastest. He could jump but not the highest. What set him apart from the other players that I had coached was that he worked hard every moment during a game. He just out-worked everyone else on the court and had great success in doing it. My last year coaching was his junior year and he led the conference in scoring and rebounding. When a new coach took over, a problem seemed to arise. The new coach actually crafted the offense around him, something I had never done, and intentionally got him the ball a lot more than we ever had when I coached. He had a lot more freedom and opportunity under the new coach, yet his offensive scoring statistics started to go down fairly dramatically during the first few games. The new coach knew what kind of player he had been and appealed to me to see if I knew why his production had fallen off so dramatically, to the tune of about ten points a game less. I came and quietly watched a game from the top of the bleachers and immediately saw the problem. With his new found importance in the flow of the offense and the freedom to do what he wanted, he had begun to take things for granted. He did not have the same hunger and drive to go get rebounds or steals to get the ball and score. He simply wasn’t giving the new coach the same kind of animalistic effort that he had given me each game. After telling the coach what I had observed, the player was appropriately challenged by the new coach and went out and had a great game in the next game and wound up repeating as the conference’s most valuable player.

Up to this point, Paul has painted a picture of two realms in which we can live. He has talked of the slavery of the realm of Adam, sin, and death but he has also talked of the freedom of the realm of Christ, grace, and life. He will continue that distinction but in this section he turns more to action than he has up to this point when he has mostly talked of these different realms in terms of status. Paul continues to demonstrate that the exodus out of sin and death carries with it the responsibilities of obedience and faith on the part of the new humanity. Paul wants the Christians in Rome, and subsequent readers, to understand that grace is unmerited but that it moves us from one realm into a new realm that carries with it the obligation of living out our new reality with the same effort and gusto with which we served our own will when we were still slaves to sin.

Paul’s question in verse 15 is slightly different than his question in verse 1 which is a question of whether remaining in the realm of sin would be a good thing in that it would allow God’s grace to abound and shine all the more. Here Paul addresses a specific concern that likely arose within the Jewish community over the effects of Paul’s gospel. In the Jewish mind, there were two spheres in which to live, the realm of the law-keepers and the realm of the law-breakers. Paul has introduced a new realm to the Jewish mind but has made it clear that the law holds no sway in this new realm. So, Paul would like to head off this question before it can gain any traction. If one has left the realm of the law does that mean that we shall sin, or in other words, “should we join the ranks of the sinners?” Paul’s answer is the same as the previous misunderstanding that he began to deal with in verse one. “By no means” is he teaching that the gospel puts one into the status of life, apart from the law, so that the grace revealed in the Messiah can reach them where it could not before. In that view of thinking that Paul is trying to correct, the law was a separate entity from the realm of sin but Paul has already alluded to the fact that the law operates only in the realm of sin and death (5:20). Thus, the Jews needed to rethink their concept that living under the law was its own realm. The law was not a realm, it was merely a part of the realm of sin.

There are only two realms and the law is not one of them. To demonstrate this, Paul will continue the exodus language that he has employed throughout this section and describe the two realms in terms of two types of slavery. Human beings in Adam simply did not and do not have a choice. They are in slavery to sin and death with no hope of bettering that status. In the Messiah, God has revealed a new option, a way out of the spiritual Egypt. Humans now have something that is quite unusual in the world of slavery, a choice of masters.

In reality, humans don’t have a choice in the sense that they will have a master. As much as we’d like to think we can control our own lives and be our own masters, we cannot. It’s a matter of being enslaved to our own will in rebellion to God, which Paul calls sin that ends in death, or because of Christ we can now follow God’s will. Christians sometimes incorrectly think that the battle between sin and obedience is between Satan’s will and God’s will but Satan is no match for God. Plus, it is important to realize that Satan has no specific will for our lives. He is quite happy to entice us into following our own will and away from God’s. This is why Paul says the alternative choice to sin and death is to be obedient to obedience, which is a shorthand way of talking of following God’s will. In doing this, we are led through the waters of obedience to the shore of righteousness where we take part in God’s covenant purposes.

Paul praises God for the fact that, although those in the Roman church, used to be slaves to sin, they have had their hearts changed just as God promised would happen in his new covenant (Ezek. 36:26). But this isn’t something that is a mindless act of emotion or even simply going through the motions or conforming outwardly based on appearances (cf. Rom. 2:25-29). This change of heart comes from the pattern of teaching that claimed their allegiance. But what is this teaching to which Paul says has set them free from the realm of sin and moved them into, Paul says metaphorically, slaves to God’s covenant purposes, his righteousness? Paul is likely referring to the pattern of teaching that was the gospel announcement and the proper human response to it. There was a clear apostolic teaching that the proper response to the gospel was to die to self, to put off that old life, and have faith in and enter into the life of the Messiah. Nowhere is this teaching seen more clearly or concisely than in Ephesians 4:20-24: “That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

If we take a minute to think about it, it seems a bit awkward for Paul to have compared the slavery of sin to the slavery of God’s grace, when God’s grace is the most freeing thing that we could possibly imagine. Paul seems to be aware of the inadequacy of this analogy if it is pushed too far but it does make his point that humans have a clear choice between solidarity to Adamic humanity or Messianic humanity. He realizes this awkwardness so much that he almost apologizes for it in verse 19, making it clear that he only uses such a simple analogy because otherwise they might not understand his point.

Paul’s exhortation in the latter half of verse 19 surely must have been as challenging to Christians in the first century as it is to us if we take a moment to meditate on it rather than passing by it quickly. Think back to the energy that you used to put into sin, impurity, and wickedness when you were a slave to sin. Think of how much mental and physical effort, not to mention time that you invested in your sinful pursuits. Think back to how much you pursued fun, members of the opposite sex, and so on. Does the zeal and effort that you now give to serving God and taking part in his covenant purposes and reconciliation match up to the effort you gave when you were a slave to sin? If you’re honest, does it even come close? Do you work as hard for righteousness and God’s kingdom as you did for evil and your own desires? You have been freed from the realm of sin and death but the question that Paul wants us to think on is do we now serve the master of our new realm with as much gusto and energy as we did when we served ourselves in the realm of Adam? Like more former player, do you give the same intense effort in your new freedom as you did before you had it?


Devotional Thought
Take some to think about how much time and energy you spent pursuing parties, drinking, fun, sex, etc., before you became a Christian. Can you honestly say that you seek God’s righteousness in your life as zealously now as you sought those things then? If you don’t spend some time to seriously think about that, pray and repent. Serve the king as much as you used to serve yourself.