Paul and the Steps of Apprenticeship (Romans 6:12-23)

Transcription

1 1 Paul and the Steps of Apprenticeship (Romans 6:12-23) Last week we talked a little about how scorn toward people who are serious about following God is not a new thing. As we saw, Jeremiah experienced it, the Psalmist experienced it, and Jesus cautioned his disciples that they, too, would experience it when they went out to spread the good news of God s kingdom. And I made mention of the fact that, in our time, there seems to be a growing groundswell of anti-christian sentiment out there. It s in newscasts, films and television, in academia, and on the Internet. I often reflect as to why things have gone this direction, especially considering that many good and positive things continue to be done in our Lord s name. But all of this got me thinking about Jesus, and grace, and our process of transformation into the people that God wants us to be. If we believers were to get all of this stuff about Jesus right, I have to think that this would enhance our credibility and our effectiveness in advancing God s kingdom. And I believe that that effectiveness would be to everyone s benefit. This morning I d like to share a few things we can glean from today s Romans reading to point us in that direction. But I d like to start by giving a little scene from my own life this past week. On my day off Michele and Christian were up in Taos, so I watched the pilot episode of a TV detective mystery set in Wales. It had kind of a postmodern, nihilistic feel to it. There was a bleakness that went well beyond the predictable gray Welsh weather. The sets were stark and darkly lit, there wasn t a lot of smiling or warmth, and the first episode, at least, was graphic, and frankly, grindingly depressing. The plot involved the murder of an elderly woman who, it turns out, was a fervent Christian who had a despicable history of mentally and physically abusing children in the orphanage she ran. You can probably see where this is going. There was also an awkward, rather mealy-mouthed priest who d inadvertently set up the circumstances for the murder by ignoring the desperate claims of the young abuse victim who turned out to be the murderer. So, with the possible exception one police officer, Christian characters came out looking pretty bad in this show. Sadly, I m finding this to be a more and more common formula, especially, it seems, in productions from the British Isles. Anyway, to bring it to my point, despite a few fleeting glimmers of hope, the overall air of hopeless resignation in this show left one with the feeling that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and that there s nothing to be done for it. In the end all you get is a depressed detective who catches the perp and then looks like he d just as soon jump off a cliff into the sea. I mean, it was a real upper. Now, maybe things will lighten up as the series goes on, I don t know. But I felt so down afterwards that I went into the kitchen and made waffles for dinner. With real maple

2 2 syrup. That actually did help. It made me feel like there s hope in the world. God s good waffles. But as I compare all of this with the message implicit in today s reading from Paul s letter to the Romans, it strikes me that things simply don t need to be this way. God, in his love, throws us a lifeline that, even in the darkest of circumstances, can produce hope in a willing heart. Paul, who understood suffering as much as anyone (and inflicted more than his share of it on Christians before his own conversion), gives us encouragement to lead us into a transformed life. Now, you won t directly find this in our passage, but I ve placed Paul s words inside of a sequence of five typical steps of discipleship. And the end game of this sequence is to take us from being receivers of grace to being dispensers of grace. In your outline I refer to them as five steps of apprenticeship. The sequence looks like this: First, we become aware of the futility of trying to change the world or ourselves under our own power. Second, we invest faith, and we surrender ourselves to God and his love. Third, we begin a life of freedom and personal transformation. Fourth, we offer ourselves for service to God and his kingdom. Fifth and finally, we ourselves become vessels of God s grace. These five steps may go in a slightly different order, and may also kind of blend together, but that s basically what they are. So Romans 6:12-23 can be found on p. 119 of the New Testament portion of your pew Bible. I d first like to call our attention to Paul s frank assessment of the human condition. I think it s fair to say that Paul sees exactly two possible trajectories for human beings: toward God or away from God. There s no standing still. Or to put it in the equally frank words of Bob Dylan a few years back It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you re gonna have to serve somebody. Paul even goes so far as to use the word slave. He says you re either a slave to sin, or to its opposite. So really, he s talking about what he sees as a basic human illusion, and that is the illusion that we enjoy unfettered freedom of will. Paul rejects the notion that we re all masters of our own destiny. He s essentially saying that, one way or another, we re wired to have a master; it s just a matter of whom or what that master will be in our life. Why is this? Because we re inbuilt with a void that only God can fill, and when we try to fill it with anything else, we eventually become enslaved. The counterfeit becomes our master. We give an idol power over us that it readily seizes. St. Augustine famously prayed to God, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. So, the restless heart does well to wisely choose its form of solace. This is why the first and most basic of the Ten Commandments is to have no other gods (idols) before Yahweh, the Creator God. It s a commandment given to us for our own good, because knowing and worshipping God is what makes us fully human.

3 3 Surrender to God is what makes us most fully ourselves, and it s what opens us up to receive life as God intends it. To illustrate the danger of rejecting this truth, all we need do, for instance, is to witness a young rebel who s fed up with being told what to do and what not to do. I ll take drugs if I want to! It s my body. It s not hurting anyone. Think that one through What was intended to serve us can quickly become our master. Alcohol and drugs are an obvious example, but the same is true for any substitute for God and His love: It can be romantic relationships, or money, or possessions, or video games, or depressing Welsh detective mysteries, or whatever. Whatever commands our energies will eventually become our master. And we can pretty much bet that whatever else we try to substitute for God will lead us away from Him. Idolatry, the fixation with (and even the worship of) anything other than God, is the most basic way to miss the mark, and it has predictable consequences. Its main consequence is futility, and the antidote is finding, trusting, and receiving God s gift of grace. It s admitting that our best efforts have fallen short in bringing us to goodness and to God, and then surrendering to his love and his lordship over our lives. The believers in Rome to whom Paul s writing have already walked the first two steps: futility and faith. Presumably they ve recognized a futility or at least an inadequacy in their own lives, and upon being drawn by the Holy Spirit, they ve invested their faith in Christ the Lord. And now Paul encourages them to make their surrender complete. He calls on them to remember that they have a new Master, and paradoxically His is a kingship over a breathtaking new realm of freedom and favor, and it needs to be safeguarded. So Paul says (verses 12-14), Therefore, don t let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who ve been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you re not under law but under grace. Put simply, Paul s saying, Remember who you are! You re a new creature. Don t be continuing to flirt with your old life. That stuff s old and dead. You re no longer living in slavery to sin and the cold and lifeless shackles of the law; you re living in the fresh air of God s freedom. Paul s talking about the joyful dance between our own better choices, and the supernatural work that God does within our spirits to transform us, as we create room for him to do so. It s like we start eating new, more nutritious food. We start breathing cleaner air. We start living in the way that s more fully human and godlier, all at the same time. By giving ourselves to God as his servants, his slaves, paradoxically we find a freedom that s more powerful (and infinitely healthier) than our old slavery.

4 4 So as we celebrate our newfound freedom in grace, that servant attitude is what Paul talks about in verses He basically talks about us becoming a new kind of slave. A voluntary slave. A slave by choice. We become slaves of obedience to God s life-giving ways; and slaves of righteousness slaves of doing right in His eyes. In our freedom we choose the only good kind of slavery: and that is the servanthood that comes from fully giving ourselves to God in order to fulfill God s timeless plan for us to become a blessing to all nations. That s what brings us to step 5. It s through our slavery to obedience and righteousness that we become vessels of grace, just as Jesus directed us to do before he ascended into heaven. Spreading the good news of Jesus. Loving and forgiving our neighbors, and even our enemies. Living honest, upright and moral lives. Sacrificing our own comfort for the good of others. Helping to free others from sin and sickness. And thus being an active part of the revolution of love, hope and healing that he launched in the rugged hills outside of Jerusalem all those years ago. It s a joyful obedience, and a surefire vaccine against feelings of meaninglessness. With this in mind I d like to conclude with an observation shared by many students of history. In his book Vanishing Grace Phillip Yancey writes of God s faithful people turning the tide against scorn and persecution over and over through history, by doing exactly what Jesus prescribed for us. For example, when the Roman persecutions were going on in the early centuries, Jesus followers banded together to do large scale, wellorganized charitable works on behalf of people with plague, unwanted children left for dead, and others with no hope, much to the chagrin of the leaders who were busily trying to vilify Christians. Their patient acts of love pumped life into a church that had been pushed to the edges of a hostile society. G. K. Chesterton says that Christianity has numerous times faced imminent doom, including the fall of the Roman Empire and the Islamic Conquest, only to be followed by dramatic renewal. He says, When the Faith had, to all appearances, gone to the dogs, it was the dog that died. And he adds, Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. Walking the steps of discipleship to become vessels of grace may well make us seed planters of another spectacularly fruitful era in God s kingdom. And our job is to be attentive to where the needs are in this world, physical and spiritual, and then to discern our part in meeting them. This life is far from an endless, pointless exercise in futility. It s actually an opportunity to be a unique part of the fulfillment of the greatest miracle in history: the establishment of God s good kingdom by flawed but forgiven people bringing abundant life to this planet. I believe this alone would be enough motivation for most of us. But I close with Paul s icing on the cake from our Romans reading. Because even helping our fellow human beings in their suffering isn t the final word in our life s story. It gets even better. Paul says in verse 22 that, not only does our servitude to God bring us

5 5 sanctification being set apart by God for special work but it also brings us literally and fully, into eternal life. In fact, Paul says, The end is eternal life. The end is the beginning. The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, he says. So if we ever feel ourselves being drawn into this age s dark mood of futility and hopelessness, my prayer is that we ll remember who we are in Christ, and why we re here. We ll remember why God put us here, now, in this place. And when we do, may God give us the joy, the wisdom and the power to be a light to our neighbors and even to the nations. Amen.