When you're a slave to sin, Life is never truly satisfying. The only way to change that is to become a servant of God instead. Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah takes a closer look at how to make that transformation and how it can fill your life with peace, hope, and peace. hope and fulfillment.
To introduce the conclusion of his special message, Finding Freedom Through Slavery, here's David. Hey, thank you so much for joining us as we close out this month together. We've had a great month talking about some principles from the Word of God that give us perspective on life. And perspective is everything. You know, if you don't have the perspective of heaven, you only have what earthly principles can give you, and that'll never be enough.
So we've added to your reservoir of truth and we've added to your principles of living and we hope you're not just listening to this truth, but that you're applying it to your life. We'll get to the lesson in just a moment, but I only have today and tomorrow to let you know that my friend Robert Morgan has given us a wonderful treasure for the 250th anniversary of our nation. This treasure is a book. called 100 Bible Verses That Changed America. that made America what it is.
This 350-page hardback book is available to you as a resource. For your gift to Turning Point during the month of July. All you have to do is ask for it, but send a gift of any size to Turning Point, and we're happy to make this book available. Thank you for being an investor in this ministry because we're making a difference around the world. People are coming to Christ.
Churches are being renewed, and God is being honored and glorified. You're a part of that, and we thank you. Be sure and ask for the book when you send your gift, and it'll be on its way.
Now here's today's lesson. Let's open our hearts to it. Paul said to the Romans, You were enslaved to sin. But then you were enlightened by the mold of doctrine into which you were poured. And Paul's concept here is incredible to me.
He said, You were slaves to sin. What is the power that will take you out of that slavery, being enlightened by a form of doctrine? Doctrine, which changes your life. What is doctrine? It's the systematic teaching of the Word of God.
It's not church light. I came across these sarcastic words by Wilbur Reese, see if they don't resonate with something you know. He wrote, I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep. but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine.
I want ecstasy, not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I'd like to buy just $3 worth of God, please. Did you know that's where a lot of folks are today?
Don't give us doctrine. Give us something that makes us feel good, but feel good doesn't change lives. And what Paul is doing while he writes to the Romans is giving us some great truth here. He's saying, You were enslaved to sin, but you were changed by the form of doctrine to which you were exposed. And then, through this enlightenment, you were emancipated, you were set free.
And then it starts all over again. Having been enslaved and enlightened and emancipated, now they're enslaved again. Notice verse 18: and you became slaves of righteousness. Once again, you can't be slaves to two masters. These Romans, as Paul writes to them, had been enslaved to sin, and then they heard the gospel and the mold or the truth that was poured into them, and they were enlightened, and they became Christians, and they were emancipated.
And now the Bible says, And now, having been set free from the old slavery, you become slaves to Christ. Wow.
Now How are these things alike? From the characteristics of slavery to the cycle of slavery, we now see the comparisons of it. And I want you to notice two phrases in verse 19 that put this together for us grammatically. He says, Just as you presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness to holiness.
Now, here's Paul's teaching: He's saying, There was a time when you presented your members, which is your faculties, your mind, your heart, your soul, your body. Your members, he said, you presented your members to slavery, to sin. Just as you did it then, so now do that same thing to your new master. to Christ. Paul says that our response to grace is to be as absolute as our response was to sin.
The Apostle uses this parallel language to make this point. First of all, giving us the illustration of the old slavery. He says, Just as you once presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, Isn't that what we did when we were not Christians? Before coming to Christ, we gave ourselves to sin. We didn't even think it was a bad thing.
It was just what everybody did. What did you do when you didn't know Christ? You did what you wanted to do. What was best for you? What made you happy?
What gave you pleasure? What turned you on? That's where the world is today. We made our bodies available to Satan to use for whatever purposes. And when Paul uses the word uncleanness, he's talking about our outward life.
And when he uses the word lawlessness, he's talking about our inward life. And when he describes it as leading to more lawlessness, what he's telling us is that sin is not static, it's dynamic. That there isn't anything such as just being In a holding pattern in your sin. Here's the way it looks, folks: you're either getting better or you're getting worse, but you're not standing still. Aristotle years before Paul.
Gave us this insight in a little paragraph I found. He said, Each action which we do in life is voluntary. But with each voluntary action, our disposition becomes increasingly involuntary. Over a period of time, we continue to make choices, but the choices are influenced by our former choices until a predisposition toward right or wrong choices develops within us. Isn't that true?
Let me give you the modern paradigm of that that you've probably heard before. It goes like this: sow and act. Reap a habit.
So a habit Reap a character.
Sow a character, reap a life. There is no such thing, young people, as a unimportant choice. Every choice we make prepares us to make the next choice and influences the next choice that we make, which influences the next choice, so that if you sow an act, it will become a habit. And if you sow a habit, it will become your character. And if you sow a character, it will become your life.
Paul talks about the old slavery, but now he wants us to understand how that applies to who we are in Christ. Notice verse 19.
So now. Present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. We are to take ourselves, and just as we allowed Sin and pleasure and Satan and all of that just to have us. We're to come now to Christ, and in the same way, we're to say to Him, Lord God, I am your slave. Take me, use me for your purposes.
Whatever you want, that's what I want. Tell me what to do, Lord. I'm ready to do it. Where are we going today, Lord? I'm your slave.
I want to be your servant. And as we follow this pattern in Christ, we will discover. That yielding ourselves to righteousness will have the same exponential effect on us as unrighteousness had before. If we go on living this righteous life and practicing it with all of our might and energy and all of our time, here's what we will find. We will find that the process that went on before, in which we went from bad to worse and became violer and violer is upside down and reversed.
You become cleaner and cleaner and purer and purer and holier and holier and more and more conformed into the image of the Son of God. That's how it works. You make a choice for God, and it makes the next choice for God easier to make. And little by little, you sow these choices of righteousness, and these choices become habits, and these habits become your character, and then your character becomes your life. One of the things this proves, if it doesn't prove anything else, men and women, is this: there's no such thing.
At staying the same as you are. You're either getting more and more holy or getting more and more sinful. Oh no, you say, Pastor, I'm in a holding pattern. No, you're not. You may think you are, but you're not.
You're even going toward Christ or you're moving away from him.
So once again, I want to ask you, whose slave are you?
Now, Paul is going to add another important part to this puzzle. He's going to show us the difference between these two slaveries, the contrast of them. And he's going to do this in a very interesting way, and it's real simple to see it because it just bounces right out of the text. In our old slavery, before we came to Christ, there were three things that we had: we had a freedom. And that freedom produced fruit, and that fruit ended up in our future, right?
In our new slavery, We have a freedom. And that freedom produces a fruit, and that fruit Becomes our future.
Now, what was it like in the old life? Did I have freedom? Yes. You know what your freedom was from? you were free from doing anything good.
That's it. You were free from good. You say, Pastor, where'd you get that?
Well, look down in your Bibles. In verse 20, it says, For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. When you are not a Christian, when you don't know Christ, Righteousness is no big deal. Whether it's right or wrong becomes less and less important. And if that wasn't true when Paul wrote Romans, boy, is it true today.
Nobody stops to even ask, is this right or wrong or moral? They just do it because it's what I want to do. That's sin. Doing what you want to do without regard to what God wants is not righteousness. And what Paul is saying here: before you came to Christ, you had a freedom.
You know what your freedom was? Your freedom to ignore anything good or righteous or anything else and just do whatever you wanted to do. You felt free to do that, didn't you? That's where we get the word free love. Free love says I can do whatever I want and there are no rights or wrongs and it doesn't matter.
But what is the fruit of that freedom? Notice again in verse 21: What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? And you know what Paul says? When you lived that way, you know what it produced? It produced the very things you're ashamed of right now as you look back on your life.
Anybody beside your pastor got any things you're ashamed of when you think of your old life? Aren't you glad God took that shame away at the cross? But you still remember it, don't you? And what is the future of this kind of Freedom that leads to the fruit of the things you're ashamed of. What is the future of it?
Notice. Verse 21b. For the end of those things is what, class? Death. It's death.
The Bible says that you can live any way you want to. Do you want to give yourself to sin? Have you ever known people that do that? I mean, not just in a quiet way, but in an overt way. You just think they're trying to do everything they can that's evil as fast as they can do it, piling it on top of one another.
You have the choice to do that? Absolutely. You're a free person. You do that, and I'm going to tell you what will happen: you'll create shameful conduct. But that's not the worst.
The worst is it'll take you to death. It'll probably put you in the grave before you should go there, but ultimately it will give you the second death, which is separation from God forever and ever and ever. I know you don't want to go there. You don't want to be separated from God. The second death is separation from God.
And the Bible says that when you give yourself to sin, It produces unrighteousness in your life, and the end thereof is death. Do you know what the Bible says? Listen to this. The Bible says there is a way which seems right to a man. But the end of it is death.
Seems right to men today to say, I can do whatever I want. Nobody's going to tell me what to do. What do you mean there are rights and wrongs? My right is my right. Don't tell me what's right.
I'm not going to tell you what's right, but God is. And you choose to go the other way, you can make that choice. But you don't get to choose what happens after you make that choice. Notice how that works in the new slavery. The new slavery looks like this: but having been set free from sin, We've become slaves to God.
Which kind of freedom would you rather have? Freedom from sin or freedom from righteousness? When you become a Christian, does that mean you don't have any temptations that you never sinned? No, it means you don't have to sin anymore. You will, but you're not bound to it, you're not tied to it, it's not inevitable.
Because he sets you free from it. And what's the fruit of that freedom? Fruit to holiness. You start doing things that are good, and better, and righteous, and honorable. And what's the future?
Verse 22, and the end is everlasting life. You see those two contrasts? The freedom, the fruit, the future. For the old nature, for the new. Easy to see the difference between the two of them.
And now we come to the conclusion. Which is what everybody loves when the pastor says that.
Now we come to the conclusion. But it's just the conclusion of the text not the conclusion of the sermon.
So Verse 23 summarizes it all up. And do you know this verse? It's the end of this passage, and it's a summary, and here's what it says: For the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now, Paul says that, and that's a verse that's been used to bring many people to salvation, but in reality, it is much more than a salvation verse. Hear what he is saying. For those of you who continue to live on in the old slavery of sin, the wages that you're going to be paid is death. But here's the interesting part of this verse: the word for wages that Paul uses here. Is a special Greek word that most people will never understand unless somebody tells them and it means everything.
The word for wages is the word opsonia. And this refers to, listen to me, ration money. Wages that you're paid daily, your food money. Money that was given to the slaves to put in their pockets every day so that when it was time for them to break, they had some money, they had some rations. To eat, a watch.
Paul says, the rations of sin is death. Most people think this verse means that if you live the wrong way and you sin when you die, you're going to get paid in a lump sum. Paul says no. No, no. You're going to get paid every day.
all the way to the end. And then the ultimate payment is the lump sum. How many of you know that when you're walking in sin and you're not walking with Christ? Every day there's a little bit of payment for that. It's the uneasiness in your heart.
It's the dissatisfaction with your life. It's the frustration with your relationships. It's the realization that something's missing. There's a hole in your heart that's not been filled with God. And those rations are paid every day, every day.
The wages of sin is death. The rations for sin are death. When you talk to somebody who's just come to Christ and hasn't been a Christian so long that they've forgotten it. And they'll tell you, boy, is that ever true When you don't know Christ, you get paid every day for living a sinful life. But listen to me, that's only one alternative.
But The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God. is eternal life. through Jesus Christ our Lord. Would you rather have the wages or the gift? Would you rather have death or life?
Would you rather have a life every day with the smell of death all over it or a life every day? with the aroma of eternity poured all over it. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is the eternal life. through Jesus Christ our Lord. You gotta serve somebody.
Whose slave are you? Are you a servant of sin or are you a servant of Christ?
Some of you say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, I'd become a servant of Jesus Christ, but frankly, it sounds boring to me. Did you know Paul made his choice to become a servant. Paul, in three of his letters, begins the letter by saying, Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.
Some of you think that if you live an absolute life of obedience and service to Jesus Christ, it's going to be boring. But I assure you, it is not. How could it be boring to walk in step with the Creator of the universe? Are you looking for a boring life?
Well, you may not want to follow Christ. If you want to be bored, Did you know God didn't create us to live this little safe in a bubble life? That's not what being a Christian is. As you begin to live more and more with Jesus Christ and follow His direction in your life, you're living life on the edge. It's an adventure, it's an excitement.
It gets me up early every morning, keeps me up late at night.
Sometimes it keeps me awake at night. Walking with Jesus Christ. It's an exciting life, and God meant it to be that.
So, becoming a servant to Jesus Christ and turning over your agenda and your life to Him, that's not boring, man. You're taking an upward step. You're going to the next level because the most exciting person that ever walked on this earth was the savior of the world. And he wants to enroll you in servitude to him so that he can give you. The life you always wanted.
Don't come to me and say being a Christian is boring. Don't tell me that. I know better. Eugene Peterson, who paraphrased the message, wrote this: He said, The word Christian means different things to different people. To one person, it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending.
To another person, it means a risky, surprise-filled venture. Live tiptoe at the edge of expectation. If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life. God is always Full of surprises. And one of the reasons why sometimes when you follow Christ, it's hard.
to make long-range plans. Because he doesn't always tell you ahead of time. You've got to sit loose in the saddle when you're a disciple of Christ. Because he's got great plans for you. He doesn't always give them to you all the way in the future, he gives them to you one day at a time.
Isn't he a surprising God? And you know, I tell people on my staff, I don't like surprises, but I like God's surprises. I came across this, and I think more than anything I've ever read in my life, it describes. how the life Of service to Jesus Christ. rolls out.
Let me just tell you, I know that all of us here aren't in the same place.
Some of you have been Christians a long time, and you've been just living life. As safe as you can, not wanting to get out of the comfort zone. I don't know who wrote this because I can't find the author, but I'm going to read it to you and you see if you don't understand what I'm saying. Listen to this. At first, I saw God as my observer and my judge, keeping track of the things I did wrong, so as to know whether or not I merited heaven or hell when I die.
Alright. He was out there sort of like a president. I mean, I recognized his picture when I saw it. But I really didn't know him. But later on, when I met Christ, It seemed as though life were rather like a bike ride.
But it was a tandem bike. And I noticed the Christ was in the back helping me pedal. I don't know exactly when it was that he suggested we change places. But life hadn't been the same since. When I had control, I knew the way.
I mean, it was rather boring, in fact, but it was predictable. It was the shortest distance between two points. But when he took the lead, when I got out of the front seat and he got in the front seat. He knew all the delightful long cuts. Up mountains, through rocky places, at breakneck speeds.
It was all I could do to hang on, and even though it looked like madness. He would just turn around and say to me, keep peddling. I worried and I was anxious and I asked, where are you taking me, Lord? And he laughed and he didn't answer. And I started to learn to trust him.
I forgot my boring life and entered into the adventure. And when I'd say, I'm scared, he'd lean back and touch my hand. He took me to people with gifts that I needed, gifts of healing and acceptance and joy. They gave me gifts to take on my journey, my Lord's and mine. And we were off again, and he said.
Give the gifts away. They're extra baggage, too much weight.
So I did. to the people we met, and I found that in giving I received, and still our burden was light. I did not trust him at first. in control of my life. If you want to know the truth, I thought he was going to wreck it.
But he knows Bike secrets. He knows how to make it bend to take sharp corners. He knows how to jump to clear high rocks. He knows how to fly to short and scary passages. And I'm learning.
to shut up and peddle. In the strangest places, and I'm beginning to enjoy the view and the cool breeze on my face. With my delightful, constant companion, Jesus Christ. And when I'm sure I just can't do any more. He just smiles and says, Pedal.
That's what it means to be a servant of Christ. And my friends. If you're not a Christian, it starts with taking Him as your Savior and Lord. But if you're a Christian and you've been holding on to the control of your life because you are afraid that if you give it to Christ, he might wreck it. I want to promise you, I was there once.
And I gave it all to him, and he has done more in my life than I could ever have dreamed about. I promise you, his plan for you is better than your plan for you. And when you come to the place when you're willing to accept that and you say, Lord, okay, no conditions, no holes barred. Here I am. Take my life.
Get ready. for the adventure of your life. The greatest sense of freedom you ever know is the freedom you know. As a slave. of Jesus Christ.
Just to get up every day and make it your goal to do whatever he tells you to do, no variation, no alternative. I don't know if we've ever lived a perfect day like that. But when we live that way... as servants of the Lord, slaves to the master. we find the ultimate joy that is available to us as Christians.
Tomorrow I'm going to talk with you about something that I'm very familiar with because I've taught on this for years and years. You might think it's a stewardship message, but it's not. It's just a principle message. It's called getting through giving. And we're going to learn that we receive if we give, we receive what we give, we receive more than we give, and we receive after we give.
Follow that tomorrow. Laid out. in principle. I hope you'll join us for the final message in July. As we open our Bibles together tomorrow, I'll see you then.
Thanks for listening today. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note and let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Right to Turning Point, PO Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163.
Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org/slash radio or calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of Robert J. Morgan's book, 100 Bible Verses That Made America. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also view over 1200 of Dr.
Jeremiah's sermons on any screen, anytime you like, on our Turning Point Plus streaming service for a monthly gift of any amount. Visit turningpointplus.org for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow for another special message from Dr. David Jeremiah here on Turning Point.
