《The Biblical Illustrator – Romans (Ch. 6b~8a)》

IV. And now, the terminus of this railway journey to “the regions beyond” is what we call, also for the want of a better name, and to keep to our “cons” for your memory’s sake, congregation, “the end, everlasting life.” Right has been, left has been, right again has been, it is now straight on! On screams the engine whistle, and the piston plunges, and the wheels move. Night! Thunders the iron steed on its ringing track, smoothly on, steadily on, into the darkness. (John Robertson.)

The blessedness of believers

I. Their freedom from sin. Consider--

1. Wherein this freedom consists. It does not mean that they are made free from the being of sin. This will be the case by and by, when they shall be like Christ as well as see Him as He is. But it does mean that they are free from--

2. But a deliverance supposes a Deliverer. Did they make themselves free? Did creatures, ministers, or angels? No, it was the work of God Himself.

II. Their consecration to God’s service. Negative religion is not enough. It is not enough that you cease to do evil; you must learn to do well. It is not enough that you are made free from sin; you must become the servants of God.

1. God has every claim. We are His absolutely. He made us. Were He to suspend His sustaining influence we should relapse into nothingness. And you are not your own in a much nobler sense; you are bought with a price, and therefore you are bound to glorify God, etc.

2. Notice the nature of this service.

III. Their present privileges. The fruit of a tree is something from which we derive pleasure and profit, and by which it is known and identified. “Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.” What fruit?

1. True profit. In the days of Job, infidels asked, “What is the Almighty, that we should serve Him?” etc., and in the days of Malachi they were audacious enough to say, “It is vain to serve God,” etc. To all which the apostle returns a perfect answer: “Godliness is profitable to all things,” etc.

2. Safety. “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

3. Peace. “Great peace have they that love Thy law.” “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace,” etc.

4. Pleasure that deserves the name, pleasure that reaches the very soul, and produces sunshine and satisfaction there. “Blessed are the people that know the joyful sound,” etc.

5. Health, if it be good for you; sickness, if it be good for you; wealth, if it be good for you; reputation, if it be good for you; for “no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.” Therefore the Saviour says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” etc.

IV. Their final blessedness. “The end everlasting life.” (W. Jay.)

The blessed state of believers

I. They are free from sin.

1. Its accumulated guilt.

2. Its tyranny.

3. Its love.

4. Its defilement.

II. They are the servants of God.

1. Governed by His will.

2. Supported by His grace.

3. Interested in His cause.

III. Their fruit is unto holiness. The fruit of their--

1. Heart.

2. Lips.

3. Lives.

IV. Their end is everlasting life. A state of--

1. Uninterrupted and eternal union with Christ.

2. Active and delightful employment.

3. The highest enjoyment. (Biblical Museum.)

Servants to God.--

God’s servants

I. The ground of their service. They are God’s property (Titus 2:14; 1 Corinthians 6:19-20; 1 Peter 1:18).

II. Its dignity. It is a great thing to be a servant of an earthly monarch; but what a dignified and dignifying service is spoken of here! Contrast it with that out of which we are taken.

III. Its freedom. Observe the words “become servants.” Although the introduction to His service is an act of grace towards you, you are not forced into it contrary to your will (2 Corinthians 5:14). It is a service of love, the yoke is easy and the burden light. This service is perfect freedom.

IV. Its privileges. A good master--

1. Provides for his servants, thinks for his servants. Oh, how God’s servants are provided for! what angels’ food, what raiment, what protection!

2. Upholds his servants, and our Master will uphold His. His name is upon them, His honour is identified with them, their cause is His. If one of the servants of the Queen, representing us in a foreign land, be insulted, in a moment the whole country is in arms.

V. Its characteristics and duties.

1. A good servant is described to us in Scripture; he has--

2. There is a beautiful directory for servants of the Lord in 2 Timothy 1:1-18 and

2. A good servant must--

VI. Its future. How the Spirit loves to light up that future (Colossians 3:24; John 12:26; Revelation 22:1-21.; Luke 12:37)! (M. Rainsford.)

Ye have your fruit unto holiness.--

Fruit unto holiness

I. God’s glory requires it (John 15:8).

II. Christ’s fulness requires it. For what purpose has He this fulness, but that He may give it out to us as the root to the branches grafted into it. What we want is faith to draw upon that fulness. There is life, truth, strength, holiness enough in Jesus, to carry us triumphantly through every difficulty; but the stint and straitening is in our own faith.

III. The spirit’s inhabitation requires it. Will God put His Spirit into us, and be content that we should walk at the low rate at which men walk who have no such privileges? “The fruit of the Spirit is love,” etc.

IV. The saint’s peace requires it. How much unhappiness we bring upon ourselves by the devious ways we take, the dark paths we wander into, and by the neglect of the means God has provided for our being strengthened and helped, and for our having the joy of the Lord for our strength. (M. Rainsford.)

Fruit unto holiness

1. Two great principles pervade and rule the universe--sin and holiness. There are but these two. There will ever be these two. Now that the second has entered, it would seem neither can be wholly destroyed.

2. It is to one of these two principles we are directed in the text. As the dark ground on which it may best appear, look first at the other. Evil, wrong, sin--the first word betokening its nature, the second its opposition to right, the third its relation to law--what a curse it has been to creation! Gather in thought all the evils which now afflict humanity, add to them all those under which creation groans, add still all those which in another world will continue forever--and you see the elements of that evil thing which has mysteriously sprung up in God’s universe; which He hates, which angels deplore, and which we call sin. It is like emerging from a dark tunnel to sweet air and clear sunshine, to turn from this subject to the one before us.

I. What is holiness?

1. It has many counterfeits.

2. The simplest definition of holiness is conformity to God. So far as we can understand God’s holiness, it consists in infinite rectitude of thought, feeling, nature, and it is essential to Him, so that without it He could not be. He is the Holy One. This holiness regulates all He does. But who can stand in His holy place to gaze upon and imitate Him?

Though we cannot do this, however, recollect He has given us reflections of His holiness.

1. God’s Word is a reflection of Himself. In a book you get a man’s thoughts and spirit. All its injunctions and prohibitions are on the side of holiness. By common consent it is “the Holy Bible,” and we are like God, holy as He is holy, in proportion as we “look into the perfect law,” catch and reflect its image.

2. Not in a book only, but in a living person has God exhibited His holiness. How holy Christ was! If you cannot imitate the original, then look at the copy. Our holiness consists in being like Christ. As you look at Christ, too, you see what holiness is not, as well as what it is. It is not asceticism. Christ “was in the world”; yet He was holy. It is not absence from temptation. He was in “all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” It is not morbid sensibility, ever weighing experience and scrutinising motive. Christ was active, “went about doing good,” was healthy in His moral temperament. It was not unnaturalness, the assumption of anything peculiar, whether in dress, speech, or behaviour. Christ was perfectly natural; the light shone because it was there.

3. Though this is perhaps a sufficient definition, it is not a complete one, for there are elements which go to make up our holiness which could not exist in Christ. In order to holiness in us there must be contrition for sin, and this of course Jesus had not.

4. Still, the definition is not complete. Were it possible to express in a word the nature of absolute holiness, we could not do better than adopt the word “Love.” God is love, Christ was love, and the nearest approach we can make to perfect holiness is pure love.

II. Why should we be holy? Why should we not; what reason can be urged for sin? It is unreasonable. Holiness is the highest reason.

1. Consider--

2. In thus gathering motives from the throne, the Cross, the work of the Spirit, forget not personal ones. The apostle urges these strongly.

3. Motives of a less personal kind yet remain. As believers formed into a collective fellowship, the object of the Church is two fold--its own culture, and the benefit of the world. Both these will be best secured by growing holiness.

III. How may holiness be best secured?

1. Negatively.

2. Positively. Holiness--

Conclusion:

1. Holiness is within the reach of all. Many things are not so. Wealth, fame, honour, position may be coveted by many, who strive to obtain, but win not. The highest distinction to be won on earth is open to the meanest.

2. Holiness is not destroyed by occasional failures. Try, try again; the steps backward may help the spring forward; the wave receding becomes stronger in its rebound.

3. The conscious absence of perfect holiness should endear the atonement. “If any man sin”--and who does not daily?--“we have an Advocate with the Father,” etc.

4. In heaven holiness will be complete. (J. Viney.)

Fruitfulness a Christian’s glory

As the glory of a healthy apple tree is its fruit, so the glory of a genuine Christian is his usefulness. He does not merely blossom out with a good profession; he bears fruit with all his might and main. There is not a sapless twig or a barren bough on the whole tree which is planted by the rivers of grace but yieldeth its fruit every month. (T. L. Cuyler.)

Fruit unto holiness

It is remarkable that Paul speaks of holiness as the fruit, and not as the principle of our service to God--as the effect which that service has upon the character, and not as the impelling moral power which led to the service. And this accords with verse 19, where they who had yielded their members servants to iniquity are represented as having thereby reaped fruit unto iniquity--or, in other words, as having, by their own sinful work, aggravated and confirmed the sinfulness of their own characters. And, on the other hand, they who had yielded their members servants to righteousness, are represented as having reaped thereby fruit unto holiness--or, in other words, they, by doing that which was right, rectified their own moral frames; and a perseverance in holy conduct made them at length to be holy creatures. This is the very process laid down in the verse before us. In virtue of having become servants to God, they had their fruit unto holiness. No doubt there is a germ of holiness at the very outset of the new life, but still a coarser principle of it may predominate at the first; and the finer principles of it may grow into establishment afterwards. The good things may be done, somewhat doggedly as it were, at the will of another; but the assiduous doing of the hand may at length carry along with it the delight of the heart; and this certainly marks a stage of higher and more saintly advancement in personal Christianity. It evinces a growing assimilation to God--who does what is right, not in force of another’s authority, but in force of the free and original propensities of His own nature to all that is excellent. By such a blessed progress of sanctification as this do we at length cease to be servants and become sons; the Spirit of adoption is shed upon us, and we feel the glorious liberty of God’s own children. And when the transition is so made that the work of servitude becomes a work of felicity and freedom, then is it that a man becomes like unto God, and holy even as He is holy. One most important use to be drawn from this argument is, that you are not to suspend the work of literal obedience till you are prepared for rendering unto God a spiritual obedience. In every case it is right to be always doing what is agreeable to the will of God. There may be a mixture at first of the spirit of bondage, so that the apostle would say of these babes in Christ, “I speak unto you not as unto spiritual but as unto carnal”; yet still it is good to give yourselves over, amid all the crude and embryo and infant conceptions of a young disciple, to the direct service of God. Break loose from your iniquities at this moment. Turn you to all that is palpably on the side of God’s law. Do plainly what God bids, and on the direct impulse, too, of God’s authority; and the fruit of your thus entering upon His service will be the perfecting at length of your own holiness, purified from the flaw of legal bondage or of mercenary selfishness--a holiness that finds its enjoyment in the service itself, and not in the hope of the great reward which is to come after the keeping of the commandments; but a holiness upheld by the present experience, that in the keeping of the commandments there is a great reward. (T. Chalmers, D. D.)

And the end everlasting life.

The believer’s end

I. There is something very solemn in that word, “the end!” (Proverbs 23:18). What of our end? Look around you and see the speculations, the anxieties, the labours of the men of this world--they all will have an end; see men of pleasure, living for pleasure--the laughter, the songs, the entertainments and revellings will all have an end; and this world will have an end. Every day, every journey, every conflict, every life has an end. What of our end? It is sure; the end will come, and it may be very near. “Oh, that we were wise, that we did consider our latter end.” Yet death is not the end of you. The dust will return to the earth whence it came, but the spirit will have gone to God who gave it--whether clothed in the righteousness and washed in the blood of Christ, or not, is the solemn question.

II. But the text speaks of the believer’s end. The end of his pilgrimage, his conflict, his prayers, his faith; “receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls,” or as it is here expressed, “everlasting life.” Who can fully comprehend the subject? Life is the perfection of being, and everlasting life is the perfection of life. All that the love of God can bestow, all that the blood of Christ can procure, all that the indwelling Holy Ghost can enable us to enjoy, this is everlasting life--the fruition of the fruit of all the travail of Christ’s soul, the enjoyment of all the fulness of God, everlastingly to behold His glory, to be assimilated to Christ, to have mortality swallowed up of life--this is “everlasting life.” The consummation of all possible privileges, the fulfilment of all Divine promises, the issue of all God’s purposes, God’s rest of love. How small the world looks in contrast with such an end, and what a poor consolation will it be for any of us to have attained even the whole world, if we lose it. (M. Raisford.)

The life everlasting

More than 1200 years ago, when Bishop Paulinus came to Edwin, king of Deira, and asked permission to preach the good news to his people, that monarch gathered his nobles and wise men to take counsel together. Then one of the thanes arose and said, “Truly the life of a man in this world, compared with the life we wet not, is on this wise: It is as when thou, O king, art sitting at supper with thy aldermen and thanes in the time of winter, when the hearth is lighted in the midst and the hall is warm, but without the rains and the snow are falling, and the winds are howling; then cometh a sparrow and flieth through the house, she cometh in by one door and goeth out by another. While she is in the house, she feeleth not the storm of winter, but yet when a little moment of rest is past she flieth again into the storm and passeth from our eyes. So is it with the life of man; it is but for a moment; what goeth afore it, and what cometh after it, wot we not at all. Wherefore if these strangers can tell us aught, that we may know whence man cometh and whither he goeth, let us hearken to them and follow their law.” This beautiful parable is a witness to us both of the darkness of man without Christ, and also of the greatness of the gift which God has given us through His Son. God has not made us for Himself, redeemed us through Christ, given us His Spirit to dwell in and sanctify us, to cast us into the abyss of death. The whole revelation of the gospel, as admirably summed up in the Apostles’ Creed, is a pledge that our end is everlasting life. Note by way of introduction that this life will be--

1. A continuation of a present personal life.

2. A fully developed and perfected spiritual life, of which we have the pledge and foretaste here. Hence our Lord speaks of both in the same terms (Matthew 25:46; John 3:36; Joh_5:24; 1 John 3:14-15). From what we know, therefore, of the spiritual life here, we may gather what it will be by and by. Everlasting life will be--

I. The complete and final emancipation from sin. Here we have victory over its dominion, but it never ceases to harass us. Here we may go to the fountain for cleansing, but the defilement which necessitates this is a sore trial. But yonder there will be no tempter, no predisposition to evil, no bad examples, no world to allure, no flesh to weaken and ensnare.

II. The immediate knowledge of God. We have that here too (John 17:3), but how fragmentary is it! We know but in part, and see only through a glass darkly. We know Him, yet we know Him not. We hear but a whisper of God’s ways and see but the skirt of His robe. But we shall then see Him as He is, and know even as we are known--know His character, attributes, work, ways, and have in that knowledge fully, as we have it now in a measure, everlasting life.

III. A life of action. True, heaven is described as a perpetual Sabbath; and compared with this feverish state the life to come will be a life of rest--rest from sorrow, suffering, conflict, doubt, weariness, and, above all, from sin. But rest without action is monotonous, and more irksome than toil; and it cannot be that the whole condition of our existence will be changed, and our very nature unmade, when we enter the heavenly rest.

1. What is the rest of the heavenly host? They indeed cry “Holy, holy, holy,” as they veil their faces, but they have wings and feet as servants ever ready to do the will of Him that sitteth on the throne. And we read that they are “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1:1-14), and surely if we are to be “like the angels” we shall be like them in this. As for the service, I do not imagine that the glorified will have reached such perfection as to need no instruction or aid. There will be no sin and no infirmities, but there will still be diversities of character and attainment. And then who knows what opportunities of service will be afforded in the distant provinces of God’s kingdom, and on what errands of mercy and hope we may be employed.

2. God “worketh hitherto.” His rest has been a rest of action. And if we are to be like Him our life will be one of ceaseless beneficence.

IV. A life in the immediate, unveiled presence of Christ. One element, of course, will be reunion with those we have loved on earth; but eternal communion with Christ will be its perfection, in that will be comprehended all that the heart can desire. Paul had dear friends, yet when he looked forward to his heavenly rest, everlasting union with Christ was the burden of his hope. Yet that was because to him to live was Christ. Here we enjoy Christ’s presence by faith; but our communion is interrupted, and He is unseen. But in the life to come we shall see Him as He is, behold His glory, inherit the kingdom He has prepared for us, and share His throne for evermore. (Bp. Perowne.)

Everlasting life, an education

Eternal life is not a gift as of something fixed, finished, accomplished, and passed over. It is a gift as education is. It is something wrought patiently and long in a man. Eternal life is a gift to us as the sunlight is to the flowers--an influence which enters into them and fashions them. Eternal life from the hand of God is a gift to mankind, as healing is a gift from the physician to the patient. It is that which is slowly wrought in them. Eternal life is wrought in us by the power of the Highest, by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. And the hope of the future is that God’s Spirit, entering into the soul, will give it eternal life. (H. W. Beecher.)

Everlasting life: its progressiveness

Eternity will be one glorious morning, with the sun ever climbing higher and higher; one blessed springtime, and yet richer summer--every plant in full flower, but every flower the bud of a lovelier. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

Verse 23

Romans 6:23

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life.

The wages of sin and the gift of God

I. The wages of sin is death. “Wages” here means “the rations” supplied as pay to a soldier. If sin is your commander, you will have “death” to eat as your pay. “Sin” is treated as a person, even as “God” is, and the more we treat it as a living enemy, the more we are likely to fight against it manfully. “Death” may be defined as separation. Spiritual death is a present separation from God. Physical death is a separation of body and soul, and the separation of both from this world. Eternal death is final, total separation of body and soul from heaven, and from God forever. Now we are prepared to unravel the sentence.

1. God treats “sin” as a master. “Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin,” and “his servants ye are to whom ye obey.” Now sin is any violation of God’s will which a man does with his eyes open. We can make no scale of sin. The only measure of the sin is the light which it darkens, and the grace which it resists. Bad temper at home--pride and unkindness--want of truth--self-indulgence and sloth--lust and uncleanness--meanness--“covetousness, which is idolatry”--a cherished scepticism--and all the negatives--no prayer, no love to God, no usefulness--all, and many else, are equally “sin.”