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

Sin sadly recollected

I heard one of the best men I ever knew, seventy-five years of age, say, “Sir, God has forgiven all the sins of my lifetime, I know that; but there is one sin I committed at twenty years of age that I never will forgive myself for. It sometimes comes over me overwhelmingly, and it absolutely blots out my hope of heaven.” (T. De Witt Talmage.)

Terrible fruits of sin

The worldly spirit makes possession the object of life. Christ makes being, character, the object. The world asks, “What do you possess?” God asks, “What are you?” A gentleman once said to a wicked man, “You do not look as if you had prospered by your wickedness.” “I have not prospered at it,” cried the man. “With half the time and energy I have spent I might have been a man of property and character. But I am a homeless wretch; twice I have been in State prison. I have made acquaintance with all sorts of miseries; but I tell you, my worst punishment is in being what I am.” Without doubt it would be delightful to have the possessions of an angel, but it would be ten thousand times better to be an angel. Not what have I, but what am I? not what shall I gain, but what shall I be? is the true question of life.

The wages of sin in time

The author of evil has ever tempted with a lie, and offers what it is not in his power to give. “Ye shall be as gods,” was his first promise; “ye shall not surely die.” But mark its fulfilment: the image of God was shattered; “sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” And when the Second Adam was shown “all the kingdoms of the world,” the devil said, “All this power will I give Thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will, I give it” (Daniel 2:21; 1 Chronicles 29:11-12). It was false. It is always so. In answering the question, What are the wages of sin in time? my reply must be--

I. Sin does not pay what it promises. I do not deny that sin has its pleasures, nor that the worldly may obtain certain advantages not to be found in the way of religion; but I assert that those who have made the perilous trial have not received what they expected; sin has paid them in debased coin. Take, e.g.

1. The pleasures promised by the sensual appetites, painted in voluptuous day dreams, or as sung by poets who profane the gift of song; all is bright, exhilarating, delicious; but the palled profligate will tell you that the mad pleasure was disappointing as well as brief, and that there is a thirst left which it is sin to satisfy and agony to deny. While for those who have thrown themselves into the current of worldly dissipation, till the jaded soul has ceased to live for God, nothing is more common than the self-condemning excuse that they are weary of a life which they persuade themselves they are obliged to lead.

2. And so it is with wealth, the glittering bait which some pursue in despite of the laws of God, but many more by that respectable covetousness which hardens the heart to the love of God and man and the influence of His Spirit. And for what? It is idle to undervalue the comforts which wealth can command; but it would be as idle to deny that the pleasure of possession is alloyed by its cares, and fades quickly with its novelty; that the habits formed by acquiring frequently preclude from enjoying (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

3. Praise, honour, power, again, are among sin’s promises, but lose their worth precisely as far as they are obtained by sin. As the result of honest duty and self-sacrifice, especially when from holier motives, these have their value, but when attained by sinful compliances, or hypocritical pretence, in the unwilling judgment of the inner man, as honours undeserved they are worthless, and conscience contradicts the voice of praise; and the fruits of reputation, which are held out as an encouragement to persevering duty, when grasped by the hand of sin, become like apples of Sodom. Again sin has shuffled her wages; she has paid her servants with a lie.

II. But we are not to think that sin has no wages in this life. She has them, and for the most part they are duly paid. Note--

1. The effects of sin upon man’s outward fortunes and circumstances, which, although not uniform when they do follow, they follow as the effects of sin; when they do not follow, it is because they have been, in spite of sin, diverted or delayed. The ruined spendthrift, who has destroyed the means of gratification while strengthening the appetite for indulgence, and who has involved others, perhaps, in common misery; the palled voluptuary, who has overtaxed the powers of nature, and bears passions still unslaked in an effete and feeble body, suffering, weary, and querulous, unloving and unloved, the very wreck of what was once a man; the doting drunkard, alternating his miserable hours of mad mirth and maudlin penitence, enslaved by a habit which disgusts although it masters him, and sinking with weakened mind and trembling limbs to an early grave; the poor lost woman, whom folly led on to sire, and sin launched into the full current of passion, and her name became a reproach, and the door of return was shut, and excitement was a necessity, and there was remorse and loathing, but no penitence, till vice and disease had done their ghastly work, and death closed the short and fevered scene; the dishonoured man of business, who, under the cover of a high character, was tempted to gamble with his credit, then to retrieve his losses by dishonesty, till his astute schemes broke down by their own weight, the disguise fell off, and amidst the curses of those whom he has impoverished and betrayed he sinks into disgrace and ruin; or, most fearful retribution of all, the irreligious parent, heart-struck to see his children reproducing his own vices and pressing on deafly on the road to endless ruin to which he first had pointed them the path--these are witnesses which meet us everywhere, all testifying that the wages of sin are sorrow, disappointment, and misery, all replying with melancholy unanimity tot the apostle’s question. “The end of those things is death.”

2. But the outward course of retribution is crossed by many exceptions, and often, indeed, the heaviest judgment here may be prosperity. “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.” There are, besides, many sins telling less sensibly upon the outward circumstances of those who commit them.

The evil effects of past sin on a believer

The apostle’s question is addressed to Christians, and he says not only that they had no fruit in their sins, whilst they were living in them, but that now, after they had abandoned them, they were still ashamed. See also Ezekiel 36:31; Eze_16:62. To the child of God, the penal consequences of guilt are forever remitted, and the dominion of the principle of evil is dethroned. Still in many ways does his past iniquity ever continue to molest him, and to the end of his days will not cease to mingle painfully in his otherwise joyous and blessed cup. How often, for example, are a Christian’s efforts at usefulness impeded by the recollection that others have of what he once was. It is said of one of the most eminent ministers in modern times, that at an early period of his life, deeply tinctured with infidelity, he made active efforts to instill its principles into others. With some he awfully succeeded, and these, at a later and a better period, he sought anxiously but fruitlessly to reclaim from the fearful sin into which he had himself been the means of seducing them. What, think you, would have been his answer to the apostle’s “What fruit had ye then in those things whereof you are now ashamed?” Would he not have said, truly then they were fruitless and unsatisfactory, but now they are, and ever will remain, sources of the bitterest shame and sorrow. Then, again, every exercise of a sinful principle contributes to the formation of an evil habit. The more and the longer it is acted on, the stronger the habit becomes; and the stronger the habit is, the more difficult, of course, will it afterwards be to subdue and eradicate it; the more constantly and readily will the mind yield to every little temptation that may arise to excite it, and the more naturally will the thoughts recur, when most unbidden and most distasteful, to the scenes of their former associations. Thus does the indulgence of sinful propensities heap up fuel for future difficulties and future pain. Every corrupt habit forms a barrier to what will then be our leading object in life, to grow in grace and purity--and increases the number and strength of the enemies we shall have to contend with; while ideas, easily and involuntarily arising within us, which our former courses have suggested, but which we now loathe and detest, will add to our pain and self-reproach and confusion of face. Oh, how can men talk lightly of sin? how can they go on from day to day in reckless and obstinate perseverance in ways that are ungodly and corrupt? Why is it that they will rather lay up for themselves, as it were, a pile that will consume themselves, and forget the end that must arrive at last? (J. Newland, A. M.)

Remorse of a wasted life

The following epitaph was written by Lord Byron to the memory of his thirty-third birthday, “Here lies in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection of the days, whatever there may be for the dust, the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life; which, after a lingering disease of many months, sunk into a lethargy and expired on January 22, 1821, leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.” (J. F. B. Tinling, B. A.)

The law of seed sowing and after harvest

The season of the year reminds us of that great and universal law of seed sowing and harvest. The name Autumn in its original signifies to increase. The law that fruitage follows seed sowing is as evident in the moral universe as in the physical. Conduct has its reward.

I. The sowing of vice has its legitimate and necessary harvest.

1. The habit of vice follows vice. The wisteria throws out its little tendrils. How very feeble are they at first. As they feel their way for support they seem to plead for help. You build for them a trellis, and, by and by, those tendrils have become so strong that they pull the posts aside, and on the walls they even move the solid brick. As I have watched and admired this vine with its cataract of bloom, I have thought of the growth and force of the habit of wrong-doing.

2. Conscience grows weaker.

3. The loneliness of vice is part of the harvest. Men say, “I do not believe that there are lost souls in God’s universe.” You can see many of them in this world. As they sink in vice they become isolated.

4. The evil propensities, passions, appetites, grow stronger by exercise.

5. Spirituality is crowded out by worldliness. The mental and spiritual vision is blinded. It is a silent progress of decadence--a silent, steady ripening of the sown seed. We stand upon one of the Alps and see the avalanche as it plunges thunderingly, irresistibly downward. At first it was but a bit of soft snow, little harder than the common snow, that began to move. So a lost soul begins its downward course in a seeming harmless thought or whim, but at last the final destruction is sudden, awful.

II. This law is true in the mental world.

III. It is also true of the spiritual world.

1. Right-doing also ends in habit, and habit in character. A man said of his father, and it was true, “He could not be dishonest if he tried.” Life-long honesty makes character, and that determines action.

2. Christian experience is enjoyed.

3. Christian motives crystallise in deeds, and these latter bring their reward.

4. A sweet communion with Christ.

5. A communion of spiritually developed, kindred souls.

6. A steadfast hope that adverse influence can no more move than can a child shake with its tiny finger the great pyramid.

7. A likeness to Christ.

8. Heaven is the final fruit, “the end everlasting life.”

Conclusion: in nature God does not arrest and change growth to something else. There is a different law applied in the moral universe. A man is growing wrong, the harvest is nearly ripened, when all is changed, and there is a new seed sowing and a new harvest. Here is then the test by which to measure ourselves. Is the fruitage within us one of humility, of desire for usefulness, for the spirit of Christ? (R. S. Storrs, D. D.)

The comparative desirableness of the service of sin and the service of God

I. As to present enjoyment. “What fruit had ye then?”

1. The “fruit” of particular principles is the conduct which they produce--the fruit of a particular course of conduct the consequences to which it leads. He appeals to themselves whether their new service was not even now happier, more honourable and more useful; whether its present fruit was not richer in its relish and more excellent in its nature. “What fruit!”--“Wild grapes,” “dusters that were bitter”; “grapes of gall.” Such were the fruits, if we understand the question as meaning what kind of fruit had ye?

2. But it may strongly convey, as such questions often do, their having had no fruit; in which case “fruit” signifies benefit. It is not a fair and just description of the service of sin to denominate it “the unfruitful works of darkness”? It is true, there are pleasures in sin. These are the allurements to its service. Yet, still, the question may be emphatically put--What fruit have they? Is there any real solid satisfaction worthy of a rational, immortal, accountable being?

II. As to subsequent reflection. Of service of sin all who ever come to see it aright are ashamed (Ezekiel 36:31-32; Eze_16:62-63), a feeling which can never have place as to the service of God--except indeed the shame of having so imperfectly fulfilled its duties. They are ashamed of--

1. Their folly. There is no infatuation like that which prefers the service of sin to the service of God! It is the preference of degradation to honour; of the most miserable of slaveries to the most blessed of liberties; of earth to heaven; of time to eternity; of Satan to God!

2. Their ingratitude. When they think of God as the Source of every joy, and who “has not spared His own Son,” and feel aright their obligations to Him, they look back with bitter self-reproach on the vileness of that ingratitude which their previous course involved. They blush for the baseness of having lived in rebellion against rich and unmerited kindness; and especially of having slighted His mercy.

III. In their ultimate consequences. “Death” is the end of one: “life” of the other. The one closes in eternal confirmation in sin, alienation from God, a sense of His wrath, and consequent misery; the other in eternal confirmation in perfected holiness, spotless likeness to God, communion with Him, the enjoyment of His love, unmarred and uninterrupted by sin, and consequent happiness; happiness without alloy, without abatement, and without cessation. But while such are the ends, respectively, of the two services, there is one marked difference between them. The one is wages--a merited reward; the other a gift--a gratuitous bestowment (verse 23). (R. Wardlaw, D. D.)

Verse 22

Romans 6:22

But now being made free from sin.

The freedom and dignity of the Christian

I. We are “free from sin.”

1. We are free from--

2. We are made free. There is some power exerted upon us distinctly Divine: we call it grace or the work of God. God calls us to come forth from our bondage; and we, hearing His voice, do come; but the power which gives us the ability to assert our freedom is His own. This freedom is ascribed--

3. The instruments employed.

II. We become “servants of God.” Our deliverance from sin is in order to this.

1. This name, “servant,” is a name of glory because it has been borne by Christ, and by the most distinguished men that ever lived. Moses, Job, David, Paul, James. These triumphed in nothing so much as rendering service in their free state to God. His service is perfect freedom.

2. How is it brought about? We first receive the truth; the blessings of the gospel, freeing us from sin, are brought by faith and knowledge into our nature. The natural effect of this is confidence and love towards God. We cease to be afraid; the spirit of bondage gives way; and the Spirit of adoption comes in its stead. This new view of God induces consecration. We yield ourselves unto God as those that are alive from death, and our members as the instruments of righteousness unto God.

3. What will the Master have us to do? It is required in a servant that there be--

III. Our fruit is unto holiness.

1. Beautiful fruit; “fruit meet for repentance.” “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering,” etc. “Holy fruits”: that is, fruits that are vital, fresh, blooming, luscious.

2. There never has been any fruit unto holiness separate from the principles of the gospel. There may be morals, dry and barren, but there is no holiness but as it arises out of faith and love towards Jesus.

3. In order to fruitfulness there must be cultivation. There must be a diligence and a care that we show forth in our tempers and practice the various points of that blessed light and beauty which is called in the text holiness.

IV. The end is everlasting life. The end is everything. If it were so that the course of religion in this world were a course of sorrow, if the end were everlasting life, it were worth the while to walk it. But it is not: the way is peace, the path is light, the progress is joy, and then the end is everlasting life. The more I see of this life, the more I feel that it is a poor, dissatisfied life. Irrespective of God, it is not worth having. And I am increasingly persuaded that the life to come is unbounded, and perpetual, and everlasting activity, conscious purity, splendid glory, and rest in His beatific vision. (J. Stratten.)

The redeemed soul

I. As gloriously emancipated.

1. It is “made free from sin”--from its power, its guilt, and its consequences.

2. This emancipation is the most real, valuable, and lasting of any.

II. As divinely consecrated. “Become servants to God.” His service is the most--

1. Reasonable.

2. Free. It insures the free action of all the powers of the soul.

3. Honourable. What an honour to be employed by Him!

III. As prosperously employed. “Fruit unto holiness.” Holiness is the perfection of being. “Having the fruit to holiness” implies that every thought, word, and deed bears towards perfection.

IV. As everlastingly blessed. “The end everlasting life.” Life without end.

1. Free from all evil.

2. Possessed of all good. (D. Thomas, D. D.)

Right! left! right!

I. The first stage of the Christian journey is conversion, “now being made free from sin.” What, then, is this “freedom from sin”? What, then, this emancipation we get at the Cross? Sin is here. Sin is in us, sin is on us. Sin has flung on our soul the double coiled chain of penalty and power. We are prisoners bound by the two-twisted grapple of guilt, but it is all snapped and shivered in the surrender of the soul to the Lord. “He hath sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” Here’s the gospel for you. “The Lord hath laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.” “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Every fraction of my awful debt Christ has rendered, and now I am pardoned, justified, “reconciled unto God by the death of His Son,” and God righteously bestows upon me the full remission of my sins, “that He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.” I am, in conversion to Christ, free from sin, its penalty. Yet once more, conversion brings freedom from the power and presence of sin. Slaving in the rice fields of sin was I! hoeing along in the heat of the plain of hell was I! manacled was I! But, “happy day!” on the horizon a broad sail appeared, and a vessel bore down to the terrible shore, and lo, the blood-stained banner of the Cross of Christ waved its welcome to my weary soul, and I lifted myself from the swamps and fled, and plunged into the deep with a cry for help. “Lord, save me, I perish.” Help came, salvation came, the Lord walked on the wave and brought me on board, and “I fell down at His feet as if dead.”

II. The second station on the line to glory is what we call, for want of a better name, conduction, “become servants to God.” You know what conduction in physical science is. It is the communication of heat from one body to another by contact. There must be touch, or there will be no passing along of the caloric wave. Can’t you realise this “natural law in the spiritual world”? It is the secret of effective service to God. Examine the extremities and see that the touch is certain. Is your soul, Christian worker, in contact with God? Is your soul, Christian worker, in contact with man? Have you regeneration from God? Have you sympathy with man? A soul saved, and soul seeker. That is service. Bring the soul into living contact with the living God, and the Divine heat by the law of conduction will ripple its waves through the mass of humanity till all the earth shall acknowledge Him; “and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.” But where shall I work? How shall I serve? how labour for God on the earth? Where you are called, there preach. Serve God with your new life where He gave it you. Serve you your God by doing His will in “the trivial round, the common task.” “Who sweeps a room as for His laws makes that and the action fine.” Be a “servant to God.”

III. The third platform we reach on this royal route to heaven is consecration: “Ye have your fruit unto holiness.” Rowland Hill says truly, “he wouldn’t give a fig for a man’s religion if his very cat wasn’t the better of it!” Be a fruiter in the Christian life, not a florist. It was said of one of those perfection florists, “Ay, he’s perfect, he says, but ask his wife!” Many will pray that will never pay, and yet paying not praying is the “fruit unto holiness.” To one of those florists of holiness I once lent my last coin, and I’ve never seen it nor him, and it’s ten years now since he, with three or four hundred more of the coins of others to keep mine company, took his spring-heeled flitting in the bonnie moonlight! Many will talk that will never walk, and yet walk not talk is the “fruit unto holiness.” The world needs Christs, be you a Christ! Live holiness by living Christ, for the blessing is not an it, but a “He.” Christ in you, working through you, that “we should be to the praise of His glory.”