Bondage of Sin

Bear with me… I’ll try to keep it nice and short…

Romans 6:15 says… “What then?  Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?  By no means!  (Paul likes to answer his own questions)

And later in verse 18 he writes, “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”

If we are free from sin as Christians, why do we keep sinning?  Before we were Christians, we couldn’t do anything but sin.  But now as Christians, we have a choice.  Most of the time we choose sin… all the more distrurbing is that most of the time we don’t even care.  It doesn’t phase us one bit.

If we are slaves to righteousness then what’s the deal with acting like we’re still slaves to sin?  Well, I think there are two reasons…

The first, we forget who (and whose) we are.  As being people of the flesh, that’s all we knew before – and I’m not even talking since we were born – I mean since Adam’s first sin.  Someone once said that it’s like what happened with the slaves immediately following the Civil War.  By the law of the land, they were free – free to do whatever they pleased (I know, I know, no voting rights and etc… but you know what I mean).  But what happened?  Many of them went right back to their old masters and worked as indentured servants basically in the same conditions they saw before the war.- because that’s ALL they knew.  They didn’t know what to do with this new-found freedom.

Another analogy (that I’m stealing from a sermon I heard somewhere).  When circuses get elephants, they bind their leg to the strongest tree with the strongest chain.  The elephant keeps trying to escape, even to the point of getting their legs bloodied, but they can not.  Eventually they give up even trying.  Well, really thick chains are expensive, so gradually, the elephant trainer, replaces the chains with weaker ones because in the animal’s mind, it still thinks it’s impossible to escape.  Eventually, all they need is a peg in the ground with some rope to hold the elephant in place, because they stop even after the slightest resistance.  We are like that elephant, for so long we were chained to the tree of sin and could not escape.  After becoming Christians, Christ actually REMOVES the tie that binds us to that tree, but we still think, we can’t move.  So we don’t even try.

I said that there were two reasons…  The second is much more tragic in that we are fooling ourselves.  We think we are Christians, but we really never were.  We really are still complete and utter slaves to sin.  We never got the emancipation proclamation.  They never removed the thick chain.  But the good news is that Christ’s offer is always still on the table.  Those who looked at it and said, “give me 24 hours to think on it” and just forgot and just kept attending church like they always have and went to Christian events and even did Christian-like things… the offer is still good.  You’re not going to get a better deal anywhere else in town…