A Word in Season: God Be Thanked! (Romans 6:17–18)

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Every one of us serves someone or something. There's something which governs our lives.

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There's something which attracts us and directs us. It's the principle by which we're guided as we make our way through this world.

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In Romans chapter 6, Paul uses the language of slavery to describe this relationship.

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Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness.

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There's a willingness here in our slavery. There's an offering up of ourselves and our faculties to someone or something, whether that's sin leading to death or obedience leading to righteousness.

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When the Apostle Paul thinks of his own experience and the experience of God's people in Rome or with us, it is then with profound thankfulness that he recognizes that that relationship has profoundly and permanently changed for all of God's people.

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He goes on in Romans 6 and verse 17 to say, but God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered, and having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

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Paul is deeply aware of what we were when God in his mercy and grace came to us and found us and worked in us.

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We were slaves of sin. We were willingly yielding ourselves to unrighteousness, our own sinful appetites, our own fallen desires.

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These were the things which governed us. We were under the dominion of darkness, and we could not and would not ever have shaken ourselves free, because in our very natures we were willingly, if not always happily, rendering to sin, rendering to unrighteousness all our energies and endeavors.

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We were trapped by it. And then God stepped in and we obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which we were delivered.

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Now you'll notice that Paul draws together here both the realities of God's sovereign power in us and our proper response to that work of God, because we obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine, that pattern of teaching to which we were delivered.

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God in his power handed us over to a new form of teaching, and we obeyed from the heart, a heart that was being renewed by the

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Holy Spirit, who was mightily and mercifully at work in us. Paul is saying here, in effect, that the

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Christians heard the gospel. They saw the beauty of Christ with eyes opened by the

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Holy Spirit. Though once blind, now they could see the sweet sufficiency of Christ and his so great salvation.

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And they yielded themselves up from their renewed hearts to his salvation and his government, so that he became both their

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Lord and their savior. And their great desire from that point on was to do whatever

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God wanted them to do. So that Paul himself on the road to Damascus, having seen the glory of Christ, asked,

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Lord, what do you want me to do? And so God at work in them had set them free from sin.

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They were no longer slaves to sin, but have become slaves of righteousness.

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From those new hearts, cleansed and washed and now enlivened by the

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Holy Spirit, they are offering to God obedience. They become servants of the

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Lord. They become cheerful slaves of God. They have their fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life.

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They're no longer drawing the wages of sin, which is death, but they're enjoying the gift of God, which is eternal life in Christ Jesus our

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Lord. And when we come before God, it ought to be with deep gratitude, with thankful hearts, looking back on what we were when

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God saw us, drew near to us and blessed us in his mercy and his kindness.

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What we have experienced as the good news of Christ has been proclaimed to us,

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Christ has become precious to us who believe and all our desires are now to worship and serve and glorify and honour him because we are no longer slaves of sin.

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We're slaves of righteousness. We're God's servants. Eternal life is ours.