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You are here: Home / The Intercessor / The Intercessor, Vol 29 No 1 / Bible Bedrock: Slaves to Sin or Slaves to Righteousness
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The Intercessor, Vol 29 No 1

Bible Bedrock: Slaves to Sin or Slaves to Righteousness
by Norman Grubb

"Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness."
Romans 6:8-18
(New American Standard)
We have seen how Paul pointed out that in our redeemed experience of justification by faith and new birth of the Spirit, we do not continue in sin. The reason is that as our Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again as representing us, we then died with Him to being sin-indwelt and rose with Him to being Christ-indwelt, as symbolized by our burial and rising in our water baptism. So now we live yielded to God and expressing His right living in our members. 
But this is based on a further startling fact of a different kind–that we are no longer "under law, but under grace," and that we are "dead to law" as well as "dead to sin." We are thus not only freed from the guilt of broken law, but from responding to and having to operate law at all!
But, steady! If we are not under law, do we not mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic radical delusion that we have lived in since the Fall, under the Satanic lie of us being independent, self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. But the actual fact is that we were never created to be independent human selves. We were deceived into that delusion by Satan at the Fall. 
Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness-owner: branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine: married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There never has been such a thing as us being independent, self-acting, self-producing human selves, and responding by ourselves to a law of evil or good. Paul now proceeds to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage in this radical misconception, and thus his freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life. 

–Taken from: Paul’s Key to the Liberated Life: Romans Six to Eight
 

More Articles from The Intercessor, Vol 29 No 1

  • The Big Lie
  • Editor’s Note
  • Q & A
  • A Look at a Book
  • Foreword to Alphabet Soup
  • A Life Transformed
  • From Elementary to Advanced Faith
  • Bible Bedrock: Slaves to Sin or Slaves to Righteousness
  • When I Survey the Woundrous Cross
  • A Letter From Norman
  • Who you really are…and not who you thought you were
  • The Self Can’t Be Improved
  • The Total Truth About Who We Are in Christ Jesus
  • No Longer Slaves To Sin…
  • The Ultimate Reality
  • Words to Live By

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