We like to think that we are in charge of our lives. There is a certain helplessness that we feel when we think things have gotten beyond our power to control. We would rather think that we are invincible. The English author, editor, and poet, W. E. Henley, in his poem, Invictus, sums up the desire of the human soul.
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but a horror of the shade
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me, unafraid
It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishment the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
While we may like to think we are always in control, it is an illusion. In fact, even as Christians who have been liberated from the control of sin, we may come back under its bondage. You see, freedom is not the ability to do what you want to do, it is the ability to do what you know you should do! And it is possible to forfeit that freedom. True, we have been forgiven and given a new life. But we now must live by this new life Christ has given us.
What should the forgiveness of Christ produce in us? Should it produce presumption on our part, where we impose upon the forgiveness of Christ? As Christians, should we continue to sin because God will forgive us? No! The forgiveness of Christ ought to generate a motivation to love Jesus Christ and to obey Him. Because of His forgiveness; in thanksgiving we now ought to be obedient to Him and reject sin. There is a lot at stake.
As a believer, what happens when I sin? What effect does sin have on me? What does the choice you make, when you choose to sin, do to you as you seek to live for Christ? Does it matter whether or not we sin now as believers? It certainly does matter, and we are going to describe several effects that sin causes in us, when we choose to engage in it.
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. 18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. 19 I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:16-19)
The first effect of sin is to make us a slave. You see, we have a choice to make, and the choice is who we are going to serve. In Los Angeles, a man was walking down the street wearing a sandwich placard. On the front it said “I am a slave for Christ”. On the back it read “Whose slave are you?” Some years ago Bob Dylan came out with a song in which were lines that said, “You gotta serve somebody. You gotta serve somebody. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.” How true. That seems to be the choice we have. Most people do serve either God or Satan.
Whose slave are you? That is the deception of sin. We think that when we engage in sin, we are just fulfilling a passing desire; or just engaging in some brief pleasurable thing that we want to do. One act and then we can forget about it. We can change; after all, we are free now in Christ, and as Christians, we do not have to serve sin any more. So let's just go ahead and sin a little bit. The deception is that we do not realize that this always leads to bondage.
Remember the commercial on TV about potato chips that challenged, “Bet you can't eat just one.” Well, this saying is true for sin. Bet you can't do just one. You say, “Oh yes I can. I can sin and I can quit sinning any time.” It's like the fellow who says, “Stopping smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times.” Well, it is not so easy, is it? What happens when you tell a lie? You tell one lie, then you find out that the lie is not quite good enough. So you tell another lie to cover the first. Then you have to tell another lie to cover the second. One person confessed to his pastor that after he had told what he thought was a little white lie, he ended up having to tell forty-two other lies in order to continue his story. Forty-two other lies resulted from one little white lie.
One act, just one sin, is no big deal, but it sets us on the road to bondage, and pretty soon we are doing things that we never wanted to do. The Bible calls it slavery. Jesus Himself said it in John 8:34, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”
W. L. Barnes, in his book Free As a Bird, tells this story:
Recently we put up a hummingbird feeder with four feeding stations. Almost immediately it became popular with the hummingbirds that live in our area. Two, three, or even four birds would feed at one time. We refilled the feeder at least once a day. Suddenly the usage decreased to almost nothing. The feeder needed filling only about once a week. The reason for the decreased usage soon became apparent. A male bird had taken over the feeder as his property. He is now the only hummingbird who uses our feeder. He feeds and then sits in a nearby tree, rising to attack any bird that approaches his feeder. Guard duty occupies his every waking hour. He is an effective guard. The only time another bird gets to use the feeder is when the self-appointed owner is momentarily gone to chase away an intruder. We soon realized that the hummingbird was teaching us a valuable lesson. By choosing to assume ownership of the feeder, he is forfeiting his freedom. He is no longer free to come and go as he wished. He is tied to the work of guarding his feeder. He is possessed by his possession. His freedom of action is as circumscribed as if he were in a cage. He is caged by a situation he has created.
When we engage in sin and choose to willfully disobey God we become its slaves. It becomes like an addiction to us. We might think that we can change our behavior until we begin to try, then we find that we have been trapped and deceived. We are now under bondage and we can not break loose quite as easily as we thought we could. If you engage in sin, you become a slave.
Sin affects us. It affects others as well. Try this: Get up in a grumpy mood tomorrow morning, and snap at your wife. What happens? She snaps back, because she is not going to be out-snapped. We like to make sure that we get the last snap. So she snaps back. Then you snap back. Then you snap at the kids and they snap at you. Pretty soon the whole house is in an uproar. The whole house has taken on your rotten attitude, and the day is ruined because your sin affects others. Our sin is not done in isolation. It affects us, and makes us its slaves, and it affects those around us.
20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! (Romans 6:20-21)
Secondly, if you engage in sin, you become ashamed. There is a very important principle in Scripture and that is the principle of sowing and reaping. Galatians 6: 7 says, Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. If you sow corn, you will reap the effect, which is corn. If you sow wheat, you will reap the effect, which is wheat. If you sow sin, you will reap the effect of sin, which is slavery and shame.
One horrible benefit of sin is that sin produces memories. This is a major problem for Christians. How do we deal with the memories of sin. You see, Satan uses those memories. He recalls those memories to tempt you and to condemn you. Many Christians suffer greatly because of sinful things that they have done and can not change; things of which they are now ashamed.
Sins fill us with guilt and regret, and we say to ourselves, “Oh, if only I had done it differently. If only I could relive that moment. If only I could change that situation. How stupid could I have been?” We mentally kick ourselves for being so dumb as to do something like that. I'm sure we could all tell stories about things we have done that we regret to this day.
Sin produces memories, and many people are haunted by those memories. They are ashamed of what they have done. That shame does not easily go away. After a period of time, I believe, you can learn to live in Christ's forgiveness for that sin, but you will always regret it. I have been forgiven for some things, and I know I stand forgiven. I know God does not remember those sins any more. The problem is that I remember them. And you will remember too. The shame of sin can destroy the quality of your life. That is why it is so important to avoid sin.
Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:21b-23)
This is the sequel to sin. The sequel to sin is not “Sin II” but death. Eternal spiritual death is the wage of sin for those who refuse to come to Christ. But death, for the Christian, is that when we sin, we begin to die spiritually inside. That does not mean that at one point we are going to be thoroughly dead and lost again, but it means that sin affects us by making us dead on the inside to the things of God. Dead to love; dead to the joy of serving Christ; dead to spiritual things, spiritually insensitive and spiritually blind. Sin working in our lives has a devastating effect. It makes you a walking corpse as a Christian.
Today, many Christians who inhabit the pews of our churches are discouraged, defeated, confused, depressed and frustrated. They are limited, and they know it, in the things God can do through them, and sometimes they do not even know why. The reason is because we are not surrendering ourselves to Jesus Christ. We are harboring sin in our lives. It might be “white” sin, like a “white” lie. Perhaps we are not harboring some of the more serious sins, but we are harboring sin none-the-less. It may be the sin of choosing our own way instead of choosing God's way. Or it may be the sin of not surrendering some area of our lives because it its too precious to us. “Lord, I'll do anything you want me to, I'll give up anything you want me to give up, I'll change anything you want me to change, BUT _____________.” You fill in the blank. Whatever you put in the blank may just be the very thing that is keeping you from unhindered fellowship with Jesus Christ.
Whenever you make an unconditional surrender, it frees you up to be used of God, and to come into unhindered fellowship with Him. Then you enter into the joy of the Lord and you know the adventure of serving Jesus Christ. But, when you harbor sin, when you are unwilling to surrender, you begin to die slowly to the joy of Christ, to the adventure of serving Him, and begin to be among the walking dead.
Who wants to be limited? I want to be in the place where God can use me, don't you? Remember, it is not so much your ability, but your availability that counts. That may be a worn out adage, but it is such a true one. It is not your gifts or talents; God has plenty of those to give freely. It is your availability to be used of God in His service. Do not sit out there and say, “Well I just do not have much to offer.” God has plenty to offer if you will simply offer yourself to Him. He will use you in many ways. He will use you in an eternal way to make a difference in the lives of people.
Now what are you going to do? You are free to choose. Who are you going to choose to serve? If you choose to serve sin, it becomes your master. Verse 14 says, For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. The grace of Christ frees us, but you must understand that our freedom is not unlimited freedom. It is freedom to serve a new Master, Jesus Christ. He told us in John 8:36: “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” But freedom does not exist outside of the freedom of the Son. Like a kite, the freedom to fly is related to the string. The very thing that holds the kite to earth is what keeps it in the sky. Cut the string, and what will happen to the kite? It will fall. But the string, which seems to bind it, allows it to fly
So, what shall we do? Continue in sin? God forbid! The message is strong because sin is serious. Sometimes we forget that it was sin that sent Jesus Christ to the Cross. God could deal with it in no other way. If you want to see God's opinion of sin, look at the Cross. How much did God hate sin? He hated it enough that He endured sending His Son to the Cross to die. We should hate it also. We should hate it because He hates it. We should hate it because of what it does to us. We should reject it outright, and choose obedience to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ has set us free. Let us walk in that freedom. Let us walk in that liberty. Let us claim our inheritance as His sons and daughters, as children of the King, and walk with our heads held up high, because we no longer have to yield to the temptation to sin. We can choose to walk in the liberty that is rightfully ours in Christ.
Are you struggling with some sin? Perhaps it is one of those white sins. Are you struggling with surrendering an area of your life to Christ? Let me encourage you to use this opportunity to make a commitment to be 100% His, by His grace. Are you frustrated? Are you out of fellowship with Him? Are you down and depressed because you have not really yielded? Yield to Him today. Do not be tricked by the enticement of sin. Be liberated by the grace of Christ.
Vance Havner told a story about a couple who had been in a bar all night long in that smoke-filled atmosphere. They stepped out on the sidewalk and the guy took a deep breath and said, “What in the world is that smell?” She said, “It's fresh air!” Sometimes we have breathed the old sin-infested air of the world so long that we think it is fresh air. Surrender to Christ is like breathing a breath of fresh air once again.
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