Free from sin... slaves of righteousness

 Free from sin... slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:1-23)

Dear Friends:

My name is Patrick Garcia and I’ve been asked by my long time friend and mentor, Thomas Yoo, to share with you a gospel message. It is my understanding that you have served time in prison and in your tenure in the correctional institution, you have come to faith in our risen Lord Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Praise be to God, for salvation belongs to our God!

The first thing that comes to my mind is that God is not a respecter of persons and if the truth about every person alive was fully known, there would not be enough correctional institutions in all the world to house the human race. Jeremiah told us that the heart of man is deceitfully wicked above all things! The reason I bring up this point is that partiality is a very easy way for carnal man to make a distinction between “us” and “them” and to somehow conclude that a person behind bars is an evil person and a person in free society is a good person. Such external judgments are convenient to pacify man’s fallen sense of justice.

What am I getting at Friends? Do you believe in freedom? I do. Freedom, like all other great and lofty concepts, must be properly defined. The Bible defines freedom as being free from sin and being a slave of righteousness.

Read Romans 6: 1 – 23

Is freedom the right to do anything we want to do or must freedom be restrained somehow to protect us from our own sinful desires? Can we restrain sin with iron bars, medication, programs, rules, or some form of organized religion?

You’ll be glad to know that true freedom is not an external working but rather an internal working by the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 1: 13-14

And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people.

New believers and even mature believer's wrestle with an important biblical concept called sanctification. (positional, progressive, perfected) Sanctification or “being set apart for God” is taught in Romans: chapter 6-8. Being a Christian or possessing eternal life begins at conversion (positional) and is lived out in every day life (progressive) and will one day be completed at our glorification. (perfected) If the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed! Friends, I want you to understand, above all, that you no longer need to sin! You have a new resident person inside of you called the Holy Spirit who already made you into a new creation with righteous desires. You who are in Christ are no longer prisoners, you are already free! You are free to live for God and enjoy your reconciled relationship with Him forever.

Romans 6 teaches us that we who have died with Christ were also raised with Christ. Before faith in Christ, we were dead in our sins and could do nothing but sin! We were enemies of God who needed to be reconciled. Father God initiated reconciliation for us through Jesus Christ by sending Him to die for us so that we could be baptized (immersed) in His death so that the power of sin would be broken in our lives. Then, at the resurrection of Christ, Father God prepared the way for us to receive a new nature because the same Holy Spirit who raised Jesus Christ from the dead now lives in us who believe in Jesus Christ. (New life through the indwelling Holy Spirit)

Positionally, now that we have repented and placed our faith in Jesus Christ, we belong to God and have become the reconciled friends of God. Spiritually speaking, we are no longer behind bars but are free! The price for freedom has been paid by Christ’s precious, matchless, sinless blood. But suppose we were to choose to sin some more since God’s grace covers all our sin… may it never be! God’s grace is greater than all our sin but to abuse grace with a type of “free for all” Christianity is no Christianity at all. Christianity is about Jesus Christ ruling in our hearts and His life being outwardly expressed through ours. We are to represent Jesus Christ in a sinful world and strive for holiness and righteous living, by faith, not by strict, man made observance to an impossible code of conduct.

Now that I’ve explained your new relationship to sin and righteousness, I would like for you to think on how you would like to glorify God with the rest of your earthy lives. I want to reassure you that God will be with you to cheer, guide, and protect you on your journey towards glorification. I would now like to field any questions or comments anyone would like to make on the topic discussed or something else that is important to you.

Thank you for your participation :)