Experience of Grace #2 - Slaves to Righteousness
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund unpacks Romans 6:15-23, revealing that we're all slaves to something—either sin, which leads to death, or God, which leads to life. Discover why true freedom isn't doing whatever you want, but surrendering your heart to Christ and walking the path that leads to life.
Summary & Application
Slaves to Righteousness: Finding True Freedom in Surrender
We live in a culture that prizes freedom above almost everything else. Financial freedom. Time freedom. Moral freedom—the ability to decide for ourselves what's right and what's wrong without anyone else weighing in. In fact, as Kurt points out in his message from Romans 6:15–23, moral freedom is partly why some people want nothing to do with God or the church. "They don't want anyone telling them what to do."
But what if the freedom we're chasing isn't actually freedom at all? What if the path we think leads to liberation is quietly leading us somewhere we never intended to go?
The Question Paul Refuses to Let Us Dodge
In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul asks a pointed question twice: if we're saved by grace and our sins are fully forgiven, why not just keep on sinning? Verse 15 puts it bluntly: "Shall we go on sinning because we are under grace and not under the law?" Paul's answer is emphatic—"By no means!" Some translations render it "God forbid" or "May it never be."
Paul isn't brushing the question aside. He's saying: if you've tracked with everything I've written in Romans 1 through 5—that we're made right with God not by what we do but by what Jesus has done—then the natural question is, why would my behavior matter at all?
Kurt summarizes Paul's answer this way: "You have been changed. You have been united with Christ. You are different than you were, if you are a follower of Jesus."
Everyone Serves Someone
Here's where Paul introduces a concept most of us would rather not discuss: slavery. Romans 6:16 says, "Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?"
The word "slavery" sits uncomfortably with modern readers, and for good reason. But as John Stott observes in his Romans commentary, first-century slavery wasn't racially assigned or necessarily permanent. It was often a chosen arrangement to relieve a debt. Becky Pippert captures the principle simply: we're going to serve someone, and whatever we serve is our master.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who resisted Hitler, warned about what he called "cheap grace"—the idea that since grace has covered everything, our lifestyle doesn't need to change. Paul's response to cheap grace is the same as his response to the opening question: may it never be.
Sin Leads to More Sin
One of the reasons Paul takes the question so seriously is that sin is never static. It compounds. In verse 19, Paul describes "impurity and ever-increasing wickedness"—a trajectory, not a moment.
C.S. Lewis put it memorably in Mere Christianity: "Good and evil both increase at compound interest." Every small choice matters more than we realize.
Kurt illustrates this with the concept of neural pathways. "The more you make a choice, the more habituated to that choice you become. Think of walking in the woods—if you take one path constantly, it gets easier and easier to walk. If you never take another path, it becomes overgrown and harder to navigate."
The story of Samson in Judges 16 is a vivid picture. Delilah asked for the secret of his strength again and again, betraying him each time. He kept giving false answers—until he didn't. The principle holds: sin will take you further than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you more than you wanted to pay.
Holiness Isn't What You Think
Verse 19 continues: "so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness." The word "holiness" might make us flinch—it sounds stuffy, maybe a little self-righteous. But the word simply means "set apart."
Kurt draws a helpful distinction: "We tend to equate holiness with morality, but they are not the same. If you are holy, you will be moral—but you can be moral without being holy." Morality can be self-serving. Holiness is about belonging to God.
Consider 2 Samuel 23. David, then a fugitive, made an offhand remark that he wished he could drink from the fountain in Jerusalem. That night, three of his men slipped behind enemy lines, drew water from that fountain, and brought it to him. They weren't following a command. They were seeking to please the heart of their master. That's what holiness looks like.
Where True Freedom Is Actually Found
Paul closes the chapter with one of the most quoted verses in the New Testament: "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23).
True freedom, it turns out, is not the absence of a master. It's surrender to the right one. Kurt compares it to owning a car: "The first time you get one, it feels like freedom—you can go wherever you want. But if you do not take care of it—if you do not change the oil, fill it with the right fuel, maintain the tires, follow what the owner's manual says—your freedom will eventually come to an end."
Righteousness isn't a restriction on good things. It's an invitation to the best things. As Kurt puts it, "God is not forcing you onto a path. He is inviting you to choose righteousness and holiness—to live in his orbit rather than your own. And that is where your best life will be found."
Questions for Reflection
Where in your life have you been telling yourself you're "free"—but honest examination reveals a pattern of slavery to a particular sin, habit, or attitude? What would it look like this week to let God cross your will in that area?
Kurt distinguished between morality (which can be self-serving) and holiness (being set apart for God). Where are you tempted to settle for looking good over belonging fully to God—and what would change if you asked, "How can I please the heart of my Master today?"
-
Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Paraphrased from The Cost of Discipleship
"He said that cheap grace is the idea that grace did it all for me, so I don't need to change my lifestyle. The believer who accepts cheap grace thinks he can continue to live like the rest of the world instead of following Christ in a radical way—simply enjoying the consolations of grace."
John Stott — Paraphrased from his commentary on Romans
"In the modern world, we tend to think of slavery as racially conditioned and permanent. But in New Testament times, it was neither. People sometimes sold themselves into a kind of servitude to relieve a debt—it was not permanent and it was not racially assigned."
Becky Pippert
"We are going to serve someone, and whatever we serve is our master."
C.S. Lewis — Quoted from Mere Christianity
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest."
-
It has already been a great weekend here at Orchard Hill—baptisms in Wexford, three services in the Strip on Sunday morning going well, groups gathering in Mars, Gibsonia, and Beaver Valley. And then you hear stories of God working in people’s lives. That is really what we hope to be a part of here as a church, week in and week out—God reaching into our lives and bringing us forward toward him.
Let’s pray. God, thank you for the chance to gather today. We ask that you would speak to each of us, that we would grow in our understanding of you, in our devotion to you, and in our affection for you. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
The Cultural Value of Freedom
One of the values that is fairly obvious in our culture is the value of freedom. Many people would say that one of the most important things in their lives is feeling free. We see this in conversations around financial freedom—most people would say, “At some point in my life, I’d like to reach a point where I don’t necessarily have to work and can basically afford whatever I need.” People also want time freedom—a chance to decide when and how they do things, not being on someone else’s schedule. And there is probably a sense in which many of us want moral freedom, meaning we choose what’s right or wrong for us, and nobody else tells us what that is.
That last one—moral freedom—is partly why some people don’t care much for God or for church. They don’t want anyone telling them what to do.
The Question Paul Asks in Romans 6
Today we are continuing our series called “The Experience of Grace,” working through Romans 6. In this chapter, the Apostle Paul asks a question twice—once in verse 1 and again in verse 15. The questions are slightly different but essentially ask the same thing. In verse 1 he asks: if everything Paul has said previously in Romans is true, then why shouldn’t we just sin? His answer is emphatic: “By no means!”—some translations say “God forbid” or “May it never be.” He uses that phrase throughout Romans to express something close to horror at the idea.
In verse 15 he asks it again, slightly differently: “Shall we go on sinning because we are under grace and not under the law?” Again, his answer is the same: “May it never be.” What Paul is saying is this: if you’ve tracked with his thinking in Romans 1 through 5—that the way we become right with God is not through what we do but through what Jesus does, that all of us deserve punishment because of sin, but Jesus makes eternal life possible and our sins, past, present, and future, are never counted against us—then why wouldn’t we just do whatever we want? If God is going to forgive anyway, if we are secure anyway, what difference does it make?
We looked last week at chapter 6, verses 1 through 14, and how Paul answers this by saying: you have been changed. You have been united with Christ. You are different than you were, if you are a follower of Jesus.
The Concept of Slavery
Today Paul introduces another concept that is often not discussed in conversations about our choices: the concept of slavery. He says you are going to be a slave either to sin or to righteousness. The reason you don’t want to go on sinning—even though it will be forgiven and you are under grace—is because sin sets you on a path of slavery.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor in Nazi Germany who opposed the rise of Adolf Hitler, wrote about this. He said that cheap grace is the idea that grace did it all for me, so I don’t need to change my lifestyle. The believer who accepts cheap grace thinks he can continue to live like the rest of the world instead of following Christ in a radical way—simply enjoying the consolations of grace. And that is exactly what the Apostle Paul is addressing here. If you get to the point where you say, “My sin doesn’t matter because I’m living under grace,” Paul’s response is: may it never be. You don’t understand.
Now, the idea of slavery is tainted for us today. John Stott, in his commentary on Romans, explains why. In the modern world, we tend to think of slavery as racially conditioned and permanent. But in New Testament times, it was neither. People sometimes sold themselves into a kind of servitude to relieve a debt—it was not permanent and it was not racially assigned. It was a choice: “I am choosing this for a season; this person is my master.” It was different from being a day laborer working for a wage. Because we think of slavery as permanent and racial, we don’t hear the word the way that original audience would have. Becky Pippert, writing about this, puts it simply: we are going to serve someone, and whatever we serve is our master.
Sin and Righteousness Lead Somewhere
Another challenge with this text is that we don’t use the words “sin” and “righteousness” seriously in our culture—we tend to use them ironically. If someone is called righteous, it usually comes across as a criticism: “Oh, you’re so righteous.” And when we use the word sin, it’s often casual: “I’m going to go be a sinner with the other sinners and have a great time.” We don’t treat it as a serious matter. But this is exactly what the Apostle Paul is pressing: understand how serious this is, because you become either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness.
Paul makes this clear in verses 16–20. Verse 16: “Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?” Notice the language: you offer yourself. In the New Testament understanding, you were not consigned to this—you chose it.
Verse 17: “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance.” He is saying: you become more of whatever you follow. Verse 18: “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” And verse 20: “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.”
In verse 19, he talks about impurity and wickedness—or in some translations, lawlessness upon lawlessness—meaning you become more self-serving, more self-centered, a law unto yourself, saying: “I am free. I do what I want. Nobody tells me what to do.” That is part of the impact of sin: you become someone who says nobody else has authority over you. We could put it this way: sin leads to more sin. The more we sin, the more free we feel to sin.
C.S. Lewis, in his classic book Mere Christianity, puts it this way: “Good and evil both increase at compound interest.” That is why the small decisions we make every day carry such enormous weight. The smallest good act today captures a strategic position from which, months later, we may advance to victories we never dreamed of. And an apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a foothold from which the enemy may launch an attack that would otherwise have been impossible.
Last week I drew a picture of an iceberg. On the surface are the acts of sin we typically think about. Those on the more traditional end might list sins of personal holiness; those on the more progressive end might list social sins. Either way, we tend to reduce our list to a small set of things and say, “I’m good” or “I’m not good.” But the bigger part of the iceberg—the part under the surface—is the attitudes and sins of omission that are harder to define and harder to see. As Lewis suggests, every time we choose a little pride, a little anger, a little of something and either redefine it or simply live with it, we set ourselves on a course that can become destructive—slavery to sin.
The Story of Samson
The Old Testament gives us a vivid picture of this in the story of Samson. Samson was a Nazarite—set apart to God, endowed with supernatural strength, and bound by certain vows, including not cutting his hair. As he matured and was being used by God, he fell in love with a woman named Delilah. She repeatedly tried to discover the secret of his strength. He gave her false answers each time, and each time she betrayed him—yet he never seemed to learn. Eventually, he told her the truth: cut his hair and he would lose his strength. She did, and he was captured.
This story, drawn from Judges 16, illustrates what Paul is saying in principle: sin will take you further than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you more than you wanted to pay.
Neural Pathways and the Path We Walk
When my wife and I were first married, we lived near a cornfield—actually, surrounded by cornfields. By late summer, the corn towers well above your head on industrial farms. One day, I decided to take our dog and cut through the cornfield to reach a nearby path. What I did not realize was that a combine was approaching—and if you have never been near one in operation, they are enormous and fast. I found myself in a row of corn with a combine bearing down on me. I had to fight to get the dog and myself out to the side—the combine went past, turned around, and came right back. It was a choice I made that trapped me, and I was thankful to get out.
That is, in many ways, what happens when we start down a path the Bible calls sinful. Scientists call it neural pathways: the more you make a choice, the more habituated to that choice you become. Think of walking in the woods—if you take one path constantly, it gets easier and easier to walk. If you never take another path, it becomes overgrown and harder to navigate. The more you choose sin, the more that path becomes a well-worn neural pathway in your life. The more you choose righteousness, the more that becomes habituated as well.
What Righteousness and Holiness Actually Mean
Verse 19 says: “Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness.” Now, we may still not feel sold on “holiness,” because we use that word ironically too—“holy roller,” “so holy.” But the word means set apart. In Leviticus, the Old Testament book largely about holiness, the concept is often applied to things rather than people, which communicates ownership. To be holy is to be set apart for God—to say, “I belong to God.”
We tend to equate holiness with morality, but they are not the same. If you are holy, you will be moral—but you can be moral without being holy, choosing morality for self-aggrandizing reasons: wanting to be seen a certain way, or because it simply works out better for you. When you are set apart for God, however, you get on a path that leads you to become more and more like God, and it reaches your motivation.
There is a story in 2 Samuel 23. David, who was the future king of Israel and a fugitive at that time, made an offhanded comment to his men: “I wish I could drink from the fountain in Jerusalem.” That night, his men slipped out, made their way to Jerusalem, gathered water from the fountain, and brought it back. Why is that significant? They were not following a command—they were seeking to please the desire of their master’s heart. That is what holiness looks like. It is not simply maintaining a list of things you don’t do. It is asking: how can I orient my life toward who God is and live in relation to him?
True Freedom
I started by talking about freedom. That is actually where true freedom is found. Verse 20 says that when you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. Verse 21 asks: what benefit did you get from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death. You feel free when you are choosing ways opposed to God—but it is not actual freedom. Freedom comes from surrendering yourself to God. That is where you actually find it.
Think of owning a car. The first time you get one, it feels like freedom—you can go wherever you want. But if you do not take care of it—if you do not change the oil, fill it with the right fuel, maintain the tires, follow what the owner’s manual says—your freedom will eventually come to an end. Neglect the maintenance, lose the freedom. That is a picture of what Paul is painting here.
Paul concludes in verses 22–23: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Whether verse 23 refers primarily to eternal death or to the present experience of being trapped in sin, the point is the same: these two paths lead to very different places.
How Do We Get on the Path That Leads to Life?
Verses 16 and 17 answer this. First, we need recognition. Verse 16 begins, “Don’t you know…” The first thing we need is to acknowledge this reality in our lives—to say: this is true, whether it seems true to me right now or not, whether this particular choice seems to matter or not.
Second, we need the will—a desire. Verse 17: “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance.” This is not just knowing what the best way is—it is being willing to choose it even when it is not what we want in the moment. As I have said over the years: if you worship a God who never crosses your will, you are not actually worshiping the God of the Bible. You are worshiping a fragment of your imagination. The God of the Bible will at some points not agree with you—and so at some point you will have to say, “I am choosing this not because I fully understand it or think it is best for me right now, but because God has declared it is right.”
Third, we see the phrase “from the heart,” which brings us to our affection. This is why Paul spends five chapters before getting to his exhortation about slavery—he is working to win their hearts, to say: God is great, his way is best, why would I want to do anything else? It is the gospel—the message that God loves us no matter what we do—that makes us say: of course I want to choose his path when it crosses my will. What better outcome could there possibly be?
Practical Examples
Let me give a couple of concrete examples. Consider anger. Yes, there can be righteous anger, but you know when the anger rising inside you is heading somewhere sinful. You can choose the path of sin or the path of righteousness. The more you choose sin, the more you will want to repeat it, the more you will repeat it, and the harder it will be to stop. But it does not have to stay that way. Because slavery, as Paul understood it, was not permanent. You can choose to let God cross your will, refuse to act on the anger, and say: “God, I am choosing your path today.” The more you choose it, the easier it becomes.
Take greed. The more you allow greed to reign in your heart, the harder it becomes to rein it in. But the more you practice thankfulness and gratitude for what you have, the easier that becomes. Or consider Philippians 2, which says to “do everything without grumbling or disputing.” Some of us, honestly, would have very little to talk about if we stopped complaining. But if you choose to complain—about your boss, your spouse, the weather (we do live in Pittsburgh)—your soul gradually shrinks, because everything gets filtered through a negative lens. When you let God cross your will and choose not to complain, something changes. It becomes easier to walk the path of gratitude and contentment rather than hostility and discontentment.
An Invitation to the Best Things
What we need, in order to let God cross our will, is a heart that is genuinely open to the things of God—because we have seen God work through Jesus Christ in our lives and therefore trust him, even in things that seem small today. And as we do that, here is what we will find: righteousness is not a restriction on good things, but an invitation to the best things. God is not forcing you onto a path. He is inviting you to choose righteousness and holiness—to live in his orbit rather than your own. And that is where your best life will be found.
God, as we are gathered this weekend, help each of us to see the places where we have gotten on a path that is about us and not about you—where we are our own masters, and though we think it is freedom, we find it is actually slavery. And where we are surrendered to you, help us to find that we are truly free. For some who are here today, maybe this is a moment of recognizing that the way we live is sinful and that we need a Savior. I pray that even now there would be a willingness to say, “God, I trust Jesus as my Savior, so that my sins will be forgiven.” Help us not to take an ironic view of sin and righteousness, but to see them for what they are. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
================================
AI-Generated Disclaimer
This transcript was edited with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Filler words, false starts, and verbal artifacts from spoken delivery have been removed, and grammar has been updated for readability. Every effort has been made to preserve the speaker’s original words, meaning, and intent as closely as possible. This document is not a verbatim transcript. For the original audio or video recording, please refer to Orchard Hill Church’s official media resources.
