Sermon Recap 10.16.2011
Seeing as though the past 30 hours or so have been an absolute circus (I will discus that in detail in a future post), that left me with little time to be able to put together a decent recap of my sermon from this past week: “A Strange Dichotomy”. As I made reference to a dichotomy is the splitting of a whole into two parts. The whole (or idea) was the concept of slavery (that Paul used 6 times in this passage alone). The two jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive parts were 1. slavery to sin; and 2. slavery to righteousness. Paul left no room for any other enslavement. We are either one or the other. This is tough to take especially for we Americans, who don’t like anyone telling us what to do. We are the epitome of independence. But what we fail to realize is that sin has brought man to the inability to do anything else and the result is that we have become slaves to it.
Where as the early part of Romans chapter 6 deals with the idea of how can we continue to live in something (sin) if we are already dead to it, the latter part of the chapter deals with the idea of how can we be continue to be enslaved by something that we are no longer enslaved to. The answer to these questions is the same but with a slightly different emphasis. Our identity and our status has shifted. Therefore, our lives should look different. There should be an automatic progression taking place in our lives now that resembles obedience to something else…truth…this is what we have been committed to. Our hearts have been molded out of a different blue print and we have beens et free from sin as a result. Now we can present those hearts (along with our other body parts – i.e. tongues, hands, feet, eyes) as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification which ultimately leads to eternal life. This means that our bodies are to be used for God’s glory, not ours, and for His mission, not our pursuits.
Awesome stuff! Enjoy the sermon. Would love your feedback.