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The Gift of Eternal Life
Romans 6:15-23
The Gift of Christmas
December 8, 2002
The gift looked beautiful. A large gift, it was wrapped in a green foil wrap with silvery glistening snowflakes, with a bright red bow. What could it be? It’s so large! Could it be what 7-year old Melissa had always wanted, what she had been hoping she would get for as long as she could remember? It sat there under the tree, and the anticipation was almost unbearable. She snuck back up to bed, waiting for the moment when she would hear her parents’ stirrings in their room.
When she heard them talking, she ran down the stairs and sat in front of the monstrous gift.
It was so exciting! Her trembling hand reached for the bow, and as she untied it, she reminded herself, “I’ve got to breathe!”—without knowing it, she had been holding her breath. She delicately opened one end of the package, trying not to tear the beautiful green and silver paper.
As she released the tape and unfolded the paper, she realized that the brown box inside had no writing on it. “Uggh! Is it or is it not what I want?” She would have to open the box to find out.
She opened the box, and inside was tissue paper—which, in a grunt, she tore through as if it were, well, tissue paper.
And there it was! The most magnificent dollhouse anyone had ever seen! It was so huge! It would take up the entire table in her playroom! It had blue walls with a pink roof and shudders. Inside were tables and chairs and details including fireplaces and pictures hanging on walls. It was perfect! It was everything she had ever dreamed of!
Mom and Dad were watching the whole episode from across the room, though Dad had to watch it through the viewfinder of his video camera. Mom was grinning from ear to ear—it made her feel so good to make her little girl happy. Dad was thinking, “He shoots, he scores!” as he knew that this gift was an absolute winner.
_____
Welcome to the Christmas season! It is full of anticipation and excitement—especially for our little ones! Our series this year is called “The Gift of Christmas,” and the greatest gift of all time for us spiritually is found in the last verse of Romans chapter 6.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (verse 23)
This is one of the great promise verses in the Bible, for sure! It makes clear what the gospel message is in such concise language that is easily understandable.
I know that I earn a wage for what I do—I work my hours at my job, and every two weeks my employer gives me a paycheck. That is the deserved wage for what I do. Spiritually speaking, the deserved wage for a life of selfishness, pride, lust, greed, and all the other sins I commit is death.
Death, the biblical term for spiritual separation from God for all eternity, is the deserved payment for all my sins that I commit in my lifetime—both large and small sins, both the sins committed on purpose and the sins where I simply mess up, both the sins where I know what I should not do and I do it and the sins where I know what I should do and do not do it.
“The wages of sin is death…” God is absolutely just, and we would not expect a purely good and just God to leave all the evil sin of man to go unpunished. If God does not do something about evil, then he is not good. If there is not a punishment, then God is not just. Sin deserves its wage.
“…but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” But God is not only purely just, he is also purely loving. A loving God would do something to save us from our inevitable demise. He would step in and do something so that we would not have to pay the penalty for our sin!
And that is exactly what he did! One of my favorite Christmas passages is Philippians 2:5-8. Philippians? Christmas? Yes! Look at it:
“Your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross.”
(NLT)
Though Jesus was God, he made himself a human being—one of us! A simple, humble baby lying in a manger. He came into the earth and took the humble position of a slave, to serve humanity. Even though he was absolutely innocent, he obediently died the humiliating death of a criminal on the cross—that is what Christmas is all about!
Or, to put it in other words, Paul spells it out in Romans 3.
“For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet now God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty. He has done this through Christ Jesus, who has freed us by taking away our sins. For God sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sins and to satisfy God’s anger against us. We are made right with God when we believe that Jesus shed his blood, sacrificing his life for us. God was being entirely fair and just when he did not punish those who sinned in former times. And he is entirely fair and just in this present time when he declares sinners to be right in his sight because they believe in Jesus.” (Romans 3:23-26, NLT)
In other words, “…the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” because Christ Jesus our Lord took the punishment of our sins and satisfied God’s justice against our sinfulness. I am made right with God—what theologians call “justification”—when I believe that Jesus died for me personally—it is when I not only say I believe that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world, but I truly believe this for myself: “I believe that Jesus died for me, for all my sins. He died to pay the penalty for all my sins."
This solves the dilemma: God is just and loving at the same time, for the sin is punished, but the guilty are given the loving gift of justification. God is therefore
“entirely fair and just in this present time when he declares sinners to be right in his sight because they believe in Jesus.”
Or, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
What a verse! What a promise! That’s the gift of Christmas—Eternal Life in Christ Jesus!
If you have not yet accepted the gift of eternal life, this Christmas would be a great time to open that gift for you from God. God, in his grace, gives you the ability to open the gift yourself. You must reach out your trembling hand and open the gift. This is done through faith in him. We are going to look at what this faith is all about next week when we study Ephesians 2:8-10. But let me tell you this much: You unwrap the gift of eternal life by believing that this is true for YOU. Faith is the unwrapping of the gift.
Then you have opened the gift—the greatest gift of any Christmas.
____
Back to our story of Melissa:
A week later, Mom walked passed Melissa’s room and noticed something, the gift that her little girl had wanted so much was sitting on her table, displayed prominently there for all to see, but Melissa was playing with all her old toys from the year before. Then it struck her—Melissa had not even touched the gift since Christmas day!
“Melissa, why don’t you play with your dollhouse?” she asked.
“Oh, yea. I forgot about that. I’m so used to playing with my old toys, that I forgot how great that one is!” Melissa replied.
“But you haven’t even played with it once, have you?”
“No.”
“Why not?” This made no sense to Mom.
“I wanted it so bad—but once I got it, I just haven’t thought about it much.”
Mom had to say something. She and Dad had paid to high a price for that gift to just let it sit there unused. “But the gift is no good unless you enjoy it! This gift is so much greater than those old broken-down toys you’re playing with. If only you’d start playing with the dollhouse, you’d realize that!”
Melissa looked up at her Mom, who seemed rather frustrated over something silly. “Okay, Mom. Don’t have a cow!”
__
What a shame to get the best of presents and then to leave it on the table to never be enjoyed! I tell this fictional story to drive home the main point of today’s message for those of us who claim the truth of Romans 6:23, which is this:
Christians are given the gift of eternal life, which should be enjoyed NOW through an ever-changing life.
Too often, we live life as if we have never received the gift of eternal life. We play with all the toys of our past life before we received the gift of Christ, and God looks at us and says, “But the gift is no good unless you enjoy it! This gift is so much greater than those old broken-down toys you’re playing with. If only you’d start living life as a fully devoted Christian, you’d realize that!”
I want to look at this great promise verse in its context, and gently help those of us here this morning to re-evaluate our lives in light of it.
Paul asks the question that we are afraid to put into words in Romans 6:15. Look at what his answer is:
“What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”
(Romans 6:15)
In other words, does sin matter? Do the choices I make in my life really mean anything? If I am under Christ’s forgiveness because I accepted him as my savior from the penalty of my continuing sin, then I can sin and God will forgive me, right? So, if I choose to be a little greedy today, or to not do the loving thing by going out of my way to help that person in need, or to bolster my self importance at work by patting myself on the back every now and then, or if I watch that explicit movie, or if I buy that expensive present for myself instead of giving to the poor, then God will forgive me. After all, if I am under grace and therefore free from the penalty of sin, then what difference does a little sin make? I know it is sin, but I am a child of God—He will forgive me!
Paul’s response: BY NO MEANS! Or as other translations put it, “Of course not!” (NLT), “May it never be!” (NASB).
Then, Paul gets into why this cannot be the attitude of the true believer in Christ.
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? 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. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. (Romans 6:16-18)
Paul’s metaphor is that all of humanity into two different slave camps. You are either in the slave camp that leads to death, or the slave camp that leads to righteousness. The difference between the people in the two camps is this: While some were in the camp that were slaves to sin that leads to death, God, in his grace, sent someone in to teach them a certain form of teaching, the gospel message of what Christmas is really all about—God coming into the world in the form of humanity to die for the sins of those who will believe—basically all that I was just teaching a little bit ago. The people who
“obeyed the form of teaching” have been “set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
So, everybody is either in one camp or the other. Well, then the question that arises in my mind is this: If there is such a dramatic difference between those who believe in Jesus Christ and those who have not yet done so, why don’t I notice it more? In other words, if we Christians really are in the camp of being “obedient to obedience,” and “slaves to righteousness,” why aren’t we more kind and gentle and self-sacrificing than those who do not claim to be Christian?
I’m being bluntly honest here—and I am looking at myself in the mirror as well when I analyze this. I often find myself apologizing to people who resist Jesus Christ because they are turned off by the people who claim to be Jesus Christ’s followers!
In fact, I have to admit that some of the people who do not claim Christ as their Lord and Savior are better people than some Christians are! They are kinder, gentler, more caring to their fellow humanity, and seek to love more than we do! Christians can come across as some of the most distasteful, judgmental, self-serving, unfriendly people in this world.
When Paul makes such a stark, black-and-white contrast between those who believe in Jesus Christ for eternal life and those who don’t, I scratch my head and say, “Really? Is it that simple? Is there not also a responsibility on our part to live out who we say we are?”
Paul deals with that next! Look at verses 19-22.
“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. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 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.”
Here Paul acknowledges that we have a choice in how we live as Christians. Even though we are in the camp that leads to life, we can still choose to live a life of slavery to sin.
Therefore, Paul urges us to purposely live a life that is obedient to the process of sanctification, to being made holy.
I must choose to live in such a way that I will be MADE INTO that which I have BEEN DECLARED to be. When I believed, I was declared “NOT GUILTY” (through the gift of Justification). With that, I was freed from the camp of being enslaved to sin in my life—I was given the ability to be changed into something very good—what God has always wanted me to be. This process is called
sanctification, the process in which we are being made holy. We are being made into what we have been declared!
I went to my 20 year class reunion last weekend. Before you go to one of these, you look at your yearbook. I wondered if those who were voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” or “Most Leadership” or “Best Looking” would live up to what they were declared to be. I must say, there were a few surprises! Not least of which was the guy who was runner-up for class clown becoming a pastor! People would ask me, “I heard you’re a pastor, is that true?” with an astonished look on their face.
We voted that night on who looked the most like they did in high school. I decided that since I was one of the guys in our class that had lost a lot of hair that I might not have too much a chance, so I began lobbying in a way that almost made me win anyway. Everybody had nametags on, and next to our names was our graduation picture. Instead of my face, I put the face of Royt Young, a beautiful African American cheerleader from our class that was voted “Most Feminine.” I went around to everybody in my class proclaiming, “Look, I haven’t changed a bit since High School!” Royt was in tears laughing when she saw my nametag.
I did not live up to “Most Feminine,” but I tried to live up to “Class Clown.” We have been declared “Not Guilty.” And now we are called to live up to what we have been declared. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can actually become more and more holy, through the supernatural process of sanctification. The power to be made righteous is a gift from God. None of us can be holy in our own strength. But the process of becoming more and more holy, more and more righteous, more and more like the One I claim to follow, Jesus Christ, does not happen without my cooperation. I must “offer the parts of my body in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.”
Doug Moo writes, “The very fact that Paul’s letters are peppered with commands shows us that obedience is not automatic. True, Jesus compared the believer to the tree that automatically produces good fruit. But, as one theologian has astutely noted, ‘people are not trees.’ Trees do not refuse the water that trickles down to its roots; they do not remove themselves from the fertile soil to plant themselves in bad soil. People, yes even Christians, do these kind of things. Thus, we must listen and respond to the commands of Scripture.”
So, it’s evaluation time. We must ask ourselves these questions:
1. Have I refused the water that can give me the ability to be all that God wants me to be? Have I lost my commitment to reading God’s Word on a regular basis, seeking to know God and commune with God through his written Word? Have I lost my passion for prayer? Do I consistently share with God my needs, my fears, my joys and my tears? Am I consistently evaluating my days, seeking to know when and where I sin so that I can confess these to God, seeking his purification from my bad habits? Am I living a repentant lifestyle, one in which I am seeking to live a life obedient to God and not obedient to sin? Am I committed to worshiping God and not the things of this world? Have I refused the water that can give me the ability to be all that God wants me to be? These are the spiritual disciplines that will make you the kind of Christian God wants you to be: Scripture reading and meditation, prayer, confession, repentance, worship. Are you actively cooperating with God in developing your holiness by doing these things?
2. How have I removed myself from the fertile soil and planted myself in bad soil?
What do I fill my life with that is a detriment to my living a life that is honoring to God? What movies do I watch? What do I spend my money on? When my mind is idle, to what do my thoughts drift? Have I fallen into the trap of saying, “Hey, I have my ticket to heaven, thank you!” and therefore convince myself that that is all that really matters. My life then betrays where my loyalties really lie: I consume the culture’s entertainment; I covet the culture’s materialism; I crave the culture’s insatiable desire for lustful pleasures; I look out for number one as much as the next guy.
If somebody were to look at my lifestyle would they be able to say, “I can tell by this person’s life that he is a follower of Jesus Christ—look at his checkbook, look at his Master Card statement, look at what he does with his spare time, look what his priorities are, look at what he says to his kids, look at how he prays, look at how he goes out of his way to care for the needs of others.”
Now, we have the context for our verse of the day, Romans 3:23, which starts with the word, “FOR,” linking it to all that preceded it.
"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
When we claim the promise of Romans 6:23, we must not wrench it from its context in the sixth chapter of Romans, missing the fact of what it is really trying to tell us about our lives right here and now.
You see, the gift of Christmas—eternal life in Christ Jesus—is not something that we Christians put into our account and say, “Hey, I’ve got heaven! Now I can live life any way I want!” Today’s Christianity is so often guilty of thinking that Christian conversion is simply a one-time moment, when we get our “fire insurance” (that is, our ticket out of hell), but then we go about our lives as if nothing has changed.
___
Melissa got up from the dirty floor on which she had been playing, dusted off her knees, and sat up next to the beautiful doll house that had been given her.
“This is new,” she thought. “I hope I know what to do with this. It’s not like all the old toys I’m used to playing with.”
And as she started actually using the gift that she had been given, she found that it was the most enjoyable toy of all! The more she played, the more she understood the way it worked, how even the kitchen cabinets opened to reveal dishes to play with! Closets opened with even further delightful surprises! The more she spent time with her gift, the more she enjoyed it! And all the things she used to do paled in comparison to it.
___
This Christmas, I challenge you to commit with me that we will cooperate with God to make the changes in our lives—to further free us from the slavery to sin that we are all still experiencing.
Commit to showing the love of the Christ of Christmas to people in extraordinary ways—ways that people will stop and give glory to God for what you are doing in his name.
Make this Christmas season one in which you can live a life free to be the kind of loving, caring, self-sacrificing person Christ has redeemed you to be!
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