“I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. 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. 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 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.”
Romans 6:19-23 NIV
Our flesh, unrenewed and corrupt nature, wants to be free to do what it wants, when and how it wants to. It does not desire to walk in obedience to God and His will. Simply put, it wants its own way. But when we choose our own way above God’s we are choosing sin.
There is no way around it. Sin is a trap of enslavement. There are consequences of sin… death. When we are in the middle of living our own way, it can be hard to see the consequences that we will reap in the future. Sin brings not only death, but guilt and shame.
Years ago one of my kids chose a “Chinese Finger Trap” as displayed below:
In a small way it is a reminder of what sin will do in our lives. We think it is harmless. We think we can play around with it, but when we try to get away from it and the harder we pull we cannot.
“Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.”
(Famous quote that I am unsure of its origin.)
We will do well to remember sin has its wages, what we are paid for what we do. Those wages are death. But God offers us a gift we do not deserve, something we could never earn on our own “eternal life.”
We can live free from sin’s entrapment, as we live totally surrendered, totally dependent, and totally obedient to God. True freedom is in being a “slave to God.”
Your Love 