Goodness - Romans 6

Good morning church - I’m so excited to get into God’s word together with you this morning. But first, I’ve got to tell you this really old story. Long time ago there was this guy Dr. Howard. Now the honorable Reverand Doctor Howard was a distinguished minister from Australia - and one day he preached a sermon about the topic of sin. And after the service, one of the church leaders came to talk with him in his office. And the man said, “Dr. Howard. Your message was great, powerful word Pastor, but um… we don’t want you to talk as openly as you do about man’s guilt and corruption. Because if our children hear you, or if we have any visitors that week, it will make them uncomfortable. Please don’t talk so much about (whisper) sin.” So the pastor pauses for a moment, think about it, then he gets up, in his office, he gets up out of his chair and goes over to a cupboard, and he pulls a small bottle out of the cupboard. And he holds it up and says, “Do you see this label? It says “strychnine” - and then you might notice in big bold red letters it has the word “Poison” right underneath. It says that, because that’s what it is - we use it on rats and vermin in the basement. But do you understand what you are asking me to do? You are suggesting that I should change the label. So let’s suppose I do, I take this bottle with the big scary Poison label, and I paste over it with the words “essence of peppermint” - don’t you see what will happen? Someone would use it, not knowing the danger involved and then they would die. So it is with sin - the milder you make your label, the more dangerous you make your poison.”[pause] So let me turn it to you for a second - as some of you know, we’re in this summer long series on the Fruits of the Spirit. And today we’re talking about “goodness” - but how do you define “goodness”? How do you know if something gets the “good” label or the poison one? I think a lot of times when churches talk about “goodness” on the one hand, and sin over on the other side - sometimes people can get hung up on the definitions. 

I might get up here and tell you that lying is a sin. That’s it’s poison, but in your life at home - I dunno, doesn’t seem like poison. Gets me out of trouble a bunch of times. OR I get up here and say that greed is poison to your soul - we encourage people to give in the church, to live generously. But maybe in your experience - it doesn’t feel like poison. In fact, sometimes it can feel pretty good to buy what you want, when you want, instead of thinking about other people. I’m going to get up here this morning and try to tell you about what is good - but we live in a culture where we think we should get to define what we think is good and evil. And I think we see it all over our lives, but probably the most potent, the most common area is sex. (pause - did you feel that? The way the whole room just tensed up?). Because the bible gives us this really straightforward and clear path on what sexual intimacy is supposed to look like inside God’s plan - but we live in a world where people look at what they want to do, and they say “well, that’s not poison. It’s not that bad - In fact, I want to call that good.” And so the question of “what is good” actually shifts as we go and it becomes - “what is my standard?” I had a friend one time say, “hey man - you can’t legislate morality!” Have you ever heard this? And I sort of laughed at him and said, “what do you think laws ARE?” Most of our laws legislate morality! Murder is against the law - because it’s immoral. Stealing is against the law - because it’s immoral. The problem is - those are the easy ones. A lot of us draw the line the same way on the obvious issues - but what about where we disagree? What IS goodness? Where is my line? Where is your line - and which one of us is right? And so we’ve got a bit of a tangled web coming into today’s message - but never fear, Paul’s going to straighten us out.

If you want to grab your bible, I’m going to be in Romans - chapter 6. We’ve been in Romans on and off in this series - and I have to be careful, because as some of you might have started to notice, I love the book of Romans so much and I get a little geeked out on it and tend to gush, but I’m going to resist that temptation this morning. If you forgot your physical bible, you can always grab one off the back wall or just look it up on your phone. I’ll be using the NLT translation this morning. Now Romans is a letter written by this guy named Paul, and he’s writing the letter to a church in Rome - but he doesn’t really know these people. He’s hoping to visit this church someday, but this is a letter to basically strangers. And I’ve said it before - if you want to learn more about Christianity, first we start with the story of Jesus, but the second place to go is definitely the book of Romans. Because Paul is writing to strangers, he sort of outlines stuff really simply - it’s sort of like an introduction to understanding God. And so we start out down in verse 3, where it says, [read v.3-4]. We join Jesus in his death. Do you ever read something in the bible and think - yikes, that’s sort of intense! ? Paul talks about when we encounter Jesus - it’s very dramatic, it’s very life and death. And he doesn’t let up the pressure, down in verse 6 [read v.6-7]. So first death, and then he talks about slavery. You know - I have a lot of friends who are pastors, and most pastors, we want our churches to grow, we want to reach people for Jesus. And so for a long time, we in church leadership tried to make church, uh - easier to stomach. Come on back to church, it’s not that big a deal. It’s almost like we tried to dial down the weird, ask less of people, make them more comfortable. Hey, come on back to church - we’ll tell you want you want to hear - hoping that more people will agree to come. We lowered the bar - but what happened in those churches is that it made going to church worth less in your life. They created a church that was more comfortable, but wasn’t actually worth attending. And the younger generation looked at that and said, “why would I bother attending?” But Paul, over here in Romans, he sort of uses the exact OPPOSITE tactic. Paul’s over here dialing UP the weird. He says, “No - I’m not going to make this easy. I’m not going to teach you something that’s worth less - I’m giving you nothing less than the full gospel. And the truth of the full gospel is that sin is poison in your life. And that’s really the first major thing I want you to realize this morning. In our pursuit of the fruit of goodness in our lives - Sin is poison in your life. It is the thing that keeps you away from God, and so it is the thing that keeps you away from goodness. Paul says - look this is a matter of life and death. Sin in our lives is not something we shrug about. No - Paul says, “when we turn to Jesus, our old self is crucified. Like, if you don’t know - that’s a big important word. Crucified - like, died.  Our old self, our sinful desires, we offer them up to die. Dead. He picks the strongest possible language.

Because, and here’s the problem: a lot of people want to make sin, and evil - not a big deal. We sort of look at religion as a method of self-improvement. When it comes to the fruit of “goodness” in our lives - a lot of us think, well - I’m mostly a good person, but I’ve just got one or two areas where I’m feeling a little guilty, feeling a little convicted and so I just want Jesus to be my personal trainer and help me do a little work out. We want to pick and choose where we need to improve, pick and choose which pieces of our life we let Jesus work on. For example - imagine life is like a set of keys. And we come to God, and we say “Jesus take the wheel.” We say, “God, I want you in the drivers seat of my life” And God says, “okay, I need the keys.’ And we hesitate and then we come to God with our counter offer - “well, okay - how about I give you the key to Sunday morning. I’ll give you the key to the occasional Wednesday night - maybe I’ll volunteer on a Saturday or a Monday. But my Friday night? I’m going to keep that key for myself. But God says to us, “No, if you want to be good, if you want to live my way - I need all the keys. I need your entire life.” What I want you to see with this is that Paul doesn’t lower the bar, hoping more people will come to him. Paul raises the bar, hoping you will understand the meaning of “top shelf.” We’re not going to water down the gospel to give you something that is worth less than what Jesus is really offering. God needs the keys to your entire life. 

Now if I had to guess this morning, I would say a lot of you in the room have probably given God SOME of your life, but you kept some of the keys for yourself, didn’t you? You’ve been a part of this church for YEARS, but you never felt the need to give it all to Jesus. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. There was this guy a long time ago, his name was Saint Augustine. Well, most people just called him Augustine, the whole saint thing came later. And when Augustine was a young man he struggled with his sin, particularly sexual sin. Apparently, he really like having sex with whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted. But he knew that God was calling him to a higher sexual ethic. He didn’t want to. And in his book, it’s called Confessions, you can feel the turmoil in his writing. The struggle in his life to hand over all the keys to Jesus. Scholars have simplified his story into three stages. First Augustine prayed, “Lord, make me good, but not yet.” He was sort of saying, Okay God, I’ll give you the keys, but later. Then in phase 2, Augustine started praying, “Lord make me good, but not entirely.” This is where Augustine was giving some keys to God, but not all of them. And then finally, Augustine’s third prayer was simply, “okay, Lord make me good.” This is where he takes the whole set of keys, his entire life, and puts it at the feet of Jesus. You see, what I want you to realize is that the reason Paul uses such crazy intense, strong language is because religion is not self-improvement. It’s self-abandonment. It’s not little tweaks to our old life, it is a brand new life. It’s where we hand over all the keys to Jesus - give control completely to God, keep nothing back for ourselves.

And again, I can sort of feel your objections. A lot of us when we look at sin in our life, especially when maybe we personally draw the line a little different than the bible does. The bible says this is wrong, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. When we do that, most of us we don’t start by saying “This sin is good” - we start by saying “this sin isn’t that big a deal.” If we jump down to verse 15 [read v.15-18]. Oof, there he goes again. First he starts out by sort of grabbing us by the shoulders and saying, “this is a matter of life and death!” and then he shifts away from death and starts talking about SLAVERY. He refuses to chill out with his metaphors. But here the thing - he’s intense, but he’s also 100% correct. You are a slave of whatever you choose to obey.  Whether you’re religious or not, spiritual or not - we are, all of us, slaves to the ones we obey. And this shows us the next big teaching I want you to grab from the text. The key to God’s goodness is obedience. And I know the temptation is to say, “well, I just won’t be a slave to anyone. Not to God, not to sin -  I’ll be my own man, obey no one but myself.” But Paul’s already thought of that. Verse 20 he responds, [read v.20-21]. Paul takes a second to pause and he says, “do you remember how it used to be? When you were in complete control of all the parts of your life - how’d that work out for you? You were free from all the restrictions of trying to be a good person, free from trying to live God’s way, you get to do whatever you want - how’d that go for you? Before you found Jesus, living in all that freedom - did you feel free? To go back to the keys metaphor - for most of us, when we are behind the wheel, when we hang on to the keys, we crash the car. Paul says, “What was the result of doing things your way?” - “you went and did stuff you’re ashamed of.”

Back in the early 2000’s, there was this movement called “New Atheism” - you probably heard a little bit about it. There was this guy called Richard Dawkins who wrote a book called the “The God Delusion”  where he makes fun of people for believing in God, and outlines why he thinks God isn’t real. And he wasn’t alone - there were lots of these prominent atheists, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others -  as a part of this massive movement. And it peaked around about 2008-2009, when they sort of started to declare victory. All the best and brightest in our world don’t believe in God - we win, moving on. But then something happened. After declaring belief in God to be silly, and sellings thousands of books and getting hundreds of thousands of people to follow them - the entire movement just unraveled. And the reason - people have been studying this lately - the reason is that once they “beat the Christians” they had nothing holding them together. Once they got rid of God as the source of their definition of what is “good” - there was suddenly no standard to build a platform on. One of the prominent stories was that Richard Dawkins was in an elevator with a woman at one of these big atheist conferences, and I forget exactly what he did - I think he said something she didn’t appreciate, and she said, “that’s rude” and he disagreed, “No, it’s not” and they had nothing to point to in order to see who was right. And suddenly, every fight and disagreement was splitting this atheist community in half. They were united when fighting Christians, but once they actually tried to build something on their own foundation - they found that it was sinking sand. I draw my circle of goodness over here, and you draw your circle of goodness over there and because you and I are just making this up as we go along there’s no way for us to settle the argument. It got so bad that nowadays in the modern world, Richard Dawkins one of the most famous atheists in history now calls himself a “Cultural Christian” - which is his way of saying “I don’t believe in God, but I want the results that come from following him” and he can’t figure out how to get them without God. I still pray, even with all the damage he has done that someday he will see - the reason Christians have built societies that have a good the world wants is because we understand where the source of goodness actually is. Paul says, “What was the result of doing things your own way?” “You did things you are ashamed of.” 

Verse 19 hear this, [read it]. Paul explains, “this isn’t actually about slavery, I’m using metaphors to help you understand.” previously you let yourself be a slave to yourself, and it led you deeper into sin. But if you give up all your keys,  give yourself up to righteous living so that you will become holy. There’s an old story from a guy named Mike Yaconelli where he says, “if you ever ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, he’ll probably say, “Well, a cow starts nibbling on a tuft of green grass, and when it finishes, it looks ahead to the next tuft of green grass and starts nibbling on that one, and then it nibbles on a tuft of grass right next to a hole in a fence. Then it sees another tuft of green grass on the other side of the fence, so it nibbles on that one, and then goes on to the next tuft and the next thing you know the cow has nibbled itself into being lost.” How many of us in our lives, how many of us are in the process of nibling our way to being lost. We keep moving from one tuft of activity to another, never noticing how far we have gone from home and how far away from the truth we have managed to end up. Like the cows nibbling tufts of grass, it always starts small - this sin is not a big deal - but soon enough we’ve nibbled ourselves far away from God’s truth. Paul finishes up with these beautiful words in verse 22. [read v.22-23]. Paul teaches us that obedience is the key. You are a slave to the one you obey, so why not obey the one that leads to eternal life. Obey the one who actually leads us to what is good. 

Here’s my point with all of this - every single person in this room, or joining us on the livestream has the same exact story. Though the details might be different, the names and faces are swapped - the content of our calamity varies creatively, but the story is the same. We have been slaves. We have lived life away from God, and we know that it leads to death. We have held on to our keys. We have insisted on driving ourselves, and at one point or another the vehicle of our life got wrapped around a telephone pole. We tried it our way, and we failed. We tried it our way and it led to death. So let me ask you - what is your slavery? What thing in your life are you holding onto? What key are you holding back from Jesus? Are you keeping the key of a failed marriage? Or a broken relationship? Are you hanging on to your drug addiction? Are you holding back the key of your sex life? Maybe struggling with pornography? Is alcohol the key you are trying to keep in your back pocket? What keys are you keeping from Jesus? And are you ready to lay them down in front of our God today? Do you give God the key of Sunday morning, but on the weekend you’re a totally different person? God, I will give you my voice in song on Sunday, but I will fill my mouth with profanity on Monday. I’m not going to give you my Monday morning key. What is your slavery? Are you a slave to your pride? To gossip? To judging others? Will you keep the keys for yourself - are you still trying to define goodness all by yourself. Are you still taking the magic marker of morality and trying to draw the boundaries where you think is best? Or are you ready to surrender? To obey God? Goodness comes from obedience. Are you willing to become a slave to the one who sets you free? 

The good news that God’s word has for us this morning is that God brings new life. But if you want new life, the old life has to die. You have to give all the keys to Jesus. You have to take everything you are, everything you’re proud of, everything you’re humiliated about, and everything you are in-between and you have to put it in front of Jesus. Come before Jesus as you are, die with him. Rise with him. A new person - a new life. In our pursuit of goodness, consider yourself dead to sin, but alive in Jesus Christ. Goodness comes from obedience.

Alright - so it’s all pretty simple so far, right? Sin is a big deal, we’re not going to pretend it’s not, we’re not going to swap out the poison label. And then, goodness comes from obedience to God. Because in a world where everyone is trying to make up their own definition of what is good - we know that God is the standard. Goodness comes from obedience to God, because God is the one true source of all goodness. And so I have two challenges I want you to take with you this morning. First - I want you to give ALL your keys to God. In verse 13 Paul says, [read it]. Give your whole body, dedicate your whole life to obeying God. And this is super practical. There’s a practice I want you to try this week. First thing when you wake up, or maybe first thing when you lay down (depending on how fast you fall asleep). I want you to do a “full body scan” to see if every part of you is used as an instrument for what is right. And what I mean by that is while you are lying there, I want you to remind yourself that every part of you belongs to God. Every piece of you, and your identity is for God’s glory. So literally, before you get up in the morning, pray down your body.  Start with your head, “God, my mind is surrendered to you - let my thoughts be thoughts that are for your goodness.” God, my ears are surrendered to you to do what is right for your glory - what I choose to hear, and let shape my thoughts.” God - my mouth is yours, let the words I use bring you glory and spread your goodness in the world. And lord if there are words in the back of my mouth that are not good, use my lips and close them. God let my heart, and the things that I long for - I surrender that to you. Let my fears be emersed in your love. God, my gut, my intuition - I give it to you, please guide me and my instincts today. God, my thumbs - because we all have these little rectangles that use our thumbs all day long. God I surrender my thumbs to you for acts of righteousness. I heard this idea from a guy named Steve Norman, who got it from a book on the fruits of the spirit, and he asked, “How many of you have thumbs that are faster than your brain can give you discernment?” Then only after you have hit send, wisdom catches up. Oops. God, my hands - the things I touch, the things I work on - let it be surrendered to you. As we move down the body - God, my sexuality, let it be completely surrendered to you. My feet - dedicated to going wherever you will send me today. I want you to try this this week - give yourself a full body scan. Dedicate every part of your body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. That’s my first challenge for you - give all your keys to Jesus, do a full body scan dedication every day. 

My second challenge, because it’s summer in West Michigan. I want you to imagine driving a boat. And maybe you’re pulling someone behind you on skis or on a tube or something. And what we learned today is that goodness comes from obeying God. Because when we keep in step with the Spirit, good fruit follows, every single time. In Psalm 23, you hear the words, ‘surely your goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.’ And so imagine you’re pulling a boat, one with some power - and when that boat gets going, what does it leave behind it? A wake, right? Every good boat with an ounce of power leaves a wake behind it. Have you ever stopped to consider that your life leaves a wake behind it? I want you to ask yourself - what is in your wake these days? Is God’s goodness and mercy following you all the days of your life? Or is your wake full of jealousy and anger, pain and mistakes? Because if what is in your wake is the fruits of the Spirit - love and joy and peace and goodness - praise God! Keep on doing what you’re doing, you are in step with the Spirit. But if you look in your wake, and you don’t see those fruit, ask God - “Lord, will you show me what’s going on in my heart?” If any part of my life is not fully surrendered to you God, will you show it to me, so that I can be the kind of person who is dead to sin, so I can be the kind of person who walks in freedom that comes from obeying you, so every part of my life can be used as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. Surrender everything, and then look in your wake and see what follows.  Let’s pray.