Free Gift

DEVOTION

ROMANS

FREE GIFT

Rom 6:19-23

19 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. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 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. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

NIV

Within this portion of Paul’s discourse on slaves to sin or slaves to God, we have one of the verses often quoted when trying to convince someone they need Jesus. But isn’t that just like us, trying to convince someone. We cannot, it is the Spirit who convicts a person to repent and accept this free gift of God. This passage says what he said before only in a plainer manner so his reader can clearly get the point. It is that same idea of having to serve somebody, either the devil or God. However there is something slightly new in the idea when we were slaves to sin our wickedness was every increasing. We were not content to just be a little wicked, we kept finding way to be more wicked. But that idea of increasing in wickedness carries over to increasing in righteousness. Sin leads to death and righteousness leads to holiness which leads to eternal life. Still we should see the point that the only thing people reap from being wicked is death. That is sad, to know people who are going to their death and not say anything to them about being able to have life instead. But we have left that life and now live controlled by righteousness. We are slaves onto God and do his bidding, rather than before when we did the bidding of the devil. So we are set free from sin, we are made holy by God and we have eternal life. This is good, very good, very good indeed. However, this verse 23 which is quoted so often shows us something. Death is the wage paid to us for sin. We can earn death because of sin. But we cannot earn eternal life being holy. We cannot earn eternal life by any means at all. It is a free gift from God if we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Eternal life is a result of something we do, but it is not earned, it is given freely. What we do is simply believe. We cannot get this eternal life if we give up a life of sin, because we will always have some sin, granted we do not increase in wickedness just because we like how it feels. We make an attempt to live onto righteousness, but we will fail to be perfect in the endeavor. We do not let sin reign in our body, but it rears its ugly head once in a while. So there is no being good enough, holy enough, righteous enough to earn eternal life. We can have eternal life only through faith in Jesus Christ. That’s it, so simple and yet somehow we tend to make it so complicated. A free gift, a free gift from God. All we need to do is open his gift and enjoy it. But what about all the rules, all the commands of God? Don’t we have to obey all the law? Don’t we have to listen to all the teachings of Jesus and put them into practice? It seems there is something we have to do, but it is not to gain eternal life, it is a result of eternal life. We want to do God desires of us because we love him and we want to please him. But following all the rules, all the law does not get us to heaven, nor does not following every last little command condemn us either. If failure to follow every command lost us eternal life, then it was not a gift from God in the first place, it was something we earned by following every command. But we know that is not true, eternal life is a free gift of God through Jesus Christ. All we can do is thank him for his free gift.