FHBC Sermon Notes

Sermon Audio: Click to Listen
Scripture Reading: Romans 6:15-23 - Listen
A Fourth of July sermon Sunday asking if we are truly free in this land.
Intro

• We claim to be the home of the free, but are/were all people really free.  Africans, Native Americans and might have argued differently.  
• Also, we do have some restrictions of law: no speeding, no stealing, no killing. 
• The scripture states that we are not really free at all.  In fact we are the home of the slave.

1. Every person is enslaved to a master. (6:15-16)
• Our slavery is not strictly visible. It is ultimately a spiritual slavery.
1. You are a slave to sin.   OR
• Our term from sin comes from archery. It means to "miss the mark".
• We think we are free, but we are under the taskmaster of our own nature. Even when no law seemingly exists, we make our own law, and in that we are slave to it. We are slave to our desires, our needs, our bodies. Even a man on an island by himself would be slave to his own hunger and need for sustenance. 
2. Your are a slave to righteousness.
• On the other side, we can put our lives, our well-being both physical and spiritual in the hands of our creator, and in that we are a slave to righteousness. Not our righteousness, or the righteousness of the law alone, but the righteousness that is simply God himself.
2. By definition, a slave necessarily obeys his master (6:16,19)
• This starts with our physical needs. They must be met, and in turn we must obey. But the path leads to spiritual and physical degradations. Our taste for something comes from the doing of it. When we follow sin, we get a taste, a desire, for sin. When we follow righteousness, we get a taste for righteousness. A test for me is to ask honestly each morning, what is it that I desire, and pray and act that my desire might be to be happy in God, to find my hope and joy in him alone.
• What is the fruit of the Spirit? Are these are what we do and live to do? When we are slaves of God, we love what he loves, and hate what he hates.
3. The default master for every person is sin.  (6:17-19)
• This is the place we all start. See Romans 1:18-32 and Romans 9, Psalm 51, Jeremiah 17, Isaiah 64:6
• It is almost American to go to church as our duty and that we are a Christian by default. But this is not where we start. We may be born as an American, but we are not free, we are not Christian by citizenship.  We are born into sin.
4. A person becomes a slave of righteousness through a supernatural work of God (6:17-18)
• We are transferred from one master to another. 
• A great price was payed for this transfer. The blood of Christ, God's Son.
• We have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching (i.e. the gospel).
• There were some in Rome that saw that under grace, they could sin more. Paul says "no way". Willing obedience comes from a new heart and mind. It is our desire that we may find our happiness in God.
• Submit to God as this is where joy is found.
5. The slave receives his just reward (6:16, 20-23)
• For sin the reward is death.
• The reward of righteousness is righteousness. v. 16, eternal life v.23. Eternal life begins now, the moment we are made alive again in Christ. And the last reward is freedom. v22.