Our New Master (6:11-23)

“Sanctification” (6:22) is the life-long process of becoming more like Jesus; it is an incredible journey of cooperating with God for increasing holiness in our lives. To me, part of the greatness of the gospel is that it can influence every arena of our lives; in other words, my great need is not just forgiveness but for actual goodness in everything I do. Through belief in the gospel message, God imparts that goodness to us; the Holy Spirit re-creates a new heart within us.

In this section, Paul gives us practical steps about sanctification, how to live from that new heart that we now have: we are to KNOW the truth of what Christ did for us (6:3), CONSIDER ourselves as now being “ dead to sin” (6:11), and PRESENT our bodies to God for His purposes (6:13). As a believer, I never outgrow these steps. I return to them again and again;

Am I believing truth?
Am I thinking that way?
Am I living that way?

But, there is a principle that lies beneath the practical steps this is worth getting into also. The principle is this: belief is an acknowledgement of who your “master” is; it is a form of worship. Before I believed, I thought I was my own master, worshipping self, only to find out I was in bondage to sin. When I believed in Jesus, I gained a new Master; in fact, I wanted a new Master. My primary motivation in believing was thinking He could actually run my life better than me! I was freed from my old master, “sin,” and joined to a new Master, Jesus Christ. Another way of putting it is that faith is inherently a self-surrender.

Self-surrender to something is an acknowledgement of its mastery over you, it is acknowledging its authority and power over you. We all live in self-surrender to something or someone, whether popularity, success, wealth, image, pleasure, power or Jesus.

Some believers get kinda crazy at this point. Maybe they are not aware that Christ is their Master or Lord. Maybe they have never thought of faith as self-surrender. Perhaps they have thought of grace only as God’s unconditional favor toward them, but not as something that actually creates desires to live a godly life (see Titus 2:11-12). Perhaps they are not aware that obedience is what expresses our faith-either in Christ or in sin (6:17-19).

This is a great paradox: the Bible speaks of both our freedom from sin and our slavery to Christ as incredible benefits to our lives because no other form of slavery actually frees. Author Rebecca Manly Pippert described Christ’s mastery of our lives this way: “Jesus will not control us in the wrong way. Nor will He control us in the easy way, by making every decision for us. He controls us in the right way: by being who He is and by calling us to become all that we are meant to be.” Salvation sets us free from our sin nature, and Christ being our Master can liberate us from our selfishness, our blindness, our small thinking, our addictions and a hundred other things. But if Christ is not Lord of our lives, something else, or someone else will be.

Christ is the only Master who brings freedom.

Slavery to Christ is what sets us free.