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When the old broken software finally gives way to something that works, the last thing you’d do is press every button just to break the new one on purpose. Yet that same impulse faces us in the Christian life, and Paul confronts it head-on in Romans 6:14-15: since we are not under law but under grace, shall we sin?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher uses the soundboard and software illustrations to explain grace and freedom from the law. How does moving from “broken software” to “working software” help clarify what it means to be freed from the law’s condemnation rather than freed from God’s purposes?
Paul asks twice in Romans 6, “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” What is the difference between understanding this question intellectually and actually living out the answer in daily decisions?
The sermon contrasts belonging to “the kingdom of sin and flesh” versus belonging to “God and His kingdom.” How does thinking of sin as a matter of belonging—rather than as individual actions we get to choose—change the way we approach temptation?
The preacher mentions seminary students who thought freedom from the law meant they could live like the world because Jesus would forgive them. Where do you see this same confusion playing out in churches or Christian culture today, and what practical steps would help correct it?
How does the Jumanji illustration—where the game demands your full attention and won’t release you until you reach the goal—challenge the idea that sin is something a person can partially indulge while still fully belonging to God?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, okay, let’s see if this is off. It’s off. But you’re on the preacher. Here we go. Preacher. Check, check. Check, check. Okay.
So this wasn’t supposed to be the illustration tonight, but let’s just imagine in a few weeks we’ve replaced this soundboard, and we have a new soundboard. And we’ve been doing various maneuvers to avoid problems with the current one, right? And so, you get a new soundboard, you put it in, and then we start doing those same maneuvers with the new soundboard. Well, that wouldn’t be very useful, right? You need to embrace the fact that it’s not malfunctioning, and you can actually make it worse if you keep treating it like it’s broken.
Now, on the other hand, it’s important for us to recognize when something is broken. A few weeks ago at Bible study, we have our Tuesday night Bible study, and we all went to log in, and Microsoft, who has generously for the last six years donated a license to use their software, let the license expire. They just didn’t renew it, even though they’ve given it to us for six years. And so we went in, and it won’t let us in. So, we went over to Google Meets, where I had a backup that I had been playing with, but we hadn’t tried for any purpose yet—just a Google Meet room for the Bible study. And so, we went over there, and it mostly worked. We had a few problems, but it mostly worked. And so, here we are in this new thing. In fact, for some folks, it actually immediately worked better. There have been some frustrations where you go into Teams, and it won’t let you in, or similar issues. But everyone got in, so that was a nice thing.
We’re in the new software. And what do you do when you’re in new software? When you’re in a new situation, what do you do? When you have a new car, what do you do? Well, you ask, what can I try? And so, that first night, it was a little crazy because everyone was trying out different buttons and seeing what they do. Because what we do, right? We don’t want to do the thing where we have the old broken thing that doesn’t work. We got used to that, and we tend to treat the new thing the same way. So, we’re exploring—how do we embrace this new thing? That’s a good question. What’s new? What can I do?
We moved to something that was working. Could we press enough buttons and do enough things where it was not functional, where it was maybe worse than the old software? Well, yeah, we could. I’m sure there are—pardon? Yeah, yeah. You can always do that, right? You can always figure out some way to break it again. But now, sometimes we do that by accident. But what if we did that intentionally? Wouldn’t that seem silly? You know, this new software’s working; the old software didn’t work. How about I break the new software so it’s just like the old software? Don’t do it, Jim; don’t do it. Yeah, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Yes, yeah. I don’t like when it’s broken. It’s nice when it works, right? It’d be silly.
If we were all sitting there at Bible study this week and someone said, “You know, remember when Teams didn’t work?” wouldn’t it be nice if we could make it not work? We’d all say, yeah, yeah, exactly, amen, Ginny. What’s wrong with you? Yeah, yeah. So, Jim and Ginny are both very wise here. We shouldn’t break it, and we’d ask, what’s wrong with you if you did break it intentionally?
So, we know that about, say, software we want to use to get together for Bible study: it’s right to ask what’s new because we’d want to move from the broken. But often, the problem is, when we’re talking about life, we get to the “what’s new” of the Christian life, and we say, well, it’s fun to get to press all the buttons. We start to ask, well, can I press enough to break it, and it won’t matter because God will fix all the buttons. And that’s the issue Paul is addressing here—that we, as those who are redeemed yet still wrestling with sin, sometimes just decide, well, let’s press all the buttons. Because God’s the ultimate help desk; He’ll fix it anyway. And Paul says, no, don’t do that.
Tonight, let’s pray that we can know where we’re rightly exploring pressing the buttons and where it is that we’re just trying to break it and go back to the old broken software. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for this evening, for your word. We pray that you would guide us, that you’d apply your truth to us as we read your word tonight, that we might be encouraged and strengthened by it. Lord, be also with our technology, that our online family can continue to be a part tonight, that everything would stay up from here on out, so that we can focus on you, Lord. That’s what we want to do. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn back to verse 14 that we finished last week with. I’ll just turn my clicker on—there we are. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Hmm. I think when we read that, we’re not surprised that that’s a bad idea at an abstract level. But how often is it that, in the practical, I’m going to live life level, we actually say that? It won’t matter if I do this—I’m forgiven. It doesn’t matter if I’m not measuring up to God’s standard—I’m forgiven. And this is a genuine tension, right? Because one of Paul’s points is to get away from living in such a way that you’re constantly trying to figure out if you can earn God’s favor.
So, you might ask, then, why are we talking about trying to live up to God’s standard? Well, when our Bible study software just shut off because of a change in the policy of our old account, none of us had the power to turn it back on. We couldn’t. It was broken. It was off. So it was good to realize we had a different option that could help us escape that broken state. We moved to it. And it’s good to ask, what can we do? But again, it would be silly—don’t do it, as Jim said. If we’re just going to try to make it work just as badly as before, that’s what Paul is addressing. God is taking you from that broken state where you can’t log in, where you can’t connect with Him, and making it possible for you to connect with the God of the universe. Not just with some really wonderful people that God has redeemed and placed in a family to study His Word—no, you can connect with the God of the universe. And He wants us to live in freedom, to be joyful in that, but not to then say, “Well, since I am now free in this new software, in this new life, let me see if I can break it.” The joy should be in being with Him, not in seeing what we can get away with.
I think John Calvin made a really good distinction here that helped bring this into focus. He said that what we’re talking about is the effect of our sin, or the effect of getting out from under the law, not the action we ought to do. When we’re told that we’re out from under the law—that we’re no longer under its curse for failing to follow it—the point of Scripture is that we don’t have to constantly worry that we’re going to fail and run trying to measure up. We don’t have to do something to prove ourselves to God. The point of that was never to say, “Now go and do the opposite of the law—see how bad you can be.” Yet, sometimes, that’s exactly how we take it. We think that freedom from the law means doing the opposite of what the law prescribes.
No, freedom from the law means not fearing when we don’t measure up to the law. And that seems subtle at times, but it’s a profound difference in how we live. One is, if it’s freedom from doing the good that the law even prescribes, then we’re saying that God didn’t free us so we can do wickedness, but as sinners, He freed us from the constant fear that our sin will drag us into eternal condemnation. Now, we can always have access to the Lord—that we’re logged in, that we never get the error that the account has been canceled. It’s freedom from judgment because we’ve been judged righteous—because Jesus has been judged righteous and we receive His righteousness. But it’s not freedom from the very purpose God gave us. He gave us a reason to live, and He still wants us to live in that purpose—even if it’s not that we perfectly meet it, because we can’t.
Remember, we looked at Galatians 5 during our confession time tonight. Paul says, “Here are the things you shouldn’t do,” right? He’s preparing to talk about the weeds that grow up before we get to the fruit of the Spirit—things that are displeasing to God and corrosive to our purpose. He will go into all that, but before that, in verse 18, he says, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” It feels contradictory, doesn’t it? He’s telling us not to do these things, and then he says, “But you’re not under the law.” Paul’s point is that we’re not under the law’s condemnation. It’s not that doing what pleases God is out of style now, or that God doesn’t want us to live as He intended. He knows we won’t measure up, and He won’t let us be lost because of that. Once that burden is lifted from us, like we discussed weeks ago, we have the opportunity to live without the pressure of trying to measure up, simply doing because we are made to do so.
That’s where we land: does the fact that God forgives us and offers us grace mean that we should sin? No. It means that we should live fleeing from sin, because we’re no longer trying to make a bargain to measure up. We tend to think of sin as something we get to do or not do. But God is telling us that sin is about where we belong—whether we belong to the kingdom of sin and flesh, or whether we belong to God and His kingdom. Where do we belong? And the irony is, when we belong to heaven, but keep living like we belong to the flesh, we’re doing what’s displeasing to Him. We’re just going through the motions of old software, fighting away from the new, trying to stay on the error screen, instead of enjoying the freedom He gives.
We tell ourselves maybe we can belong a little to the kingdom of sin still, but sin can’t own us partially. It owns all of us. Do you remember the children’s book Jumanji? It really stuck with me as a kid. Years later, I saw the movie, but just the book was so vivid. The story is about two kids who find a board game in the park with a warning on it. It looks fun—they’re bored, they want something to do. They see the warning, but they take the game anyway. It says that once a game of Jumanji begins, it will not be over until one player reaches the golden city. That sounds like nonsense, right? Like a long Monopoly game. It won’t be over until you accomplish something—own all the properties.
But what they don’t realize is that Jumanji is immersive without VR. Whatever bad things happen on the game board happen around you and to you—monkeys tearing up your kitchen, a contagious disease from a fly. If the fly bites you and you fall asleep, that’s part of the game. The only way to escape all those troubles is to finish the game. It demands your full attention—it’s all-inclusive, taking every bit of you. I think, with sin, we often look at it, get bored or tired, and see the warning. The bargain with sin is that it says, “I want all of you,” and you won’t be able to leave until you reach a goal—the goal the world promises, which is never truly attainable.
Romans 6 confronts us with a question: which game do we want to belong to? Do we want to belong to God’s game, or the world’s game? The fact that God has freed us from the law doesn’t mean we should say, “Well, since I’m free from the law, I can now do whatever I want.” It doesn’t mean that. When we forget that Jesus has already completed the game for us, we’re living in a way that, ultimately, seeks to go back to the old game.
Instead, God calls us to His better plan. He invites us to stop fighting away from His software, to enjoy the freedom and the purpose He has for us. If you haven’t trusted in Jesus, you can say, “I’ve been playing the sin game, and it’s only getting worse—I don’t want to play anymore.” And good news: you don’t have to complete that game because Jesus has already completed it for you. You don’t need to stay stuck. He’s calling you to the better place He has prepared.
God says that, yes, He wants you to escape the law—not in the way you think, because if you think escaping the law means doing everything the law prohibits, then you’re still playing the world’s game. True escape from the law means freedom to be who He made you to be.
Once again, let’s look at verse 14: “For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law but under grace.” What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not. I prefer that translation—it’s so forceful. Paul uses the most intense way of saying this—he wants to be very clear: “Don’t do it! Absolutely, positively, no ifs, no ands, no buts—just don’t do it. Period.” The fact that our individual sins don’t condemn us eternally because Christ has paid the price doesn’t mean we should sin. It means we have the freedom to live genuinely—when we stumble, we’re not stuck in Jumanji. We can escape because sin no longer has mastery over us. It cannot claim us as belonging anymore.
It’s absurd to say, “I’m free, so I’ll sin.” That’s like saying, “I’m free, so I wish I were enslaved again.” But that’s exactly what happens when we choose to indulge sin, knowing we are no longer slaves to it. Like in the story of Jumanji, the children could destroy the board. If they had been wise, they’d have completely destroyed it. But at least they didn’t put it back in the park and start playing again. Too often, we set aside the sin and then pick it back up, thinking maybe this time it won’t be so bad. But sin is always so bad.
Paul reminds us in Romans 5:20, “The law came in so that the trespass might increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The question then is: shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase? No. That’s exactly where we started our series. Paul asks twice almost the same question: Should we sin more so everyone can see how great Jesus is? If you help someone escape sin, and they go right back into it, you wouldn’t thank them for it. If you help a friend pull their car out of a ditch, and they press the gas and drive right back in, you’d doubt whether to help again. It’s exhausting, and it’s not glorifying to God.
Paul makes clear: no, you are not glorifying God by sinning more so that He might demonstrate how great He is at forgiving. We don’t need to make His grace bigger through sin. Back in verse 15, Paul anticipates this question: “Since we’re not under law, does that mean I can do whatever I want?” The answer is a firm, “Absolutely not!” I recall a story from seminary. Some students who had been in very legalistic churches—churches that taught they were still under the law—came to seminary and heard about God’s grace. They thought, Wow, there’s so much grace here. Then they decided the best way to discuss theology was to go to the bar and drink a lot—show that they could be Christians and still live like the world—that they could be “free” because they’re no longer under the law.
That’s a dangerous overreaction. It’s the danger of saying, “I’m not under the law, so I can do whatever I want,” embracing what the world does because now Jesus will forgive. But that’s not how Jesus calls us to live. It reveals that we don’t truly understand our citizenship. If we belong to Jesus and want to be His, we shouldn’t act like we’re not. We should live in the freedom He provides—living holy, joyful, and full of purpose, not trying to see how far we can bend the rules or indulge the old nature.
It’s freedom, yes, from the law. Freedom. But we don’t understand oftentimes what freedom is. It’s not some generic freedom where it means that at every point now as I approach life, I can do any of the multitude of options that I can handle with that particular choice, right? I can get really drunk, or I cannot get drunk, or I can encourage other people to get drunk, or I can criticize the people getting drunk and beat them up, or I can… it’s not that kind of freedom.
It’s freedom to realize that when we don’t meet God’s standard, and we still have a loving heavenly Father who is right there with us; a loving heavenly Father who loves us so much that the last thing we should want to do is give Him another reason to forgive us. We should want Him not to need to forgive us again, even though we’re going to come to those places. And He invites us to that forgiveness when we do.
Instead, it’s freedom to actually live, to actually fulfill our purpose. Because once you’re freed from the weight of all your sin, once you’re freed from the fact that every single option that you choose or don’t choose might be the one that condemns you or saves you, and you realize no, that’s not the case, then we can actually have the freedom to go and seek to do what’s pleasing to Him because He’s actually made us to do that. It’s not about just doing something that’s totally out of our nature. It’s about being the people, the men and women that God made us to be and actually experience what it’s like to really be.
2 Timothy 1, right? Paul writes to Timothy, he says, He has saved us and called us to a holy calling not because of our works, but by His own purpose, and by the grace He has granted us in Christ Jesus before time began. Called us to a holy calling. He saved us and called us to a holy calling. Not because of our works, but His own purpose. Notice how Paul puts everything together right there. Christ has saved us. It’s not a question mark.
How sad. I’ll hear believers say, “Well, I hope I end up getting to go into heaven. I hope I get to be in God’s presence.” I don’t know. How sad is that? God, if you have trusted in Jesus, God has saved you, He’s redeemed you. You don’t need to hope that maybe you’ll measure up. You measure up because Jesus measures up. Yeah, we should applaud God for that, right? That’s an amazing thing that God has done.
And He didn’t just save us and forget us. He saved us so that we could go and be. He gave you gifts. Each of you in here, I’m looking around, and I know each of you has gifts and talents and interests that can bless people. And He saved you for those things, to live doing those things, to not be stuck anymore.
So Paul says to Timothy, He has saved you, but then He’s called you. But then Paul goes back just so that there’s no confusion, that we don’t think, “Well, after He saved us, maybe then I earn God’s favor?” No, not because of our works, but because of His purpose. We’re not going to save ourselves, but we’re saved to a mission.
In a few weeks, the annual St. Louis tradition of the Muni will open back up, and I think, and Bob back there, they’re probably anxious. I know that they’ll be there, and maybe I’m sure many of you will end up at the Muni at some point this summer, as St. Louis has been doing for over 100 years now.
You’ll go there and watch the play, and it’ll surely be amazing. The music will be beautiful. The stars will be wonderful as they’re shining down over the stage. It’ll be wonderful, right? There’s probably one thing that I think most of us would agree isn’t wonderful: getting out of the parking lots. Because if you go there and you get the really good spot, right? You get there early and you get pretty close.
You know what that means? You’re going to be there a very long time after it’s over. You can choose whether you want to walk further or wait longer. And so you’re in that prime parking spot, that one you patted yourself on the back for a few hours before when you were all excited for the play, and now you’re tired, and it was a hot humid night, and you just want to go home.
And all you see is a sea of red traffic lights ahead of you. And you do 15 minutes later as well, right? And maybe a little longer than that. And then you see the exit to Forest Park. And you pull off onto one of the roads around the park, and it might still be a little trafficky, but you start to actually be able to move.
Your car starts to have a recognizable speed on the speedometer again. And there’s a freedom that you feel on that, right? We made it. But then you say, “Well, you know, I didn’t look at the fountain by the World’s Fair Pavilion while I was in there. Maybe I should turn around.” Right? I’ll go back. I always like to look at that. I’m gonna go back in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t do it. We have a lot, don’t do it, right? May it not be. Don’t do it. Yeah, it’s definitely a trap. Don’t want to do it. There’s some wise people here, you know that? Don’t do it. Because what’s going to happen? It’ll be really easy going back in.
Then you have to do it again. You’re going to go through the sea of red lights again unless you just decide to stay there until after midnight and maybe get mugged or something. I don’t know. Probably a bad idea. Don’t do it, don’t do that either. You realize, “Wait, I’m out of here.”
And yeah, there are things that were beautiful and attractive about being in that park, even when I was sitting there complaining about not being able to move. And yes, I now, as someone who has a car that can freely move on the highway and the streets around there, have the freedom to go back in, but do I want to? Oh, actually, maybe a little bit. Yeah, I do.
But then there’s a part, then there’s the sensible part of me that says, “No, I don’t want to do that.” And you don’t want to do that. Your Muni experience this summer, if you go, will be better if you don’t do that. The car can be itself when it actually can move again. And we can be ourselves when we can actually move.
And when God has rescued us from the traffic jam, and He hasn’t just let us kind of work our way out, He’s brought in a helicopter and airlifted our car out and set us down where we can actually go and be where we need to be. We can get back home, we can get some sleep, we can go and do the work we need to do the next day and feel rested as we do it. We can do all those things.
Let me say, but what about that fountain? It’ll be there next week, right? And God is going to restore all things. And there will be a time when even the things that we can’t enjoy fully at this moment because our sin corrupts them will be fully good and true, and we can enjoy them.
So what we need to do is keep our eye on the road, keep our eye on where we’re headed, and not go back. Do I want freedom? Or do I want freedom to be myself? And I think we often think those are the same thing. And I think we often think that freedom to be myself means, “I can sin, and I can live in my truth,” and whatever that might be.
But freedom to be myself is to finally be if God made me to be, which is not to sin, but to glorify Him. And if we want to actually have freedom to experience what it’s like to be right, we want freedom to be ourselves in Christ when He makes us new and He starts to change our desires. And we say, even where my desires aren’t changed yet, God, let me experience what it’s like. Give me the strength to do it.
Because we too often settle for just freedom. “Yeah, I can come and I can confess sin again.” God says, “I have better for you than that.” You’re not a mistake. I made you. And I gave you gifts, and you can use them in a way that glorifies Me rather than in a way that simply ensnares you in sin again.
God offers us freedom to truly be ourselves. We can finally be what we were made to be. When we look at what Paul is talking about here, that’s what He’s inviting us into: to quit being ensnared, start being genuinely free.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, we do pray that You would help us, that You would help us because we find freedom oddly confusing. You free us from the weight of sin, the death that is brought by sin, and we say, “Well, but could I maybe still do a little bit of it?”
Lord, would You help us not only to experience Your freedom but to live in it, to go from just doing whatever because we have freedom, to actually experiencing the freedom to be ourselves, the men and women that You made us to be, to use our gifts to Your glory, to experience a taste of what will come when You make all things new every time that we do what You made us to do.
I pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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