One time I memorized Romans 6 as a tactic for overcoming sin. “What shall we say, then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”
It seemed good. Strong and compelling. But it never worked. Not any more than any other tactic. And the more I think about it now, the more I realize something is drastically missing in any strategy based only on chapter 6 of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.
Like any other passage in the Bible, this one chapter is not intended to be read and fully understood for application in and of itself. Romans 6 comes smack in the middle of perhaps the most in-depth look we have on what takes place inside a person as he comes to faith in Christ.
Is this passage powerful? Yes.
Should we memorize it? Absolutely!
But we cannot separate it from the chapters around it and in my zeal to find something that rids me of lust, I did just that.
When Man Tries Getting Pregnant
You see, focusing only on Romans 6 as a tactic for fighting temptation gives the impression victory is entirely our responsibility. For instance, verses 11-13 begin with “So you must consider yourself…” “Let not sin therefore…” and “Do not present your members…”
The chapter is full of exhortations toward living pure and holy lives. But if we focus only on this chapter, we come away with the impression that we do the work of living dead to sin and alive to Christ. And we are supposed to do this because, when we were baptized, we were buried with Jesus and then raised with Him to life (vs. 3-10).
Therefore, if we are going to be true Christians, we are now to live differently. And that’s true. Why else would Paul have written the chapter?
The problem with this narrow approach is that it’s sort of like me trying to get pregnant just by putting on a dress and growing my hair long. I don’t mean to be inappropriately descriptive. It’s just that no matter how many “womanly” things I do—even if I changed my voice and got breast implants—unless significant parts of my biological makeup are completely redone, I’m never giving birth.
In the same way, just because I walk around reciting Romans 6 doesn’t mean I actually am dead to my sin.
Even more, just because I recite Romans 6 doesn’t mean I will actually live pure and holy. At least, not without hearing the rest of the story.
And the rest of the story is about an experience we can have where God completely redoes significant parts of our biological makeup. Not in a physical or even sexual sense. But in a deep, internal, heart sense. So, at best, this approach suggests our ability to live dead to sin is possible because Jesus conquered sin. At worst, this approach suggests living alive to Christ is a matter of our own gumption.
Jesus Redeems, Not Man
Paul wrote in Romans 5, before getting to the point of considering ourselves dead to sin and exhorting us not to sin anymore, that we have peace with God because of Jesus Christ.
Peace does not come because we no longer sin. I’m not suggesting he is saying we can live a life of sin and still have peace—that’s what chapter six is all about. But Paul simply explains that peace is not available because of our perfection.
Peace is available to us because of Jesus.
But to understand this concept—a concept so deep I feel as if I am drinking from a fire hydrant every time I read about it—Paul takes us back in time. He tells us the story of man. Actually, he tells us the story of God, and how He is redeeming man.
The Story of God
In Romans 1, Paul says “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” (vs. 18) He goes on to say that what can be known about God is plain because God has shown it. He says God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in all things that have been made. Man is without excuse (1:19-20).
So, in everything made on earth, the sky, the stars, the clouds, the mountains, the trees, the oceans, the fish, the animals—everything—God’s divine nature is made known to man. And it has been so ever since Adam and Eve.
The story of Adam and Eve is not a random story to kick off the biblical narrative. Their story is our story. Paul goes back to the beginning because if we are to understand ourselves, today, we must understand man back then.
God created and it was good.
All of creation perfectly displayed His glory and all He is and everything was magnificently beautiful because God is beautiful and He loves His creation very much.
Adam and Eve walked in perfect relationship with God. They knew God, the Creator, in His fullness. But something happened. Something went wrong. And in Romans 1 Paul is getting ready to tell us what went wrong and how it affects us, today.
He said, “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” (Romans 1:21-23)
Paul was not only speaking of Adam and Eve, but he was moving beyond them and telling the story of Cain, the people in Noah’s day, Babel, the descendants of Abraham, and all those that followed. They knew God, but chose to ignore Him and worship something else.
What happened that causes us to wrestle with lust and pornography? Why is it that we experience pain and sometimes hurt others, ourselves? Because back in the garden a couple chose to listen to another person’s voice instead of God’s.
They chose to honor someone else as God, instead of God Himself.
Under the disguise of gaining knowledge and wisdom, they became fools by counting God’s Word, His glory and creation, as meaningless and considering someone else’s word and glory and ideas as having greater merit.
And ever since that time, man has been making the same foolish mistake—including you and me, today.
“Therefore,” wrote Paul, “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…” (Romans 1:24-25)
The issue of lust is not a matter of a strong sex drive, a biological compulsion and need for sexual intimacy. Neither is it a matter of having too much desire for erotic pleasure.
The issue of lust is an issue of worship. It is an issue of who we consider to be God.
Even more than that, lust is a matter of serving ourselves over God. For all of history, man has had (and will continue to have) a propensity to fulfill God-given desires in ways that dishonor God as God and serve himself (the creature) instead of God (the Creator).
The serpent broke man’s relationship with God not by getting man to worship himself, but by getting man to worship man? When Eve has only Eve’s interest in mind, and Adam has only Adam’s, God can no longer pour out His glory and purpose and worth and security into them.
Instead, they are trying to find glory, purpose, worth, and security in themselves. They begin feeling shame because they are woefully unable to provide, in and of themselves, the things they truly need.
Not only that, they feel shame because they dishonored God as God. They slapped Him in the face, the One who gave them breath. They chose another god, and their choice carried unrelenting consequences.
And as much as it makes us squirm, this is our story too.
Slapping God in the Face
The day I Googled naked women I basically clipped the back of my hand across my Creators face.
Did He want me to see a naked woman someday? Did He care about me being able to express my sex drive and experience erotic pleasure? Absolutely! Just not in that way or on that day.
He did not design thirteen-year old boys, or twenty-year-old men, or fifty or sixty—however old we may be when we try gratifying our sexual urges in our own way on our own terms—to find sexual fulfillment in the confines of our own selves and pornographic images.
He designed that kind of pleasure for marriage, something freely available to each of us. But instead of waiting until marriage, I decided take matters into my own hands. And maybe you have done the same. Or maybe, instead of keeping it in your own marriage, you decided to put in “overtime” on your cell phone, or at the coffee shop by yourself.
Either way, anytime we try gratifying ourselves sexually outside of the context of a marriage commitment and emotional intimacy, we are slapping our Maker in the face and saying we would rather worship someone else.
We Are God
Paul finished chapter one of Romans by recounting various acts of unrighteousness mankind does as a result of worshiping and serving the creature instead of the Creator. Women have sex with women. Men have sex with men.
“They do what ought not to be done, filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” (Romans 1:28-31)
It can be easy to look at this list and see the awful things done and comfort myself by the fact that “I haven’t done that.”
I have never had sex with a man or murdered someone, for instance. Neither do I hate God.
But notice the list is not limited to the obviously evil deeds. He lists “haters of God” smack in between “gossips, slanderers” and “insolent, haughty, boastful.” Why? Because someone who slanders and someone who is haughty is just as much a hater of God as the person who murders another man.
Impurity, homosexual relations, murder, strife, covetousness, boastfulness, inventing evil, disobeying parents are all acts of foolishness, faithlessness, heartlessness and ruthlessness. They all come from the lust of our flesh. And as long as we continue to not honor God as God, He continues to give us up to these things.
It all becomes normal way of life. And people—even sometimes Christians—begin accepting it as normal not because a better interpretation of Scripture affirms such things as normal, but because we have decided we are God—not God Himself.
Worshipping Ourselves to Death
It isn’t as though mankind was duped into this mess. God had made it clear as could be that if Adam and Eve ate of the fruit they would surely die. (Genesis 2:17)
The issue is not over clarity. “God, you weren’t clear enough, I didn’t know what you meant.” Adam and Eve had no excuse.
The issue is about who they honored as God.
We believe whoever we have honor for. Adam and Eve believed the serpent. They honored him because he offered their deepest desires could be fulfilled without Creator God, without parameters and boundaries.
In the same way, when we lust, when we look to pornography or masturbate or have sex with someone who is not our wife to fulfill the God-given desire for sexual intimacy, we honor someone else as God. We are saying, “I don’t believe you have good intentions for this creation. I think I can do a better job.”
But true to what God warned, when we choose to not honor Him as God, we only experience death—deeper shame, greater frustration, and a dreadfully stronger vacuum in our souls.
Hope in the Middle of Chaos
But just as Genesis 3 is not the end of the story, Romans 1 is just the beginning of Paul’s history lesson. In fact, he clued us in that something hopeful is coming before even recounting the awful mess we are in.
Verses 16 and 17 of chapter 1 say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes…for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”
The gospel is a message of hope because it is the power of God for salvation. What do we need salvation from?
Death. We need salvation from this mess we all find ourselves in the middle of.
In the verses before, Paul said he found himself eager to preach the gospel to them. So, he was getting ready to tell the gospel. But first, they must understand why they need it. Hence, the list of unrighteousness that God’s wrath burns against. There is hope, however, and that was what Paul wanted to tell in the following chapters.
The book of Romans is a letter of hope.
There has always been hope. Even in Genesis 3, where we read of the great breach in God’s relationship with man, we also read of hope. God told the serpent that one of the woman’s descendants would come and crush his head (Gen. 3:15).
God was not thrown for a loop by man’s disregard for Him as God. It is as if He knew man could not do it on his own. I dare say, it’s as if God needed a villain in the story to prove His great love for His creation.
All the way from the beginning, God has had a plan for redeeming man, for winning man’s heart back and fully restoring His relationship with him. In Romans 1, Paul was getting ready to talk about that plan.
In chapter 2 of Paul’s letter, he talked about how the law was designed to show mankind his need for salvation. The law is an act of kindness from God (Romans 2:3-4), not an act of control, as some view it.
God never meant for man to be able to keep the law.
It was never intended to be a way we could have relationship with God again. . .if we could only get these things just right. Rather, God’s intention for the law was (and still is) to show us how dreadfully far we are from attaining the holiness and perfection needed for standing in His presence.
God wants to do something else in man, something more than getting him to walk a perfect line. In other words, God is doing something that radically changes man’s ability to walk in righteousness, sort of like that biological overhaul we talked about earlier.
But it must be clear that it is nothing man does in and of himself. That is the reason for the judgement of the law, Paul said.
No one is righteous, chapter 3. “No one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does what is good, not even one.” (3:11-12)
You and I are not exempt from Adam and Eve’s dishonoring God as God.
As they did, so we have decided we can do a better job of meeting our needs and fulfilling desires than God can.
We worship ourselves. We self-protect, self-gratify, self-obsess. We worship the creature; not the Creator.
And no matter how hard we try, we cannot fix this mess. Not even through keeping the law. It was never meant to clear our slate. It merely shows us a slate that needs cleared. It shows us our need for a Savior.
Righteousness, perfectness, a restored relationship where we experience God’s full security and pleasure and function as designed, comes from faith in what God has done. It doesn’t come through anything we do ourselves.
Just as something happened beyond our control to mess up God’s good creation, God has done something—without asking us—to fix it.
Compelled by His love for His creation and by His desire to restore the beauty that once was, God broke through heaven and completely shattered the power of deceit and doubt His enemy has over us.
Experiencing that freedom happens not by working harder, but by accepting it in faith.
This story is not about us. We slapped God in the face. We deserve death. We believed someone we have never met, ignoring the obvious attributes of God we see every day in creation.
This story is about God. It is about His love, a love He recklessly pours out on us.
In the middle of our slapping and turning away, He comes running after us. Not because we are so special; but because He knows we will only die heading down our own track.
He made us for life, and He wants us to experience life to the fullest. No one has the power to save us from destruction except God Himself. So, while we are busy sinning—in the middle of Google searches for pornography, in the middle of laying on our beds rubbing ourselves and experiencing pleasure alone, in the middle of fantasizing about ladies in a way that brings a rush and a sense of significance—in the middle anything we do to try filling the voids in our souls on our own terms in our own way—God empties all of Heaven of His riches and sacrifices His only son, laying everything on the line, to buy us back from death and restore in us the breath of eternal life (Eph. 2:4-7).
Even though we have wasted the inheritance He already gave us, He places us back in the family, securing, again, an inheritance for eternity.
God has promised to do this for each and every one of us. No one is too far from the reach of God’s overwhelming love and mercy. We simply have to acknowledge we need it, and accept it.
Paul continued his narrative of God’s story in Romans 4 by recounting Abraham’s faith in God. It is written that Abraham’s faith was “counted to Him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).
This happened before Abraham was circumcised, even before he had children. All God had done at that point was tell Abraham He was going to make his name great and that through him (Abraham) all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3). So, faith being counted as righteousness had nothing to do with anything Abraham did, other than have faith.
When Abraham questioned God about how He was going to do it, God showed him the stars and told him his offspring would be as numerous as they are (Genesis 15:5). As Abraham stared in awe at the sky, he was “fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised,” as Paul put it in Romans 4:21.
And his being fully convinced of God’s ability was counted as righteousness. God—not circumcision nor Abrahams ability to produce children—blessed all the nations of the earth through Abraham. Abrahams belief in God’s ability worked righteousness in himself.
In other words, his faith gave him freedom from his flesh. God could create His image in Abraham. And Paul said the same is possible for us, as well (Romans 4:23-24).
God—not getting rid of the internet nor finding outlets to release sexual urges—restores our security (or relationship) with Him.
Our belief in God’s ability works righteousness in us. Or, in layman’s terms, as we become fully convinced that God is able to make us into men who have nothing to hide and are free to fight for others and add value to those around us, we begin using our sexuality in ways that honor God instead of disgracing Him.
Jesus Is Our Hope
But even faith feels like a work we need to do unless we understand God’s promise. When God made His covenant with Abraham He went through a ritual that feels pretty eerie to our modern western minds.
Essentially, He gathered together some animals and split them in half. This was a common way of entering into a covenant with someone in the ancient world. The two individuals covenanting together would then walk through the middle of the halves, calling down a curse upon themselves if they ever failed to keep their end of the covenant.
The point of all this is God never asked Abraham to call down the curse on himself (Gen. 15). Only God passed through the middle. Only God invited a curse on Himself if He ever broke His promise.
He was laying everything on the line; essentially saying to Abraham, “I will do this. And if I don’t, may all of who I am be entirely destroyed.”
In other words, God took full responsibility for restoring mankind.
It wasn’t Abraham’s responsibility to make sure everything worked out. Neither is it our responsibility to change our hearts from self-centered rebels to God-centered worshipers.
Faith for Abraham was accepting what God said He would do.
Faith for us, is simply accepting what God has already done.
And what has God done? How did God bless the nations through Abraham? Who was the descendant of Eve that crushed the serpent’s head? How is it that our hearts are changed so we can live “free indeed”?
Jesus.
Jesus came through Abraham.
Jesus came from the mother of all living (Eve).
Jesus took upon Himself everything due us: God’s wrath, complete separation from the Father, and, ultimately, death.
Jesus on the cross is the full display of God’s forgiveness toward us for the sin we committed against Him. Because of Jesus, Paul said, we have peace with God (Romans 5:1).
This Is the Gospel.
God made me, through Adam, and He made me good.
He gave me everything I needed for self-worth, security, and a sense of purpose. Most of all, He gave me life.
But I chose another way. I chose to believe He was holding out on me and did not have my best in mind. I went looking for self-worth and security in other things. I looked inside myself. I wanted to be God of my own life, so I decided to numb my pain through a secret life of lust.
I preferred finding a sense value through a nightly rush in my bed over trusting God has given me value because He cares about me and has made me in His image. I did not realize at the time why I looked at pornography or masturbated compulsively, but it does not matter. I still did it. I still sinned. I sought sexual fulfillment in a way God never designed me to experience sexual fulfillment.
After all, thanks to Adam and Eve, I have a propensity to try fulfilling God-given desires and healing emotional wounds my own way.
Nevertheless, God came after me.
He knew I could not restore myself. He knew I was dead and would never find Him again. So, He condescended to become a man—one of my own kind. And, as a man, He endured every kind of temptation I feel.
He became familiar with the struggles and issues of life on this earth. He felt grief, rejection, and what it was like for others to discredit what He had to say. But instead of trying to heal Himself, instead of looking inward and seeking security and god-like wholeness on His own, He submitted to His own perfect design.
And for Him, thanks to me, that meant going to the grave because the consequence of disregarding God as God is death. He had said so long ago in the Garden.
So, He died. He laid Himself down and was killed. And He did this for me, so I could be restored to Himself.
What the Gospel Means for Me
I had grown up in a Christian home—a pastor’s family. I knew what made God happy and what made Him sad. I could recite God’s design for humanity and sexual expression, and I knew we as humans were broken and tended to go against that design. Most of all, I was well acquainted with the fact that God had sent His Son to pardon mankind from their sins.
We deserved death, but thanks to Jesus we get life.
Unfortunately, this was nothing more than Sunday School information to me. I did not know what Christ’s death actually meant for me, personally. I had not grasped the sacrifice—the ridiculousness, the recklessness of giving everything He had so I could share in His abundance.
You see, I took God’s mercy and grace for granted, like a child takes for granted the fact that his parents feed him regardless of how he acts throughout the day. I had never paused to consider the expense it is for God to continually extend grace to me even though I continue trying to do life my own way.
It’s like a millionaire continually giving a homeless man money hoping that one day he will begin using the finances to create a sustainable income for himself.
Only, the homeless man never does. He continues doing life the way he always has, squandering every penny the millionaire shares with him.
But what is grossly different from the homeless man comparison and my situation is that this gift cost God the life of His one and only Son. And, unlike the wealth of a millionaire, God’s giving never runs out.
His love never ends. He keeps on pursuing. He keeps looking down the lane, waiting for His prodigal son to come home. No matter how many prostitutes His son had slept with, no matter how many debts His son now owed, no matter how much slop and muck His son had caked to his clothes, Father God was never letting go of the possibility that His son would return.
And His prodigal son is me. I never grasped any of this as truth of God’s love for me until hearing Him say in a still, quiet voice, “I forgive you” after having spent the day in porn.
All this time I was trying to get God to notice me, to win His approval and affection. But it was a lie.
I didn’t have to win His approval. His forgiveness was not conditional to my performance. Through Jesus, He was coming after me regardless of whether I was wanting Him.
And as Cory Asbury wrote, there isn’t a shadow He won’t light up, a mountain He won’t climb up to come after and rescue me. There is no wall He won’t kick down, no lie He won’t tear down to come after me.
He has not, and is not letting go.
Have you experienced God’s reckless love? Share about it in the comments below.
