May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my rock and my redeemer. Amen. I want to direct our attention this morning to our first reading from the sixth chapter of Saint Paul's letter to the Romans. And for purposes of context, let me offer a very brief outline of the contents of this letter, at least leading up to this point where we read in our passage today. Paul begins by establishing the doctrine of sin. And to be honest, he holds no punches. He weighs into it very directly, into the nature of sin and its effects and consequences for our lives. Once he has established that doctrine well and solid, he turns to address the doctrine of salvation, that we are indeed not left without hope, but God has an answer for the problem of sin, summed up in salvation, our peace with God obtained by way of faith in Jesus Christ. And once he has those two doctrines in place, he then turns to the Christian who is still keeping pace with him at this point. Some have already checked out by now. Those who are seeking more and wanting to grow and mature in their faith, and he now addresses the doctrine of sanctification, that is, our growth in Christ as we seek to become more and more like Christ, more righteous, more holy. And I'll add that as I was reading through this particular passage, chapter six, beginning at the 15th verse, this passage, as I was reading and studying it, I began to feel within myself some minor symptoms of whiplash. And it took me a while to figure out why that was, but I believe it's due to the fact that this is a very grammatically dense passage. Paul is packing a lot into eight verses. And moreover, he switches and pitches our attention back and forth between the past tense and the present tense reality, no less than twelve times. And it's really summed up in the words of John Newton's uh hymn, Amazing Grace. What Paul is getting at, I once was lost in the past, but now, today, I testify to the fact that I'm found. Again, I once was blind, but now I see. That's what Paul is doing in this passage, back and forth. What I once was is no longer. What I am today is a new reality in Christ. He's aiming to address right from the get-go some faulty logic as it pertains to sin, and you would have picked up on it yourself with the question, what then? Are we to go on sinning because we are no longer under law but under grace? It comes off as a rhetorical question, and his answer is simply, briefly, no, certainly not, by no means. Sin, as Paul unpacks and unfolds this answer, sin, he affirms, always leads to death, not sanctification, not growth. And so we are not to expect to grow in sanctification, to grow in Christ, as long as we are willing to give ourselves back over to the slavery of sin. And the way in which he proceeds from this point, which is beginning in verse 16, which is the third sentence in your uh bulletin, Paul encourages us to count the cost, if you will, but we need to count the cost. There has always been a cost involved with sin. It's no light thing. And it goes all the way back to the beginning, the beginning of the story, the beginning of creation. And the cost is indeed nothing less than life. To put it a little more precisely and personally, our lives, your life, my life, all lives, all who have fallen short of the glory of God, all who have succumbed to the power and the dominion of sin, there is no unrighteous, that's all of us. Paul says the same thing in an inverse sort of way, a little bit roundabout here at the very end of our passage, in the final sentence, he says, the wages of sin is death. That is, what sin pays for an honest day's work, which would really be a dishonest day's work, is death. That's what we deserve. This ought not be any surprise from the very first pages of the Bible, when God warned Adam and Eve, you will recall he warned them. You first of all, you may eat. Notice the the the the positive here. You you may eat of every tree of the garden in abundance, which met their needs and more probably. But there is one tree, and I warn you that you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Period. No if, ands, or buts. And as we know, that they did eat, and thus they died, and their death was both a spiritual death as well as a physical death. The spiritual death came with immediacy in the form of estrangement from God, loss of innocence, and an overall condition of spiritual deadness. It wasn't necessarily perceivable to the eyes, but they were cut roses. And the physical death, which tends to get a little more attention from us, the physical death followed not long after, once the process of decay and corruption ran its course, and all that was left was a corpse to be buried. And if we have any doubt of that and wonder if we are not subject to the same sentence, uh we too, lest if we need to be reminded, will come to an end and be put into the ground. As a people of the book, if you will, as a people who value these words and accept them as not only true and trustworthy, but as words that we find our own life within these pages, we find our own meaning within these pages, it simply does not make sense that we somehow are exempt from the parameters of this sentence, of this warning, that we somehow can are different and can dodge death despite our own participation living into sin, as we too have taken of the tree. One of the problems we face with the topic of sin is the fact that we have been so conditioned in our fallen nature, we have grown so accustomed to sin that we tend to normalize it, and our tolerance level for it has changed. We make accommodation for it, we make excuses for it, we even go so far as to blaming others first before ourselves for our own sin. And we mitigate the severity of sin, the consequences of sin, and our hearts and minds in very clever and creative ways. But we need to be reminded that God does not. God makes no concessions, he does not turn a blind eye like an unjust judge. God's standards are the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And the same sentence of death awaits all who give themselves over to sin. The cost is death. Sin leads to a dead end. There are no outlets. That's the force of Paul's words here in the sixteenth verse. He's saying sin leads us into shackles, and those shackles are shackles of slavery, and that slavery ends in death. No alternative. Moreover, along the way, sin is a terrible slave master. It dominates you, it holds you in despair, darkness, and hopelessness, awaiting judgment and destruction. There's no hope down that road. Don't even flirt with it. We don't often see it this way at first, but someone said that sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay. Paul clearly wants us to think very seriously and soberly about these things. Paul wants the Christians in Rome and, for that matter, all who read, Mark, learn, and inwardly digest these words, including us today, to recognize and to remember that all of us, without exception, all of us have lives of experience on Sen's highway to death. If you haven't already, you may conclude that this is a very deep and purpley message on the fifth Sunday of Lent. That it is Lent after all. You may even be one yourself now, caught up in the snare ensnared in the throes of sin, with the word slavery coming to mind, that you can't seem to do anything about it. You can't seem to spring yourself from its grips. And if you're not in that condition now, currently, you may be one who is able to look back formerly in your life to a time when you were. And I'm sure you look back with gratitude and thanksgiving for the fact that you no longer are. Whatever the case may be, wherever you are, slavery to sin is not where Paul is encouraging us to either remain or return to. There's hope to be had, even though this sounds like death row. Because, well, let me ask you, what is the hope? Well, in the on the one hand, we might say the hope is Jesus Christ, and that's absolutely true. Paul here uses the logic of grace. What does Paul say here in the first sentence? You may have just read right past it, but we are no longer under law, rather, we are under grace. We're no longer under law, but under grace. I remember reading once an illustration by a pastor by the name of Charles Swindall, I believe it was in his book called The Grace Awakening, where he contrasted the heavy, the the heavy nature of being under law with that of being under grace. And he put it in this way: he said, to be under law, to live your life under law, is in fact to live under the weighty, heavy, burdensome hand of God that presses down in judgment. It's the law that's perfect, and you're not, nor am I. And you are guilty under that law, and there's no way out. But in contrast, as Paul affirms, once again, this is like a refrain throughout the whole passage. We're not under law. We're under grace, and to be under grace is not to be under a heavy, burdensome hand, but it's like to be under a shower of water that's washing you, cleansing you, restoring you, renewing you, revitalizing you, redeeming you, and reconciling you back to God. I think this was wrongly attributed to Bob Marley. I think it's a lyric from someone else, but you may know. Someone said, Some people feel the rain, others just get wet. Do you recognize grace for what it is? Do you feel the grace of God? Do you know the grace of God? Or are you just trying to get out from under the grace of God because you can't make any sense of it? It's really inconvenient, and you'd rather be dry and get back under law. It's a common temptation. How tempting it is to think that if I can just get back under the law and get my act together and live a holier life, I will please God and all will be well. There's no hope down that road. That leads to increasing sin. And as I've said, to death. It makes a difference what you're living under. Are you Christian living under law or trying to live under law, or are you living under grace? So then, we're under grace. Does that mean then, that we can sin all we want and just let grace abound? No. That's not the purpose of grace. That's not the point of grace. But rather, the grace of God does not grant us free license to continue living as slaves to sin. Rather, God's grace liberates us from sin's shackles, so that we are now made free to serve Him, God. After counting the cost of our doom and gloom death row sentence due to sin, Paul here turns and pivots to encourage us to consider counting our blessings. And it may be helpful for you to just hear that sometimes when things seem gloomy and they're just closing in on you and you can see no way out, stop for a moment. Count your blessings and let that refresh you. And that's what Paul does here, verse 17. What does he follow this up with? He says, but that's a refreshing word. But thanks be to God. Count your blessings, Christian. Why? Because, and here's where the whiplash sets a little bit back in, because you were once slaves to sin, but now you have become obedient, and not just obedient, but obedient from the heart to the doctrine or the standard of teaching to which you were committed. What does that mean? What doctrine? What has sprung me from the grips of slavery to sin? What is the doctrine? Well, once again, back to the refrain, the doctrine is the doctrine of grace. Grace has set us free. And grace has made its way down into the regions and the recesses of our hearts, producing obedience. Obedience to God out of a heart of gratitude. I was trying to think of a biblical story that illustrates this by way of example, and my mind was taken to the story of the prodigal son that Jesus tells. You know, the prodigal son took his inheritance that he was allotted, and he went off to a far country and he squandered it, and he lived foolishly and sinfully, and having nothing left, no hope left, he came to a point where he recognized the only thing he could do at this point was to repent and to return to his father and plead his father's forgiveness and hope for grace. And he did. That's exactly what he did. He returned to the Father, and the Father came out to meet him. And what did the father do? Did the father execute judgment upon him? Did he give him law and say, Son, you've done very bad, and you're guilty? No, he didn't. The father gave him grace, the grace of forgiveness, a welcome reception in the arms of his father, a return back into his house, and a restoration of status of a true child of his father. What did the son not do? I think it's very safe to conclude and say that the son did not then gather up a new inheritance and decide to go back out into the world and squander it once again. That's not how the story ends. No. Grace has changed the sun. Grace is not just a transactional operation, a little bit of sin, a little bit of grace to cover. It is a transformative power that changes hearts and minds and lives, and it restores and it redeems us back to God. I won't afflict any more whiplash upon us, but I will just encourage you on your own time to read the remainder of this passage where Paul does throw us back into the past, and he says, if you've doubt any of this, go back and look at your former life and count your losses. Notice that you received no fruit, no profit from the things you once gave yourself over to in the form of sin. And he concludes with an encouragement to rather count on God. Count on God. God is the one who calls us out, who looses us, who unbinds us from our burial cloths, and says to us, Be free. Let him go. And in that freedom, we are then encouraged not to return back into the tomb, but to live under the grace of God, for God, with God, into eternity. In the words of our collect, O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, grant unto thy people grace, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and that our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.