Don’t Let Sin Reign (Rom. 6:12-14)
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The language of this text is martial and the issue at hand is the absolute necessity to prevent the attempted conquest of the soul by sin and the imperative to resist its incursions into the soul. You will notice the language: reign, obey, yield, dominion. Sin seeks to reign over us by making us obey sinful desires, so that we yield to it and let it have dominion over us. But we are not to let it reign like a king in our hearts. Instead, we are to present the members of our bodies as instruments, or weapons of war, for the sake of God and his righteousness. We are to fight back, in other words. We are to wage an unceasing war against sin in the arena of its lusts.
The word for “instruments” in verse 13 is the Greek word hopla, which is translated elsewhere as “weapons” and “armor.” For those of you who know a little about history, you may know that the soldiers who fought for the ancient Greek city-states like Sparta and Athens were called hoplites, which is a word that comes from hopla. Thus, for example, in 2 Cor. 10:3-5, Paul writes, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons [same word as in Rom. 6:13] of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” The band of men who were dispatched by the high priest to arrest Jesus were armed “with lanterns and torches and weapons” (Jn. 18:3). Elsewhere, it is translated by the word armor: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Rom. 13:12; see also 2 Cor. 6:7). Paul imagines that the members of our bodies, our eyes and ears and mouth and hands and legs and so on, are like weapons of war which we can either use in the service of Christ or of sin. The exhortation is to resist using them for sin and instead use them for the cause of God and truth.
Of course, the Bible often uses martial or military language, doesn’t it? Paul to Timothy: “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier” (2 Tim. 2:3-4). Again, as Paul surveys his own life, he says, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith” (4:7). And then there is the 6th chapter to the Ephesians, where Paul likens the Christian life to spiritual warfare outfitted with helmet and shield and sword and so on.
Why does the Bible use this language? The Bible does this because, as Paul puts it to the Ephesians, we are in a war, a war with the devil (Eph. 6:10-20). He is out to kill: he goes about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. 5:8). He is “a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him” (Jn. 8:44). Brothers and sisters, we are in a war. We are in a war in which there are only two sides. You can’t not choose sides. You can’t just decide to be neutral. You are not given that option. You will either serve Satan and use your members as weapons of war in the service of sin, or you will serve Christ and use your members as weapons of war in the service of righteousness. Which will it be? Where are you right now? Jesus said that the one who is not with him is against him. Are you against Jesus or with Jesus? Are you fighting for him or against him?
In war, you not only need weapons, but you also need good leaders and a secure supply line. This text tells us what our weapons are. These are our members. And of course the Christian has the very best of leaders, the Lord Jesus Christ. God is the one to whom we present ourselves in our ranks. But there is another thing here which we must not miss. We have a supply line which cannot be broken. This really is the whole point of this passage. The believer who has been born again and led to gospel faith and repentance has been given the ability to fight back against sin by dying to sin and rising to walk in newness of life. But this life is sustained by an unceasing supply line to heaven. It cannot be broken. It is the supply line of grace. We have no need to fear being cut off and having to fight our way back to our lines. The line to heaven is never broken. The support and strength we have access to in Jesus can never be destroyed. And for that reason we have every motivation to keep in the fight, no matter how weary we may become, no matter how fierce the battle may become. As Luther put it,
The point of these verses (12-14) is to remind the believer that because we have all the resources that we need to fight sin through union with Christ (verses 1-10), we can and ought to fight the sin in our lives. We must not therefore separate them from the previous verses. You cannot fight sin successfully and in a way that glorifies God unless you are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. Are you mired in sin and utterly in bondage to it? My friend, you need Christ. Only he can deliver you. As long as you try in your own strength to get yourself out of the entanglements of lust and pride and vanity, you will never make any headway. As long as our “imprisoned spirits lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night,” only the light of God through Christ will be able to break through the shackles and lead you to freedom and salvation from both the guilt of sin and the power of sin. It is only in union with Christ which we have through faith that we can do what the apostle says in verse 12-14. There is no salvation in any other name. The exhortation of verses 12-14 is simply impossible apart from the indicative of verses 1-10.
And if you have Christ, you still need to hear these verses. These verses in fact are written for believers. They are the ones who can resist sin through the grace of the Lord Jesus. And so I want to encourage us to do what the apostle says here, to not let sin reign or have dominion over us but to yield ourselves to God as those who are alive from the dead. How do we do that? We do it by listening to what the apostle has to tell us here. As we do that, I want you to consider three things with me. First, let’s consider the risks we are exposed to. Second, let’s consider the responsibility we are held to. Finally, let’s consider the reason we are sent to.
The Risks We Are Exposed To
What is the risk and danger to which we are exposed? It is, first of all, that we can come under the temporary rule of sin: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof” (12). Now, as I’ve been at pains to show, the true believer cannot continue in sin that grace may abound (1). Paul’s whole argument in this text is that this is impossible. There is a fundamental change in the believer, namely, death to sin and rising to walk in newness of life, that cannot be undone. But that does not mean that even true believers can’t fall into sin or come at least temporarily under its power. It cannot mean that because otherwise this exhortation would be meaningless. We are exhorted to not let sin reign because if we let it, it will reign over us like a king! And there is nothing the devil would love more than to bring a believer down.
The risk is that we can be brought into bondage. Sin wants to make you obey it. Those who commit sin, our Lord said, are the servants of sin. There are good kings, yes, for Jesus is the best and most perfect King of kings and Lord of lords. But sin is a terrible king. It is a terrible ruler. Its rule is truly bondage. Sin lures you into a cage with promises of pleasure and then shuts the door behind you and leaves you begging for scraps. We become like the prodigal son who left his father’s house to satiate his flesh with sinful pleasure but soon found that such pleasures were only for a season, and it was such a short season.
Think about what pornography does to men in particular. Porn promises pleasure, but what it really does is to enslave you and bring you into a miserable bondage. It is a monster whose tentacles will reach deep into your soul. Men, young and old, flee from this like you would from a monster. Cut out an eye, cut off a hand if you must. Radical amputation – like getting rid of a cell phone or laptop if necessary. Remember what Jesus said: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Mt. 5:29-30). This is why Paul tells the Corinthians to flee fornication, porneia (1 Cor. 6:18). Run from it, be disgusted by it, fear it. And run to Jesus in repentance and faith for healing and grace.
It's important to see where the bondage lies: “in the lusts thereof.” Sin works first and foremost at the level of desire. Lust is desire, and when it is translated “lust” it means “sinful desire.” The bondage is often not one that feels like slavery, at least not at first, because the way the devil gets us hooked is by drawing our desires to willingly embrace what God has forbidden. This is how Satan has always done it, as with Eve: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen. 3:16). This is why our Lord said, it’s not what goes into the mouth, but what comes out, which reveals the heart, which is what corrupts us: “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Mt. 19:18-20). This means that we must keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life (Prov. 4:23).
Sometimes we can fool ourselves by thinking that as long as we are not sinning openly, as long as we can keep the hatch down that sits over the sin in our hearts, that we are okay. But, my friend, this is false thinking. For one thing, the one you need to care about is not other people who have limited vision and perception, but God. And God already sees your heart. But also if you don’t kill the sin at the level of the heart, I can guarantee that it will even ferment itself out into the life. There will be a point where it will no longer be contained. If you do not work to kill the sin at the level of the heart, you have already lost. The fight for sin really is either won or lost at the heart level.
Secondly, we should recognize the risk from having our bodies used as instruments for sin and Satan: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin” (Rom. 6:13). Again, the word “instruments” means “weapons.” Weapons are not objects of curiosity that you hang on the wall, but objects that you take onto the battlefield in order to kill and maim and destroy the enemy with. So what does that imply about how sin uses our members? Does it not imply that when we sin we have armed ourselves to do damage to the cause of God and truth? Sin is not a neutral thing. Sin is not something we can hide away, like a stolen piece of candy that no one will ever know we took. No, every time we sin we have weaponized our bodies for the service of Satan. We are doing damage to the kingdom of God. We are hurting people around us and most of all we are falling short of the glory of God. So don’t think, “It’s just a little sin.” A little bullet can still kill a person as well as a big bomb. What sins are we minimizing? Are we thinking of them as weapons (which they are) or are we thinking of innocent pleasures (which they aren’t). If you can imagine the sins of your life as if they were in a box, don’t imagine them as if they were a box of chocolates but a box of grenades with rusty pins. They are going to blow up in your face if you don’t get rid of them.
The apostle Peter put it this way: “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” (1 Pet. 2:11). Fleshly lusts, what do they do? They war against the soul. What are we doing when we sin? We are turning the guns which ought to be aimed at the devil and his minions and turning them on ourselves. You cannot sin with impunity. You cannot go on in impenitence and think you will remain spiritual strong. Every sin chips away at the soul.
So, what do we do? Throw up our hands and give up? No! Brothers and sisters, let’s take sin seriously, and let’s not underestimate the danger of sin, but let’s not overestimate our enemy either. You know, one of the reasons why Union General George B. McClellen was never able to decisively defeat the Southern General Robert E. Lee’s army was because he always overestimated the size of Lee’s forces, often attributing to him twice the numbers that he actually had. And it paralyzed him. Let’s not do that with sin. Should we take it seriously? Yes! But also let’s realize that we have through union with Christ the ability to kill it. We have a responsibility to kill the sin in our lives. And that’s what Paul now turns our attention to.
The Responsibility We Are Held To
“But yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Rom. 6:13). The main verb here is “yield” which the apostle uses twice, once negatively with respect to sin (“don’t yield your members as weapons of war for sin”) and then positively with respect to righteousness (“yield your members as weapons of war for God”). But yield sounds passive, doesn’t it? Is this what Paul has in mind? Does he mean for us to “let go and let God”?
Far from it. It is translated “present” in Romans 12:1, “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service,” which is hardly a passive thing we are being called to do. It’s translated as “stand” in 14:10, where Paul reminds us that we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God. Then it’s translated as “assist” in 16:2, when the apostle asks the Romans to assist Phebe “in whatsoever business she hath need of you.” None of this is passive. The verb means to present your bodies, to put them at the disposal of God for the sake of righteousness. The idea, I think, is that of soldiers who are ready with their weapons to go to war for their king.
First of all, we are to yield ourselves to God. This is more than just a formal acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty; this is again like a soldier who is utterly committed to the cause of his king and country. God is our God. That means that God’s sovereignty is more than just a doctrinal box we are supposed to check; it’s a total outlook of life. It means that we are striving to love God with all our hearts and souls and strength and mind. It means that the God of the Bible, revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has the devotion of our heart and the commitment of our lives. It means, as the apostle puts it in his description of the Macedonian Christians, that we have given ourselves to God for him to do with us as he pleases (2 Cor. 8:5). It means that we can say with Paul of God, “whose I am and whom I serve” (Acts 27:23). It means that we say and mean it when we say, “I am a servant – a bondservant – of Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:1).
How does that look? Practically, it means that the Scriptures are the ultimate and fundamental authority in my life. It means that I tremble at his word and rejoice over it as one who finds great spoil. And that means that I read it and meditate upon it, and apply it to my life, including those parts of my life that are out of sync with it by repenting and conforming myself to it. Brethren, you cannot be a healthy Christian if you are not daily being confronted with Scriptural truth at some level. Are you a man or woman, a boy or girl, of the word? If not, then it is fraudulent to claim that you are yielding yourself to God. You cannot yield yourself to God if you are not daily yielding to him in his world. It would be a like a soldier refusing to obey orders.
Then it means that you are a person of prayer. How in the world can you yield yourself in battle to the leadership of an army if you never communicate with it? Of course there is the matter of taking orders, that’s found in the Bible, but there has to be communication back from the rank and file to the officers who are over the military operation in the first place. One of the reasons the infantry charges on the Western Front in World War One failed repeatedly was because the front waves inevitably lost communication with their own front lines and one of the consequences of this was that the artillery wasn’t able to adequately support them. They were then left to the mercy of counterattacks far from their own lines. Now this illustration only goes so far because of course God knows our position and our needs at all times. He’s never in the dark. But he has ordained his blessings to fall to us through the instrumentality of prayer. We simply cannot expect it otherwise. And when we are in battle against sin, we are never more in need of prayer than at this point. This is why, I think, when the apostle is done listing all the pieces of armor in the Christian panoply in Eph. 6, he goes on to say, “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” (Eph. 6:18). Don’t ever go into battle without the walkie-talkie of prayer at your side. (John Piper is famous for saying, by the way, that prayer is not a domestic intercom to ask God for a lemonade on the veranda, but a war-time walkie-talkie to call down air support when we are under heavy fire in desperate spiritual warfare.)
So yield yourself to God in his word and prayer. Basically, it means that your whole life is lived before God. It means that you live consciously of his control over all things, conscious of his right to every breath that you breathe, conscious of his right to have the glory in all that you do, conscious of his right to command you down to the smallest detail of your life. It means that you do this, not because you have to, but because you feel utterly compelled to live this way. You cannot imagine living any other way! To God alone the glory! Soli Deo gloria!
Have you yielded yourself to God in this way?
Then it means that we yield our members – remember, the members of our body – as weapons of righteousness for God. I commented earlier in a previous sermon how concrete this makes holiness. It begins in the heart, yes, and we must never forget that, but if it does not manifest itself in concrete actions in our life through the members of our body, in our words and deeds, then our profession of faith is useless.
It means that we are using our eyes as instruments of righteousness, not as inlets for sin. It means that we are using our hears to hear the things that are “true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise” (Phil. 4:8). It means we are using our hands and our legs and our minds to do the will of God in all things. It means that we use our mouths to speak the gospel whenever we can, and to minister grace to the hearers. It means that we see the purpose of our life in light of the grand purpose of the universe, to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
We have to be actively engaged in killing sin in our lives as well as cultivating righteousness. It means being actively engaged in the fellowship of the saints. It surprises me sometimes when I see all the people who claim to be Christians, but who think that it is not great thing to be a part of the church. But this is not what the NT teaches. The NT doesn’t imagine healthy lone-ranger saints. The very purpose of the spiritual gifts which are given to the church as the church is to cause growth. But these gifts are not all given to one person – we really to need each other. And we need each other in each other’s lives – not as busybodies, but exhorting one another, loving one another, forgiving one another, bearing one another’s burdens, watching out for one another, and so on. If you want to be a holy man or woman, I encourage you to plug into the church. The church needs you and you need the church.
How long are we to do this? As long as we are in our “mortal bodies” – “Let not sin reign in your mortal bodies that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” As long as we are this side of the grave, we will have to deal with the sin in our bodies. It is true that we are risen with Christ, and that we have died to sin; that is an objective reality, but that does not mean that sin is not still latent in our mortal bodies. The fact that we are united to Christ in his death and resurrection simply means that we are now in the position to fight the sin in us and it is inevitable that l true saints will fight the sin within them. The ungodly cannot do this; they cannot obey verse 12, but the one who is born again and united to Christ can and will.
As we survey our responsibility – the responsibility to work out with fear and trembling our salvation – it can be daunting. It can feel overwhelming. But this is not all that Paul says. There is one more thing that ties us back to verses 1-10 and gives us the hope and encouragement to fight sin and work for righteousness in this world.
The Reasons We Are Sent To
There are two verses I want to point you to so that you are reminded of the resources that you have as a Christian in spiritual warfare. The first is that phrase in verse 13, “as those who are alive from the dead.” This is a reminder of what Paul has been saying in verse 1-10. These commands do not come to us as naked commands. They are meant to come to people who are already empowered by the life of Christ through union with him by faith.
The life by which we resist the dominion of sin in our lives is the life of Christ. We are risen to walk in newness of life with him. And that means that the power to resist the force of sin is the power of him that rose from the dead.
And that brings us to verse 14, which I think is one of the most encouraging and helpful verses in the entire NT when it comes to fighting sin: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” Here we come back from the imperative to the indicative, from the command to the ground of the command.
We are reminded of a fact: “For sin shall not have dominion over you.” This fact is the fact which grounds the command of the previous verses. Why can you not let sin reign in your mortal bodies? Why can you not yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin? Why can you yield yourself to God? Why? And the answer is because, for, sin shall not have dominion over you. If you truly trust in Christ, this is true of you. Sin cannot have dominion over you because you are dead to it through the Lord Jesus.
This may seem like a contradiction to verse 12 but it isn’t. Even when the saint temporarily comes under the reign of sin, he or she is still united to Christ which means that the more fundamental reality is that they are under the dominion of Christ, not sin. A soldier may become a prisoner of war, but that does not mean they have enlisted on the side of the enemy! Sin may make you or I it’s prisoners for a while, and may for a time appear to reign over us, but we are still under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And because of this we are always – always! – able to break out of the POW camp of sin through faith and repentance and make it back to the safety of renewed fellowship with the Lord and his church.
And why is this? “For ye are not under the law but under grace.” Man, there is so much there. For the moment, let me just say that the contrast here is that the law – or Law of Moses – doesn’t give grace to empower its members for obedience. But the New Covenant in Christ does. “The law came by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17). We need to hear this, especially when we begin to believe the lie that we can’t help it, that we are too weak to resist the sin that seems to have such a powerful attraction upon our heart. We can help it, not because we are strong, but because Christ is.
We need to hear it when we think that it’s okay to get by on a half-hearted obedience. No, as the apostle John put it, “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not” (1 Jn. 2:1). “Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Mt. 5:48). The fact that perfection is not absolutely achievable this side of heaven doesn’t mean it’s not the target. We ought to strive for universal obedience. And we can strive for it and we can grow in Christ-likeness because of these glorious realities.
So, brothers and sisters, these verses not only command us; they inspire us. They not only give us orders; they give us hope. Let’s glorify God and enjoy him by refusing to let sin reign over us and by yielding our bodies, not as weapons in the service of sin, but in the service of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For sin will not reign over you, for you are not under the law but under grace.
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