12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.“Let not sin reign.” That phrase should immediately signal to us that Paul’s notion of sin is quite different from ours. Sin is lying, hurting, gossiping, lusting, etc. Sin is about doing. Doing bad things. It’s a convenient theory. Reduce the amount of naughty things you do and the better you are. Then we read Paul, and Paul says, “Let not sin reign in your mortal bodies.” How exactly does an act “reign” over us? It doesn’t. But Paul isn’t talking about mere acts, for he says, “Let not sin reign . . . to make you obey their passions.” Sin is rather personal here. It is a power, a force with desires and passions. Sin isn’t just the results of our poor choices; sin is the cause of them. Sin is the desires that lie behind the choices we make.
Farewell Self-effort. This is literally a life-changing discovery. Becoming a better person can no longer be considered a battle of self-effort. Self-effort is about the strength of the will, but here we find that the will itself is corrupt. The will is not an independent force that we can muster against any and all that opposes the good. The will is subservient to the values and desires of the heart. The heart says, “I want something sweet,” so the will says “Let’s go to Starbucks.” The hearts declares, “But I’d rather not put on some extra weight,” and so the will says, “Make it a skinny.” It is not the reverse. The will does not say, “Heart, desire something sweet, so I can choose Starbucks.” The will doesn’t desire. The will chooses, and the will always chooses what the heart wants. You might think, “Not always. I really didn’t want a decaf, sugar-free, skinny latte, but I choose it.” True enough, but all you are saying is that you valued your appearance or your health (or both) more than you valued the enjoyment of fat and sugar. Therefore, gritting your teeth and marching forward in the determination to do better simply isn’t going to get the job done. You want to fight with the will, but the will is a slave to the heart. And if the heart is crooked, the will will be crooked also.
Under Grace. When you read Paul’s command, “Do not present your members to sin . . .”(8:13) you immediately conclude Paul is instructing you to toughen your will. And if sin were simply a bad choice, that would be sufficient. But as we have seen sin isn’t just a bad choice; it is distorted desires behind the choice. So although Paul gives a command, which seems like an appeal to self-effort, he looks elsewhere for the power to keep that command: “Sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace”(8:14). “Law,” I think, refers merely to self-effort. But we are not under the demands simply to perform; we are under grace. Grace says you don’t have to perform because Christ already did. It says you are accepted even when you fail. The law by itself keeps us under the delusion that we can do it if we just try hard enough. Grace frees us from the delusion and tells us we can’t. The law by itself enhances the dominion of sin by enslaving us to the soul-destroying cycle of effort, failure, condemnation, guilt, effort, failure, condemnation, guilt, ad nausea. Grace frees us, for Christ took our guilt, absorbed our condemnation, paid for our failure, and redeems our efforts. The pursuit of righteousness then is no longer an effort of futility. Rather, under grace it is a pursuit in which we have nothing to loose and everything to gain. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
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