The Master | The Dark Road to Dawn, Week 5

Passion Sunday. We enter the final week of our Lenten series with Romans 6:15–23 and the question underneath every valley: who is your master? Father Aaron preaches on slavery, surrender, and the only gift that wages can never buy.

Transcript

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In the name of Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Good evening and welcome to Northward, the Word, the North, your week. Tonight, the final message in our series, The Dark Road to Dawn. We are talking about who truly is our master. And I was preaching this morning on Romans chapter 6, verses 15 through 23, with a real focus on verse 19. We've walked through desire, pride, and shame and fear, and today we finally get to that question underneath all of it. Here's my message from this morning. There's a road just outside of Yellowknife, and someone can tell me what the name of that road is, but there's a road just outside of Yellowknife where there's these mineshafts that come out. Anybody? Ingram Trail, thank you. So when you're traveling down Ingram Trail just outside of Yellowknife, if you're just driving, you come around this curve and there's this big mine shaft that comes up out of the ground. And I want you to imagine a really nice northern summer day, you know, where the sun is just really, really bright. Everything is light, everything is clear, you can see from miles. And you're on top of this mineshaft, and you're looking out, the sun is shining, and then you take one step down into the mine shaft, and the sun becomes dimmer. But your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and so it becomes manageable. And then the sun moves further and further away as you move deeper and deeper, and your eyes adjust. And then suddenly you're halfway down this mineshaft and darkness seems normal. It seems manageable. It becomes comfortable. So much so it becomes so comfortable that if I were to then grab you out of that mine shaft and put you back outside in the sun, it would hurt. You who need sun to survive, you who need sun to live, would be in pain if I took you out of the darkness and placed you into the light. So we've traveled through these different valleys for the last five weeks. And each of these valleys we've gone deeper and deeper into darkness. So we began with the valley of desire, disordered desire. That valley led us to the second valley, which was this valley of pride. Pride led us to the valley of shame, and shame led us to the valley of fear. And so this morning we're gonna wrap up this series, The Dark O to Dawn, and we enter this final week of Lent. Today is what's called Passion Sunday or Passion Tide Sunday. We enter the season of the Passion, and we're turning our eyes towards Jesus on the cross. And Paul's letter to the Romans this morning shows us something that is so essential to our Christian journey. You become what you serve. The only question is which master has you? Paul says in verse 15, he's got this great question for us. Shall we sin because we are under law, not under law, but under grace? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? And it's a very, very fair question. Look at the logic here. Jesus died for our sins on the cross. Established fact. We cannot earn heaven, also established fact. That was a free gift that God gave us. This relationship with Jesus is a free gift. God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son that whoever should believe in him should not perish. So if we believe on believe in Jesus and we believe all of these things, can we go on living a sinful life? Since sin is not the determining factor in us being saved, in our salvation. Jesus died for us. And Paul says, no. And Paul's point is very simple, actually. There is no such thing as a neutral life. Everyone yields to something, everyone serves something, everyone is becoming something. The question is never whether you have a master, it is who ultimately is your master. So let's go back to the mind shaft for a second to fully understand this. The light of the sun is righteousness, is godly living, is holiness. The darkness underground is lawfulness, lawlessness, and sinfulness. And the further we dig, the darker it becomes. We travel down, down, and down a bottomless pit. So to understand the mechanics of this, we'll go to the early church to a guy called Augustine who explains it in his confessions. He says, each time you sin, so do something that's not aligned with who you're supposed to be, aligned with your nature in relationship with the Creator. So each time you sin, you become a little more bound to that sin. Right? It's like a sticky tack. Each time you touch it, you're a little more stuck to it. And each time you do that, your ability to choose otherwise becomes harder. He says the soul begins to fold inward on itself, step by step by step, until choosing God feels almost impossible. I'll give you an example. The habit that you return to when no one is watching. The thing you reach for when anxiety strikes, when pressure lands on your desk, that is ultimately the master of your life that continues to pull you deeper and deeper. So recently, uh a multitude of situations landed on my desk. As they always do, you have a very nice, comfortable week, and then everything comes at once, not well balanced, right? So everything's landing on my desk, and it is a bit anxiety-inducing to say the least. So all sitting there piled up. And so the first thing one should do when one feels instrument is think logically, pray about it, sort it out, and figure it out. Well, the first thing I did was I reached for my phone and uh I opened up uh TikTok and I have a block on my phone, so I went and had to find the block to unblock TikTok and I unblocked it and watched a few videos and distracted myself. Now I realized something. Uh there's a reason there's a block for it on my phone. It's a habit. The moment I feel stressed by something, overwhelmed, I reach for a temporary reprieve rather than the one who can give me ultimate peace. Every time I'm I'm I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm reaching for something. Paul says it in verse 19 in this morning's text. You present your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness. You present yourself, your members, parts of your body, as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which leads ultimately to more lawlessness. One act of yielding to something leads to another. Yielding ultimately becomes service. So once you yield to something, you begin to serve it. Service, which is still free, right? We serve out of free choice, ultimately becomes slavery. And once it becomes slavery, it's one step away from identity. The further you go into the mind shaft, the smaller the sun becomes, the darker the darkness, and your eyes adjust, and it starts to feel like home. But Paul doesn't leave us there. Here's the turnaround. Paul says, You were that person. Past tense. Something changed. And that change came from outside of you. That change is not from you, but something changed in you. Paul says in verse 18, having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. Jesus on the cross, which we will remember on Good Friday in just two weeks, his ultimate act on the cross was to free us, to purchase us free from the slavery of sin. Now it's very easy to look at that and say, okay, fine, fair. Sin is what keeps me from being my true self. It's me doing wrong things, it's me missing the mark in life. Now I've I've come to Jesus, I've been baptized, I've had my hallelujah come to Jesus moments. I'm free from sin. But you're not free. The clarification here is you're not free from temptation. It doesn't mean we never fall, but our new life in Christ means we have chosen a new master, a new direction. When I was working as a musician, I wasn't home a lot, so I was on the road a lot. So I'd eat a lot of junk food. It's a prime example of this. And I still occasionally enjoy junk food. I really do. But I've changed my lifestyle. I don't eat junk food on a daily basis. I eat healthy on a daily basis. I have a new lifestyle. Do I still think a Coke would be great right now? Absolutely. Will I drink a Coke Zero this afternoon? It's Sunday in Lent. Absolutely. Do I sometimes have a burger? Oh, I do, I do. I love myself a good Mac, wonderful. As soon as I get to anywhere that was a McDonald's, I order myself a Big Mac. But it is no longer my master. I have chosen to let something better lead me in life. And Paul asks a question in verse 21: what fruit were you getting from those things? And that's where we come down to the ultimate, the ultimate question. What fruit were you getting from those things? The things which you are now ashamed of. So what he's trying to say is those things that you've left behind once you became a Christian, those things that don't align with your true identity, those things of sin, of you missing the mark, what were you ultimately gaining? What fruit did you gain out of those things? And the answer is nothing. The valleys we walked through, desire, disorder, desire, pride, shame, and fear. If we recall back, if we reflect back on each of those, we saw that each of those produced a fruit that was poisonous. Each of those ultimately produced a fruit that was poisonous. A fruit that was not good for us. And here's where we have to be honest with ourselves. Here's very honest. We come back to that question of if we've joined the church, how is it possible that we're Christians and we still have some conflict in our life? How is it a person possible that a person who calls himself a Christian all their life, let's say, from birth, from cradle to grave, so to speak, baptized, filled with the Holy Spirit, sitting in a pew every Sunday, and still live a life that's largely untransformed, a life that looks like everybody else's life. How is that possible? And the answer is the same answer that we've had for every single sermon in this five-sermon series. The answer is simple. Surrender. You can accept Jesus with your mouth, with your mind, and even to a certain extent with your heart, but if you do not bend your knee and submit to him as the master of your life, still sin still reigns in your life ultimately. Real transformation is not a moment you record, it is a direction you're moving in life. The question is not, did you once surrender to Jesus? The question is, which direction are you moving right now? Are you still surrendering your life to Jesus? You see, what you serve in your life shapes how you see yourself as a person. Sin tells you that you are what you have done. And it shrinks you, it makes you less of a person. But Christ tells you that you are what he has made you. And that he restores you. Your worth, your dignity, your identity, they are all tied to which master is ultimately the master of your life. You become what you serve, and the question that you have to ask again and again, which master am I serving? And Paul doesn't end us there, he gives us a very, very clear closing to the text, a very clear contrast to wrap up the text and to summarize the gospel in essence. What's the good news? What is the gospel? Paul gives us two words wages and gifts. They're not the same thing. Wages you earn, gifts you receive. Sin always has a ledger, and eventually it pays out. The house always wins, so to speak. Paul says, For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Death is when creation, that's us, cuts itself off from its creator. The wage of cutting yourself off from the one who made you, from living out your purpose in life, is death. The slow death of becoming less and less and less, more hollow and further from the light. Losing your destiny, who you were meant to be, who God has called you to be. But God does not operate on a wage system. God does not look at you in the mind shaft and say, you climb down there, you figure it out. Like our mothers would always say, you got yourself into that mess, you get yourself out of the mess. That's not how God works. No, no, no. God works like this. The moment you surrender, the moment you give up managing yourself, trying to be perfect, trying to climb your way out of the hole, the moment you look up and surrender and have the faith to let go of the rope you're holding on to, Jesus sends down another rope to pull you out of that mine shaft. And when you turn your eyes upon Jesus, all the problems of the world, all the things of the world grow strangely dim. And that is what Paul means when he says sanctification in the text, being made holy. This is what Paul means when he says being set free from sin and enslaved to God. Not a heavier burden, a lighter one. The being made holy, the life that becomes synergy with God. You don't earn it, you receive it from him. But you have to stop serving the old master long enough to open your hand and take what the new one is holding out. Every valley we went into in the last weeks, they can all go deeper. And at the bottom of every valley, the bottom of your desire and your pride and your shame and your fear, wherever you are right now, if you look up, there's a cross. And it's not a symbol on a wall, it's a person. It's a master who looked at the wages that you were earning from your life and said, I'll pay that. And then I'll give you my love, I'll give you my peace, and I'll give you my righteousness. So as we look ahead next Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. He's riding on the donkey. The crowds are gonna wave palms and cry Hosanna. And they're not gonna understand what's coming next because Friday is gonna get crucified. Sunday he's gonna ride. He's gonna rise up again. The question that we're gonna ask ourselves is simply are we gonna go on this journey with Christ to the cross and to the resurrection? I want you guys to go back and to look at those valleys. Look at what valley is a master in your life? Which wound is still infected because it has not been confessed? Which darkness are your eyes still adjusted to? Take it to the cross. Not your performance, not your best effort, not your good resolution, not your good deed, but simply your surrender. You become what you serve. The only question is which master I see. Are you willing to let go of this world and turn your eyes upon Jesus and give him your hand? Amen. Well, this has been Northword, the Word of the North, your week, a daily podcast from St. John Sportsmith in collaboration with the Anglican family. You can find all of our episodes on the LinkedIn Tree, on Facebook, Instagram, and wherever you get your podcasts. Until Monday, God be with you.