01 If Grace Covers All Sin, Why Not Keep Sinning?

Today we’re kicking off a new season of the podcast which is a special companion series to my book, Start Strong: A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity. Each episode will walk you through one of the book’s “See for Yourself” passages, helping you read Scripture with confidence, even if you’re just starting out. Today's passage is from Chapter 1.

Most people today assume we’re basically good—and that sin is a few bad choices sprinkled on top. In this episode, Krisan Marotta walks through Romans 6:15–7:6 to show why that view quietly empties the gospel of its power. Paul’s argument reveals that grace doesn’t make sin safer; it exposes just how destructive it really is—and why understanding sin is the first step toward real hope. 

In this week’s episode, we explore:

• Why believing we’re “born innocent” blinds us to our need for a Savior
• How Paul answers the objection, “If grace covers all sin, why not keep sinning?” (Romans 6:15) 
• What it means to be a “slave” either to sin or to righteousness—and how that shapes the quality of your daily life 
• How the Bible defines “death” as more than physical dying: a present experience of decay, futility, and relational breakdown 
• Why sin always pays out in death, even for believers whose eternal inheritance is secure (Romans 6:23) 
• Why the law could expose sin but never cure it—and how it actually inflamed our rebellion (Romans 7:1–6) 
• Paul’s marriage analogy for being released from the law so that we can “belong to another,” to Christ, and bear fruit for God 
• How the Holy Spirit, not human willpower, becomes the new way we serve God “in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” 

After listening, you’ll come away with a clearer understanding of what sin really is, why it always brings some kind of death into your life, and why grace is not permission to drift but the power that frees you from slavery to sin. 

Series: Start Strong: A New Believer’s Podcast

Start Strong: A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity is available now wherever books are sold.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Season And Purpose
• 2:47 Are People Basically Good
• 5:20 Romans Context And Paul’s Critics
• 9:15 Objection Two: Under Grace, Why Not Sin
• 13:20 Death As Present Experience
• 17:27 Slaves To Sin Or Righteousness
• 22:10 Obedient From The Heart
• 26:14 The Fruit Of Sin Versus Life
• 30:10 Marriage Analogy And The Law
• 34:05 Released To Serve In The Spirit
• 38:15 Pulling The Argument Together
• 40:39 Resources And Closing

Transcript

Krisan Marotta: 0:43

Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today, we're kicking off a new season of the podcast, which is a special companion series to my book, Start Strong: A New Believer's Guide to Christianity. Each episode is going to walk through one of the book's See-for-Yourself passages. We'll begin with Romans chapter 6, verse 15, to chapter 7, verse 6. This is from chapter 1 of Start Strong. This is a passage that asks one of the most important and often misunderstood questions in the Christian life. If grace means that God forgives every sin, no matter what, why not keep sinning? If you don't have a copy of my book, Start Strong, no problem. You'll be able to follow along and understand the passage and its main theme. If you do have the book, you might want to read chapter one before listening to this episode. If you're listening or reading with a friend, a group, or a book club, there are free discussion questions available for each chapter. There's also a companion workbook to help you reflect, journal, and apply what you're learning. And you can find all of those resources at startstrongbook.org. Thanks so much for listening. Let's get started. Most Americans today, including evangelicals, believe that all people are basically good. This year's Ligonier Ministry State of Theology survey found that 64% of evangelicals agree with the statement, quote, everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. Plus, 53% agreed with the statement, quote, everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. But here's the problem. If we believe we're born innocent and are basically good, we won't see any reason to need a savior. And that is a devastating misunderstanding of the gospel and exactly the kind of thing I addressed in chapter one of Start Strong. Today we're going to explore why a right understanding of sin isn't a theological technicality. It's the first step to real hope. Because unless we see how deep the problem of sin goes, the solution won't seem necessary. So let's talk about what the Bible says about our nature and why getting this wrong is more than just bad doctrine. It's a spiritual blindfold. We're going to unpack a passage today from Paul's letter to the Romans. I had a hard time picking which passage to study for this podcast and which ones to include in the See for Yourself passages, because there are so many that deal with the nature of sin in one way or another. But in the end, I decided on Romans 6.15 to 7.6. Let me give you a bit of background to orient you to where we are in the letter. If you've never studied Romans before, I encourage you to do so. One of my first podcast seasons ever was on the book of Romans. Now it's a podcast of a live recording that was transferred from a cassette tape, so the sound quality isn't so great, but the content is still there. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Paul wrote this letter to the church in Rome. This letter is unique among Paul's letters because he hadn't visited Rome at the time he wrote this letter. So this letter is not a response to a specific situation, to a problem, or to an event. It's an introduction of Paul and his gospel. In the first four chapters, Paul explains the gospel. He explains and argues that we are justified by faith in Christ Jesus and not by keeping the law. And then in chapter 5, which is one of my favorite passages of scripture, Paul answers the question, so what? And he talks about the results of the gospel, why it's such good news. I think we'll probably look at that passage when we get to chapter 14. Then in chapters 6 through 8, Paul answers objections to his gospel. So having laid it out in 1 through 4, talked about its implications in five, in 6 through 8, he starts taking questions. I mean, you can think of these chapters as a kind of QA following the lecture. Except these questions are not the clarifying questions of Paul's fans and followers. These are objections and questions that would have been raised by Paul's critics and his opponents. These questions are intended to discredit Paul's gospel by saying, Well, Paul, if your gospel is true, then it means this other outrageous thing is true. And we know that outrageous thing can't be true, so therefore your gospel is not true either. The first question he looks at is in Romans 6, 1 through 14, and we won't go into that one, but let me just explain it to set the scene for you. The first question is, shall we sin that grace might increase? So his critics reason something like this. God is glorified when given the opportunity to demonstrate his grace. Paul claims that God forgiving our sins and justifying us is part of the gift of God's grace. The more sinfulness God has to forgive, then the greater the grace he can demonstrate. Therefore, we should just keep on sinning so that God can show his grace. See, Paul, if your gospel is true, God will benefit if we pursue evil. And we know that can't be true. So, Paul, neither is your gospel. Paul says, No, that is not true because grace includes more than just forgiveness. Grace includes breaking the power of sin in our lives and giving us the hope of the glory of God, essentially the hope that we will one day be made holy. Part of the gift of salvation is giving us a desire for holiness and a hatred of sin. So part of the gift of grace includes that we no longer want to sin. Why would we continue to pursue something we no longer want to do? So to continue in sin would be to make a mockery of God's grace. It would be rejecting the part of the gift that frees us from our desire to sin. The passage we're looking at is the second question, which starts in Romans 6.15. Paul's critics say, okay, maybe we shouldn't pursue sin, but your gospel doesn't have any incentive not to. Your gospel eliminates the one effective incentive we have, the law. The law says do these things and you will live, don't do them and you will die. That incentive is explicit in the law, but you removed that in your gospel, so therefore your gospel is a license to sin. So we see this in Romans 6.15. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means. That's the question, that's the objective that they are raising. If grace means no matter how much we sin, God forgives us, why not keep sinning? After all, if our inheritance is guaranteed, if we can't lose salvation even when we disobey, then what's the downside? Why don't we just live however we want? If the threat of punishment is off the table, why bother trying to be good? That's the objection Paul anticipates here. His critics assume that if the gospel removes the threat of the law, if it's true that salvation doesn't depend on our obedience, which it doesn't, then the door must be wide open to sin. They believed fear was the only relevant deterrent, and without it, what is there that's left to motivate us? Well, that's the challenge that Paul takes head on. And his answer is forceful. By no means. Grace doesn't invite sin. Grace changes everything about our relationship with sin. But to understand why, we have to shift our thinking entirely, and that's where Paul takes us next. I'm going to give you an overview of his answer first, and then we'll go back and look at the details. Paul's answer is basically there is an incentive to avoid sin, and it's a powerful one. Death. In Romans 6, 16 through 23, Paul says, When we sin, we experience death. Now, as I argue in the book, Paul does not mean physical death here, as in our heart stops beating and the end of life. He's not talking about the ultimate death of being cut off from God forever. That inheritance is secure for those who trust Christ. Instead, as I argued in the book, Start Strong, death is a quality of our present experience. When we sin, we always experience some kind of death right now, in the form of loss, bitterness, grief, sorrow, tragedy, corruption, futility, strife, frustration, hostility, all of that is death. Every time we sin, we experience some negative consequence. And that's the incentive to stop sinning. If we want to experience life, we have to turn away from what's killing it. Now, Paul points out that the law was never an effective deterrent to sin. The law told us what was right and wrong, but it couldn't change us. It couldn't make us the kind of people who wanted to stop sinning. In fact, it often did the opposite. Just like you tell a child, don't touch the cookie jar, and what happens? Suddenly, the cookie jar is the most fascinating object in the room. Well, that's the second part of Paul's answer, which he describes in Romans 7, 1 through 6, and we'll get to that. His second answer is the law exposes sin, but it can't stop it. So this whole question, if there's no threat of losing my inheritance, why not sin, is built on a faulty assumption. It assumes fear is the only thing that keeps us from committing evil, but that's not true on two counts. First, fear of losing your inheritance was never the thing that made people holy. It just made them afraid. And second, there's a much more reliable incentive, which is death itself. Sin always leads to death. That's how reality works. It's like the law of gravity. If you drop something and it will fall, if you live in sin, you will experience the death that follows. Think of it this way. Imagine two dogs walking with their owner. One is on a leash. It stays close to its owner, but only because it has to. The leash restrains it. If its master lets go, the dog's going to bolt. Obedience is enforced from the outside. It's enforced by force and fear. The other dog walks freely beside his master without a leash. It could run off in any direction it wanted to, but it stays close. Why? Not because it's forced to, but because it wants to. The dog loves his master and wants to follow him. It's learned that staying near his master is the best place to be. Well, that's the difference between fear and love. The law is kind of like a leash that might trap us for a time and enforce obedience, but only grace changes us so that we want to follow our master. Under grace, we stay close, not because we're afraid of what will happen if we wander away, but because we've discovered the life that comes from walking beside our master. Fear might hold you back from sin, but love is what draws you forward into holiness and following God. Now, before we get into the details, let's talk about what Paul means by death in this section. And this will be review if you've read chapter one. Death in this context isn't just the moment our hearts stop beating, it's the kind of existence where everything naturally and inevitably falls apart. Life, especially eternal life, is the opposite. It's the kind of existence where everything naturally and inevitably grows stronger, richer, and more whole and complete. And this is one of the passages in the New Testament that proves Paul's definition of death is some quality in our present experience, because his whole argument depends on the fact that we experience something now that makes us no longer want to sin. If Paul meant some future kind of death or death as in the end of life, then his argument will fall apart. Now we can hear the contrast in Paul's language. Watch for that when we start reading the passage. So Paul doesn't mean death is in physical death, and if he meant death is in the ultimate sense of being cut off from God and losing our inheritance, again his argument would stop making sense because he's already argued that our inheritance is secure in Christ, and we're not in danger of losing that. So he must mean the kind of death that we taste in this life, the experience of futility, corruption, and decay that we all experience now. Death in this sense is not the end of existence, it's the quality of existence that we all live with. It's the slow unraveling of everything we care about, this phenomenon we see in all of human life where everything left to itself breaks down, falls apart, and fails. Our bodies age, our relationships strain, our joy leaks out, and it takes constant effort and work just to hold life together. To stay close to people, to stay kind, to stay civil all takes work. Left alone, our relationships drift toward alienation and frustration. Science has a name for this. It's called entropy. The principle of entropy is that everything is moving from a state of order to a state of chaos. And spiritually, that same law applies. Human and spiritual relationships, without work and effort, move toward hostility, resentment, bitterness, and chaos. That's why we see war and strife and divorce and betrayal and cruelty. It's not abnormal, it's natural to us, as natural as breathing, because we are sinners and we live in a fallen world. And this tendency to decay, to corrupt, to fall apart is what scripture means by death. It's spiritual entropy. That is the problem that we need solved. Death has to be fixed. And we can't fix it ourselves. And Paul's going to argue in this section, the law couldn't fix it. In fact, the law, with all its threats and demands, doesn't eliminate evil, it often intensifies it because it stirs up what's already broken inside us. Well that's the big picture, so now let's look at the details of his argument. We'll start with Romans 6, verses 15 and 16. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means. Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? Paul's argument is very simple here, but it's also brilliant. He says, look, the one you obey becomes your master. That's true in the most literal way. If you choose to obey a master, that master owns you. If you choose to obey the master of sin, that's going to lead to death. If you choose to obey the master of obedience to God's ways, that leads towards holiness and righteousness and life. Now he's already told us that death is more than the end of physical life. Death is this slow unraveling of everything good that we talked about. And he's told us that eternal life is not simply living forever, it is the promise of living forever as holy, complete, and whole people free from sin and death. Now we know our inheritance is secure. By faith alone we are granted eternal life. That's not at risk. But when we follow sin and pursue sin, that will still bring death into our daily experience. The only way to avoid death in our present experience is to avoid sin. And the only way to taste the life to come is to pursue obedience to God and holiness. So Paul says, whoever you obey, sin or holiness, will determine the quality and character of your life. Sin necessarily produces death, holiness necessarily produces life. When we obey sin, sin becomes our master and controls the character, quality, and tenor of our lives. It determines the kind of experience we have now. On the other hand, when we obey righteousness, when we trust and follow God, righteousness becomes our master. And righteousness determines the quality and character of our life. Now notice that Paul isn't talking about obedience to the law here. He's going to make that clear in the verses coming up. The law, he will say, can't produce life because it can't change who we are inside. The obedience Paul means here is the obedience that flows from trusting God and longing for righteousness. So when Paul says, look, you are slaves of the one you obey, he's not just making an observation about behavior. He's describing a spiritual reality. The master you serve determines the kind of life you will experience. If you give yourself to sin, you will get death. If you give yourself to obedience to God, you will find life. You can't choose sin and expect to find life. The master you choose is going to determine the outcome. Now remember, he's answering the question, should we just sin because there's no incentive not to? And the first answer he gives is, look, the master you obey is going to shape the quality of your life. So if you want to taste life even now in this broken world, then you need to pursue righteousness. Now he goes on, this is 17 through 19, but thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. Okay, Paul says you were once slaves of sin. What used to define you, what used to be your master, was being a slave to sin. You were helpless, you were trapped, you were unable to change your evil ways, but then God stepped in and saved you. God stepped in and forgave you and gave you a new heart. That's what he means by you obeyed from the heart. You responded to the gospel, you believed and trusted in Jesus, and in that moment God became your master and you became slaves of righteousness. I think this phrase obedient from the heart is key. Paul's not talking about external rule keeping. So we don't just follow a new set of rules. God has changed us so that we want to follow his rules. We are drawn to the one who rescued us. Now, so far that makes sense. But then Paul says something that sounds almost contradictory. After telling us we've been freed from sin, he turns around and says, in 619, now stop sinning. Stop presenting yourselves as slaves to sin. So what's going on there? When you came to faith, on the one hand, nothing about you changed. There's a sense in which you're still you, you have the same weaknesses, the same strengths, and the same struggles. But on the other hand, there's a sense in which everything about you has changed. You now have the possibility of overcoming those weaknesses and struggles in a way that you never had before, because sin is no longer your master. God is your master, and he has given you a new heart that desires to follow him, and he's in the process of teaching you how to do that and making you the kind of person who can follow him. God has made a permanent claim on your life. But practically speaking, in your daily experience, you still face choices. This side of heaven, we all still wrestle with temptation and sin. God has not yet freed us completely from the penalty and the presence and the power of sin. I think that's why Paul adds, I'm speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations, because of our humanity, because we haven't yet received our full inheritance in the kingdom of God, because God has not yet freed us completely from all the power of sin, sin and death is still part of our reality, and we need to be encouraged to pursue the truth. You could think of it like a trip. Your ultimate destination is settled. God has bought your ticket and you are not going to miss the train. You will get on the train and it will take you where he wants you to go. But between here and there, you still have to decide which paths to take. You still have to make choices today and tomorrow. And sometimes we will choose wrong because God has not yet freed us completely from sin. That's why Paul says, present yourselves as slaves to righteousness. Not because you have to do that to earn your salvation, but because you're learning to live in line with the truth of the gospel. The question in every moment of temptation is simple. Which master are you going to serve right now? Sin, which leads to death, or righteousness, which leads to life. And sin always brings death. Not in the sense of eternal separation from God, because if you're a Christian, if you're a believer, that's been settled. But death in your experience, brokenness, regret, loss, futility, frustration, sin always costs something. Now remember, grace is still real and active. God will forgive you if you trust him. It's not like there's some limit on sin, and oh, now you've committed one too many and you've forfeited grace. It doesn't work like that. Once God saves you and makes you his own, he will not let you go. As your faith matures, your choices will begin to line up with the truth that God is already making real in you. Let's move on to verses 20 through 23. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification, and its end eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. I think that's one of the clearest passages we have that shows that death is this quality of our present existence. When you were slaves to sin, what was the result? What was the fruit you were seeing in your life? You were seeing death. Okay, when he says, when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regards to righteousness. I think that's kind of tongue in cheek. It's like saying you were fat-free, you were sugar free, you were righteousness free, i.e., you didn't have any. Righteousness made no demands on you. It didn't bother you. You couldn't live it out even if you wanted to. You were completely free of it, and that's not a compliment. Then Paul asks, so what benefit did you gain from that kind of life? What was the results that you saw in living a life of sin? What did you really get out of living for yourself, chasing sin, and ignoring God? And he answers his own question, death. The fruit of that life, everything that grew out of that kind of life was death. The things you once thought were fulfilling turned out to be empty and destructive, and they left you ashamed. That's what sin always does. It promises freedom, but it delivers corruption. Before you came to faith, you might not have described it that way, but you probably felt it. You were weary, you were frustrated, you were disillusioned and dissatisfied with the consequences of sin in your life, and deep down you wanted something more. That hunger, that longing to be free from sin and death is what drew you toward God in the first place. That's why Paul says we don't need the law to threaten us in order to motivate us. We already know what sin brings. We lived it. We know the shame, the regret, the emptiness, the futility, the frustration. Why would we want to go back to that? Verse 22 makes that point. The very thing your heart was craving, the freedom from sin, the holiness that we longed for. Now that's possible. That's our destiny. That's the kind of life God is building in us. That's our incentive. Why go back to death and despair that we beg to be freed from when the kind of life we long for is now within reach? And then Paul drives this point home with one of the most famous verses in the Bible. 623, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Death is the natural and inevitable result of sin. It's the paycheck you get when you live a life of sin. Life, by contrast, is the natural and inevitable result of holiness, and that is a gift. You don't earn it, you receive it through trusting in Jesus. And that's where Paul lands his argument. The incentive to avoid sin is not the fear of God's wrath or losing your inheritance, because if you belong to God, you can't lose your inheritance. The incentive to avoid sin is the nature of reality itself. Every time we sin, we taste a little bit of that death. And every time we choose to obey God, we taste a little of the life that is to come. And with that, Paul moves on to his next point in chapter seven, and that is the law, as it turns out, was never an effective deterrent to sin anyway. Let's look at Romans chapter seven, verses one through three. Or do you not know, brothers, for I'm speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives. For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. So Paul uses a simple picture that everyone in his audience would recognize. Marriage law. As long as a woman's husband is alive, the law binds her to him. If she runs off with another man while her husband is still alive, then the law can charge her with adultery. But if her husband dies, she's released. That legal bond no longer binds her. And she is free to marry another. Now, why would Paul bring up marriage when he's talking about the Christian life? Because he's drawing an analogy between how the law operates in marriage and how the law operates in our sanctification. I think this is the logic. As long as the husband lives, the law is enforced. It binds his wife to him and enforces faithfulness. But when the husband dies, the legal bond dies. She is released and free to marry another without guilt. Now Paul takes that structure and lays it on our spiritual story. Under the Mosaic Law, we were effectively bound to our sin. The law told us to be holy. The law explained how to do that. But the only resources we had to try to be holy was our sinful selves. The law could explain the demands of being holy and following God, but it couldn't give us the ability to follow Him. It couldn't give us the ability to be holy and righteous and good. In other words, it can't change our hearts. So what did that legal pressure do? Well, it kept us married, as it were, to our sinful selves, people who can't be holy. So under the law, we're stuck. We're stuck trying to make ourselves holy by our own power, and that will never work. Now here's where the gospel comes in. When we place our faith in Jesus, something like a death happens that changes our legal situation. The bond that kept us tied to our old slave of sin self gets broken. We are no longer under the law that condemns us and binds us. We metaphorically died in our metaphorical marriage to our old selves. And just like the widow is now free to belong to another, we are now free to belong to God. Or in Paul's analogy, we are free to be married to a new husband. God gives us his spirit to change us and make us the kind of people who want to keep the law, and eventually we will be able to keep it. So under the law, we were bound to try to make ourselves holy, and that only chained us to failure. But under grace, the binding has been released, and we are now free to belong to God Himself, so that He can do the sanctifying work that we need. Let's look at the last three verses, Romans 7, 4 through 6. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we may serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. So here Paul explains the analogy he just made about marriage. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have been released from our marriage to the law so that we can be married to Christ. And the purpose of this new relationship is that we may bear fruit for God. When we were under the law, the law kept telling us what holiness required, but it didn't give us the power to do it or achieve it. The law kept saying, Do this and you'll live, prove your worth, make yourself holy. But the harder we tried, the more we discovered how deeply sinful we are. The law didn't cure sin, it just exposed it. It didn't promote holiness or righteousness, it forced us to see our failure. I think that's what Paul means by saying the law aroused sinful passions. It makes them obvious to me. The more I try to keep the law, the more I see that I'm not, and the more I strive to prove I'm righteousness in my own effort and self-effort, the more frustrated and hopeless I become. I think that's what he's talking about in verse 5 when he says, While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. Now let me pause there because Paul uses this word flesh a lot, and it's easy to misunderstand him. Most of the time, when Paul uses this word, at least here in Romans, he means everything I am apart from God. My flesh is everything that belongs to me in my own strength, my own willpower, and my own resources. The me that's left when God is not helping me, when he has not intervened. So when I try to keep the law in my flesh, I am keeping the law based on my own resources, my own strength, and my own power. And I inevitably fail because I am a sinful person. The only fruit, the only result that that kind of effort produces is death. If we want a different kind of fruit, if we want a different kind of life and holiness, we have to belong to someone else. That's what Paul means by being released from the law. The death of Jesus frees us from the terms of the old covenant, the one that said, try and do this on your own. We are no longer under that contract. Now we're under a new one, and in the new covenant, God says, I will make you the kind of person who loves holiness and righteousness and give you the desire, the heart to follow me. So when Paul says we've been released from the law, he doesn't mean that the law is bad or it's irrelevant or it no longer matters. God hasn't changed his mind about what's right and what's wrong, or what's good or what's bad, all the things that the law can teach us. The moral standards of the law still describe holiness, obedience, and righteousness. What's changed is the contract. We're no longer required to produce that kind of obedience on our own in order to earn life. Because of our faith in Jesus, God gives us a new master, a new heart that begins producing not only holiness in us, but the desire for holiness. That's why Paul ends this section by contrasting two ways of serving God, in the new way of the Spirit or in the old way of the written code. The old way of the written code means the old covenant, trying to obey through our own self-effort without any divine intervention. The new way of the spirit means living with all of God's resources now available to us through the Holy Spirit, such that we trust God to make us holy. Under the old covenant, we were on our own. Under the new covenant, we have the Spirit of God working inside us to change us and to make us the kind of people who love God and want to obey Him, something we can never do on our own. So Paul's second point is clear. It only made things worse by binding us to our own sinfulness. But the gospel frees us from that old hopeless arrangement and joins us to Christ, who can give us his spirit so that we can become the people he wants us to be. Now, let me try to pull all this together. Remember, the objection Paul has been answering is this if the gospel is all about grace, if our inheritance is secure no matter how much we sin, then doesn't that remove any real incentive to avoid sin? And Paul says, absolutely not. There's still a very real incentive, and it's called death. Sin always brings death, not just the final kind of death, but the death we experience right now in our daily lives. The brokenness, shame, emptiness, the slow unraveling of everything good in our lives, the wages of sin are always death. And if you want to be free from that kind of decay and corruption and futility, if you want to taste real life, the only path is holiness. And as for the law, that was never an effective deterrent to sin anyway. The law didn't stop sin, it exposed it. It made our sin more obvious by showing us how high the standard is and how far short we fall. The law said be holy, but it couldn't give us the power to be holy. All it really did was prove to us that we couldn't do it on our own. That's why grace is not an invitation to sin, it's the only thing that can finally free us from it. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure it out. You'll find the blog version of this episode, including links and resources, at WednesdayInTheWord.com slash Start Strong Podcast One. You can listen to all the episodes in this series at WednesdayInTheWord.com. There is no charge, no spam, and no ads. Just free, trustworthy resources to help you grow in your understanding of scripture. If this podcast has blessed you, please consider following, rating, or reviewing it on your favorite podcast platform. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. If you haven't read the book yet, you can find it wherever books are sold, or start with all the free resources at startstrongbook.org. You'll find small group discussion questions, a companion workbook, and links to more studies that go deeper into these same passages. If you're reading along in the book Start Strong, you might want to read chapter two before listening to the next episode. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can hear more of Reggie's music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisson Murata, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.