When I was child, my parents, like thousands others, were terrified by an epidemic which was sweeping world. COVID hadn’t been invented yet, and the Spanish flu had run its course, but this was just as frightening. I remember, shortly after moving to Denver, my sister and I were taken to the school on the corner of Grant Street and Garland Drive – Hulstrom Elementary – where we given a little paper cup with a liquid vaccine. I expected it to taste terrible, but it wasn’t bad. My parents had been told that the Sabin Oral Vaccine would protect us from polio. It may have.
Poliomyelitis has been killing and crippling children perhaps from the days of Noah’s grandchildren. But its symptoms were first described in 1789 by an English physician named Michael Underwood. Sixty years later the medical community formally recognized polio as a virus-caused disease. In the 1940s and 50s more than half a million kids throughout world were crippled or killed by polio each year. And in this country in just 3 years between 1953 and 1955 there were 119,000 cases with 6,600 deaths.
The polio virus is highly contagious, although science has been rather successful in fighting it in recent years. Today, it is basically confined to the so-called “Third World Countries.” It attacks the spinal cord of its victims, causing paralysis – beginning in the legs. But its damage can reach higher up on the body, even to causing the lungs to stop functioning. In my childhood, thousands of kids spent time in machines which helped their chests to expand and contract, bringing oxygen into their lungs. Where this failed, or if it wasn’t available, those children died.
I know two people who were struck with polio in their childhoods but who have lived to talk about it. One is a good friend of mine. The wrist watch I wear is a gift he gave me a few years ago. When we first met, he was severely limited but able to get around with crutches. The last time I saw him he was using a wheel chair. He is a small man, but because of his infirmity, he has a well-developed chest and big arms. He is married, but doesn’t have any kids, perhaps because of his polio. The other man, I’ll call an acquaintance. I met him forty years ago, and today I see him from time to time on Facebook. He, too, is a tiny man. In one recent picture he is propped up by crutches, standing between two other, and both were nearly twice his height. Today, he is a Baptist pastor and author, and an excellent musician, singing and playing his own music. Both of these men are Christians, and I hope they’d approve of this message, although probably neither one would be interested in preaching it. I would like to take an old, old sermon outline and put into the wheel chair of a polio victim.
Twice in Romans 6 Paul makes the statement that Christians are “free from sin. That is a glorious thought – “freed from sin.” It is similar to what my friends might think about freedom from polio, crutches and wheel-chairs. Sadly, some people have taken that statement and run rampant with it like some sort of naked streaker. The freedom to which Paul refers, needs to be properly understood. For example, it is not the freedom of utter lawlessness. That is the theme of this morning’s message.
I asked that John 5 be read earlier, because the man whom Jesus healed may have been suffering from polio. As I said a moment ago, the poliomyelitis virus has been around for a very, very long time. And it causes paralysis – impotency in its victim’s legs, before moving on. The man whom Jesus healed had been impotent 38 years, but that sabbath day he walked home rejoicing. He got out of his “wheel-chair” so to speak. He the threw away his “crutches” and freely went home unencumbered by the disease which had crippled him.
When Paul told his Christian friends they were free from sin, there were things to which he did NOT refer.
The context explains exactly what he meant, and I will come to that in a few minutes. But at this point, I’d like us to consider what the Apostle didn’t mean. For instance, those people hadn’t yet been delivered from the sin nature with which they were born. Just as they came into the world human beings and not turkeys or antelope, they were born sinners. I am a sinner and you are a sinner, because as the Bible says, “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” referring to the sin of Adam. No one has ever become a sinner by sinning; we sin because we are all sinners by nature. And just as our parents were born mortal, beginning life in the process of dying, so are all their children and grandchildren – you and me. Many of our parents have died since giving us life. They died because they were sinners. There is an horrible corruption which flows out of our native sinfulness – a corruption which is fatal. Romans 5:12 – “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Romans 5:17 – “By one man’s offence (sin against God) death reigned” over all of Adam’s children. Death follows everyone in every place where sin is king. And obviously that is everywhere and everyone.
If I may illustrate it this way: we are all polio victims. We may walk around with little obvious ill-effect, but we are still infected with the virus; we are dying. We may be on the very verge of death, confined to an iron lung trying to pump physical life into our bodies. Or we may be on spiritual crutches, in a wheel-chair, or laying at the edge of the Pool of Bethesda, but we are all victims of our own sin natures. Paul, in Romans 6, is not telling us that we are free from our sin nature.
And second, there was not one Christian believer in Rome who had become sinless in any practical sense. There are many Christian religionists who make the claim of “sinlessness,” but they must twist some scriptures and ignore others to speak of it in their churches. I have known people who made the claim of “sinlessness,” but I also saw that they couldn’t justify their claim by the way they lived. I worked beside one of those folk every day for several years. That person was as outwardly sinful as me or any of the rest of us. Even if she was a true child of God, she was nothing more than a redeemed SINNER.
Apostle John reminds all of us, “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Not only “have all sinned and come short of the glory of God” in the past, but we are still living in fleshly bodies which are perpetually perpetrating sinful deeds. Our hearts remain deceitful and desperately wicked. And our minds – our brains – are constantly filled with vain thoughts, wicked imaginations and sinful plans. Our tongues are often so quick to vocalize our sinfulness that our teeth and lips can’t stop them. Our throats are open sepulchers and septic systems – filled with deception, cursing and bitterness – Romans 3. “There is none that doeth good, no not one.”
If I may put it this way, we are enslaved to our wheel-chairs and crutches. As we roll down the street and across the parking lot, our very condition tells world, that we are “polio people.” It is not necessary that we be rolling or crutching our way into a tavern, gambling den or pot shop. Just by looking at us, the world knows what we are – victims of the sin of our first parents.
I am probably confusing the point in your minds, but what I am trying to say is this: A saint of God, is nothing more than a sinner who has been saved by God’s marvelous grace. But there is one very large difference between him and those of you who have not been born again. The Christian has been made free from certain other aspects of sin, and YOU have not. Thus far he has escaped the death to which polio leads, but hopefully he has tossed aside his crutches at the command of Christ, and by grace walked home from his Bethesda.
Despite these effects of sin, there are other aspects from which the Christian HAS been freed.
For example, he or she has been freed from the condemnation of his sin. Like sin, the poliomyelitis virus has a very deadly outcome – it kills its host. The initial symptoms of the disease are very much like many others: fever, fatigue, headache and vomiting. But then it moves on into stiffness of the neck and then pain in the limbs. Finally, the pain develops into that spreading paralysis, which left untreated kills its victims.
And the Bible makes it very clear that the ultimate effect of sin, after often ruining a person’s life – it kills him. The last verse in our text should be sufficient to prove my point: “The wages of sin is death.” God told our first father, “In the day you sin against me, you shall die” and he did. I’ve already quoted Paul in Romans 5 – “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” “By one man’s offence (against God) death has reigned” over humanity since the beginning of time. God said to Ezekiel, “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die” – Ezekiel 18:4. James tells us that like the polio virus, when sin is finished it produces death – James 1:15. Sin is 100% efficient in killing its host.
However, just as our Saviour raised the bodies of people physically dead, He also has resurrected the dead spirits of countless condemned sinners. Every one of them – every Nicodemus and every Bethesda cripple – had been cursed by his sin before he was saved. But Christ delivers from the condemnation of that sin; He delivers from death.
Galatians 3:13 describes how sinners are saved: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a cruse of us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” Christ in His flesh “bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins should live unto righteousness, by whose stripes ye were healed” – I Peter 2:24. And “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” – I Peter 3:18.
As an illustration, I might say that Christ Jesus, the Son of God who became incarnate for this purpose… The Second Person of the Godhead took upon him a mortal body, exposing himself to the fatal virus. He was not a sinner Himself – neither by nature nor by evil deed – but He deliberately set Himself in the way of sin’s ultimate judgment. He could have thrown off that disease, just as He healed others, but He chose to bear it to its ultimate end. For a time He endured the pain, limitations and indignities of human crutches and reproach, but it was for a reason. He was hated; He was ridiculed; He was beaten, and had His beard ripped from His face. “His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men” – Isaiah 52:14. He had no form nor comeliness; and when people looked on him there was no beauty that gave any natural eye a desire for Him – Isaiah 53:2.
And when He died it was for the purpose of freeing His elect people from the condemnation of their sins. There are nearly fifty scriptures which declare that the believer’s condemnation is GONE because Christ. For example, Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now NO condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus…” The Lord Jesus Himself said, “Verily, verily I say unto you, He that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me, that everlasting life, and shall NOT come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” – John 5:24.
Going back to my illustration, we polio victims, confined to our iron lungs just to keep life in our bodies, have been given eternal life – special, spiritual life – by the grace of God. We have believed the gospel report, and we have humbly put our faith in Christ for eternal life. We are free from the condemnation of sin, even if not free from the effects of sin in other ways. We are still confined to the crutches and wheel chairs of our sin-riddled bodies. But this brings us to Paul’s point here in Romans 6.
As born-again people, we OUGHT to be free from the ENSLAVEMENT of sin.
Verse 6 – “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with (Christ), that the body of sin might be destoryed, that henceforth we should not SERVE sin.” Verses 11 and 12 – “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” Verse 14 – “For sin shall not have dominion over you.”
Here is where my illustration gets more complicated, taking on a life of its own, and perhaps falling apart. Both my polio victim friends are Christians, believers in Christ, and I expect to see them in Heaven one day glorified and without their crutches. One of them works for a branch of the Government of Canada, and the other is a gospel preacher – the pastor of a Baptist Church. As I say, both are confined to their virus-ravaged bodies, and they will be until the Lord calls them to Himself. But they are trying to use their lives and their bodies for the glory of the Saviour.
I haven’t spent time with either of them recently, so I can only judge from a distance. But I would say that they are living above their limitations – they are living beyond their crutches. They get out of bed each morning and move their small, crippled bodies into their moveable chairs. Then they do as much as any of us – any Christian – to live a life pleasing to the Saviour who gave His life for them. One pushes himself to the piano to write and sing hymns to the glory of the Saviour. He rolls into his study, preparing messages to share with the saints and with the lost. One uses his crutches, walking up to a pulpit in order to preach the gospel. I would hope that both men employ their limited bodies and lives to bring others to Christ. Paul is telling all of God’s children, to do the same.
There is no greater service – there is no greater opportunity – than to be an ambassador for the Saviour. A straight body and strong legs are not essential to that service. And even if the virus has not devastated us as much as others, we are all still in some degree of limitation. But one necessity for service is freedom from the actual enslavement of our former sins. This is Paul’s message in Romans 6 – “Let not sin reign in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” “Being made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.” In God’s strength, throw aside the effects of that sin-virus and live to the glory of the Saviour.
After this kind of freedom from sin, there is yet another aspect.
One of these days, the Lord Jesus will visit our Bethesda, and He will say, “Rise, take up thy bed, and come home with me.” It may be – that will be the day when our physical heart stops beating and our physical lungs can no longer draw in the oxygen we need. Or it might be on the day when the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, and we which are alive and remain on the earth shall be caught up together, to meet the Lord in air. Either way, we will leave our crutches behind; we will leave the effects of our sinful myelitis to be consumed by His judgment here on earth.
In that day, “when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” – I John 3:2. As Paul said in Philippians 3:21 – He “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working where by is able even to subdue all things unto himself.” There is a day coming when we will be freed from the presence of sin, and our own propensity to sin. What a day that will be, when our Jesus we will see.
I can only imagine the agony that fell upon my two friends in those early days when the polio virus began to invade their bodies. At first they probably gave it little attention – in the same sort of way that many have little concern that they are sinning against God. But then the symptoms became worse, and then worse, until there were things they could no longer do. In fact, their sin became so bad that there were even certain aspects of sin which they could not do. Then at some point their hearts became as broken as their bodies. Probably, for a time they became absolutely miserable, knowing what had struck them and knowing what their disease had in store for them.
How important it is that people infected with sin, come to realize how desperately wretched they are. They need to learn that there is no human surgery – and no mere religious medicine – to cure them. They need to become like the impotent man at Bethesda, aware that there is no man – human doctor or earthly priest – to help them. They need to realize that there is only one escape from the ravages of this disease: the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
My friend, if you have not been born again, you are going to die a horrible sin-controlled death. Then you are going to hear the word “guilty.” At that time, you will have been accused, arraigned, convicted and pronounced “guilty.” You may be laying at the pool-side, hopelessly impotent. But the Healer is here. Christ Jesus is beside you this morning. Listen to Him say, “Wilt thou be made whole?” Aren’t you interested? Don’t you want spiritual health and life?
This morning I implore you to call out to Him: “Lord save me.” Acknowledge your sinful myelitis – humble yourself before the Great Physician. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ who has healed others. Trust Him to save you as well. Do it today while there is still life in your sinful, dying body.