Submit Yourself to your Heavenly Master

G. Paulraj

In our life whatever we yield to that becomes our master especially before our salvation we were slave to sin or to Satan who is the author of all transgression, trespasses. But after our salvation now we belong to Christ and we are freed from that old slavery and we have become God’s servants. Therefore Apostle Paul in Romans 6:18-19 invites us to be the servants of righteousness because once we yielded our bodies to uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity. But now according to Romans 6:19 we are expected to yield ourselves to the Lord in the same way we yielded to sin. Or in other words we should have a desire to be as good a saint as we were sinners.

As Christians and as saved believers we ought to obey God and yield ourselves to righteousness because when we yield ourselves to righteousness we will be serving God or in other word we will be slave to Him not to sin. Apostle Paul in this passage explains this committed Christian life with the analogy of a master/slave relationship in conjunction to which we would serve?

In verse 19 Paul tells them why, “I speak this way using the illustration of slaves and masters, because it is easy for you to understand.” During the 1st Century in the Roman world the old master’s authority over the slave will come to an end when a slave was passed to new ownership. Once says Paul you were slaves to sin and the Sin was your old master. Before Christ become your master you were forced to do all the evil desires your heart ordered you to do you had no power to say “No”. Think about your own life today. What has God liberated you from that you were powerless to change in your best efforts: Anger? Rage? Immorality?  Impurity? Addiction to drugs or to watching pornographies? Did you find yourself in a lifestyle that repeated itself in destructive mistakes and bad influences on a path of self-destruction?

According to this text that lifestyle and those patterns should be completely broken no longer embraced or lived now because you have come to Christ. You have been free from sin’s power When slaves were transferred to the new owner there is a new set of rules. So Paul goes on to say: But now you have passed from the service of sin into the service of God; your business now is to do what pleases God, not what sin dictates.

What it means to live under grace and submitting ourselves to His mastery is illustrated by the life of John Newton. Newton was born in London, half a century before the American Revolution, to a mother of superb spiritual qualities and a nondescript father. His mother died when he was six. Five years later he went to sea with his father who was a ship’s captain. He became a midshipman and for a time led a wild existence, living in utter disgrace. He rejected the God of his mother, he renounced any need of religion and he lived an irresponsible and sinful life. Eventually he became a slave trader, crossing the ocean several times as captain of slave ship, responsible for terrible human degradation among the captives he had crowded on board. But grace was always a factor in his life. He survived a deadly fever in Africa, and his ship survived a terrible storm which almost killed him.

Finally, dissatisfied with his life, he began reading the writings of Thomas a Kempis. Somehow, the Holy Spirit began stirring inside his soul, awakening him from sin, urging him toward salvation until he finally gave his heart to Christ. He was so thoroughly converted, in fact, that he felt a call from God to enter the ministry. He was eventually ordained in 1781 and accepted a pastorate in Olney, England. But Newton’s disgraceful past never left his memory and he was completely dumbfounded over the privilege of living joyously free under the divine grace of God. In an intense moment of inspiration, when he was thinking of the wonder of the grace of God which had saved even a wretch like him, he wrote the hymn, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound." Theologian Charles Hodge explained the relationship between divine grace and the human heart. “The doctrines of grace humble a man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.”

Thus the true children of God will serve His/her master who delivered him or her from the bondage of sin. Dear reader the choice is left to you either you can choose to serve the old master of your life and reap the wages of sin or you can choose to serve Jesus as your Master and live a life of holiness and Christ-like character.