Today's Scripture Reading (March 8, 2021): Romans 6
Pastor G.
C. Brewer (1884-1956) liked to preach from this passage in Romans and would
often include a story about some teenage boys who watched the Tennessee River
rise above flood stage. As the boys stood watching the river, they caught sight
of a small rabbit trapped on what was becoming a smaller and smaller island.
The boys were busy discussing the rabbit's fate when they began to consider the
possibility of rescuing the scared animal. The problem was that even though all
of the boys were good swimmers, they had been drilled by their parents repeatedly
about the dangers of the Tennessee River when it reached flood stage.
Finally,
the biggest and strongest of the teens decided that he was going to swim over to
the island and rescue the rabbit before the island disappeared altogether. He
was an outstanding swimmer and made it all the way to the island. He gathered
the rabbit into his overalls and jumped back into the water for the swim back
to shore. But the teen had no sooner gotten back into the river when the end of
a partially submerged log hit him in the head. The boy disappeared under the water's
surface, and it would be four days before the officials could find his body,
far downstream. The boy's friends were present for the recovery of the body,
and one of them found the remains of the rabbit in their friend's overalls. The
dead boy's friend held the body of the rabbit up and proclaimed, "This is
what he gave his life for!"
G. C. Brewer
would then conclude that "What people labor to receive through sin, they get!"
Sin and death are the great equalizers of our existence.
Sin is already present in our actions. Death will be a part of our history, both
in the little ways that we seem to die every day and in that final moment when
we disappear below the surface of this world, never to reappear on this plane.
The presence of sin and death is what makes God's gift of eternal life so
necessary in our lives. Paul argues that when we work for sin, death is the payment
we are laboring to receive.
God's gift is life. It is the cancelation of the wage that
we have rightfully earned. It is not that our belief in Christ allows us to
escape the consequences of our actions, but, instead, that the gift of God that
helps us to shape our existence in this life and to escape the ultimate
destruction that should be our wages. Both have been taken away from us because
of the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf.
But Paul's point is more than just that we have the
opportunity to exchange our earned wages for God's gift. He is arguing that because
we have received the gift of God, we need to do whatever we can to stop working
for sin's wages. Instead, we can allow ourselves to be shaped by the gift that
we have been freely given. Recognizing the damage that sin does in our lives,
we should do anything we can to avoid committing even the smallest sin and
everything we can to magnify the shaping power of the gift of God both in us and
all of those with whom we have contact.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Romans 7
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