“What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? May it never be! Don’t you know that when you present yourselves as servants and obey someone, you are the servants of whomever you obey; whether of sin to death, or of obedience to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that, whereas you were servants of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were delivered. Being made free from sin, you became servants of righteousness.
“I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh, for as you presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to wickedness upon wickedness, even so now present your members as servants to righteousness for sanctification. For when you were servants of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit then did you have at that time in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, being made free from sin and having become servants of God, you have your fruit of sanctification and the result of eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace?” takes Paul’s declaration in Romans 6:14 and turns it into an excuse for the very slavery from which grace has brought liberation. His answer is immediate: “May it never be!”
Freedom from sin does not leave the believer morally independent, belonging only to himself. Paul describes liberation as a change of masters. Those once enslaved to sin have become servants of righteousness and servants of God. The difference appears not only in whom they obey but in what each service produces. One bears fruit ending in death; the other bears fruit in sanctification and ends in eternal life.
Shall We Sin Because We Are Under Grace?
Romans 6:15
“What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? May it never be!”
The question differs from the one that opened the chapter. Romans 6:1 asked whether believers should “continue in sin, that grace may abound.” Here the proposed excuse is Paul’s declaration that believers are “not under law, but under grace.”
Someone could hear freedom from law as freedom from the seriousness of sin. Paul refuses the conclusion without qualifying the grace he has proclaimed. Being under grace does not erase the distinction between righteousness and sin or turn liberation from sin into permission to return voluntarily to its service.
The problem with the objection becomes clearer once Paul identifies what obedience to sin actually means. Sin is not an expression of freedom. It is another master.
Servants of Whomever You Obey
Romans 6:16
“Don’t you know that when you present yourselves as servants and obey someone, you are the servants of whomever you obey; whether of sin to death, or of obedience to righteousness?”
Presenting oneself to a master for obedience means entering that master’s service. Paul gives two possibilities: “sin to death” and “obedience to righteousness.”
Sin therefore offers no genuine independence. Refusal to obey God does not make the sinner master of his own existence. The person who presents himself to sin obeys sin.
John 8:34
“Jesus answered them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is the bondservant of sin.’”
The alternatives also move toward different ends. Sin leads to death; obedience leads to righteousness. Using grace as permission for sin would therefore amount to using liberation as an excuse to return to bondage.
Obedient from the Heart
Romans 6:17–18
“But thanks be to God, that, whereas you were servants of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were delivered. Being made free from sin, you became servants of righteousness.”
Slavery to sin belongs to the former condition of Paul’s readers: “you were servants of sin.” Their obedience to the teaching they received is correspondingly described as coming “from the heart.”
Christian obedience cannot be reduced to external conformity. Their allegiance has changed. The gospel did not merely provide new information while leaving their fundamental loyalty untouched. The teaching they received laid claim to them, and they responded to it from the heart.
Paul’s wording is unusually strong. He does not merely say that a form of teaching was delivered to them; they were delivered “to that form of teaching.” The truth they received now shapes the life to which they belong.
“Being made free from sin, you became servants of righteousness.” Liberation does not mean the absence of obligation or allegiance. The believer has been freed from a destructive master in order to belong to another. Christian freedom is therefore not autonomy. Those freed from sin belong to God.
Present Your Members to Righteousness
Romans 6:19
“I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh, for as you presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to wickedness upon wickedness, even so now present your members as servants to righteousness for sanctification.”
“I speak in human terms” acknowledges the limitations of the slavery comparison. Paul nevertheless continues using it because the image makes the competing allegiances concrete.
Their former service to sin had expressed itself through their bodies. They presented their members to “uncleanness and to wickedness upon wickedness.” Sin’s mastery produced actions and habits consistent with the master being served.
Those same members are now to be presented “as servants to righteousness for sanctification.” The body is not discarded when allegiance changes. What once served unrighteousness can now be placed in the service of righteousness.
Sanctification appears here as the fruit of that new service, not as an alternative means of obtaining justification. Those who have already been freed from sin are commanded to present themselves to righteousness. A decisive change of mastery has occurred, and the life of the believer is increasingly brought into conformity with that change.
Free in Regard to Righteousness
Romans 6:20–21
“For when you were servants of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit then did you have at that time in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.”
The freedom offered by sin has a bitter irony. When Paul’s readers were slaves of sin, they were “free in regard to righteousness.” Righteousness exercised no mastery over them because they belonged to another master.
Paul asks them to judge that freedom by what it produced. The things belonging to their former lives have become sources of shame, but shame itself is not his final argument. Those things were carrying them somewhere: “the end of those things is death.”
A freedom whose destination is death has been exposed as slavery. Whatever independence sin appears to promise, its servants remain beneath a mastery whose fruit reveals its character and whose end reveals its true cost.
Servants of God
Romans 6:22
“But now, being made free from sin and having become servants of God, you have your fruit of sanctification and the result of eternal life.”
“But now” places their present condition against the life Paul has just described. They have been freed from sin and become “servants of God.”
The language also clarifies what Paul meant by becoming “servants of righteousness.” The believer has not exchanged slavery to one impersonal force for slavery to another. He belongs to God, and that belonging produces a different kind of fruit.
Where the former service produced shame and ended in death, service to God produces sanctification and has eternal life as its end. Obedience therefore genuinely belongs to the life of those who have been freed from sin. Grace has not made transformation irrelevant; it has made a new kind of life possible.
Yet Paul does not allow that transformation to turn eternal life into compensation for successful service. His final sentence carefully distinguishes the end of sin from the end God gives his people.
Wages and Gift
Romans 6:23
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
A wage belongs to the worker as payment for service rendered. Paul has already used that distinction when discussing Abraham:
Romans 4:4
“Now to him who works, the reward is not counted as grace, but as something owed.”
Sin pays its servants. Its wage is death.
Paul could have completed the contrast by saying that the wages of righteousness are eternal life. He does not. The difference between the two sides of the sentence is deliberate: “the free gift of God is eternal life.”
The obedience and sanctification of those who serve God remain real. They are the fruit of the new allegiance Paul has spent the passage describing. But they do not place God under obligation to pay eternal life as a wage. Eternal life remains what it has always been in Paul’s argument: grace given rather than debt settled.
Nor is the gift detached from Christ. It is eternal life “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The one who frees from sin is also the one in whom the life opposite sin’s death is found.
Slaves of Righteousness
Sin’s promise of freedom collapses under the weight of its own outcome. To obey sin is to serve it, and its service produces the very bondage from which grace liberates. The life Paul describes under grace is not independence from God but belonging to him.
That makes the final contrast sharper than two possible masters offering competing rewards. Sin gives its servants exactly what its service earns: death. God does not answer with another wage.
He gives eternal life.
The difference between death and life is finally the difference between what sin pays and what God freely gives in Christ Jesus our Lord.