The wages of sin.

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

August 3, 2025 at Holy Communion

Romans 6:17–23

“The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

In our daily prayers at home, Katy and I say this in both the morning and the evening: “O heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who art everywhere present and fillest all things, treasury of blessings, and Giver of Life, come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.” It’s a prayer to the Holy Spirit, used at the start of most Eastern Christian services—and at its heart is an appeal to the Spirit of God as the “Giver of Life.”

But of course it is also a prayer of purification: “cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls.” And that’s part of the power of the prayer. It connects the Holy Spirit as a “treasury of blessings and Giver of Life” with the human desire to overcome sin and present oneself spotless before God.

We too quickly assume that sin is a matter of offending against God, and its solution is forgiveness. And of course we use that language all the time. But we get a distorted view of sin unless we realize that beneath the guilt-and-forgiveness paradigm there is a more fundamental one: the paradigm of death and life. To sin is to fall away from the Giver of Life, and so to enter into death. And so conversely, to depart from sin and live rightly is primarily about re-entering relationship with the God who is Life itself.

This is what we hear in our second reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The final verse of the chapter is one of the most famous in the entire book: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). It’s famous because it is often included in evangelistic tracts detailing the “Romans road,” a constellation of verses from the Book of Romans which are meant to confront the reader with their own sinfulness, the wrath of God, and the forgiveness available through faith in Christ.

And that is the context which, for much of my life, I thought of this verse. I understood it to mean that because I have sinned I have merited that God should send me to eternal death, unless I repent and reach out for his free gift of eternal life. That was, until I read and considered this verse in the context of the whole passage.

We can get everything we need from the word “wages.” The “wages of sin” are not the rewards that God pays out to anyone who has sinned; the “wages of sin” are the rewards that sin pays out to those who serve sin. This is actually the ordinary sense of the word “wages”: they are the rewards conferred by your employer, not by someone else.

And that’s what Paul says in various ways throughout the passage. His persistent metaphor for sin and righteousness is of service to a master. He starts in verse 16 by telling us that we can either present ourselves to serve sin or to serve God, and that service to sin “leads to death,” but the service of God “leads to righteousness.” Later on he says it again: before we repented, he argues, we “once presented ourselves as slaves to impurity” which led only to deeper and deeper chaos, but now we have taken a new way and we present ourselves as “servants of righteousness leading to sanctification” (v 19). And in case it wasn’t clear enough he says it again: the “fruit” we got from “the things of which we are now ashamed” was just death (v 21), but the fruit of righteousness is eternal life (v 22). And so, he summarizes, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life” (v 23).

So the point about sin: death is not a consequence of sin in the way that being sent to prison is a consequence of murder. That’s a judicial consequence, a penalty imposed from the outside by a third party. Instead, death is the consequence of sin in the way that concussions are a consequence of playing rugby or lung cancer is a consequence of smoking—it’s what you signed up for and you can’t really be surprised when it happens. Death is an internal or natural consequence of sin, like receiving wages is the natural consequence of working.

Spiritual death, the alienation of a beloved child from the Father who gave them life—and who is Life itself—is not a which consequence God metes out to sinners. It is a consequence from which God saves sinners by extending to them the gift of eternal life, if only they would receive it. And so the “free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v 23).

A question priests get asked every once in while is whether such and such thing is a sin. Is it a sin to do this? Is it a sin to think about doing that? Where’s the line between sin and non-sin in drinking? Where’s the line between sin and non-sin in sex? And so on. But the point has been missed. The answer is, “Does it bring you death, or life?” The evidence that something is sin is that it pays out its wages, killing your spirit, pulling you down, entangling you with the dark forces which don’t want to see you flourish and grow up into the full stature God’s Son.

In an earlier chapter of Romans, St Paul defined sin this way: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)—that’s another misunderstood step on the Romans road. Sin is a “falling away” or a “falling short.” In fact, the Greek word for “sin” used throughout the New Testament is “missing the mark.” There is a way of blessedness, a way of life; sin is simply taking any other road.

In fact, there are things we do all the time which deal us death, and most of them don’t make the list of nasty sins. In one way or another they have to do with burying our feelings—burying them in food, or media, or vindictive thoughts. That’s another conversation, perhaps, but the point is important: just because the Bible doesn’t say it’s a sin, doesn’t mean it doesn’t fall short of the glory and pay you wages of death.

The point for us this morning is that we need to practice discernment. Pay some good, close attention to yourself. If you are experiencing any form of death—it might dissipation of your mental centredness, or a constant sense of irritation with everyone and everything, or anything else that brings you into a place of darkness—first, consider how you might simply be receiving your wages from some habit you need to turn away from. But then, more importantly, seek the Giver of Life.

The wages of sin may be death, but God holds out to you a gift of life. He pays workers the same no matter when they start serving (Matthew 20:1–16), and he pays in pearls of great price (Matthew 13:45–46). The Spirit of God is the Giver of Life, and he can be sought at any time and in any place.