Today’s reading from Romans 6:1-14 asks the question, ‘Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’. Saint Paul answers the rhetorical question with a resounding ‘no’, going on to explain that that God’s call is to something altogether different.
On a long train journey recently I was in the same carriage as a group of men on their way to a prolonged stag party. They were already very drunk, very loud and become more of both all the time. Whether to be amused, irritated or sad depends on your outlook on life. However, what I saw in a group of high spirited revellers is in microcosm an illustration of the misery that those fighting against addiction of all sorts live with throughout life.
I have heard addiction being described as like drowning. The water becomes deeper and cannot be stopped. One person’s seaside holiday is another person’s nightmare just as one person’s party is another person’s prison sentence. One individual’s flutter is the next person’s future in ruins.
If you can read Romans 6 and give thanks for the grace and strength that has allowed you to grow daily nearer to Christ, spare a thought and a prayer for the next person who is being dragged ever further from any sense of being able to get hold of the hope of recovery, or turning the back on the suffocation of progressive descent into despair and ruin.
No one sets out to get hooked on something addictive and vanishingly few can say they have got off the hook with no harm done. What Saint Paul puts in a theologically deep way is, in human terms, like being saved from drowning for those fortunate to find the strength and grace to be able to do as he prescribes.
For all the extremes, a lot of us live in the middle ground. We are not uncontrollably addicted to what kills us but nor do we easily resist some measure of what taints us.
A Prayer
Lord God, help me to work out what it means to turn my back on my old life of sin and find the new resurrection life with you. Give me strength not to be mastered by sin for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.