In March 1748 a merchant ship called the Greyhound was caught in a violent storm in the North Atlantic, on its way home to England. Waves tore away timbers from one side of the hull. Water poured in faster than the crew could pump it out. Among the men working the pumps through that long night was a twenty-two-year-old sailor named John Newton.
Newton was, by his own later account, one of the most profane men on board. He had been raised by a godly mother who died when he was a small boy, and he had long since thrown away whatever faith she taught him. He mocked religion, led other sailors into vice, and had spent part of the previous years in miserable conditions on the coast of West Africa, working for a slave trader who treated him little better than the captives he dealt in. The ship that was now sinking beneath him had found him there and was carrying him home.
Somewhere in the hours of that storm, exhausted and expecting to drown, Newton found himself praying. The ship did not sink. After weeks of drifting with almost no food, it reached the coast of Ireland. For the rest of his life Newton marked the tenth of March as the anniversary of the day God had mercy on him.
That would make a satisfying story if it ended there. It does not. For the next six years, John Newton, now a praying man who read his Bible and held services for his crew on Sundays, worked in the Atlantic slave trade. He rose to become the captain of slave ships. He later admitted that during those years he had felt no serious scruple about the business at all.
If you wanted an argument that grace leads to sin, you might think you had found it. A man is forgiven freely, by grace, and goes on to captain ships carrying human beings in chains.
PunchlineHold that thought. We will come back to John Newton, because his story did not end on the deck of a slave ship either.
The question grace provokes
Paul knew that the message of grace would be accused of encouraging sin. He had just written one of the most astonishing sentences in the Bible: “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20). Immediately he heard the objection forming in his readers’ minds, and he voiced it himself:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
“Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” If more sin means more grace, and grace glorifies God, why not sin more?
The Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once observed, in his exposition of this chapter, that if our preaching of grace never provokes this question, we may not be preaching the same gospel Paul preached. A message that mixes grace with conditions never draws the accusation, because everyone can see the conditions. Only a message of truly free grace could make anyone ask whether it leaves room for sin. The objection is a sign that Paul was preaching grace in its full strength.
But his answer is immediate and emphatic. “God forbid.” The Greek phrase is me genoito, the strongest negative Paul has: “Let it never be!” Then he asks a question of his own: “How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”
Notice that Paul does not answer the objection by watering grace down. He does not say, “You are right; we had better add some law to keep people in line.” He does not retreat into threats. He answers by explaining what grace has actually done. Grace has not simply forgiven the believer and left him as he was. It has joined him to Christ in His death and resurrection. The believer has died to sin. That is the ground of Paul’s whole argument in the chapter.
The person who asks, “Can I go on sinning, since I am under grace?” has misunderstood what grace is. He imagines grace as a kind of permission slip, a document that lets him do as he pleases without penalty. Paul sees grace as a power that has changed his relationship with sin at the root. A dead man does not go back to live in the house he was carried out of.
A change of masters
Paul develops the point a few verses later, and he comes at the same objection from a different angle:
For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.
“For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” This is the sentence that provokes the second form of the question: “shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” And again Paul says, “God forbid.”
His answer this time uses the language of slavery, which his readers in Rome would have understood very well. Many of them were slaves or former slaves. “To whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are.” Everyone serves something. There is no neutral ground. A person is either serving sin, which leads to death, or serving obedience, which leads to righteousness.
Then Paul gives thanks: “But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you.” Notice the tense. Ye were the servants of sin. That was their past. Something decisive has happened.
The phrase “that form of doctrine which was delivered you” is fascinating. The word translated form is typos, which can mean a mould or pattern. And the Greek actually says that they were delivered to the teaching, not that the teaching was delivered to them. The picture is of molten metal poured into a mould, taking its shape. The gospel did not simply hand these believers some new information. They were handed over into it, like metal poured into a cast, and they came out shaped by it.
“Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.” The believer has changed masters. He has been bought out of one household and brought into another. Paul says elsewhere that this new service has its own fruit: “But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life” (Romans 6:22).
So when Paul says believers are under grace rather than under the law, he is not describing a lawless life. He is describing a life under a new and better rule. Law ruled by demand and could not break sin’s power. Grace rules by a gift that changes the heart, and under its rule sin loses its dominion. The question “Shall we sin because we are under grace?” is like a freed slave asking whether he should go back and volunteer for his old master’s whip. The very question shows that he has not yet understood his freedom.
Grace is a trainer
Earlier in this series we looked at the way Paul describes grace in his letter to Titus. It is worth returning to one word. Paul says that “the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:11-12).
The word translated teaching is paideuo. It is the word for the training of a child, the whole process of raising a son or daughter, including instruction, encouragement, correction and discipline. Grace is not a lecturer who reads out information and leaves the room. Grace is a parent who lives with you, trains you day by day, and shapes your habits over years.
That means grace has a curriculum. It teaches us to say no to some things and yes to others. It is not vague about holiness. And because it is a parent’s training and not a judge’s sentence, it can be patient. A father does not disown a toddler who falls while learning to walk. Neither does he tell the child that walking does not matter.
The writer to the Hebrews describes the Father’s training in the same terms. Earthly fathers disciplined us as seemed best to them, “but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness” (Hebrews 12:10). God’s training has a goal: that we would share His holiness. Grace does not aim at less holiness than the law demanded. It aims at more, and it actually produces it.
Changed by what we behold
How does that training actually happen? Paul gives one of the most beautiful descriptions in his second letter to the Corinthians. He has been contrasting the old covenant ministry with the new. When Moses came down from Sinai, his face shone so brightly that he covered it with a veil. Paul says that a veil still lies over the hearts of those who read the old covenant without Christ. Then:
Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away. Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is , there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.
“When it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away.” Turning to Christ removes the veil. Now we can see.
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.” The word translated changed is metamorphoo, from which we get metamorphosis. It is the word used for the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain (Matthew 17:2). It describes a change that comes from within and shows itself without, like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
Notice three things about this transformation. First, it is ongoing. The verb is in the present tense: we are being changed. Second, it is gradual: “from glory to glory,” one degree to the next. Third, it is the Spirit’s work: “even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” We do not transform ourselves by gritting our teeth. We are transformed as we behold.
This is why grace produces holiness rather than sin. Grace turns our faces toward Jesus. It removes the veil of fear and condemnation that kept us from looking at Him openly. And as we look at Him, in His word, in prayer, in worship, in fellowship with His people, the Spirit gradually shapes us into His likeness. A person under the law looks mainly at himself, measuring his failures. A person under grace looks mainly at Christ. And we become like what we look at.
Paul’s phrase also explains why transformation can feel slow. From glory to glory is a journey, not a single leap. There are believers who expect to be fully changed overnight and despair when they are not. The New Testament never promised that. It promised that the change is real, that it is continuing, and that the One who began it will finish it: “he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).
NuggetGrace turns our faces toward Jesus, and the Spirit changes us into the likeness of the One we behold, from one degree of glory to the next.
Keeping in step with the Spirit
If transformation is the Spirit’s work, does that make the believer passive? Paul’s letter to the Galatians answers that question. Having defended freedom from the law with all his strength, he immediately warns against turning that freedom into an opportunity for the flesh (Galatians 5:13). Then he describes the battle every believer knows:
This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these ; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.
“The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” Paul does not pretend that the Christian life is free from conflict. The believer has a new nature and a new Master, but he still lives in a body with old habits and desires. There is a real tension, and Paul names it honestly.
Then he lists the works of the flesh, and they are not pretty: sexual sin, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred and strife, jealousy, anger, factions, envy, drunkenness. Paul says these are “manifest,” plain for anyone to see. He adds a solemn warning: “they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” The present participle suggests a settled practice, a way of life. Paul is not saying that a believer who stumbles into one of these sins has lost his inheritance. He is saying that a life characterised by them is not the life of the kingdom. Grace never makes such a life acceptable.
Against that list he sets the fruit of the Spirit. Notice the change of word. The flesh produces works, many and scattered. The Spirit produces fruit, singular, a harvest that grows from a single life. Fruit is not manufactured. It grows from what is alive.
“And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” Here is the decisive fact again. Those who belong to Christ have, in their union with Him, put the flesh to death. Its claim on them has been broken.
Then Paul’s final appeal: “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” The word for walk in verse 25 is different from the one in verse 16. It is stoicheo, which was used of soldiers marching in rank, or of keeping in line with someone. Paul is saying: since the Spirit has given you life, keep in step with Him. Follow His lead. Match your pace to His.
That is where the believer’s responsibility lies. He cannot manufacture the fruit by his own effort. He can keep in step with the One who produces it. Paul tells the Romans the same thing in different words: “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). We put sin to death, but we do it “through the Spirit.” Our choices matter enormously. Our power comes from Him.
The counterfeit Jude warned about
There is a real danger to face here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. There has always been a counterfeit of grace that does lead to sin. Jude, the brother of James, wrote a short letter to warn the church about it:
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.” The word lasciviousness translates aselgeia, which means unrestrained indulgence, a shameless disregard of moral limits. These men had crept into the churches. They used the language of grace, but they used it as a cover for immorality. And Jude says that in doing so they were “denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.” To use grace as a licence for sin is to deny the lordship of the One who gave it.
We should take Jude’s warning seriously. There are still people who speak about grace while living, and encouraging others to live, in ways that grieve God and wound people. There are leaders who use grace language to avoid accountability, and believers who quote “there is therefore now no condemnation” while refusing to stop doing harm. Grace is never an excuse for that.
But notice what Jude does not do. He does not tell the church to stop preaching grace. He does not suggest that the cure for a counterfeit is to abandon the genuine. A counterfeit banknote does not make real money worthless. It makes it all the more important to know what real money looks like. Jude ends his letter with a doxology full of grace: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 1:24). The answer to counterfeit grace is the real thing, which keeps us from falling.
How can you tell the difference? Real grace always leads toward Jesus and toward holiness. It produces a growing hatred of sin, not a growing comfort with it. It makes people more honest about their failures, not more skilled at excusing them. Counterfeit grace leads away from the lordship of Christ. It talks constantly about freedom and rarely about the Lord who set us free.
Born of God
The apostle John adds one more dimension, and it is perhaps the deepest of all:
Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.
At first reading, this verse can terrify a sensitive believer. “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin... he cannot sin.” Does that mean that a true Christian never sins at all? If so, none of us would qualify.
But John has already said, in the same letter, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). And he has written, “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). John does not believe that Christians never sin. So what does he mean?
The verbs in 1 John 3 are in the present tense, which in Greek often describes continuous or habitual action. John is saying that the one born of God does not go on sinning as the settled pattern of his life. He cannot make sin his home. And John gives the reason: “for his seed remaineth in him.” The life of God has been planted in the believer like a seed. That seed is alive. It grows. It has a nature of its own, and its nature is God’s nature. Peter describes believers as “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
This is the final answer to the question with which we began. Grace does not lead to sin, because grace has given the believer a new birth. A person who has God’s own life in him will find that he cannot settle comfortably into sin. He may fall. He may struggle for a long time with a particular weakness. But something in him will not let him rest there. The seed keeps pushing upward toward the light.
Paul reminded the Corinthians of the same reality. He listed the kinds of people who would not inherit the kingdom of God, and then he wrote:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
“And such were some of you.” Fornicators, thieves, drunkards, extortioners: Paul knew the backgrounds of the people in that church. “But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” The past tense is decisive. Grace had already done something in them. And it was not finished.
Transformation in real time
PunchlineWhat does all this look like in an ordinary life? Usually it looks slower and messier than we would like.
I once counselled a father who had spent years controlling his household by shouting. When he came to Christ, he was deeply moved by the Father’s love. He spoke warmly about grace in his testimony at church. But his wife and children still went quiet and tense when they heard his car at the gate in the evening.
The grace he had received was real, and it needed to reach the pattern his family lived with. That meant listening when his wife described how his anger made her feel, without defending himself. It meant apologising to his children by name. It meant seeking help from a mature counsellor who could help him understand where the rage came from. It meant learning, slowly, to walk out of the room before his voice rose, and to come back calm.
If he had said, “I am under grace, so you must stop bringing this up,” he would have been resisting the very training that grace was offering him. And where any family member is in danger, the church must never use the language of grace to keep a victim silent or to keep them in harm’s way. Safety comes first, and grace has no quarrel with it.
But because he knew he was accepted, he could face the truth about himself without being crushed by it. That is one of grace’s greatest gifts. It makes honest repentance possible. A person who fears that admitting his failure will cost him God’s love will hide. A person who knows that God’s love is settled can afford to look at what needs to change.
That father did change. Not in a week. Over about two years. His daughter told me later that the day she knew something had really happened was the evening she heard his car at the gate and did not stop what she was doing.
John Newton left the sea in 1754, after a sudden illness shortly before he was due to sail on another voyage. Over the following years his understanding of the gospel deepened. He was ordained in 1764 and became the curate of the small town of Olney in England, where he and the poet William Cowper wrote a book of hymns together. For a New Year’s Day service in 1773 he wrote a hymn about his own life. We know it as “Amazing Grace.”
Grace was not finished with him. In 1788, more than thirty years after his last voyage, Newton published a pamphlet called Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. In it he described the cruelty of the trade in detail and confessed with shame that he had once been an active part of it, saying that the memory now made his heart shudder. He gave evidence to the government inquiry into the trade. He encouraged a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce, who had come to him for counsel, to stay in public life and fight for abolition.
In March 1807, Parliament passed the act abolishing the British slave trade. Newton died in December of that year, nearly blind and his memory failing. He is remembered as telling a friend near the end that he could recall only two things clearly: that he was a great sinner, and that Christ was a great Saviour.
The years Newton spent in that trade are a grief, and he grieved them himself. We should never use his slowness to excuse our own. But his story shows what grace does over a lifetime. It did not leave a slave-ship captain at peace with his cargo. It kept working on his conscience until the man who once felt no scruple became one of the voices that helped bring the trade to an end.
Grace does not lead to sin. It leads, sometimes slowly, always surely, to transformation. If you are under grace, the seed of God’s life is in you, the Spirit is training you, and your face is turned toward Jesus. Keep looking at Him. Keep in step with the Spirit. The One who began this good work in you has not finished, and He will not stop.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you ever been afraid that a strong message of grace would make people careless? How does Romans 6 answer that fear?
- Paul says believers were “delivered” into the mould of the gospel. In what areas of your life can you see that shaping taking place?
- What does it mean to “keep in step” with the Spirit in the specific situations you face this week?
- How would you explain the difference between real grace and the counterfeit Jude describes?
- Is there a pattern in your life, like the father’s anger, that grace is calling you to face honestly? What would one step of change look like?
This Week
Read Romans 6 every day this week. On the first day, underline every statement about what has already happened to you in Christ. On the second, underline every instruction about how to respond. For the rest of the week, choose one area where you know the Spirit is training you. Each morning, pray Galatians 5:25 in your own words: “Holy Spirit, You have given me life; help me to keep in step with You today.” Then, if it is appropriate, ask one trusted person who knows you well where they see that quality needing to grow, and listen without defending yourself.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the grace that saved me, and for the grace that is training me now. Thank You that I have died to sin and been raised to walk in newness of life. Forgive me for every time I have treated Your grace as an excuse, and for every time I have been afraid of it. Turn my face toward Jesus, and by Your Spirit change me into His image from glory to glory. Help me to keep in step with the Spirit, to bear His fruit in my home and my work, and to face honestly whatever You are calling me to change. The good work You began in me, I trust You to complete. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.