What We Choose to Obey | Romans 6

welcome to our together on mission podcast where we seek to be with and like jesus as we begin a conversation with jesus in the morning scripture prayer and meditation and then continue that conversation within throughout your day your host is travis twyman the pastor at the inland vineyard church in corona california hey everybody welcome to the together on mission podcast my name is ben i'm the group's director here at the inland vineyard and i get the pleasure of hanging out with you all today uh we'll be looking at a couple verses in romans 6 today uh we'll start off with um chapter 6 verses uh we'll start off with 13 uh 13 so paul writes so use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of god sin is no longer your master for you no longer live under the requirements of the law instead you live under the freedom of god's grace and then verse 16 he says don't you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey you can be a slave to sin which leads to death or you can choose to obey god which leads to righteous living so what really kind of sticks out to me in this passage as i've as i was reading chapter 6 and just kind of praying over it um this is the whole concept of uh you know verse 16 where paul writes um that you become a slave of whatever you choose to obey and i started reflecting on this like how i've seen this in my life or um just how i've seen it play out is uh your behavior it can train your heart on what to love so the more that you do something the more that you you know like to do that thing or or um the more that you yeah the more you engage in an activity um the easier it is to do right this is i mean this is the concept behind practice any sort of practice whether it's an instrument or a sports team or any sort of activity the more that you practice it the more that you yeah eventually enjoy doing it and um you know for me when i first started learning to play guitar i hated i hated it like it first of all like it hurt like my fingers were hurting i was i was like 10 years old and just having to um learn the discipline of practicing even though i didn't like it but what ended up happening is over time like now it becomes becomes something that i enjoy playing guitar and i enjoy um you know playing music and things like that but if i didn't push past that initial uh discomfort or um that initial kind of period of time where i didn't like doing it if i never pushed past that i wouldn't have the joy of being able to play guitar and which is um has been a huge part of my life you know in adulthood um so the whole concept of we become a slave to whatever we choose to obey and i think um it's good to kind of think about that in the context of our our walks with jesus um you know setting aside time to pray or read the bible or take a walk out in nature and just marvel at god's creation you know it can seem like we don't have time for that it can seem like you know reading the bible is is it can be hard and challenging and it can be weird sometimes because it's such a different um such a different context than what we live in today you know like we're not farmers we didn't live you know thousands of years ago like it it's so completely different from our lives today that when we read scripture sometimes it can be weird and unfamiliar and it's hard to even get anything and um and on a side note too like our society our lives are so transactional that if i spend half an hour reading the bible and i don't feel like i got anything out of it then i'm not going to want to do that again and you know what paul's saying here is that whatever we we become a slave to whatever we obey so behavior trains the heart on what to love so if if i don't push past that initial kind of discomfort or try to like seek understanding when i'm reading scripture uh my heart's never going to love scripture my heart's never going to love prayer if i don't keep at it you know and you know as human beings we kind of switch back and forth between operating out of desire and operating out of discipline and you know it's great when we have that desire when i wake up and i want to read my bible and i want to spend time praying um you know it's great i love it when it happens the stars align and it's super easy and it's perfect and it's effortless but there's times when it's not effortless there's times where it's you know i don't want to read my bible i don't want to spend time praying um you know for whatever reason and you know sometimes i do sometimes i don't and but what i found is that when i the more that i start building those habits and building those rhythms um the more i desire to continue those habits and those rhythms it's um you know it's just like with exercising or whatever's and you know until we have created habits out of it um it's hard to do you know and we're never going to change if we don't have repetition right we need repetition for formation we need repeated actions repeated patterns repeated habits repeated rhythms and that's what's going to those those choices then become um habits and they become our character right so for me i try to you know uh this is what we always do at um the beginning of the year resolutions who do i want to become what do i want to do at the end this year but if we don't actually take steps practical steps to do them we don't ever achieve any of those things so um yeah so we become a slave to whatever we choose to obey so for me i've been reflecting on what are the small you know kind of micro choices that i make every day that i don't realize have added up to become patterns or you know characteristics of who i am um you know good or bad you know just reflecting on those in general it seems like a you know we think that we're formed by these huge big one-time choices but really we're not we're formed in the small tiny um sometimes imperceptible choices i make every single day and so that would be my kind of encouragement my challenge to you all um spend some time reflecting on what are the small choices that we make that we don't necessarily keep accountable because they're so small but they actually have over time have created patterns or behaviors um whether it's you know physical behaviors or even just like mental beliefs like what am i what am i believing that may not be totally true but i've believed these tiny small little lies along the way that now after you know a couple years have become a part of my thought life that's not what jesus is really and i mean it's not it's not leading to life it's not leading to um an abundant life it's you know leading towards death and um so that would be my encouragement my challenge i'll spend some time today thinking through those things reflect over the past five ten years of your life um you know what are some things you'd want to keep what are some things you want to change what are some things you want to get rid of and what were the small tiny choices that might have contributed to those things um hope this was helpful and i will see you another time have a good day thanks for listening to the together on mission podcast we truly hope that you were blessed and encouraged by it today if you had any questions about the inland vineyard church our ministries or our sunday services feel free to connect with us on our brand new app which you can find in the google play and the app store and check out our social media pages like facebook and instagram or even check out our website at inlandvineyard.org inlandvineyard.org