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Liberating Facts

Romans 8: 1 – 17

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 25 Sep, 2005

SIN IS a vital topic for Christians. It is far from the only topic, but it is one of the most basic. It sits at the heart of a relationship with God.

We Christians are part of that plan which God is working out through Jesus, to recapture the entire universe from enemy hands and replace Satan the Usurper with Jesus, the King of Kings.

Perhaps you could understand the sin problem if you think of each Christian as being like a bomber or a Humvee in the King’s army.

If that bomber has a damaged motor, or if the Humvee’s floor is blown out, it is no longer serviceable. It is towed away for repairs.

Sin is just like some damage which puts us out of action until it is repaired.

Don’t forget, though, that God’s entire airforce is made up of second-hand aircraft, rescued from the scrap heap and repaired. God loves to repair what the world scraps.

However, the basic principle is that damaged craft don’t fly.

And sin-damaged people are unusable to God.

Here’s God’s word:

JOS 24:19 Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the LORD. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins...”

Isaiah also writes,

ISA 59:2 But your iniquities have separated

you from your God;

your sins have hidden his face from you,

so that he will not hear.

The sin issue is not just a matter of doing things that hurt others. It’s not even just a matter of damaging ourselves, of doing things which are demeaning to our own sense of self. It is a matter of making ourselves unfit for God’s holy and righteous purposes.

That is why we must deal with the sin issue.

We saw a couple of weeks ago, when John was baptised, that Paul takes us on a journey through Romans 6, Romans 7 and Romans 8. You can’t stay stuck in Romans 6. You have to move on into Romans 8.

Last week, I tried to cover the entire context a bit better. I tried to fit each chapter into its own place, and help you understand the sequence.

In Chapter 6, we find ourselves as immigrants into a new land, as newcomers into the realm where Satan is defeated and sin is atoned for, and Christ rules over all.

Paul described it to the Corinthians when he said,

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old things are passed away, and everything is becoming new.

Another translation says,

If anyone is in Christ, there is a whole new world...

A lot of Christians get confused because they think they should become sinlessly perfect and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, all because they have believed in Christ. They misunderstand Paul, and think they have become some new kind of creature.

It’s a wrong and confused conception.

Some time back I preached on Colossians 1, and I talked about where it says,

God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption,the forgiveness of sins.

I said something like this: "When you first trust in Jesus, you board that train into the promised land. It takes you out of the cold marshes of Satan’s lands, and into the sweet pastures and the sunny slopes of God’s Kingdom. It is a pleasant place.

But you have not yet reached the city of God. You are not yet in the new Jerusalem. You are still on a journey through the border lands. You will climb long hills that nearly strain the engine to a standstill. You will come to places where the enemy has placed rocks on the tracks. You will meet bands of robbers, seeking to steal all that you have.

You must keep journeying until you reach the Central station. You must keep on until the journey’s end.

But never forget that you are already in the land.”

Well that’s Romans 6. We are in the land where Jesus rules and where sin and Satan are defeated. You are responsible to choose to live as true citizens of that new land.

But you have not yet reached the goal.

As John writes,

Beloved, now we are God’s sons, and it does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

In Romans 6, you are in the land, you are on the way, but you haven’t yet reached your journey’s end.

And that is a great cause for pain.

No Christian is saved to sleep. We are saved to serve, and service not only means the burden of bearing loads; it also means the burden of struggling with your own willingness.

Becoming a Christian never makes the sin issue easier. That’s a falsehood.

Romans 7 describes the situation very well. We enter the land through faith in Christ, and we are immediately in conflict, because we have immigrated into the Kingdom of God, and we are trying to live a kingdom life with a worldly mind.

I became a Christian at 16. So I had 16 years of non–Christian thinking behind me before I even began to consider what a Christian mindset should be like.

I not only had 16 years of non–Christian thinking, these were my most formative years. I quoted the old Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”

I am not saying that I grew up in a drug family, taught by some Fagin to pick a pocket or two. I grew up in a socially aware, socially responsible family, where decency and responsibility were valued, and where there was an ethos of sticking to your post even when the shelling is intense.

But you can’t live in this world without being tainted by it. You can’t be human without thinking in merely human terms.

So the experience of conversion is an experience of conflict. Your converted heart already tells you to live to please your Lord who did so much for you; but your humanity tells you to do something quite different.

That’s the conflict Paul describes in Romans 7. In Romans 6, we have entered the land. In Romans 7, we are struggling with a heart that wants to follow Jesus and an established pattern of life which seeks to go its own way and would give Satan great opportunities to destroy God’s work.

And that conflict never ends, because Satan never goes away. And hat conflict also never ends, because our humanity is programmed to go in the opposite direction to God’s perfect will.

You struggle, you train yourself, you beat your body into submission, so that you will be more a Kingdom person, but the battle continues.

A little while back, an offer in effect landed on my plate which would give me things I like in exchange for not playing quite straight.

It was one of those, “Who would know? Who would really care? Everyone will forget even if you get caught” situations. And there was the possibility of hurting other people’s feelings if I refused.

But to do it would have compromised me, and I had to refuse. Yet I still kicked myself for refusing.

Life is like that.

As Paul points out, we live in a tension were we don’t do the good we want to do, and we do do the evil we don’t want to do.

We struggle to know how to change our ways.

Paul knew the sharpness of this conflict, and he cried out,

What a wretched man I am! Who shall deliver me from this dead body?

He says that being in this tension is like the murderer condemned to go around with his victim’s rotting corpse chained to his back as a constant reminder ot the crime. He can’t free himself of the dead body of his own humanity, a dead body which threatens to destroy his own life.

Finally we come into Romans 8. Here is where the answers to the questions posed in Chapters 6 and 7 begin to be answered.

Paul writes,

ROM 8:1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ² because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

The first liberating fact is that we are no longer condemned on account of our failures.

Yes, we do sin, but no, we are not condemned.

Making this discovery was liberating for me, because I am good at condemning myself. And that is exactly how schools and police and even some churches want it. They want us to condemn ourselves and, if we don’t do it, they will do it for us.

It is a tool of social control. The theory is that condemnation will keep people on the straight and narrow.

That only works to a point, because ultimately people start feeling, “I am such a failure, so why do I bother?” That’s what Paul means about the law being weakened by sinful nature. The law can show you you are a sinner: it can’t change you.

³ For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ⁴ in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

As Paul shows, it takes Jesus, our sin–offering, to start making a change in us.

This is the second liberating fact:

Once I really know and understand that,

Bearing shame and scoffing rude

In my place condemned he stood,

then I will respond in gratitude and love and want to begin changing.

And that change begins takes place because it is the work of the Holy Spirit to make it take place.

If we know that Jesus truly gave himself for us on the cross, and if we trust in that death to be effective for us, then immediately the Holy Spirit comes in, and begins changing us from inside.

And he does it through love and gratitude, not through criticism and condemnation.

The third liberating fact is that those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.

ROM 8:5 Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. ⁶ The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; ⁷ the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. ⁸ Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.

There is a stark choice before us: we can have a mental inclination which leads to alienation from God; we can have a mind set on our natural desires, and head towards death, or we can have a mental inclination which is Spirit–controlled, and which leads to life and peace and a closer walk with Jesus.

The choice is partly ours.

If we let the Spirit be in control, he does not change us overnight from a person who lives by the flesh into a person who lives totally righteously; but he creates in us a new mental inclination which develops practical holiness in our lives.

If you make it a point to let the Spirit keep on working in you, if you don’t keep quenching the Spirit by rejecting his promptings, then it will be like having a supportive and encouraging friend by your side.

A good number of years ago, I felt very let down by my work, and, no matter how much I argued or insisted, no one was listening to me.

To make it worse, they imposed conditions on me which were harsher than for others doing the same kind of thing.

I reacted by digging my heels in and refusing to play.

I had a good friend at the time, a Catholic Christian, who had a knack of phoning at the right time. She phoned and I told her what was happening, how I was feeling, and what I was doing in response. And she just said, ”Is that what you think you should do as a Christian?”

She pulled me up at once, and I changed what I was doing.

Imagine a friend like that, speaking whenever you face struggles and temptations! And that’s what the Holy Spirit does — even if he has to speak to someone who listens to him better than you do, and ask your friend to phone you.

But, just in case you feel that this can’t possibly really apply to someone like you; in case you feel you have to take some extra step before this process can begin, here’s our final liberating fact: The Spirit of righteousness is already at work in you, if you are a Christian believer, saved by grace through faith.

ROM 8:9 You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰ But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹ And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

I just want to close with a simple challenge this morning. It’s a challenge to move on, to recommit yourself to that indwelling Spirit.

Paul tells the Ephesians,

Be filled with the Spirit.

If you are already a believer in Jesus, you have the Spirit, but does he truly have you?

Be filled with the Spirit.

Now is a great day to surrender, to ask him to fill you, to empower you, and to glorify God in and through you.

Let him touch you and fill you once again today.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us all,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)