No images? Click here LIFE IN THE SPIRIT (PT. I)Romans 8:1-4 January 15th, 2023 One important aspect of the Christian life is sharing the gospel that leads to eternal life in Christ. We read in 1 Peter 3:15 that we should be prepared to explain the reason for our hope. Our hope is not blind faith, it is based on knowledge, and Romans 8 is a treasure trove of Christian doctrine. In this one chapter we get a snapshot of the entire Christian life. In verses 1-17 Paul continues his thoughts on sanctification, helping us see what life in the Spirit looks like. Then in verses 18-39 he transitions to our glorification and what we can look forward to in Christ. Paul bookends this chapter with no condemnation in verse 1 and ends with no separation in verse 39. As we go through this chapter, we see the main theological theme is the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our life. We will see how the Holy Spirit works in our sanctification and how He enables us to live out the Christian life, how we can do the good we want to do rather than the evil our flesh temps us to do. Verses 1-17 is divided into three sections: 1) Spiritually aligned, 2) Spiritually minded and 3) Spiritually led.
The book of Romans is really a letter to the church at rum. As a letter, it would often be read all at one sitting. This is important to remember because all the things that Paul had said in previous chapters lead to this point: In Romans 1:18, he declared that God reveals His wrath against man who suppress the truth. His wrath is revealed in that He allows man to follow his own sinful desires (vv. 24, 26 & 28) and suffer the resulting consequences. He ends Chapter 1 and begins Chapter 2 by stating that man inherently knows his actions are sinful because he judges others for the same things. Paul says to the Jews that God’s wrath is being stored up against them, and that God is not partial to the Jews because of their heritage; they will be judged by the same standard, and perhaps even more strictly because they have the Law. We who have a great understanding of the gospel and Christian doctrine must take heed because Jesus said in Luke 12:48 “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required.” Then in Chapter 3, Paul reminds us that ALL are sinners, and that includes himself and us.
Also in Chapter 1, Paul quoted Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous shall live by his faith”, and he expounds on this theme in Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4 he discussed Abraham’s justification by faith and in Chapter 5 he describes the peace we have with God through faith in Christ and how the sinful nature that we received from Adam has been replaced by the righteousness that we now have in Christ. In Chapter 6, Paul explains that the symbolic death and resurrection that we experienced in our baptism frees us from the bondage to sin and allows us to be in bondage to God’s Law. In Chapter 7, Paul contrasts the law of sin and the Law of the Spirit. He explained the purpose of the Law and how it made him realize that grievous sin remained in his life even though he was now in Christ. When Paul studied the Old Testament Scriptures, it greatly troubled him to learn that he did the things he hated. In verse 24 he cried out in despair, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” In Chapter 8, Paul helps us understand how the Holy Spirit works in our life to overcome sin and enable us to live in a way that is pleasing to God.
I. Spiritually Aligned (vv. 1-4)
We see an amazing transition from the depth of despair in Romans 7:24 to a height of exuberance two verses later. Romans 8:1 proclaims the good news that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Paul understands that, because of his sin, he is a wretched man indeed but, being in Christ, means that he is not subject to condemnation. By faith we have been reconciled to God through Christ and the life of Christ is being recreated within the believer through the process of progressive sanctification. No condemnation means not only not guilty, but also no penalty and no consequences. Condemnation is a legal term. When we think in terms of the legal system, we often think of the scales of justice. Because of the sinful nature we inherited from Adam, the scales were tilted toward judgment when we were born, then we added to the judgment by our sin. The good news is that the atoning sacrifice of Christ tilted the scales from wrath to favor. When we, who were former enemies of God, repent of our sin and place our faith in Jesus, God regards us as His friend. This is the gospel.
In Chapter 1:18, Paul declared that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of man who suppress the truth. Every man knows from creation that God exists because God made the world in such a way that it would declare His glory (Psalm 19:1). Man inherently knows that if he acknowledges the existence of God, he will be obliged to worship and obey Him. Because man suppresses the truth, God gave them up to lusts, impurity, dishonoring of their bodies, homosexual relations, debased minds, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossip, slander, haters of God…boastful, disobedient to parents, etc. (Romans 1:24-28) God gives them up to the sinful desires that were within the sinner. At this time, God has only partially released His restraining hand. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the world results in the world not being as bad as it could be and man not being as bad as he could be. However, the person who persists in his sin will one day find that God’s restraint has been withdrawn completely and he will then pursue his sinful passions with abandon and receive the corresponding consequences.
In Chapter 1 Paul stated that God’s wrath is being revealed and in Chapter 2 he adds that God’s wrath is being stored up against ungodliness. At this point, as the Roman Jews read this letter, they probably concurred that God’s wrath was being stored up against sinners. Then Paul pointed out that God’s wrath was being stored up against them because they have the Law but do the same things that they accuse others of doing. (Verse 1) It must have been a slap in the face when Paul said in Romans 2:5 “But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.” God warns the Jews that, because He has shown great favor and kindness to them throughout history, it is dangerous to presume upon His grace.
The Romans knew that God’s kindness to them was intended to lead them to repentance. God speaks to the self-righteous hypocrite in Romans 2:8-11, “but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. 9 There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil… 11 For God shows no partiality.” God is saying, Just because I chose you as a nation, just because I gave you the Law, just because you have circumcision, when you stand before Me, you think I will show favoritism toward you when you are unrepentant and self-righteously judging other people. In verse 14 of Chapter 2, Paul says that God placed morality in the heart of man, he is given an understanding of truth and error, of right and wrong.
Paul reminds us in Chapter 5, that if you do not believe, if you suppress the truth, if you self-righteously judge others, you are weak and ungodly. Verse 8 describes us a sinners and verse 10 as enemies of God. This is how we stand before being reconciled to God – objects of His wrath. In Chapter 6, Paul states that we are either slaves of sin which leads to death or slaves of obedience that leads to righteousness. Slaves of sin will face a death that they cannot possibly fathom – a living death. In Matthew 9:47-48, Jesus described the fate of unrepentant sinners: They will “be thrown into hell, 48 where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” In his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards said, “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber…O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in! It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked.” An indescribable horror! The longer a person lives with a hard heart, the more times he rejects the gospel, the more times he is called to repentance, the greater the wrath stored up against him when he stands before the Great White Throne of judgment (Revelation 20:11).
Paul asked in Romans 14:10-12, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; 11 for it is written, "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God." 12 So then each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.” There we will be before God, the God who created the universe, the God who is the Lord of Hosts, reigning in heaven, the God who is sitting before the cloud of witnesses that go before us. All of our deeds and all of our words will be set before Him. There will be no excuse and no partiality. Paul describes these people as being a body of death in Romans 7:24. This is a spiritual death; their life is a stench to Him because they reject His truth. In Romans 3:13-18 Paul describes these sinners in the following way: 13 "Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. "The venom of asps is under their lips. 14 Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.15 Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 in their paths are ruin and misery,17 and the way of peace they have not known. 18 There is no fear of God before their eyes." Whenever they open their mouths, the smell of death comes out, originating in the heart; only foulness gushes forth. Also, they have no reverence for God, and no awe or regard for God, no contemplating the majesty of God, the greatness of God. They reject His deity, His holy character, and there is no submission to Him. They are atheist, a term that means no God for me. The one who has sin reigning in their life brings condemnation and death. But for the one who repents before the Lord and places their faith and trust in Him, and who humbly submits to the Lord, and believes in the work of Christ, there is no condemnation.
When the redeemed stand before God they will have an advocate, Jesus Christ, the righteous (1 John 2:1). When God looks at us, He will see His Son because we are in Him. This redemption, this salvation of sinners is the thing “into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). Being created in the image of God, man can have a relationship with God that angels cannot, and they marvel at it. When Lucifer and the angels with him rebelled against God, their fate was forever sealed – there would be no redemption. With man there is forgiveness and cleansing from unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9) We may have lived in sin for an extended period of time but, with confession and repentance, there is no condemnation. We, too, may wonder why God would forgive us and restore us to fellowship when we have been so disrespectful toward Him. The answer is that we have a new spiritual alignment.
The basis of our new spiritual alignment is being united with Christ. There is no condemnation because we are bound up in Christ. Romans 6:5-8 describes this being bound up in Christ, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” Being in Christ means that we place our faith in Him; we believe that He is the only way to God; that the righteous life He lived is applied to us. Through faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit we are united to Jesus (Titus 3:5). At the moment we believe, we are united with Christ in such a way that we are released from our old husband, which is the law, and are united with our new husband, which is Christ. Being now the bride of Christ, we are no longer under God’s wrath. Through faith we are justified before God; no charge will be brought against us; no punishment and no condemnation will be levied against us for the sins we committed in the past, nor sins we have committed today, nor the sins that we will commit in the future. We are fully pardoned.
We are not united with Christ in the sense of locking arms; we are united in Him. This is a fantastic mystery. The entire doctrine of redemption is wrapped up in these two words: in Christ. Man is capable of only a limited understanding of the concept of what it means to be in Christ. God created the institution of marriage and said that husband and wife would become one flesh (Genesis 2:24), yet this is different from being in Christ. It is impossible for us to comprehend how the life of God could be pulsating through our veins. We are perfectly spiritually aligned with Christ, released from condemnation, and united with Him. This is because we are united with the Spirit of Life.
Paul said, “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Here Paul is speaking about the law, referring to a principle, not the Law, meaning the moral Law of God. The principle here is that sin no longer dominates the life of a believer but now there is a dominating influence of God’s Holy Spirit. In Chapter 7 we saw that Paul sometimes felt overwhelmed by the power of sin, but then he reminded himself that there was no condemnation because he was in Christ, and here (verse 2) he reminds himself that he has been set free from the law of sin. The law can no longer fill you up and condemn you with more sin. The power of the law has been broken by the power of the law of the spirit. Sin no longer dominates the believer because he is not under the law but under grace (Romans 6:14). Summarizing Romans 3:13-18, we see that the throat is an open grave for someone who is dominated by sin, but, refreshing, living waters flow from those dominated by the Spirit of life. Those dominated by the law of sin are deceivers but those dominated by the Spirit of life speak truth. Curses come from the mouth of those dominated by the law of sin, the venom of asps is on their lips. However, blessings come from the mouth of those dominated by the Spirit of life, and the fruit of the Spirit comes out from within us. The former brings only ruin and misery; the latter bring the good news of the gospel to the world.
It is impossible for the believer to live in a constant state of being dominated by a life of sin. The condemnation has been lifted, sin’s dominance has been obliterated because of what God did. “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” Sin has been condemned for those in Christ, and believers can live in victory.
When Paul says that Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh, it does not mean that Christ was a sinner; it means that God, in Christ, experienced the frailty of man. In the second Person of the Trinity, God experienced total dependence on human parents, submission to authority, hunger, thirst, tiredness, rejection, excruciating pain, etc. Also, Jesus faced temptations to sin that were far greater than any of us will ever experience. We do not know the full force of temptation because we give in to sin, whereas Jesus resisted to the end. And Jesus experienced a temporary breaking of the bond of fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, something that we will never know fully. Jesus voluntarily submitted Himself to the laws of His creation and to the Law of God, so that He might fulfill the Law for His people. Paul expressed the humiliation of Jesus in Philippians 2:7 thusly, “[Jesus] made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Matthew 4 describes the temptation of Jesus by Satan, himself. Jesus was alone in the desert, tired, hungry, thirsty, and weary from all the temptation, and He was at His lowest point. Jesus, in His full Divinity, had cast Satan out of heaven (Isaiah 14), and now, in His humanity, He was submitting Himself to Satan’s temptations. He could have called myriads of angels to rescue Him, but He sat there – for YOU!
At the end of the forty days of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Satan realized that Jesus was not going to break, so he left Him until an opportune time (Luke 4:13). John MacArthur says that Satan’s temptation of Jesus continued throughout His ministry and culminated in Gethsemane. When we resist temptation, Satan does not give in. He knows our flesh is weak, so he increases the temptation. On the night before His crucifixion in the garden at Gethsemane, the temptation was so severe that He sweated drops of blood. For sinful man the issue is not the greatness of the temptation but the weakness of the flesh.
In the likeness of sinful flesh, Jesus experienced the full suffering of humanity. He experienced the full fury of humanity, abuse, mistreatment, and a gruesome death. Jesus suffered at the hands of man, and He suffered at the hands of God. He had lived in perfect compliance with the Law of God, yet He experienced the full force of God’s wrath against sin. With this in mind, we can see why God is angry with sinners who reject His salvation. He gave Himself to save us from Himself! God set the standard, and the only way justice could be fulfilled was by Himself, in Jesus, following the standard perfectly. God set forth the perfect offering for our sin, and that was Himself. God did what the Law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, and He did this for those who believe.
Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh and obeyed perfectly “in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” God set the standards, the standards have to be met, and there are no exceptions. The Law has been broken by every person (Romans 3:23) and James 2:10 tells us that if we fail at one point, we are guilty of breaking the whole Law. (A small crack in a car’s windshield means that the windshield is broken.) When the Law is broken, a penalty must be paid, and there are two options – paid either by us or by Christ. This is an offer made to everyone. If we reject the offer of Christ paying our penalty, there is no leniency, no partiality, and no grace.
We must believe verse 3, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” We must believe that this is God’s plan, His will; that He has done for us that which we cannot do for ourselves. We must believe that He condemned Himself on our behalf. He looks at us and sees the Law fulfilled perfectly. We once stood in opposition to God, not aligned with Him due to our sin, and now we stand co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17). We stand before Him declared as justified and sanctified, and we walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. As a Christian, I no longer walk around dominated by sin, I now walk around dominated by the Spirit, and I can now walk perfectly in tune with the Spirit.
We don’t know our adversary, Satan, very well. We don’t know how powerful he is, so we must prepare well for the battle. Satan knows that Christians are no longer dominated by sin, yet sin remains within each of us. We need to believe that we have power to overcome sin and recognize that the temptations from Satan are designed to lead us to despair. Even the most powerful weapons are weak in the hands of an army in despair. Believers are reconciled to God and are, thus, a target of the enemy. We must put on the full armor of God so that we are able to stand against the devil. This is a spiritual battle against the rulers, against the authorities, against darkness, against evil in the heavenly places. To fight effectively, we must put on the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. We must take up the shield of faith to quench Satan’s fiery darts of temptation, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. The only offensive weapon we have in our arsenal is the Word of God, and this is the weapon that Jesus used effectively against Satan in His forty days of temptation. At every temptation He pointed to Deuteronomy and said, “It is written.” As we are engaged in this spiritual battle, we need to remember who we are in Christ, and remember that our adversary, Satan, is a defeated foe. Thus, we have every reason to be confident.
The leadership at Southside Church understands the temptations and weaknesses that we all experience, and they have developed a philosophy of ministry designed to help each of us grow in sanctification. The first step is to Glorify God by attending the worship services of the church. God is glorified when His people gather to worship Him and when they get to know Him and learn of His desires for their life. 2 Peter 1:3 says, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.” The desire of the leadership at Southside is that we all Grow in godliness, and godliness, or sanctification, begins with knowledge. We grow spiritually by exercising the disciplines of the Christian life: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, participating in the Equipping Hour on Sunday morning, attending worship services, Bible studies, Growth Groups and fellowship. These are all very important in the spiritual growth process. The next step is to Go, to be involved in ministry here at Southside and in your own sphere of influence: your home, your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, etc. Maybe a lack of spiritual growth is due to lack of knowledge. Maybe we come on Sunday morning because it is traditional, but we are not really involved in the ministry of the church. Maybe we come from a church that doesn’t encourage us to study the Scriptures and to be engaged in the lives of fellow worshippers. Maybe we lack discipline in applying the things we are taught. When we are involved in the lives of others, weaknesses are revealed, and we are sanctified as we work through these issues. God wants us to be firm in our salvation, growing in our faith, and administering the gospel. Everything at Southside is intended to grow you in your sanctification. Spiritual growth is hard work – it is war. When we come on Sunday morning, we rally together around the truths of Scripture, and we sing words that glorify God and remind us of His character.
In Chapter 7, we saw the struggle that Paul had with sin. He admitted that he didn’t understand his actions. He failed to do the things he wanted to do and, instead, he did the things he didn’t want to do. Paul understood that the Law is good, and he desired to do what is right, but he saw another law working within him leading him to do the things he hated. He acknowledged that the Law is good, and he said it was not he who was doing the things he hated, it was the sin that dwelled within him. Though he desired to do good, he was greatly burdened by the knowledge of the sin he continually found in his life. He said in verses 24-25, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Understanding how wretched a sinner he was made the realization that there is no condemnation for those in Christ all the more a blessing! Paul knew he could live in victory as he walked in alignment with the Spirit.
Selah:
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