The Key to the Spiritual Life: The Holy Spirit
Romans 8:1-5
We are in Romans 8 and since it's
been a while since I was here I'm going to do a little bit of review. Now
Romans 6, 7, and 8 is the best and most detailed or logically developed explanation
of the spiritual life within the epistles written by Paul. The first epistle
that Paul wrote was the epistle to the Galatians. Galatians contains in sort of
a seed or seminal form a lot of the basic teaching that we find here in Romans
6, 7, and 8 although by the time Paul wrote Romans he has developed his
thinking much more and he's writing a different kind of letter to the
Christians in Rome. He's laying out in an extremely logical manner the
foundation for Christianity.
First he deals with the problem of
sin in the first couple of chapters. And then the problem that if man is
unrighteousness then how does man get righteousness. Man gets righteousness by
having it given to him by God: justification by faith alone is the doctrine.
Righteousness is imputed or reckoned or given to the person who believes the
promise of God, specifically in this age, the promise that Jesus Christ is the
Savior, the Messiah, the One who died on the cross for our sins. So as we walk
our way through Romans we see there's a tight, logical progression: sin, then
justification, Romans 3, and then Romans 4. Romans 5 begins to work out the
benefits of our justification because we have been justified by faith, Paul
begins in Romans 5:1. We have, as a present possession, peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ. As we get into Romans 5:12 and following, Paul is
setting up the transition from talking about how to be justified to the topic
of Romans 6, 7, and 8 which is how does the justified person live.
The issue in Romans 6, 7, and 8
isn't how to move from spiritual death to spiritual life; the issue isn't how
to become justified; the issue is how does a justified person live. So when we
get into passages in Romans 6, 7 and 8 that talk about death we have to
remember that isn't talking about the spiritual death of the unsaved person.
That would mean the solution is justification, regeneration, but the true issue
is the death-like experience of the believer who continues to swim in the
stream of carnality. As long as we are living according to the flesh, which is
the term Paul will use, then we experience the same consequences of sin that
the unbeliever experiences who is spiritually dead.
The believer does not become
spiritually dead once he is made alive in Christ but he does experience a
death-like existence because he's not benefiting from the life-giving blessings
and benefits that God has already given to us as believers. As we have studied
in Romans 6, 7, and 8,
connected to what we've been studying in Colossians, Paul approaches the
Christian life the same way by going first and foremost to what happens in the
legal realm before the throne of God at the instant the person believes in
Jesus. There is a transformation that occurs at that point in time, a
transformation that not only involves a declaration of justification and not
only involves regeneration but also involves that doctrine that is
misunderstood today called the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
We studied that that should be more
accurately interpreted or translated as the baptism by means of the Holy
Spirit. It's an identification that occurs at the instant that we trust in
Christ, at that instant when you say, “I believe that Jesus died for me, will
save me, that Jesus is the One who paid my penalty”. As soon as we trust in
Him, at that instant, God the Holy Spirit is used by Jesus to transform us and
to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection. It is through that
identification with His death, burial, resurrection that we enter into Christ.
This is a doctrine or theology often
referred to as positional truth because it refers to the truth of our new
position in Christ. Paul goes back to this in Colossians 2 and 3. Everything he
says about the Christian life is based upon our understanding of this radical
thing that happens. We don't experience it. The only way you can learn about
the baptism by the Holy Spirit is by reading about it in the Scripture and
coming to understand it in these passages. It's not something that knocks you
off your feet when you trust in Christ. It's not some inner feelings. You don't
get butterflies in your stomach or the rosy glow. You don't have any kind of
external manifestation. There's no experience that goes with it.
You might have the flu as a friend
of mine who had mono. The only thing he could get his mind around when he was
down flat on his back was a book called The Late, Great Planet Earth. He was reading
through that and finally decided after years of being witnessed to by his
uncle, a guy named Bill Munderlin, that some of you
knew. Finally at the age of 32 he trusted in Christ and he said he just rolled
over and went back to sleep. But at that instant he was baptized by the Holy
Spirit and placed into Christ.
That's what Paul says in Romans 6.
I'm just going to read this again for review. He says in 6:3, “Or do you not
know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus [entered into his
death, burial, and resurrection] were baptized into his death?” When we have
water baptism it depicts this abstract doctrine. One of the things that is a real tragedy in the history of Christianity is that
people haven't really understood baptism. Baptism is just like the Lord's
Table; it is a visual symbol to help us grasp an abstract reality. And so in
the ritual of water baptism, someone is taken and they are plunged into the
water and that is a picture of our identification of Christ in His death.
At Christ's death what did he do? He
paid the penalty for sin so sin is dealt with at that point so our
identification with Christ in his death has to do with the application of that
payment of the sin penalty to us. Being under the water is analogous to Jesus
being in the grave for three days and then when we come out of the water that
is a picture of Christ's resurrection to new life and that we now have a new
life because of our identification with Him in His death, burial, and
resurrection. So Paul says, “Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized
into Christ Jesus [that's everyone who believes that Jesus died on the cross
for their sins] were baptized or identified into His death? Therefore we were
buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from
the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of
life.”
Paul says that it's in that verse
that we learn how to walk in newness of life. It's not a methodology. You're
not going to get it because you come to church and you hear five points on how
to be a victorious Christian or ten points on how to live the Christian life,
how to walk the Christian walk. Paul says that the way you're going to live as
a Christian is that you have to get it inside your head the fact that you're
not the person you were before you were saved. You're a new creature in Christ.
You have a new identity in Christ. There are new realities about you and you
have to learn these from the Word. You're not going to get them from
experience. It's not going to be based on how you feel about your relationship
with God. It's not going to be based on how you feel about sin. It's not going
to be based on any kind of experience, it's going to
be based on the fact that you understand in your head that something has
changed. And then because you understand that new reality you're going to live
differently. Now there are people who just have a hard time doing that.
Let me use the illustration of
immigration. Back in the 19th century, if somebody immigrated to the
United States and they came from Eastern Europe or
Southern Europe, or they came from Western Europe, or even if they came from
Africa or Asia, they wanted to be an American. They left behind most of their
cultural identity. For a while they may live with others who came from their
background because that was someone similar, but as they came to understand
America and English they came here to be an American. Many families that came
here never had their children learn the language of their homeland. It was
never taught to them because those parents understood that they had a new
identity. They weren't Germans any more. They weren't Swedes. They weren't
French. They weren't Russians anymore. They were now Americans. They weren't
Greeks; they weren't Italians. They were Americans. And so they had a new
identity and they had to learn to live in light of that new identity as defined
by this new culture.
In the Christian life, it's that
same way. We get a new identity and we have to quit using the language we used
in the old country when we were spiritually dead and carnal. We need to quit
thinking according to the cultural norms and standards. In the old country they
were under the tyranny of a king or a dictator or an absolute ruler, just as
before we were saved, we were under the tyranny of the sin nature. They have to
learn to think in terms of everything they are now in this new country. Then
they have to live in light of that.
But what we have today is people who
come over from many countries, but especially from Moslem countries—from
Saudi Arabia or Somalia or other Arab countries—and they go into
apartment complexes or other areas, like a ghetto, where they're separated from
America. You get people who come up from Mexico and they live in a community
where everyone speaks Spanish. There may be one, two or three generations that
never learn English. They don't learn to function as an American. They don't
want to take on the new culture of being an American and leaving behind the
culture of what they were.
That's like most Christians. They
want to continue all of the ways they had before they were saved. They just
want to make sure they're going to go to Heaven. But what Paul says is that you
have a new identity and once you capture that new identity you're going to have
freedom and learn to enjoy freedom. Just like historically people would come to
America because they wanted to be free, not to do whatever they wanted to do, but they wanted to be
free from the intrusions of large government, big government getting into everything
in their life.
I'm going to give a commercial now
so if you don't want a commercial from the pulpit take a vacation mentally.
Some of you know that last June I wanted to take some kind of gift with me for
the people speaking to us in Israel, something from Texas. We waited until the
last minute because there was so much going on and we finally decided it would
be great to give them a little tin of various kinds of nuts with an outline of
the state of Texas. It was too late to order them from a place in Austin where
we'd get things like this before so I looked around in Houston. I found a place
called the Houston Pecan Company and it's just a little warehouse kind of place
over in the Gulfton ghetto area in Bellaire. We went
in and I immediately recognized that the lady who seemed to be running
everything was Jewish. I told her what I wanted it for, that we were going to
go to Israel. That immediately established a connection.
Myers was with me and he was looking
at something on the wall. It was an article from the Houston Post back in the
late 80's or early 90's. It was the story of a man who had been a Holocaust
survivor because of Oscar Schindler. That was the father of the lady helping
me. He was the little guy who kept coming in and out in his walker. We had a
great visit with him. Well, today I went back over to visit with them and to
get some nuts for gifts for Christmas. There was another guy there who is an
Israeli artist. I met him and got to visit with him. He was at this Israel event
I spoke at about a week ago. He said, “I knew you looked familiar but I just
didn't recognize you in a sweatshirt and blue jeans.” When I pulled out he had
a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said in large letters, “The bigger
the government...” Then I had to get very close because the rest was in very
small letters and said, “...the smaller the citizen.” I thought that was a
great way to put it. We've got a lot of very conservative Jews in America who,
as one Jewish writer puts it, “Israelis are Republicans and American Jews are
liberals.” So that sort of shows the difference between the two.
Anyway, when you have big government
like people had in the old country before they came to America, it was the
tyranny they left. The bigger the government, the less freedom we have. The
smaller the government, the more freedom and the larger the citizen is. So when
people came to America they had freedom and that fits the analogy that I'm
using because when we're free from the sin nature, when we trust in Christ,
that's the freedom Paul is talking about in Romans 8:1-5. It's what Paul is
referring to in Galatians, chapter 5, verse 1, “Stand fast therefore in the
liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a
yoke of bondage.”
Freedom isn't the ability to do
whatever you want to. Freedom is the freedom from the tyranny of the sin nature
so we can do what God wants us to do. We're always under some sort of
authority. It's either going to be our placing ourselves under the authority of
the sin nature and Satan or placing ourselves under the authority of God, but
there's no neutral ground where we're just under our own authority. We deceive
ourselves in arrogance into thinking well we're just going to live our lives my
way. No, when you say I'm living life my way what you're really saying is I'm
doing it Satan's way. People just ignore that particular aspect to it.
Romans 6 lays this down and says the
purpose for that identification of Christ in the baptism by the Holy Spirit is
for the purpose that we walk in newness of life. Now let me connect the next
dot for this.
Turn over to Romans 7:6 which
addresses the second issue here which is that not only are we delivered from
the tyranny of the sin nature but, as we've seen, we're delivered from the
tyranny of the Law. Paul says, “But now we have been delivered from the Law,
having died [see, there's this same use of this concept of death, that
identification with Christ in His death means we're dead to the sin nature,
dead to the Law] to what we were held by so that we should serve in the newness
of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the Letter.”
So in Romans 6:4 we're to walk in
the newness of life; now we're to serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in
the oldness of the Letter. So the newness of the Spirit is the life we're
supposed to have. But as I pointed out last time in Romans 7 where Paul is
addressing the Law's relationship to sin and death he points out that the Law
reveals this sinfulness of the sin nature. The more God says, “Thou shalt not”
the more we want to. The more the Law says, “Thou shalt do this” then we're not
so concerned about that. We want to do what we're not supposed to do. So the
Law brings this out from inside the person.
The Law reveals the sin nature and
the sin nature is the cause of spiritual death and it is the cause of a sort of
experiential carnal death, I would add for the believer. And so Paul raises and
answers these questions in Romans 7:7, “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin?
Certainly not! On the contrary...” The Law brings sin out and exposes sin in
your life and Paul, as a Pharisee thought that he was able to do everything in
the Law and he would impress everybody and God. But what actually was happening
was that he ultimately discovered that on all the externals he could deceive
himself into thinking that he was accomplishing it, but when he got to the last
commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” he couldn't deal with the fact that he
couldn't overcome mental attitude sins.
His answer is that the Law is holy
and reveals sin in verses 7-12, and then in verses 13-25 he points out that the
Law tells us what to do but doesn't impart the ability to perform. We know what
the requirement is but there's the frustration of not being able to meet the
requirement. So we do what we don't wish to do and we do not do what we want to
do, which is, as a believer, to obey Him. And then we have the solution, which
is the Holy Spirit and at the end of chapter 7 he utters this statement, “O
wretched man that I am.” Why is he so frustrated? Because he can't figure out
how to meet the requirements of the Law, how to live a holy life; that is, how
to live a life that is set apart to the service of God, and all he ends up with
is fulfilling the lust of the flesh which brings just failure and temporal or
carnal death or operational death into his life. He has a death-like
experience. He's not experiencing the joy, the happiness, the fulfillment, the
significance, and the meaning that should be his in Christ.
Then you see the shift in his
thinking from the negativity, derision, and defeatism of verse 24 to gratitude.
Gratitude and becoming praise oriented is the first step in any level of
spiritual growth. Thanking God is the starting point of any kind of grace
orientation. Recognizing that God did everything and that we simply have to
respond to it. So in verse 25, Paul says, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the Law of God but with the flesh
the law of sin.” Here he's talking about serving the Law, which is fulfilling
the mandates of the Law but it's because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Then I spent some time on Romans
8:1. This is a very well-known textual problem, which
means there are some manuscripts which include the last phrase and there are
some ancient manuscripts which don't. So the question is whether this is really
a part of the Word of God or not. If you have a King James or New King James
version then that is included in your translation. If you have a NASB, NASB95, NEV, NIV, ESV or any of the others its not there and it involves two different ways
of handling textual problems. I believe the Majority Text, which is similar to
the text of the KJ or NKJ, is the more accurate, more critical version. We went over this in
detail last time.
The Critical Text, which is what is
behind a lot of the modern versions, is only based on two primary ancient
manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus
from the 4th century. The Majority Text, that is the majority of translations
that we have plus Alexandrius, which is also an early
North African text from the early 5th century, and is very similar to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and the
corrected version of Sinaiticus, include it. I think
it should be included on the basis of just the external evidence here but also
because of the context.
People will say, “Well the scribe
just copied it in the wrong place. It's located down in verse 4.” There's no
reason that God the Holy Spirit wouldn't repeat Himself. He does that several
times in the Scripture just to get our attention. But here it's defining what is
going on in Romans 8:1. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus...” If the verse stops there as it does for many people who
want to limit this to talking about no condemnation because we're justified,
we're in Christ Jesus. But all throughout this section, those who Paul is
talking about are not under condemnation. The word is further defined as those
who “do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
So the relative clause as I point
out in the bottom paragraph of this slide, defines further those Paul is
talking about in the phrase “those who are in Christ.” They are the ones who do
not have the condemnation and the ones who are also walking according to the
Holy Spirit. It hinges on the meaning of the Greek word for condemnation. I
pointed out it is only used 3 times in the New Testament. It's the word katakrima and all three uses are in
Romans. Two of them are in Romans chapter 5, and that tells us that it's in the
post-justification section of Romans. It's not in the section where he's
talking about the sinners back in Romans 1 and 2. It's not in the section where
he's talking about justification and being justified from condemnation. It's in
the section where he's talking about how justified people live. And justified
people are able to live for the Lord only when they walk by the Spirit and
they're free from condemnation, which relates to punishment. That's how the
word should be translated, as punishment, and it's not punishment in terms of
eternal punishment but temporal punishment or consequences for sin in a
person's life. Greek dictionaries talk about its meaning to judge someone as
definitely guilty, and thus subject to punishment. So the idea is guilt and
punishment. The Arndt and Gingrich dictionary says its not merely condemnation
but the punishment following a pronouncement of legal guilt. The focal point of
this word is on punishment so it's really functioning on the Divine discipline
that comes in the life of a believer who continues to walk according to the
flesh. The emphasis is not on eternal punishment but on the consequences of sin
in the life of a believer, and so the issue here is on the believer's spiritual
growth.
In terms of summary, I said that
what Paul has been saying is that we are no longer under the judicial penalty
from the Supreme Court of Heaven, which is back in the early part of Romans,
that as a believer in Christ we've been set free from the judicial penalty
related to future punishment and from present spiritual death, but if we're not
walking by the Spirit we still act like we're dead spiritually so there are
consequences to that which is present time punishment.
The arena of application here is
related to those who are already in Christ. That means they're already
justified. It's not to those who are unsaved but to those who are saved. The
key word in this passage that we run into is the word flesh. It's going to come
up so this is just a little review of the sin nature and the diagram I'm using
here because this term flesh comes up and is juxtaposed to Spirit many times in
Romans, chapter 8. It's introduced here in the first verse, “… those who do not
walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Paul recognizes
something here, something that a lot of modern Christians don't want to admit.
That is, that it's either one or the other.
How many times in life have you
heard someone say, “You know, I don't like so and so because for them
everything is either black or white; it's either yes or no and there are just
so many shades in between.” Well, that's why they don't like God. God sees in
terms of His way or the highway. It's God's way or man's way. It's either
walking by the Spirit or walking by the flesh. You can't have your right leg
walking by the Spirit and your left leg walking by the flesh. Notice I put the
right leg walking by the Spirit and the left one by the flesh. I just didn't
want you miss that; it was intentional!
The sin nature is called the flesh.
The term 'the flesh' in Scripture refers to the physical flesh, the physical
bodies of animals or the flesh of man. But then it is taken metaphorically to
refer to the moral condemnation of man with the sin nature itself, that which
is tied to man's temporal situation and his temporal failure. And so the term,
'the flesh' isn't just talking about just something physical but is used to
refer to that which energizes and animates the fallen condition of man, which
is the sin nature. I think it's interesting how the Bible uses this as a
phrase. Very few people really try to probe into the metaphor here and why Paul
uses this metaphor. I think it's because the very DNA structure of our physical bodies
carries the corruption of the sin nature and it gets transmitted from one
generation to another.
So we have this sin nature
represented by this black diamond and at the very center of the sin nature is
something that drives it. Everything comes back to this. If you can get a grip
on the dynamics on the sin nature then you have a great tool to use in
understanding what is going on in the world, why it happens, why people do the
things they do. It will help you from being overly disappointed in people who
fail. It will keep you from being overly disappointed in yourself when you
fail. It will help you to understand there are basically two ways of looking at
life. There's the way of looking at life from the standpoint that man is
inherently corrupt because of Adam's sin and those who look at mankind as being
basically good, just flawed. He doesn't have basic faults; he just has a few
problems. He's not dead; he's just a little bit sick at times so that's the
difference.
Thomas Sowell in his book The Conflict of
Visions has an excellent historical analysis of this, showing how this
impacts how people look at society and how people look at government, and how
people look at the role of people and the role of those in government. He shows
historically that the people who tend to think that man is perfectible and that
society is perfectible are those that think that man is basically good. Those
who think that man is not perfectible but that man is inherently corrupt and
therefore our government needs to have checks and balances on itself because
it's comprised of human beings, checks and balances on the citizenry, that they
understand that man is basically evil. We use different terminology for these
two groups. The group that thinks man is basically good is the group called
liberals. People who think that man is basically evil are called conservatives,
and that's been the historical designation and historical truth. Sowell does an
excellent job of developing that. Only someone who is a believer in Jesus
Christ who understands the Word of God and the nature of sin can understand
that.
Many of the Founding Fathers understood
this concept whether they were actually born again or whether they were of a
sort of Unitarian theology as some were among the founding fathers or whether
they were a more dedicated orthodox believer. They were products of a culture
that had a strong Christian theistic orientation and they understood that man
was basically evil. Therefore you can't give very much power to any human being
because if he's evil, he's going to take advantage of that power and enlarge
his own power. So they created a government in the Constitution with checks and
balances to try to keep government small, and they created a government where
it was designed that there would be opposing forces so it would keep the
government from doing very much. Because in their view of government, a
government that did very much and was efficient in accomplishing its ends would
eventually take freedom away from the people. They understood that man was
basically a sinner; they understood that sin had to be controlled by law and by
society and by punishment.
We live in a world today where the
idea of sin has been forgotten and disposed of; sin is antiquated. I read a
book by Robert Schuller about forty years ago. Robert
Schuller was the one who had the drive-through church
originally out in Southern California and then he had the Crystal Cathedral in
Orange County. One time George Meisenger and I went
out there just to see the sights at the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller
came out with a book, which he sent around a free copy of to pastors all over
the country and it was called Self Esteem: The New Reformation. It was a fitting book for its age
because in its introduction he said that back in the Protestant Reformation in
the 16th century, early 1500s, there was a belief that man was
basically a sinner. Now that was all right for that time. They interpreted the
gospel as Christ dying for sins. That was all right for that time but now we're
more advanced and we understand from psychological research that man's basic
problem is that of self-esteem. Man doesn't think very highly of himself and we
need a gospel that Jesus died so you can have a good self-esteem. Sin is just
an antiquated concept; it just doesn't work anymore. That was his gospel.
The Bible teaches that we're all
sinners and until the moment you're saved (this is what Paul goes into in
Romans 6) everything you do, whether its something good or something bad,
everything comes from the sin nature. It either comes from an area of weakness
or an area of strength. The area of weakness produces sin. The area of strength
produces what we call human good. But it's all
motivated by this core thing that I've always called the lust pattern. Today
psychology is trying to redefine this. We don't like sin any more so it's not
that people are sinners, they just have disorders. It's also known as
syndromes. People like those words because it softens it. You've got a
syndrome. It's not your fault. It's not because you're making bad choices
because you're choosing to follow the dictates of your sin nature. You just
have a syndrome. It's not really your fault. You're okay and I'm okay. Wayne
Dyer came out with that psychological framework back in the seventies. The
Bible says, “You're not okay and I'm not okay” and God is going to judge us by eternity
in hell unless we do what He says. So we have these syndromes or addictions. We
have chemical addictions, sex addictions, and food addictions and addictions to
laziness and Facebook and Twitter and the Internet
and your cell phone. We have addictions to everything.
We used to call them bad habits. The
trouble with bad habits is that it's your fault because it's your volition. You
choose to do this. If it's an addiction, it's not my fault. It's something
within me. I'm just a victim. And so it produces a victim mentality. But the
Bible doesn't say you're victims of anything except your own volition. The only
solution is to submit to God but we like to think we have addictions or
emotional illnesses. You just have an emotional problem so now everybody is
addicted to pills to take care of their emotional problems. The Bible says
you've misidentified the problem so you've misidentified the solution. The
problem isn't a syndrome or disorder; it's not an addiction. The problem is, you're a sinner; you're corrupt. And the only solution is
first and foremost to recognize that Jesus died for your sins and you've become
free from the tyranny of the sin nature, and then to learn the Word of God and
learn Bible doctrine and apply it and implement it in your life day to day, and
all these things will be taken care of and eventually they will be flushed out
of your life, but only because you've replaced the garbage in your soul with
the truth of the Word of God. As long as you're majoring in the garbage in your
soul all that's going to come out is garbage: garbage in; garbage out.
The lust patterns produce both
relative good and relative sin. I always love the line when Jesus is talking to
his disciples and he says, “How then you, being evil give good gifts to your
children?' It's a great line. Now I try to get away with it here but in most
churches if a pastor walked in to his Board of Deacons and said, “You guys are
all evil but you're giving good gifts to your children”, he might have a
problem. But Jesus told his disciples that their basic problem is sin. We're
all evil.
One of the things that make a person
a hero isn't because they have sterling character, and it isn't because they're
always making the right decisions. If we look at Hebrews 11 at all those great
men of faith that are highlighted there, there are a couple of things we ought
to remember. Number one, none of them were free from the tyranny of the sin
nature because that didn't happen until the Day of Pentecost. They're not like
us. They're still slaves to the sin nature even though they were believers.
Number two: they all failed miserably most of the time. Not unlike us. But what
made them heroes of the faith was that at critical times they rose above their
sin nature, they rose above their carnality, and they chose to follow God and
to trust God at a critical time. That's what makes a person a hero.
As a conservative I can look at the
Founding Fathers and say they all had feet of clay, because we all do; we're
all sinners. And what I want to focus on is what made them great. What were the
elements that caused them to rise above the flaws of their sin natures and the
corruption of their humanity? Because that is what made them
great. We're all subject to the same failures and flaws that they had.
The liberal thinks that because they were heroes they were always good. But let
me show you about this affair and that affair and this problem and that
problem. See, liberals want to tear them down because these people had a lot of
failure.
The issue in life isn't failure.
We're all failures most of the time when it comes to God's standards. Heroes
are those who rise above their failures, rise above their sin nature, and trust
God at critical times throughout their life. That's what makes heroes, heroes.
Not that they do what comes naturally but on occasion, they did what did not
come naturally. That was what was unique. So even as sinners we do relative good,
but we're still flawed sinners; we produce what we call human good. There are many wonderful moral people out there, who
give to many good causes, who help people who are wonderful, kind, and generous
and give of their money and give of their time and give of their talents, but
it's all done from the sin nature; it has no eternal value.
But then on the other side, at the
bottom of the triangle we have our personal sins, our areas of weakness when we
commit sin: overt sins such as outbursts of anger, or murder or thievery, or we
have sins of the tongue: gossip, slander—all the gossip when you pass on
undocumented e-mails which tell something negative about someone else and you
don't know whether it's true or not, but you would like to believe that it's
true about that person because they're just such a horrible politician. That's
gossip, that's slander, that's not Biblical. So we have a new area of sin
called computer slander and computer gossip.
The lust patterns can manifest
themselves in a couple of different directions that are sort of opposite to one
another. These are trends and I've called it desire trend because it's lust
expressed through a desire in one direction or another. Lust drives it either
toward aestheticism which is the idea that somehow if I just live according to
a rigorous moral code I'm going to impress the God or gods or fate or the universe,
and things will go well with me. And so there's a trend toward aestheticism,
which is the idea that if I just give up things that's going to impress God. If
I dedicate my life to my religious system, that's going to impress God. Legalism
is the idea that what I do is the basis for blessing from God and that leads to
a moral degeneracy like the Pharisees. That's what they thought. They were very
moral but they rejected God's offer of righteousness for their own
righteousness. So they were moral degenerates.
And then on the other side we have
the opposite: those who are licentious, lascivious. They follow all their lust
patterns. You know, Jesus preferred to hang out with this crowd because the
other crowd doesn't think they need his help. He hung out with the publicans
and the prostitutes and the sinners and got judged by the Pharisees, those on
the other side, for that. But people who are licentious and lascivious know
that they need grace; there's no pretension there, they know they're
desperately in need of grace. But if you live in the sin nature that leads to
an immoral degeneracy, immoral degeneracy is no better, no worse than moral
degeneracy. They're both degenerate. That's the problem.
Now as we look at what Paul is
saying here in Romans 8, he's talked about the eternal realities, that at the
instant we trust Christ as Savior we are identified with Christ, we're placed
in Christ by the baptism by the Holy Spirit. That's our new identification. So
we're in Christ. We are His. But in terms of our day-to-day temporal reality,
moment-by-moment in time we can either be operating on the Word of God, being
filled by the Holy Spirit, and walking in the light, or we can walk in the
darkness according to the sin nature. When we do that, we're walking in
darkness and we're experiencing the same results as the unbeliever.
We have a life of death and
corruption, of unhappiness and misery because we're operating on arrogance and
the only way to recover is through 1 John 1:9. So as I pointed out last time as
we get into that first verse in Romans 8, “There is now no condemnation to
those who are in Christ Jesus ...” [in Christ Jesus;
there's no condemnation, no punishment] “...for those who are not walking
according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” And then he's going to explain
in the next verse why we can say there's no condemnation, no punishment.
He says, “For the law of the Spirit
of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” So you
have a contrast here between two laws: the law of the Spirit of life and the
law of sin and death. Now in that first phrase it talks about the law of the
Spirit of life, it shows the source of that law. We're still under a law. It's
not the Mosaic Law but it's absolute realities. It's absolute standards and it
comes from the Holy Spirit. He's the Spirit who produces life. That second
genitive there, “of life” should be understood as a genitive of product. It's
the law from the Spirit who produces life in us. That life comes from the
Spirit and it is in Christ Jesus. It has set us free from the law of sin and of
death. So, again, we have these contrasts. It's either one or the other.
Now when we look at what Paul is
going to say in Romans 8, I want you to observe about 4 things here. First of
all that the word translated Spirit with an upper case as pneuma is used thirteen times in Romans
6 through 8. Now the word is used a couple of other times meaning other things
but in terms of meaning the Holy Spirit it's only thirteen of those times and
twelve of those are in Romans, chapter 8. There was one in Romans 7:6, that we
were set free form the Law, that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit,
and everything from Romans 7:7 to 25 was a digression. Romans 8:1-2 he comes
back to what he means to serve in the newness of the Spirit. Isn't that
interesting? The Holy Spirit is not mentioned at all in Romans 6 and only once
in Romans 7 but it's twelve times in Romans 8.
The second thing we should observe
is that Spirit is contrasted with sin once in Romans 8:2, “where the law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the Law of sin and death.”
See the contrast between the law of the Spirit and the law of sin and of death.
The rest of the time it's contrasted with flesh—Romans 8:4, 5, 9, and
Romans 8:13. My point is that sin and flesh are synonymous. Paul prefers to use
most of the time the word 'flesh' to describe the sin nature because it
permeates our entire life, our entire body, our entire person, so he contrasts
either one or the other. It's that black and white thing again. You're either
walking by the Spirit or by the flesh. You can't do a little bit of one and a
little bit of the other. There are no mixed motives. It's either one or the other.
Spirit in this passage is connected
to life and contrasted to death. This is one of the major concerns of
Scripture, going all the way back to Moses in the Torah. He says, “I set before
you this day, life or death.” Are you going to follow the Torah and experience
the benefits of life or are you going to disobey God and experience death?
There are consequences to our decisions. If you make the right decisions based
on God's revelation, then you'll experience the fullness of blessing from God,
and if you don't then you're going to experience the ongoing punishment and
condemnation in life from God. So in this whole chapter we see a stark, rigid
contrast between flesh and Spirit, between life and death. It's one or the
other.
We see this in various passages such
as in Romans 8:12-13 where Paul says, “Therefore brethren, we are debtors or
under obligation ...” Now that's an interesting word
because there are lots of Christians who think that if we're obligated to do
anything after we're saved, we are legalists. Grace says I can do whatever I
want to do but the Bible says, no, we're under obligation. There are
responsibilities that come with our privileges in the Royal Family of God. We are a new creature in Christ and
there's a purpose for our life. We are not to waste it. We are to live our life
for the Lord. “... we are under obligation, not to the
flesh, to live according to the flesh.” You're not obligated to your sin nature
at all. But for 8, 10, 30 years you lived like the sin nature was the boss, so
it's real hard to say no. That's because you've got a really bad habit and so
do I. Not doing what the sin nature says every time can’t be done without grace
and God the Holy Spirit.
So “… we're under obligation, not to
the flesh [sin nature] to live according to the flesh [sin nature]. For if you
are living according to the flesh you must die ...”
Now, wait a minute. We're not going to lose our salvation. That's not what it's
talking about. It's not saying you're going to have spiritual death. Remember
there are 7 different kinds of death in the Bible. There's physical death,
spiritual death [everyone is born spiritually dead, Ephesians 2:1], sexual
death [Abraham was sexually dead and he was past the age when he could father
children.]. There's positional death, which occurs when we're identified with
Christ in His death. That's our positional death. There is carnal death when we
are living according to the sin nature. There's temporal death when we're
experiencing the consequences of that in our life. Then there's the second death,
which occurs for those who rejected Christ and they go to eternity in the Lake
of Fire.
So when he says you must die he's
not talking about physical death, he's not talking about future eternal
punishment, he's talking about experiencing the death-like consequences of
living according to the sin nature. But in contrast, “… if by the Spirit we put
to death the deeds of the body ...” Notice he's
switched from talking about the flesh to the body. Paul is constantly using terms
relating the sin nature to our physical bodies because it's through our
physical bodies that the sin nature expresses itself in what we say and what we
do, where we go, and those kinds of things. So we have to remember that this
passage is addressed to the brethren; it's not addressed to unbelievers. He's warning believers so that they can have life rather than a
death-like existence.
Second, believers have been given
eternal life but they can still experience carnal death. So then in Romans 6:16
and 21 Paul laid this down: that either we live our lives as slaves, we're all
slaves, but we're either slaves to sin resulting in death. But he's talking to
believers; he's not talking about dying spiritually. We're talking about
experiencing the death-like results of living on the basis of sin so we're
either live as slaves to the sin nature, which is self-destructive, or we live
as obedient slaves to God and that results in righteousness in life.
Righteousness and life are seen as two sides of the same coin. In Romans 6:21
he says, “What fruit [benefit] were you then deriving from the things of which
you are now ashamed for the end [outcome] of those things is death?” So that's
what he's talking about.
James 1 gives us a dynamic on how
the sin nature operates. He says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am
tempted by God”. See we think of temptation only when we've yielded to it. I'm
not tempted unless I yield to it. No, that's not the Biblical view. If you go
on a diet and you wake up in the morning and you have a satisfying breakfast
and thirty or forty minutes later someone offers you a donut, you say, “No, I’m
satisfied, I’m not very hungry.” But if you get up in the morning and you're
running late and you don't get to have your breakfast and someone offers you a
donut and you bite their hand off getting it, you were tempted by someone else
both times. Just because you didn't yield to it or feel attracted to it doesn't
mean you weren't tempted. That's the external or objective sense of temptation.
Anybody who has ever been hunting
knows a wild animal is going to be tempted by the bait in the trap. He'll come
up and sniff around and walk around and look at it, back away and look at it.
Then finally they decide they're not going to go for it. See, they've been
tempted by the bait in your trap but they didn't yield to the temptation. We
often think of temptation only in the sense of yielding to it but the Bible
talks about it in both senses. So each person is tempted externally. Here he
talks about moving from that external temptation, which is the word used in James
1, but it becomes subjective and enticed by your own lusts. This is when all of
a sudden you decide you're going to yield to that external test and now you
want it and you're going to go for it and grab it.
“When the lusts [internal desire]
has conceived it gives birth to sin ...” What happens
then? When sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. This is for believers.
This is what happens in our life. We can have a life characterized by the
blessing of God or we can have a life characterized by sin and corruption. This
is the contrast. It's our decision. Are we going to pursue life or death? So in
conclusion, let me just give these two definitions. Life is to be understood as
capacity to life and experiencing the joy, peace, contentment, and happiness in
any and all circumstances based on the fact that God the Holy Spirit is filling
us with His Word. There's a fullness in His Word and
we're walking by the Spirit and advancing to spiritual maturity. But death, in
contrast, is the loss of blessing in time due to the failure of executing the
plan of God for our life. It is based on attempts to live life on the basis of
our own desires, our own terms, really rejecting Scripture as the authority for
life. The reality is in Romans 6:18, we've been set free from sin but we've
become slaves of righteousness. We're always slaves of either sin or
righteousness. We’ve been set free from sin and enslaved to God and the result
of this is eternal life. Not life everlasting, which refers to the qualitative
aspect of life as much as the eternal ongoing aspect of life. This is the
freedom we have in Christ. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”
This brings us to Romans 8:3 and we'll start there next time.