Free From the Inside Out

Transcript

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[0:00] Well, our text today is Romans 8, 1 through 17. I'm actually going to read it again. I'm sorry for the repetition, but when you guys were playing bingo, you weren't really thinking about the content. So we're going to read it again. But before that, a little bit of introduction. Last time we looked at Romans 6, that this idea that death frees us from the law. So death is this sort of gateway into freedom for the new life that we have. The law cannot work on us. The law has no jurisdiction over us if we've passed from life into death. And that very famous thing where Paul says, don't you know that those of you who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death? And thus, you've been buried with Christ by baptism and raised with him again to new life. And so the sense that a Christian who has been baptized and, as we'll see, who has received the Holy Spirit has now died to sin and death and the devil and the flesh. And has been raised to a new life. And there's something new operating on them. And this is kind of the key to understanding how justification works. Justification works because we really give up on ourselves. We let, as the old King James says, we let the old man die on the cross and the new man

[1:15] comes to life or the new person comes to life. And that new person is led by the Spirit. And that's what we're going to see today. Now, here's our general roadmap. Again, each section that we're in gets us part of the way there. But the...

[1:29] The main idea that we're kind of still working through in Romans is that Paul is laying out the problem of our sin. And the solution to our sin has something to do with the law and with Jesus and his obedience, with our faith, with the faithfulness of Jesus, which is a different thing but related, with justification and righteousness, which are the same word, and how God puts that together to rescue both Jews and Gentiles into a new body. beloved community of justice and shalom, marked by right relationships with each other and with God. Remember that? I keep saying that, but that's kind of where that's our big roadmap, and each section of us gets us part of the way there. So today we're talking about the power of the flesh versus the power of the Spirit to make all of this happen. So now I'm going to go again to our reading, this time in earnest, Romans 8, 1 through 17, and here's our reading for today. Pay attention when he talks about the flesh and about the Spirit and the contrast that he draws between the flesh and the Spirit. Romans 8, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of

[2:47] sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son to the world, he has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their mind on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their mind on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh. You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life. Because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that

[4:06] dwells in you. So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God will live, and all who are led by the Spirit of God will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God will live. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, Abba, Father, it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if in fact we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this word. And we ask that you add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name. Amen.

[5:00] Now, I want to go back to chapter 7, what Ryan was reading, because it was a little bit about the law. Remember the law. The law is this challenge that we have. The law that God gave. And the big problem with Paul and the law, and we'll find this over and over again, is that the law doesn't do what God hoped the law would do. That doesn't mean God was defective in giving it, and it doesn't mean that God was defective in giving it. It doesn't mean that God was defective in giving it. The defect was entirely with his people. It was entirely with us. So God had these really great hopes at Sinai. He made the Ten Commandments, sent them down. He augmented those laws with hundreds of others that he gave through Moses.

[5:41] And what we found, as Ryan was reading, is the law actually, instead of saving us from sin or keeping us from sin, the law actually produces sin. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Isn't that almost counterintuitive? It's a bit paradoxical. The law, which is supposed to guide us and give us this great life, and sometimes it can, but Paul is saying, in a very provocative way, he says, the law makes things worse because we're worse. What is his example? He said, I wouldn't have known what it was to covet. I didn't know what that was. But when the law says you shouldn't covet, all sorts of covetous ideas came into my mind. The law had this power to suggest that you shouldn't covet. And so, Paul says, I wouldn't have known what it was to covet. The possibility of sins that I didn't know existed yet. Oh boy, this is not what God intended. But us being humans and fallen, that's what happened, right? Now, this is really important for Paul's audience, because you have to remember who Paul is sending this letter to. He's very much hoping that Gentile believers in Rome and Jewish believers in Rome will forge a beloved community that transcends their ethnic differences. But the problem for the Jews is that they don't know

[6:58] what the law is. And so, Paul is saying, no, it can't, it won't, it never will. In fact, it makes sin worse because it gives you more ideas for sin that you never had before. And so, if Paul is going to bridge this gap between Jewish and Gentile believers, he's going to have to make a in Rome, he first has to take away the one of the things that keeps them apart, and that's the law. Now, how does the law keep them apart? Well, Jewish believers would maybe be keeping the law about what foods they eat or won't eat, about table fellowship with Gentiles. And you cannot have a church that won't eat together. You can't have a church that won't eat the same foods, more or less. I mean, you can have vegans and vegetarians in the church, but they'll, you know, everybody's going to serve a salad at a church potluck. But you can't have a church, where one group won't even walk in the door because something's being served that they think is not kosher or not good. And so this was the the barrier was this misunderstanding or older understanding of what the law was and what the law did and Paul needs to dismantle that desperately before this bridge can be built. Okay so and there really were only two choices. One was to

[8:20] get the Gentiles to adopt Jewish dietary laws or adopt the law or adopt that understanding of the law that Jewish Jewish believers had. But that doesn't make any sense and over and over again in the New Testament he rejects that idea and that had been tried by some Jewish believers. They said to the new Gentile believers, well we were Jews and then we became Christians so if you want to become a Christian first you need to become a Jew and then you can become a Christian. And Paul said no no no there's no middle ground there there's no there's no middle in a Christian. There's no middle ground. There's no middle ground.

[8:53] Right to being a Christian without having a Jewish understanding of the law. So the only way to build this bridge was to help the Jewish believers understand that the law doesn't function the way they thought it did, and that's important, okay? So now, Paul chooses then that we have to help them understand how the law doesn't work, right? And he's not doing it to favor one group, but because it's obvious from human history and personal experience that the law never really succeeded at saving the Jewish believers. Human history, if you look back into the Old Testament, all through the Old Testament, at a certain point they have the law from Sinai and on, and you could say, well, you're without excuse then because you know what the law is. But the wickedness of God's people after the law came is on full display if you read 1 and 2 Chronicles. 1 and 2 Kings, Judges. If you read Judges particularly, you'll find some passages that are horrifying. These are people who had the law. So even a Jewish people reading their own scripture would say, it doesn't seem like the law did what the law was supposed to do. And there's one big reason for that, and now we're getting into our reading for today. There's one big reason for why the law doesn't work, and that is what we call the flesh.

[10:40] Now, this is a word that needs a little bit of attention, but it's a word that needs a little bit of attention. The Greek word for this is sarx, and it means actually flesh. So when you're talking about, say, you go to the butcher and there's a pile of meat laying on the counter and you're going to buy it, or if you have a package of bacon, that's sarx, that's flesh. So that's very simple. It's muscle, it's tissue, it's food, right? But there's another definition of it. It's not just literally flesh. There's a spiritual definition of the word, and it's something inside of us that awakens us to the word. And it's something inside of us that awakens us to the word. And it's something inside of us that awakens and entices something in our flesh, right? It's a desire for satisfaction of our deep inclinations. Our flesh is that thing that has appetites, right? Now, my flesh definitely has appetite for chocolate. It has appetite for bacon. So those are the two of the prizes I gave away. I'm not trying to lead you astray out there by giving you these prizes because these are good things. Chocolate is a good thing. Bacon is a good thing if you're not a vegetarian or a vegan, right? These are good things in moderation, right? The flesh, though, has this ability to never really be satisfied. It

[11:49] sometimes wants more bacon than it needs. It wants more than it really is entitled to. And so a lot of things that we desire and want are good things. There's no doubt about it. So don't get me wrong. Don't come away from here saying that the flesh only wants bad things. Your flesh, it wants companionship. It wants friendship. It wants fresh air. It wants beauty. It wants all sorts of things. But your flesh also wants to meet all those needs in perverse ways. That's the challenge that Paul sees in the flesh. The flesh makes mistakes a lot. The flesh wants things to a greater degree, right? So there's all sorts of things that our flesh desires. I make a list. Every now and then it's good to make a list so that if you hear it, you go, oh, yeah, that could be me, right? Intimate gratification. However we can get it, our flesh wants that. Shopping. Substances, legal and illegal. Gambling. Adrenaline is used in the New Testament. It has this added definition that often these appetites are opposed to what God wants. Or in a way, these are appetites, they're not necessarily for bad things, but for fulfilling that appetite apart from God's provision. So even in our reading today, it says the flesh is opposed to what God wants.

[13:12] Right? The flesh can be opposed to what God wants. In another way of talking about it, when Paul talks about the flesh, Paul is talking about sinful nature. He's talking about the brokenness. Steve, are we having problems? If you unplug the network cable from the back of the computer and then plug it in again, the purple one. Yeah, I know. We're having network problems and I can't wait for Eric to get back. I know it's very hard to unplug that network cable.

[13:46] Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Steve. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Where was I? Okay. So yeah, the things of the flesh. So we can be, this is the contrast that Paul makes over and over again. The flesh and the spirit. We can be led by the flesh and its desires or we can be led by the spirit and its inspiration, right? Right? The things of the flesh often are opposed to the things of the spirit. The things of the spirit are opposed to the flesh. And when you live in the spirit, the flesh loses its power over you. Your sin nature loses some of its power over you. So why does Paul make such a big point of it? Because you saw over and over and back and forth. Oh, good. We're back to green. I think we got it. Yeah. I think we got it. Good. What happens is every now and then our sending capacity goes down by 20 fold. And then we can't send properly out into the world. But then it comes back if we unplug it and plug it in, which is not optimal for the people at home. So people at home, if you're still on with us, we had a network interruption, but we're back to green now. So that's good. So with all those interruptions, I'm going to ask again, why does Paul make such a big point of this? He talks about this a lot. So the point is that the flesh is the reason that the law doesn't actually work. This is the issue in chapter seven. The law doesn't work. And Paul needs to make the case that the law doesn't work so that this bridge can be built because of the law.

[15:12] Between Jewish and Gentile believers, the flesh is powerful. It's actually more powerful than the law. The flesh is so powerful that it corrupts the law and turns the law into a how-to manual on how to sin. Right? The flesh is so powerful it hears a law and it says, oh, I hadn't thought of that. I'm going to break that law. That's how powerful the flesh is. I didn't even imagine I could covet. But when the law told me not to covet, I got really covety. Is that a word? I got really envious. I got really jealous. Right? So what is the answer to this enormous conundrum? Right? How do we build this bridge? We have to find something more powerful than the flesh. Right? Because the flesh has the power to subvert the law. So what can do what the law cannot do? Right? That's the question. And Paul gives us the answer, of course. Paul's been actually dancing around it all through this point. We haven't had a lot about the spirit. But now, finally, he starts laying out the spirit. This is not the only place where he lays out the spirit. This is where he starts really developing the idea of the spirit. So the spirit is what helps us build the bridge. The spirit is more powerful than the flesh. The spirit can do what the law cannot do. And we have to remember that the spirit is God's active force in the world. We're talking about God's Holy Spirit now, one member of the Trinity. The spirit goes and does all sorts of amazing things. It's how God gets things done in the world. So here's a short list of all the things that the spirit does. You may remember the spirit.

[16:41] The spirit guides us. It informs us. The spirit's a companion. It tells us when we're sinning. It inspires us or gives us words to say or to prophesy. It gives gifts for ministry and on and on and on. But perhaps the most powerful thing it does, and the one maybe we talk about less, is that it moves through us and it helps us make right choices. That's amazing. You think about that there's, you know, eight billion people on the planet and a certain percentage of them, billions, are Christians. The spirit is active in all of them at the same time. What great bandwidth the spirit has, but the spirit is part of God, of the Trinity. God has infinite power to do this, infinite bandwidth, right? So the spirit moves through us and helps us make right choices when we make them. So the spirit is sort of the antidote to the flesh. I would call spirit anti-bacon, right? Right? Right? Right?

[17:55] Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? law that we break, the Mosaic law, but there's a different law. It's the law of the spirit of life. That's more powerful. The law of the spirit of life is that thing that helps us actually keep the law. The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. That's chapter 8, verse 1. Okay, so the spirit sets us free, but how does he do that? Well, here's how. Jesus came in the flesh. He answered the problem of sin in the flesh. This is chapter 8, verses 2 and 3, and he himself never gave in to the flesh's desire. This is very important. Jesus had flesh, right? His flesh had appetites, but he only met those appetites in godly ways. He never met them in ungodly ways. He never met them in unholy ways, right? This is the difference, and so he kept the law in his flesh, and he died in the flesh, right? And now the requirements of the law are fulfilled in us because he's given that gift to us. So how do we get this to happen? And we can look at chapter 9. Maybe, Steve, you can bring up, I mean, verse 9 in chapter 8. It might be the second of the slides. It says, you are not in the flesh. Remember, you are not in the flesh. You don't actually,

[19:19] if you've been baptized into Christ and raised again, then you're not in the flesh anymore. You were baptized into Christ's death, and that part of you has died. So in a way, when we say the old person has died, we can say that the flesh has died.

[19:40] Right you. I mean, this is like a miracle that we're walking around in every waking moment. And I don't know if we always pay attention to it or even appreciate it. The most powerful being in the universe is dwelling inside of you. He's guiding you. He's giving you the upper hand over the flesh. So I want that to sink in. The most powerful being in the universe is here right now inside you, inside me. So how does that get us where we want to go? Well, it means we despair of keeping the law, even though the law is good and it shows us how much we need God. The law is still important, but I think there are some Christians who make the law too important, okay? I have met Christians who somehow, even after reading a passage like this, think that what they need and what I need and what you need and what the rest of everyone else needs is for them all to be keeping the law a little bit more, right? Let's have you all keep the law. And this often is, how about if you all keep the law? And how about if it's you all keep the laws that aren't really that hard for you? Right? for me to keep, you know. Let's not talk about the ones that are hard for me to keep because that's nobody's business. But my business is your business and your business is keeping the laws

[21:06] that are easy for me to keep. And then when you don't, I can kind of feel like I'm better than you. I've met these people and I've been that person, there's no doubt. I mean, I have to be honest, right? But here's the problem.

[21:20] It's a real challenge to get other people to keep the law unless they're your kids. And even then it's a challenge, right? And your kids are really the only people that you can legitimately get to keep the law, right? You're, as a parent, you're helping guide them into adulthood. But at a certain point, you have to let them go and make their own choices, right? It's a real challenge to get other people to keep the law. And I don't have the energy for it. It's how much energy it takes to try to manage what everybody else is doing. It's this constant vigilance. And then the fact that you start crossing some important boundaries when we manage other people's lives and behavior.

[21:56] It's actually a bigger challenge for me to get me to keep the law, right? If I put that on myself. The flesh, it's powerful. It subverts the law's message. It turns it into an instruction manual for how to sin more. And at its root, this obsession with me and other people keeping the law, I think is sometimes about control. And maybe if it's about control, then it's also about anxiety because those things tend to go together. That's maybe a topic for another time. But this idea. This misguided view that we can control what everybody else does and says and thinks. That's not what, that's not the freedom that Paul is putting on offer here. He says, you live in the spirit. And you have the spirit of God dwell in you. And if you have the spirit of God dwelling in you, you actually give up control. You stop controlling other people. You stop, unless it's appropriate for you to. You have to raise your children. But that's not the point. That's really the only exception. Or somebody who's vulnerable that's in your care.

[23:00] You stop controlling other people. In a way, you stop trying to control yourself. And you say, I give up control to the spirit of God who dwells in me, who can now lead and guide me. And who then is the anti-bacon. The one that fights against my flesh for me. And gets me to choose the things that God wants me to do.

[23:24] Once you get past that. Once you have a moment where you say to the spirit, my life is unmanageable. Can you come and take over? Then there's nothing left to control. But there's all this freedom to do and be what God calls us to do and to be. So it sounds strange. But the path to freedom is through dying to yourself. Dying to the flesh. Dying to your plans for your life. Dying to the illusion that you can control your life and other people. Dying to all that. And submitting to God and the spirit. And saying, I give this to you. You can do better with it than I can. And the rewards that come from that are so great. There's true freedom. And then you're in tune with what God is doing in the world. Paul says, against such things there is no law. He says that in Galatians. It's a very similar passage in Galatians. Against such things there are no laws. When you live by the power of the spirit. And you have the fruits of the spirit.

[24:24] So, can you come and take over? Getting back to where we're going in Romans again. This is the bridge. The Jewish believers have to give up how they understand the law. And perhaps their need to control themselves and others. And the need to divide the world into parts. And the Gentile believers need to submit the flesh to the spirit. And operate from the spirit's power. And then we're getting closer to Paul's goal for Romans. Is this beloved community in Rome and everywhere. Where Jews and Gentiles and all ethnicities and all backgrounds. Are coming together to live in shalom with each other. And with the power of the spirit. And that's what we hope for in our community here. We may have difference amongst each other. But the spirit can guide us into unity. And the spirit can guide us into truth. And when we give our control of our individual lives to the spirit. And we give control of our corporate life as a body to the power of the spirit. Then God comes in and does great things through us. And that's even in our Compass for Community. We talk about being led by the spirit. Well let's pray. Father thank you again for this word. Thank you for Romans chapter 8. For this powerful word. Thank you that you've saved us from the flesh.

[25:39] Thank you that we've died to the flesh. And been raised to new life. To the life of the spirit. Father send your spirit again over and over again to us. Fill us anew every day. That we may live and work and do things in the world that you desire. And that you would do things direct for us to do. In Jesus name. Amen.