Free From Condemnation

I don't know if you have, if you've ever, ever occurred to you about these, like the letters that Paul wrote, that they were written not to be read, but to be heard. Because people didn't have the literacy we have, you know, so whenever you wrote a letter to a church, they would read it out loud in the congregation, and there's a difference between hearing something, you don't have to look over and go back and try to figure out what it means, and it's the difference between hearing something and being able to look at something and study it and go back over it over and over again. So Paul, in his writing this, would be conscious that the letter he's writing would be read, and it would be read in a long lengthy time, I mean not just one or two verses a week, but in a passage as big enough that people could get the breadth and the sweep of it. So whenever you pick up a place and taking it in small pieces like we're doing, it makes it a little more difficult to get the feeling that Paul would have had for it. In this section, chapter 8, beginning of verse 1, Paul is really responding to what he said before. There's a clue, usually the word therefore tells you that this is a conclusion that Paul is coming to based on something he said earlier. And the whole of chapter 7, of course, is what he was talking about, and the whole of chapters 1 through 7 is a reference that he's talking about too. So we can't go back and read all that tonight, but to see the last part that Paul was talking about that led him up to this was a rather discouraging, overwhelming, negative idea that he had. I'll go back and read from verse 21, so we know that this law is at work. When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself, in my mind, am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. So he ends this by talking about this long, all the way from verse 7 of chapter 7 all the way to the end, and I just read the last part, about this tremendous struggle that we have between the resident nature of sin inside of us and the presence of Christ living in our lives. And so he starts his conclusion in chapter 8, the first verse, Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Now he's talking about this whole section in chapter 7, the idea of the reality of sin as a powerful force in his life. And he's referencing also in chapter 5, verse 18, where he talks about, Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. You heard, you may hear some people talk about translating the Bible so it's gender neutral. There's one of those places where you would do that. If we were writing this today, we would say consequently as a result of one trespass was condemnation for all people. Not just for men alone, but for all people. So also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all people. Now Paul's talking about all of the race, the human race, that stands under condemnation for what's taking place. And as one act of sin by Adam caused sin to be permeated through all of society, so the death of Christ has in some way provided a remedy for this powerful grip that sin holds on all mankind. So he's addressing here that very statement that he made in chapter 5, verse 18. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What is the difference here? He's talking about how sin has entered the world through Adam. He's talking about the way Christ's death has provided a remedy. It's this phrase that he uses, in Christ Jesus. Therefore there is no condemnation for people who have become a part of Christ's life. Now Paul loves the phrase, in Christ. It's a lesson, it's a word, the phrase that he uses over and over again to describe what it means to be a Christian, we would say. What it means to be a follower of Jesus. In this description, he's talking about this intimate relationship that I was talking about this morning. A relationship with Jesus that's so close that we are caught up in him, drawn to him, that his life becomes ours, that our life becomes his, so that there is an intimate relationship between ourselves and Christ. This relationship is more than being baptized, it's more than joining a church, it's more than praying a prayer. It is a lifestyle, a lifestyle that draws intimacy between ourselves and Christ. So whenever we have Christ in our lives, and he controls us, and I want to make that distinction, I often hear people talk about inviting Christ into their life, or having Christ in their life. That may mean something to us, if you've ever made a commitment to Christ, but in reality it doesn't say a lot, because Christ is in the life of everybody in the world, in the sense of judgment, in the sense of guidance, in the sense of trying to direct us. There's not anybody in the world over whom God is not at work trying to bring them to faith in him. What's different is, for many of those people, God is telling them what they should do, telling them what's right, telling them what's wrong, but they're doing whatever they want to anyway. They don't care to listen to this. What this relationship of being in Christ means is that we've said to him, I give you authority over my life. I live my life for the purpose that you have for me. I will listen to what you have to say, and I will try to put in practice the things you tell me you want me to do, so that I have a relationship of intimacy with Christ. That is, he directs me, he guides me. I'm asking him about questions of decision-making, I'm asking him about decisions I have to make about finances, decisions I have to make about relationships, decisions I have to make about things that are provision for myself, financial things. All of these things are I share with him, so that I am in him and he is in me. There is this close relationship. Now, he says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Those who are outside of Christ that don't have this relationship of intimacy are in deep trouble. As Jesus said in the book of Matthew when he talked about the judgment day, the amount of church work you've done will not satisfy this relationship. Even miraculous things that you've done won't satisfy this relationship. What satisfies this relationship is a spirit of submission to Christ, a spirit of faithfulness to Christ, and a spirit of obedience to him. And this relationship he calls being in Christ. It's like we would think of as someone who has a bowl of milk and would take maybe their doughnut and put it in there, or a cup of coffee and would take their doughnut and put it completely in that cup so it would be submerged, completely covered, surrounded by the coffee or the milk or whatever it is. So our lives are completely encased in Christ. Now what happens to us once we are owned by Christ, once we are joined to him, is we now take in our lives the very life of Christ himself and the protection that he offers to us. So that's why there is no condemnation in us. Now he's going to explain what happens that allows us in this relationship to live without condemnation. The reason, verse 2, because Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit of life, set me free from the law of sin and death. Now what Paul is talking about is a reference he's made to the verses that he just preceded in talking about. In chapter 7, beginning with verse 7, he says, What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not. Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what it was to covet if the law had not said, Do not covet. But sin seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment and produced every kind of covetous desire. Apart from the law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that their very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. Now when Paul is talking about this, he's talking about God gave the ten commandments and all the laws in the Old Testament for the purpose of helping us. But what happened was that he uses the word sin, sin in its powerful force deceived people into looking at this law and suddenly saying, You don't covet what anybody else does. And it prompts us, because it said we shouldn't do this, to want to desire to do the very thing the law told us not to do. So it was given to us as a guide to righteousness. But sin, the power of sin, took hold of it and instead made it a stumbling block for us. All of a sudden I realized, here is something God tells me I shouldn't do, so I'll start wanting to do it. The power of sin attracts us to this very thing that God said we shouldn't do. Now he says, I am not under condemnation because through Christ Jesus, that is the work that Christ has done, his life and his instruction for us, the law of the spirit of life set me free. He means that what Christ has done in his work is reversed the process that sin has had on the law. So that no longer is the law a place of stumbling, but now the law has become a guide for life. Take the issue of covetousness. Now that Christ is in his life and he's connected to Christ, he looks at that instruction about covetousness and says, I'm not going to do that. That's deadly and dangerous. Because now he's been set free from the grip and power of sin that he talked about in chapter 7 that was so powerful in his life that now Christ has come back and redeemed the law. Sin took this law and turned it against us. The law said don't do this and sin took it and made us attracted to it. Now Christ has come, now that he is in Christ and Christ is in his life and changed his way of thinking and changed his way of valuing things, now he can see the law for what it was from the very beginning. And it's all because of the presence of the Holy Spirit. That's why he says, through Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit of life set me free. In other words, when this Holy Spirit took hold of his mind and his heart and his will and caused him to be able to see things correctly, now the things that he was not supposed to do become dangerous to him, no longer attractive. The Holy Spirit has caused him to see these things are no longer attractive to me. That transformation of his mind, transformation of his power, of his desires. He's been set free from the law of sin and death. Now he talked about this previously in chapter 7. He said this sin was attracted because of the fleshly nature that he had. His human flesh. He uses the word flesh, Paul does, in many different ways. He uses it to talk about just the body like you have here sometimes. Sometimes he uses it to talk about the sinful part of human nature, and here that's what he's talking about. This sinful part of our human nature has got hold of it, and now he calls it the law of sin and death, what he was describing before. Whenever the law is given to us, and it becomes because of our fleshly desire. Remember he said the law is not bad. In fact it's a wonderful gift from God, but it's sin that has turned it around to make it evil. It's like something very good that God gives us that Satan makes evil. Do you know what we don't like to talk about in church? Sex. Why do we not want to talk about it? Because Satan has made that in our world an evil and wicked thing. So when you talk about it in church, where holy people are, we say, oh, that's kind of bad stuff, but it really was a gift of God. Such a wonderful gift that had it not been given, none of us would be here. We owe life in the world to this thing that God has given us, the joy and pleasure to us, but Satan has taken it and turned it into something in our culture that is wicked and evil so that we don't even want to mention it or talk about it in church or around good godly people, as if we were all made neuter. This is the power sin has, to take the wonderful things of God and turn them around so that they become distasteful and evil and wicked in the eyes of people. It is this human flesh that takes this act and makes it into something that is an act that leads to death and destruction. The misuse of what God has given us, the take away or the takeover by our sinful human culture and nature, that turns these things away. But what the Spirit of Life gives us is, here is what God has given us, here is the channel through which this is useful, helpful, and wonderful, and now I can see it, and now because I am in Christ and He is in me, I know how to be able to think about this, and I'm free from the power that sin holds. Remember in chapter 7, he kept talking about sin as being a power, in verse 8 of chapter 7, but sin seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment. He talks about sin as a powerful force, but now sin, the law of sin, this powerful force and death, he is now set free from that because he is in Christ. Verse 3, he goes on to explain now how this happens, how does a person get free from this? For what the law was powerless to do, in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. The law intended in its gift to give us guidelines about how to live, and to guide us away from this force and power of sin that would lead to death, but instead it was hijacked by the power of sin and turned against us so that it became a force for wickedness. So that the law then became something that showed us our sin, and as he said earlier, that the law actually made sin worse because it condemned us. When we didn't know that we were sinning, and we read the law that said you should not covet, then all of a sudden the guilt and the shame came to us and made it even worse for us because the law now used against us to condemn us. But here he says the law was not powerful enough to resist this, it was powerless against the force of sin. The law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature. So it wasn't the fault of the law, but our fleshly nature that was easily deceived into doing what was wrong. So the power of sin came because we would listen to it, and our human nature was attracted by the power of sin, and it came under the control of sin. Nothing can attract you if you don't listen, or you don't look. But our human nature both listens and looks. I read something the other day, it was amazing, I don't know if it's true, but somebody checked up on all the two major pornographic sites on the internet and came up with a figure that people in the United States watch like two billion hours of pornography a year in our country. You remember what it was for every family, it was something like, I don't know, in every home in America, they counted all the homes in America, it was like the average watching of pornography, even out in all the homes, it would be like several hours a day. The power of sin is overwhelming in its control of our lives and our own natures. What God did was He said, okay, I'm going to give you, to the Israelites, I'm going to give you the direction so that you'll know how to live and be able to have the right kind of life. But the law in and of itself could not give that. And the reason was our sinful human nature took it and turned it. Now God did, by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful human man, to be a sin offering for what the law was powerless to do and that it was weakened by the sinful nature God did, by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful human nature to be a sin offering. Here He describes how it is that this break or this, how God broke the hold of sinful human nature. He sent Jesus into the world to be fully and completely human. That's why this doctrine of the humanity of Christ is so important to us. Jesus came and took on this sinful human nature. And the power of sin that He talked about in chapter 7 was attacking Jesus all the time. We get a little picture of it when Jesus goes into the wilderness. Satan is attacking Him at every level to try to get Him to use the law, the instructions of God, to His own benefit. If you look in that passage, Satan is talking to Him about godly things. You jump off the temple, then the Bible says the angels will catch you. Not one of your toes will be stubbed. That's the Bible. You can count on that. Jesus was tempted in His human fleshly nature to listen to that. But what He did in every instance was He resisted the power of sin. This force of sin that He talked about in chapter 7 was at work and war inside Jesus. And He never once yielded to it. He broke the power of sin. For the first time in human history, from Adam to that day, sin had won every single battle over every single person who'd entered the world. But Jesus came and broke the power of sin over sinful human nature. Because Jesus had the same sinful human nature all of us have. The warring passions to do what Satan wants Him to do. The warring passions to do what sin tempted Him to do. All of these temptations the book of Hebrews said Jesus experienced. And He fought every single battle that we fight, and He won every single one of them. So that He defeated the power of sin. And in our human nature He was victorious over sin. The law was powerless to do, for what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. He was offered up to sin, and sin did its work on Him, and He won. So that the hole that sin had now is broken, and now that Paul is in Christ who has won this battle, he begins to participate in the victory that Christ has achieved. This great act of Jesus to come into the world and fight this battle gives the result for us of victory over sin. And so He condemned sin in sinful man. So in the man who is there yielding to that, the condemnation still stands. Remember He started, there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, but those outside of this relationship with Christ, the condemnation still stands. He won this victory for those of us who place our trust in Him, who become in Christ, who are connected to Him in this intimate life of dependence, this intimate life of relationship and obedience. And that allows us to be able to participate in the victory that Christ Himself won. And so He condemned sin and sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us. So the condemnation stands for those who are outside of Christ, and for those of us who are in Christ, now we are able to participate in what Christ has won, the righteous requirements of the law. Now He's not talking about the sinful law that sins control, but it's this new law that Christ has given to us because it's the law of the spirit of life. So we can receive the law as God intended originally to guide us. Is the law worthless? No, it's not worthless. What He's done is freed it from the control of sinful human nature. So now it is like the law originally given, and its purpose is given to us now to accomplish what it was intended to accomplish in the beginning, so that the sinful human nature no longer controls it. The righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful human nature, but according to the spirit. You see, the sinful human nature lives according to its desires. It's a great problem that people have. You know, they come to be saved, and they say, I give my life to Christ, and I commit myself to Him. But they're still living based on their own sinful human desires. If they want to do something, they just go ahead and do it. If they come to make a choice, they do what their human nature tells them is the right thing to do. They make decisions about the things in their life, like all the other people around them are making decisions about their life. So they claim a relationship with Christ without this intimate connection. It's like, you know, if you're connected to Christ, it would be as foolish as to say, my body is making decisions that my mind has no control over. Now if somebody told you that, you'd say, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. To say, I'm connected to Christ, but I'm making decisions, and I'm living a lifestyle without asking God what I should do. There's no connection. There is no in Christ in that lifestyle. And so what happens, this person is still standing condemned. That's why when Jesus talks about the judgment day, he's talking about, I don't know who you are. You're not connected to me. So what Paul is saying is, those who are in Christ do not live according to their sinful nature, but they instead live according to the Spirit. That's what Jesus meant when he said, by your fruit you will know them. A lot of times people say it's really hard to tell what a believer is, but you know why it's hard? Because we oftentimes are willing to call people believers, who do not live a lifestyle that's obedient to the teachings of Christ. And when you blur that line, then you begin to say, I can't tell the Christians from the non-Christians. But the followers of Jesus are people committed to live in obedience to him. I'm faithful to what you teach. I do what you tell me. I live focused on obedience to you. My life belongs to you. And the decisions I'm making are controlled by the Spirit and not by my flesh. What do we mean by the flesh? It's this part of us that has desires of this world as a priority. My pleasure. My convenience. What I like. God is not very interested in what we like. He is very interested in what he likes. And that's the standard by which he wants us to live. But when we turn that around so that our fleshly nature controls what we do, then disaster looms. I hear a lot of people who want to go to church where they like it. Well, you don't always want to. It's like a kid saying, I want to have a family that I enjoy all the time and whatever gets on to me. I can do whatever I want to do. I just enjoy myself. Well, that child never grows up to be responsible. In the family of God, if God isn't telling you some things you don't want to hear, something's wrong. You're not hearing God. Because every one of us need to hear things we don't like to hear and we don't want to hear. And what the Holy Spirit is trying to do for all of us is to shape us into the kind of people he wants us to be. Paul says, the victory and answer to chapter 7 where I'm talking about this war going inside of me is won because of Christ and the Holy Spirit. What is the answer to this sin that rages inside of me? I have no condemnation because God has already won this victory. And what I do is I give myself to Christ and I'm in him and in that relationship he's already won this victory and now I just live according to the Spirit. The Spirit of God is the same power that enabled Jesus to live this life. And when we come in him, the Spirit comes to us and he gives us the ability to live this life in Christ and there is no condemnation for us. You should feel sometimes when you sin conviction, but you should never feel condemnation, which means you're an enemy of God and you're outside of his kingdom. Conviction, yes. Let's put it in the way of a family. A child growing up in your home should sometimes feel upset because of their disobedience, but they should never feel because of their weakness, immaturity, and disobedience as they're no longer your child. And in the kingdom of God, once you've entered this relationship with Christ, there should be no way by which your life feels condemnation. Conviction yes, guilt sometimes yes, but not condemnation. For we are in Christ and God can no longer destroy you, can no more destroy you than he could destroy Jesus himself. Why? Because we are in Christ. And that is the great thing Jesus did for us. You'll notice he's not talking about the cross necessarily, but he's talking here about the life he lived, never yielding to sin. Let's pray. And so Father, we ask that you would teach us how to be in you every day. Show us what it means to live this life according to the law of righteousness, to live according to the law of the spirit of life. We ask, Father, that our lives would reflect to the world this great victory you've won, and that we would never take for granted the fact that we have been set free from sin's ultimate control of our lives. Help us to let the world know what it means to be rescued from the powerful grip of sin. In Jesus' name we ask this, amen. Amen. Amen.