My message today comes
from the last verses of Romans chapter seven and into the first verse of
chapter eight. Please follow along as I read:
(Romans 7:15, 19-25a,
8:1-4) “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not
practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very
thing I hate . . . 19 For the good that I want, I
do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am
doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but
sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in
me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of
God in the inner man, but I see a different law in [my
body], waging war against the law of my mind and making me a
prisoner of the law of sin which is in my [body]. Wretched man that I
am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to
God through Jesus Christ our Lord! . . . .8:1 Therefore there is
now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
By his own admission, Paul
was not a ‘stained-glass’ saint. He never walked the streets of Europe, Asia,
or Jerusalem with a halo glowing around his head. Not at all. Paul was a sinner
like everyone else.
Please pay attention.
This is important, especially because of its application to our lives in
Christ. Paul openly admits in this text that he struggled with his sin-nature –
just as everyone else on planet earth today struggles. Listen again to what caused
him such desperate grief: “For what I am doing, I do not understand;
for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am
doing the very thing I hate . . . For I joyfully concur with the law of
God in the inner man, but I see a different law in [my
body], waging war against the law of my mind and making me a
prisoner of the law of sin which is in my [body]. Wretched man that I
am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?
Have you ever felt that
way – discouraged and frustrated so often by the things that go through your
mind and out of your mouth? I’ve been walking with Jesus since December 1972. Nearly
52 years. And hardly a day goes by that I don’t chasten myself for something I
KNEW to be wrong, but I did it or said it anyway.
I think Paul’s
willingness to admit his daily struggle with sin – both to himself and publicly
through this letter – I think THAT is part of the KEY to understanding his usefulness
for Christ. He had a good and correct grasp of his sin-nature, and how his
sin-nature left him in DESPERATE need of God's ongoing mercy and pardon.
It's not that Paul in
his ‘before-Christ’ life wasn’t living according to the Law of God. Listen to
what he wrote to the Christians at Philippi: (Philippians 3:4b-11) “If
anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far
more: circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of
the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a
Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to
the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.”
But then he continues
to tell them what he had learned in his ‘after-Christ’ life: “But whatever
things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of
Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the
surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I
have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may
gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of
my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in
Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of
faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection
and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His
death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
Prior to meeting
Christ, Paul THOUGHT himself to be righteous before God. But now, after meeting
the Lord and having his spiritual eyes opened, he saw himself as he truly was without
Christ Jesus: Wretched. Some synonyms of the word are ‘despicable’ and
‘deplorable.’
That’s an interesting
word to come out of the mouth of a Christian – and especially one such as the
great apostle Paul. Or is it? I’ve read commentators say that this section of
Romans describes Paul BEFORE his Damascus Road experience. I think such an idea
is a dangerously wrong-headed attempt to remove the humanity of this great man.
If you take the time to look at the verb tenses Paul uses in this text, you’ll
notice they are all in the present tense. In other words, Paul was declaring his
CURRENT condition. He was telling his readers that he is NOW wretched. He is
NOW struggling with wrong when he wants to do right. He is asking who will NOW
deliver him from his body of death.
I believe Paul used the
word ‘wretched’ to refer to himself because of how terrible he felt about how often
he lost the battle with sin. But we need to pause here for some important
application and guidance from Scripture. Paul FELT himself wretched, but as he
explains elsewhere in this letter, he KNEW God saw him differently. For
example, here is what he wrote in chapter five:
(Romans 5:1,7, 9) “Therefore,
having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ . . . Much more
then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from
the wrath of God through Him.”
Although Paul FELT
wretched, he ALSO knew that because of his ongoing repentance, God had forgiven
him, God had JUSTIFIED him, God had declared him to be without guilt.
By the way – have YOU
ever felt so badly about your own sins as to call yourself ‘wretched’? If not,
then perhaps you need to check your relationship with the Holy God. And you
might memorize this text in 1 John 1:8-10 – “If we say that we have no sin,
we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess
our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say
that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in
us.”
Please hear this again:
If the great apostle Paul knew he was NOT a stained-glass saint, then we should
not fool ourselves into thinking we are better than Paul. To think that is to
run the real risk of our pride interfering with what God wants to do
with us. And one of the slippery signs of pride in our life is evidenced by how
easily we justify and rationalize our sins instead of confessing and repenting
of them.
And by the way, when
was the last time you asked God to reveal to your mind the length and breadth
and height and depth of your sins? It is only when we recognize that our sins –
ANY OF OUR SINS – are not merely misdemeanors against the Holy God of the
universe, but each sin is tantamount to treason against our Holy Creator – only
then will we begin to understand Paul’s most mournful cry: “Wretched man that I
am!” And only THEN will we also begin to understand why he said what he said
next: “Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
When Paul asked, ‘Who
will deliver me from the body of this death’ he was not asking a rhetorical
question. He asked a question to which he already knew the answer – just like
the psalmist who wrote: (Psalm 121:1-3) “I will lift up my eyes
to the mountains; From where shall my help come? My help comes from
the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot
to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber.”
Who will deliver Paul
from his wretchedness? It is the same one who alone can and will deliver you
and me from our wretchedness.
Our help, our rescue, our
pardon, our forgiveness, our salvation, our deliverance comes ONLY from the One
who made heaven and earth. No one else can rescue us from our wretchedness. Not
our education. Not the Church. Not our good works. Not religious philosophies
or well-meaning opinions.
Only the One who made
heaven and earth can rescue us from ourselves, and from the grip of sin. God
alone can forgive us and change us and wipe away all of our sins. Every last
one of them. And THAT is also why Paul tells his readers only a few verses
later: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus.
Did you get that? NO condemnation. No guilty verdict from the
Judge of all the earth. Oh! How can anyone realize the utter depth and height
and breadth and length of the promise?
Those who live and then die ‘in Christ Jesus’ will never, throughout
ETERNITY, face God's wrath for their sins, however minor or major those sins
have been. “No condemnation for those in Christ Jesus” is Almighty God's VOW to
receive every penitent sinner who follows Christ. There will be no stopovers in
a fictitious place called Purgatory.
As I prepared this
message of God's patience with us and His forgiveness, I thought of the lyrics
of a song by Kathy Trocolli. I’ll play the song at the end of this message, but
I want you to hear some of the more salient lyrics that speak to my heart. I
hope they will encourage you, also:
But what does it mean
to be ‘IN’ Christ Jesus? Well, first of all, no one can be in Jesus unless we
know who the real Jesus is. And we cannot know who He is unless we believe what
the inerrant, infallible, and fully inspired Word of God tells us who He is.
Regardless of what most
of humanity will opine, Jesus is not a philosophy, or a set of church
doctrines, or a concoction of myths and spurious history.
Jesus is Almighty
Jehovah God who took on the flesh of a human in the Virgin’s womb, lived a
sinless life, died on a cross as the ONLY atoning sacrifice that God the Father
will accept as payment for our sins, and then raised Himself from the grave.
Listen to what Jesus said of Himself in this regard: (John 10:18-19) “No one
has taken [My life] from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I
have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up
again. This commandment I received from My Father.”
C.S. Lewis famously
said it well: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish
thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept
Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That
is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort
of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a
lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would
be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is,
the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a
fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet
and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense
about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did
not intend to.”
But there is more to
being ‘in Christ’ than just knowing Him from Scripture. We can’t be ‘in Christ’
unless we ALSO know Jesus as our Lord. And what does it mean that we make Jesus
the Lord of our life and lifestyle? It means that we fully – not partially –
strive to obey Him in whatever it is He wants us to do or not do.
That’s essentially what
it means to say, “Jesus is my Lord.” Surely one of the more frightening
warnings Jesus gave us is this text in Matthew 7:21-23 “Not everyone who
says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the
will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that
day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out
demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will
declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice
lawlessness.’”
Those who sat in the
churches of Laodicea believed a dangerous idea that God was okay with them. But
God was NOT okay with them. Unlike Paul’s abject humility before God, and his open
shame over his sins, those who attended church at Laodicea had none of those
qualities. Contrast Paul’s ‘wretched man that I am” with what Jesus accused
those in the Laodicean church (Revelation 3:17-19):
“Because you say, “I am
rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know
that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you
to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich,
and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the
shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes
so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline;
therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door
and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come
in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”
Let me close this
message with this last comment: Luke records a conversation between Jesus and a
Pharisee with whom Jesus was having dinner. While they were eating, a sinful
woman entered the house and began weeping in His presence, wetting the Lord’s feet
with her tears and wiping them with her hair. The Pharisee was offended and
said to himself that if Jesus was who He said He was, He’d never let that
sinful woman even touch Him.
The Lord then said to
the Pharisee: (Luke 7:41-47) “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five
hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When
they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of
them will love him more?” [The Pharisee] answered and said, “I suppose the
one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged
correctly.” Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this
woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has
wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave Me
no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My
feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with
perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been
forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
I believe Paul loved
Jesus as much as he did because Paul KNEW from where he’d come. And Paul KNEW
how wretched he remained because of his sin-nature. But Paul ALSO knew that God
loved him so very much as to completely erase every one of his sins.
“He who is forgiven
much, loves much. He who is forgiven little, loves little.”
Of how much has God
forgiven you? Of some misdemeanors? Or of wretched treason? I hope you will let
the Holy Spirit speak deeply into your heart, because only when you and I admit
we are treasonous sinners will that text in chapter eight mean to us what it
SHOULD mean to us: “No condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.”
God LOVES you. God
loves me. Calvary’s cross is undeniable evidence of His ongoing love for us.
May the Holy Spirit, please, Lord, cause us to humble ourselves before the
Savior’s feet, washing them – as it were – with our tears and wiping them with
our hair.
Oh, how He loves you
and me.
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