A New Master

Introduction

We are continuing our series on Paul’s letter to the Romans today. Romans is this important book of Christian faith, because it shows us how the gospel of Jesus Christ overturns systems of status and power and redefines words like righteousness, freedom, and justification by looking at them through the lens of Christ’s sacrifice and triumphant resurrection, which we will be celebrating in just a couple weeks.

Today we are going to talk about our NEW MASTER, and the present, ongoing work of the Holy Spirit to form a new covenant family, which we know of today as the church. We’re going to dwell on him today and celebrate the powerful work he does in us that enables us to experience freedom, life and love.

PRAY

First, the Torah

Last week, Don talked about the struggle that we have between what we know to be good and right and true—Paul calls this the law, referring to the Old Testament Torah—and an enemy of the soul that Paul refers to as the flesh. Don called it a spiritual tug-of-war; I want to briefly touch on this before we open up Romans 8 this morning, because the longer you’ve been in the church and gotten into ruts and routines of spirituality, the more we tend to find our righteousness and status defined by our own doing, which is the exact thing Paul is warning against here. Instead, the more we come to recognize our inability to meet God where he is, the deeper our gratitude for how God meets us where we are.

Way, way back in the beginning of the Bible, God plants the first humans in a garden and is present and active with them. He guides them toward flourishing and beauty and goodness, and the relationship there is right—YHWH is the creator and ruler, mankind is the creation, trusting and dependent. But then a disordered love leads to rebellion, as they elevate the self. The desire to become wise in their own eyes and to take knowledge and power for themselves breaks the relationship between God and man, and they create enmity between creation and creator. Sometimes that word for enmity is defined as hostility, hatred, war, but at its simplest definition it refers to a a state separation, relational distance. Whereas the presence of God and man were once fully fused together—God breathes his own Spirit into man’s body and animates life—man now turns his back on YHWH and is expelled from his presence, sent to go it alone. And from this point on in the Biblical story, we find the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, these first humans, constantly giving in to their disordered hearts and choosing to take for themselves. And the consequences, time and again, are tragic.

Now, that is not the end of God’s story—not by a long shot. He continually intervenes in the tragedy of humans to rescue them and point to the hope of the original creation, to be a community formed around loving God and loving others. He takes a man named Moses and uses him to lead his people, the Israelites, out of slavery in Egypt. And as they prepare to enter into a land given to them by God, Moses records a set of laws for the people, known as Torah.

Torah was more than prescribed commands; it was wisdom, understanding, discernment. Torah marked the space between good and evil, tov and rah, and defined for human beings the nature of tsedekah, rightly ordered relationships—how a good Creator treats his creation, how a grateful and dependent creation trusts in its Creator—in other words, righteousness.

And yet they fail, over and over again. Moses warns that there are diverging roads of obedience and disobedience—the former leading to life, the latter leading to death. He urges them to bind the law to their foreheads (their minds) and their wrists (their actions). But as they continue to fail and fall, as sin continues to ravage and consume, the people grow weary, and the prophet Ezekiel writes that for humanity to actually, truly find life, the law must be etched, not on minds and wrists, but on hearts. In other words, you cannot intellectualize faithful love. You cannot work your way into right relationship. Real life must come from a new heart designed to love. The old humanity must give way to a new creation community. Enter Jesus.

With that, let’s dive into Romans 8 together.

Liberty in the Spirit (Rom. 8:1-4)

We are going to hit on three active movements of our new master, the Spirit, in our lives. The first one is that we find Liberty in the Spirit.

Romans 8:1–4 CSB

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do since it was weakened by the flesh, God did. He condemned sin in the flesh by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh as a sin offering, in order that the law’s requirement would be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

There is no condemnation. There’s a word picture Paul wants us to see here. Condemnation (katakrima) is a judicial pronouncement upon a guilty person. Paul says in chapter 7 that our inability to meet the demands of the law comes from our slavery to sin—to be “of the flesh” is to be ruled by it. And in the first-century, to be a slave was akin to a death sentence. You were essentially a living corpse, bound to do the will of your master, to be used and abused and then discarded. You are technically alive, but your status and identity has been stripped from you.

Isn’t this the nature of sin? Augustine in the fourth century once called sin “loved turned in on itself.” Martin Luther in the sixteenth century later called the one who lived for his own pleasure and gratification as homo incurvaturs in se, or “man curved in upon himself. The flesh promises freedom from God, freedom from morality, but instead becomes its own god, the new spiritual authority, that we become bound to feed, and justify, and please, and protect. If the law is centered around loving God and others, and the law of the flesh is about loving the self, we are doomed to fail when the flesh becomes the master of the house. It is impossible to live out the commands of God, even with a will to do good, when you are a slave to sin. What you once perceived as freedom is actually chains. Broken relationships. Addiction. Mistrust and anxiety. Shame and despair. Regret. When man is curved in upon himself, the view gets pretty dark.

But hear this: There is a new master in town. Where sin once ruled your heart and turned a well-meaning rule for life inward upon self, the Spirit now resides. What you could not do, God did. He sent his own Son to meet the demands of the law. Jesus, in every way, exemplified what it means to love YHWH your heart, soul, mind and strength, every part of your being, and what it means to love your fellow man. Where you would take for yourself, Jesus would give. Where you would assert your power as king, Jesus took the role of servant and slave. And where you would take life to preserve your own, Jesus gave up his life so that you could find peace and rest.

What the law could not do, since it was weakened in the flesh, God did.

Through this fulfillment, God now expels sin from its former residency in your heart. And he now takes its place as your master, and institutes a new law—the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.

You are now free from the condemnation of the old law. And the only way to be set free from a one law is to be placed under another.

In the Spirit, you have liberty. Now, that may seem strange at first, because I just said you have a new master, a new ruler. But the point of liberty is not freedom from rulers, it’s freedom from the oppression and condemnation and death that comes from poor rulers, who put self-love above others and disorder lives. We see that in the world throughout history, and even today. But liberty never means anarchy, it means a better ruler has come. See, God’s goal for his people has not changed. He is still actively forming a community structured around loving God and loving their neighbor. Only now, the structure is not a set of laws—it is the presence of a sacrificial God—presently leading you and guiding you and reordering your passions and your life.

And as a result, you no longer walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. That may not always feel like its happening, but it is. If you place your trust in Jesus, if you place your hope in the one who truly loved first, who set you free from condemnation and death, your law code has changed.

Sometimes we fall back into the old law, the old ways. That’s not because the flesh has somehow succeeded in taking back the heart. But reordering takes time. Even those the Spirit of the living God, his very presence, lives within you, and he is straightening out the curvature of your spiritual spine, our old habits die hard. You’ve had those chains on for so long, you’ve been weighed down by shame and condemnation for so long, it’s hard to live differently, as if you’ve been freed. Your gait still limps forward, as if you are dragging along the weight of sin. To be finally freed from this, and to fully walk untethered by the flesh, there’s more change in store. Paul’s gonna show us the way in a moment.

Life from the Spirit (Rom. 8:5-11)

We have liberty in the Spirit, but we also have life from the Spirit. Verse 5-11:

Romans 8:5–11 CSB

For those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit have their minds set on the things of the Spirit. Now the mindset of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace. The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit to God’s law. Indeed, it is unable to do so. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him. Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.

The mindset of the flesh, the mindset of the Spirit. That word, mindset in Greek is phronema, referring to a point of view, a way of thinking. It’s the idea that the landmark ahead of me, a destination, and I’m going to take the path that best helps me reach that goal.

The destination of the flesh is death. The destination of the Spirit is life and peace.

Paul says right here that the way of the flesh and the way of the Spirit are hostile toward each other, directly opposed to one another. Elsewhere in the new Testament, Paul puts it this way:

Galatians 5:16–17 CSB

I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don’t do what you want.

Here’s the basic idea here. What you aspire to, what you long for, what you love most, you will pursue to the end. In other words, what you love determines how you live. And if your loves are wrongly ordered, your life will be wrongly ordered as well.

John Mark Comer: If the flesh is our shallow, animalistic drive for self-pleasure, the Spirit is our higher and even deeper desire for love and goodness. It’s the empowering presence of God deep in the the marrow of our bones, gently coaxing us into greater levels of self-giving agape. Which desires we give into will shape the trajectory of our souls and society.

Here are a couple examples for you. It’s not bad to love your job. But if you love your career more than your teenage son, that’s a disordered love and will create major problems for both you and your child. It’s not bad to love your child. But if you love your child more than you love God, that’s disordered and will deform how you relate to both. It’s not bad to love physical passion with your spouse. But if you put physical passion above spiritual intimacy, it will twist and deform everything about your relationship. Disordered loves cause us to see everything through the lens of that disordering.

In the worldview of the flesh, you take what you need to survive. You make your own way, you fight for your loves, you feed your appetite, you give way to your instinctual nature. The perspective of the flesh says, take.

But the mindset of the Spirit says, give. Because in Christ, you have received the Spirit of God. His very presence lives in you. It’s like that Genesis 2 thing all over again. Back then, God took a lifeless body, unable to walk or move or speak or anything, and breathed into its nostrils the breath (the spirit) of life, and man became a living being. The Spirit of God brings dead things to life. And now, in this present age, the Spirit of God moves from lifeless body to lifeless body, filling and reanimating them, with new hearts, new minds, new eyes. When you walk on account of the Spirit living in you, you love differently, think differently, see differently, and live differently.

And this is because Spirit-filled life is, first and foremost, about the presence of God drawing near to man, and man, in response, drawing near to God. As God dwells with us so intimately that we are in him and he is in us, it is as if our way of thinking, our view of the world, our desires and loves, become innately synced with God’s. That is what Israel thought the law would do for them, but instead, it only proved to show what they could not do apart from the giver of life.

So we longer take, because we have no need to take. We have been given everything we need, everything we could ever truly desire. You don’t have to fight for peace, because you have it. You do not need to search for contentment, because you have it. You don’t need to earn righteousness or favor with God, because it has been granted to you. You do not need to take life to have life. You have been given life, and now you can freely give without fear or concern for yourself.

That’s easy for me to say up here. It can be really hard to live that out, especially when the rest of the world continues to be locked into a different mindset, focused on a different, fleshly sort of way. It can take some time to truly have your perspective changed by God, when everywhere you look, friends and jobs and social media and politics of all types keep assaulting our senses with the need to please the self, protect the self, provide for the self.

Here is my encouragement to you. Give it time. Practice spiritual disciplines like fasting and confession. Fasting gives you a break from feeding your appetite and consuming constantly; it starves the flesh, and feeds the Spirit. Confession is a public invitation to admit that you are still a process, that you still struggle to see things the way God does, and you still give into that feeling of condemnation and shame. Over time, when you build in those regular habits, you will learn to walk with this new life you are given.

And when you finally begin to see through the eyes of the Spirit, we are enabled to see the Spiritual scoliosis in others. When you look around and you see your local community or your society turn inward upon self, beset by passions and desires, addicted and enslaved to pleasures and powers, we need not be offended by that. It is not an assault on you—you have been set free! Instead, when we see what God sees, we learn to feel what God feels, and that is not condemnation—makes that clear—but compassion. Do you look with disdain upon a crippled and diseased figure, or does your heart break? The eyes of the Spirit make it possible to see through the sinful passions and find the person that needs Jesus, that needs a new heart.

Loved by the Spirit (Rom. 8:12-15)

You have liberty in the Spirit. You have life from the Sprit. Finally, you are loved by the Spirit. Paul wraps up his thoughts this way:

Romans 8:12–15 CSB

So then, brothers and sisters, we are not obligated to the flesh to live according to the flesh, because if you live according to the flesh, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!”

The Holy Spirit is more than just the Jiminy Cricket Conscience. He is the very presence of God, who brings life out of death, who brings about comfort and peace, who transforms hearts and minds. And it is this new creation life that lifts us out of the tragic lineage of Adam, and grafts us into a new family tree, that of Christ. Because of the Spirit, we now not only call YHWH our King, we also call him Father. And as we now know him by Father, we treat him as a father.

This is what true righteousness is all about. A graciously restored relationship between a Father and his kids.