No Condemnation
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Romans 8:1-4
Romans 8:1-4
Please stand…
English Standard Version Chapter 8
8 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
The Word of God for the People of God. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.
Krysta and I were watching a TV show the other night that had a new season. It had probably been a year since the last season ended. We started the show and, to our surprise, there was no recap, they just picked up where they left off. We were a little confused because we had forgotten what the previous season was about. Does that happen to you? We had to piece it together with context clues and bits a pieces of our memory to remember exactly what story we were jumping back into.
We have been in Romans for 21 weeks now and I would not be a good teacher if I thought that you were doing the homework like you should or that you understood everything the way that I do, so I want to take a moment to do a quick flyover that will help set up the text today.
I know that there are some new people here who haven’t been with us throughout our time in Romans so this will be good for you. It will also be good for those of you that don’t have a great deal of biblical literacy. We should read the bible and study it. We should think about it and what the Lord would have us do with our lives in light of what that Word says. If you don’t understand something that I am talking about, please grab me afterward and let me explain it to you. It doesn’t do anyone any good if you don’t understand the words I am using. This time is for believers to come together and be equipped for the ministry of the Gospel. My job and my heart is that you would love Jesus and grow in your understanding of His great love for you. I hope today will be a blessing for you.
The Apostle Paul writes the letter to the Romans.
He starts the message in Romans 1:16
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
Then he unpacks what he means.
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
What is the IT, the Gospel? The Gospel is the righteousness of God, namely Jesus. Jesus is the Gospel in His life, death and resurrection. The Gospel means “good news”. Jesus came to this earth, put on flesh and dwelt among us to save us from our sin and give us eternal life for all who believer. In order to have good news, we must know what the “bad news is.” He goes on to then tell us about the wrath of God. This wrath is against all ungodliness and unrighteousness…
English Standard Version Chapter 1
who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Paul makes the case that there is a TRUTH that is out there and everyone can see it through nature. Meaning you can go outside and see that there is order. You can see that things tend to work the same way every time. There are laws in the universe, the sun comes up each day. There is a force that is holding you to earth every day. You can see that when a male and female bug, bird, animal, human mate, another of its like kind comes forth. All the evidence that you can see with your eyes and through your life experience in this place should point your head up and ask, “Who made this?”
It is a natural evolution of thought. When you see a person, you know that they had a mom and a dad. When you see a painting, you know that there was someone with a paint brush. When you see a bible, you know there was someone with a printer and a book binder. These are not random, they are planned, organized and thought out, so when people say, “Nah, there is nothing above us, there is no god, this is all random…” Paul is saying that you are suppressing the truth. You are lying to yourself and in so doing you are spitting in the face of God.
English Standard Version Chapter 1
20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
People who do this want to live how they want. They want to satisfy all their lusts and push any notion of an ever watchful eye away. They don’t want accountability, they want to live and strive for what best suits their flesh. They did not and do not want God and so, therefore, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. There is punishment for this behavior in a world that was made for and governed by God…
English Standard Version Chapter 1
32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
As you finish chapter one, you may be thinking, “Great. I’m not that guy. I believe that there is a God.” You might be feeling pretty good about yourself. Then chapter 2 rolls along and says that if you judge those people and practice the same things they do, whether in the privacy of your own home or in your thought life, you, too, will not escape the wrath.
You can be far from God and run after the things of self and deny His goodness or you can be the most devoted churchman and fall pray to this as well if the exterior is what you are using to measure your spiritual maturity.
Paul is setting us up for chapter three where he says that none of us can be justified, be made right in the eyes of the One True and Good Law giver, by our own works. No one is exempt from sin…
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Don’t get up on that high horse. If the mark is the glory of God, we missed it by an ocean. That is the bad news. We are all sinners and that sin puts us at odds with the Lord. We, on our own, are far from Him, outside of His family, but this is where He is going to tell us the good news…
English Standard Version Chapter 3
24 and (we) are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
This is the heart of the Gospel. God sent Jesus to take on flesh and exchange our sinful life for his glorious one. God overlooks our sins when we have faith in Jesus. This “faith” that we need to have is not just a mental assent to some person that walked around 2000 years ago. It is not just “I accept Jesus in my heart.” and walk away the same. It is kneeling to Him as the Lord of your life. We are saved by grace through faith, but it isn’t an empty faith, it is an active participation in a new relationship. We see Paul working this out in the next few chapters. Paul talks about the faith of Abraham. Abraham didn’t just say, “I believe in Yahweh now.” When God asked Him to go, leave his country and his family so that God would make him a great nation even though he was old and without children, he went because He had an active faith in Yahweh. God was his Lord, so when God told Abraham to be circumcised as a man, guess what, he did it.
He believed what God told him. He believed God when He said that He would make Abraham a great nation. He believed God when He said that He would give Abraham a son in his old age. That is an active faith. When we are married to a spouse, we make vows to love the person in sickness and in health, richer for poorer as long as you both shall live. Those are active. Love is active, service is active. Abraham’s faith and love for the Lord caused Him to want to follow and be obedient to the Lord.
If this is who we are then we have peace with God.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
This is amazing news because if we look at chapter one, the very start of Paul’s breakdown of the Gospel, we have this problem of God’s wrath that we must overcome. We have a sickness that inclines our hearts away from God, namely this thing called sin. We all are born wanting to do it and our flesh is weak and we fall or, most often, run into it. This sin is devastating and we learn that because we have committed these sins, we, like any job, get a wage and that wage is death.
The peace of God comes through God rescuing us…
but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Not through rigidly following the law, not by any means of our own, but only by the Lord coming down and giving us a free gift while we were His enemies. He doesn’t come in like a conquering king and force us to worship Him. He wins and draws us by His love. That He would go through such lengths to save us should give us pause and say, “I want to follow that king.” The idea that this Jesus who gave His life for us is the same Jesus who created all things and holds all things together through the power of His word, the idea that you can know the one who created it all and that He wants to call you his friend is the draw of the Gospel. That is the peace. God wants to call me a son and He wants to be my friend. I was an orphan with nothing, but He wants to give me eternal riches. That is a good trade. He wants to take my once dead spirit and make it alive in Him.
The promise of Romans 6 is that if our old life was buried with him in baptism, we take part in His death and we also share in his resurrection and have a new life. The news gets better and better, where we once were slaves to sin, where that is all we could think about and want to do, now we can be slaves of righteousness meaning that He can change our hearts and our minds affections so much that we will desire to do good where we once desired to do bad.
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
Man, I’m a new tree with new fruit. I have a new life and a new restored heart. Maybe you have felt that way. When Christ first got ahold of me, boy I felt it. I just watched the chains fall off. Some took longer than others, but I knew that I had been shown something that was better than anything I had before. It’s fun to walk tall, but as I started walking this faith out, things would pop up and knock me down. This following Jesus is a constant mirror of yourself. He shows us the law and the mirror because He loves us, but sometimes its not real fun. He started uncovering things I had hidden, the past can be a monster. I had to confess things that I wasn’t proud of and I had to fight sin, and still do, that wants to hold tight to me even now.
Paul, who had been met on the road to Damascus by Jesus himself, converted and then taught the Gospel by that very same Jesus tells us in Romans 7:21-24
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
It is almost as if we just went back to chapter 1. I thought unrighteousness was punished? I thought that if I keep falling into sin, I can’t be sure of my relationship with Jesus? I think Paul was fully secure in his relationship with Jesus. I think he knew exactly where he stood. Here is the difference between those rebelling in chapter one and where you may find yourself in chapter seven, the heart. Paul is grieved that he keeps falling into the very thing that hung Christ on the cross, namely the sins of the flesh. He hates that he does these things that he doesn’t want to do. They are a stench to him now, but there still is that draw from the flesh that is enticing him. He doesn’t easily go down with the ship. He fights the flesh. He disciplines his body and he strives for holiness, but the flesh is weak.
Jesus knows this of us. He understands the human condition. When Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night He is betrayed by Judas and arrested to be tried and then crucified, He asked the disciples to stay awake, pray and keep watch, but they kept falling asleep. Matthew 26:40-41
And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
He knew that the disciples loved Him, but their flesh was unable to carry out the command. It is likely that they wanted to do what Jesus had told them to do, but because of their grief and fear they were fatigued and kept doing what they didn’t want to do. Our spiritual nature and our flesh will, unfortunately, be at war until we are fully sanctified in the presence of Jesus. It doesn’t give us license to walk in every manner pleasing our own desires, but when we do sin…
… we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
This flesh that we have is a gift from God. It is the vessel in which we get to experience this world. We should love our bodies and the joys that they bring. One day they will be fully sanctified too, but there is a law of sin that needs to be washed away that is a hinderance for us for the time being. When Paul says, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” he points to Jesus. He is the one that will deliver me from the shame and regret of what this body sometimes does that fights against what I want to do.
It is Jesus alone that overcame that for us. He is our redeemer. When we abide in Him and He in us and we acknowledge and follow Him as Lord…
English Standard Version Chapter 8
8 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Write this on your refrigerator, your steering wheel, your mirror in your bathroom. Remember this. When you sin, the condemnation is not coming from Jesus. That sin has been paid for. He knows you are weak. Jesus put on flesh just like you and me and He knows the struggle. When we sin, He is quick to forgive and wants to do even more. Just in case you are not convinced by this very clear passage.
For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.”
“I, I am he who BLOTS OUT your transgressions for my own sake,
and I will not remember your sins.
then he adds,
“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
Behold, it was for my welfare
that I had great bitterness;
but in love you have delivered my life
from the pit of destruction,
for you have cast all my sins
behind your back.
He will again have compassion on us;
he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins
into the depths of the sea.
God is serious about setting captives free. He had the perfect way to do this, you must die so you can live. If you are dead in your trespasses and sins and you become alive to Christ then who are you married to, sin or Christ? You can’t be under the law if you are dead. Remember the law is just a mirror to show you how you have sinned. When we abide in Christ and we put Him on, what does that mirror show you, it should show you Jesus. Yes, you will will still sin, but that is not what defines you, you have been bought, past, present and future sins, by Christ. He took the trade and didn’t even check the engine or the tires.
English Standard Version Chapter 8
2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
Church, this is why we can be joyous. We can live, work, love, give knowing that God is taking care of us. If we are seeking after His heart in everything that we do, if we are becoming disciples and letting the Holy Spirit change us from the inside out, we can live knowing that we have a citizenship in heaven and that we serve a good and generous King that loves us and looks after us. That is why Jesus can tell us in Matthew 6, “be anxious for nothing, not what you eat or wear or where you will sleep because the king we serve cares for us and loves us.”
English Standard Version Chapter 8
3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
You didn’t find Christ, He found you. He did the work for you. You couldn’t overcome sin on your own. He became the sacrifice that you could not give for the atonement of your sins. Someone who is unrighteous cannot meet a righteous requirement. It took the most righteous coming down and giving Himself so that we may have life.
Glory to God. If you are here and you don’t follow Jesus and really have never thought about eternal things, I pray today that God woke you up to receive the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ. He will take your past and forget it, put it behind His back and separate you from your sins as far as the east is from the west. You can have freedom from the sins that haunt you today.
If you are in Christ and you still struggle, He knows. Sometimes we hold on to things because that is what we have always done and they are comfortable. After a while, the rock in your shoe is just there and you don’t know what it would feel like if it was taken out. That is why there are people in the church that gossip, are bitter, are angry, have a lustful eye, because you have done it so long you can’t imagine a life without it. I would encourage you to lay those things at the foot of the cross and pray earnestly for the Lord to take those desires from you. You don’t have to live in that space if you don’t want to. You have been set free by the righteousness of Christ.
Freedom is a beautiful thing. Yesterday was the 250 year since our Declaration of Independence signing, but freedom is not the end, it is a tool. What does freedom allow us to do? In our country, freedom is the tool that allows us to meet on Sundays and any other day that we want unencumbered by the law of the land telling us we can’t. Freedom in Christ allow us to worship God more fully because He has taken all the chains off us that hindered us from loving Him more deeply. Drink deep the love of Christ. Draw near to Him.
