Rom 8.1-11

We have a sword

Romans 8.1-11

Jason Procopio

If you’re joining us for the first time, you’ve picked a great week to come, because our text for today is the beginning of probably the most well-known, and perhaps the greatest, text in the entire Bible. It’s not truer than any other text—all of the Bible is God’s Word, and all equally truthful—but it’s perhaps greatest in the sense that nowhere else in the Bible do you see so much good news concentrated in one place. The thirty-nine verses of chapter 8 contain a mountain of spectacular news for our souls—so much so that you could read it every day for a month, or a year, or maybe even the rest of your life, and still not get to the bottom of it all.

We’re going to be spending five weeks in this chapter, until mid-March, so it’s going to be a good month.

But just in case you weren’t here last week or the week before, we need to remember what we saw in the previous chapter, because understanding Romans 7 is absolutely essential to understanding Romans 8—particularly the first eleven verses, which we’ll see today.

In Romans 7, Paul takes a step back from the gospel he’s been explaining since the beginning of the letter, and he describes our experience: what it’s like to be a Christian, born again by the Spirit of God, still living in this fallen world. And he describes it as a war, between what he calls the “law of the mind” (that is, God’s law, applied to our hearts and minds) and the “law of sin”.

We know from almost the beginning of the Bible that human beings are naturally rebellious against God; we are all like our father Adam, we all want to reject God and be our own masters. (That’s what we mean when we speak about sin.)

But when God saves us, he transforms us by his Holy Spirit. He gives us new hearts to love him, new minds to perceive him, and a new will to obey him.

The one thing he doesn’t do—at least not yet—is transform our bodies. Our bodies are still the same bodies we had before—our bodies are still susceptible to sin’s influence, still habituated to sin’s preferences.

These two forces—the new hearts God that gives us, and the old bodies which try to pull us away from him—are constantly at war within us. Paul concludes chapter 7 by saying (v. 25):

So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

This is the situation we’re in, and this is the situation we’ll be in until our death, or until Christ returns. Until that day, we struggle with sin, and our struggle is a good thing, because it means that the Spirit is in us, giving us new desires which cannot stand idly by while sin gains the upper hand.

The question is, How does that struggle happen?

So in Romans 8, Paul is taking us out of our experience, and bringing us back to reality—he’s saying, no matter how it feels, here’s how we fight, and here’s why we fight.

I’ll go ahead and spoil the main point of these first eleven verses for you. Here’s the main message: Christ has fulfilled the law, so now we can fulfill the law.

And he shows us this by showing us two main things: sin has lost its power in us, and the Spirit gives power to us.

Sin has lost its power in us (v. 1-8).

Paul has just finished setting the stage for us: our bodies pull us to serve the law of sin; but our minds, renewed by the Holy Spirit, serve the law of God. I think Paul intentionally uses the word “mind” here, instead of “heart,” because he knows that if we want to serve the law of God, if we want to obey God, we will need to fix our minds on something solid and specific. It cannot be passive. Our minds must be engaged.

So in chapter 8, verse 1, that’s what he gives us: here’s what we point all the attention of our minds toward:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

It’s sometimes hard for us to feel the weight of this sentence, because we repeat it so often. Imagine you’ve been in a relationship for many years—long enough to know how these things go. You have hurt the other person. You have sinned against them, and you know you’ve hurt them, and you feel awful. All you want to do is make it right. You go to them, you ask for forgiveness and they forgive you. And because you know them, you know that for the rest of your life, the other person will never hold that sin against you. They’ll never use that sin as a weapon against you. They’ll never pull it out during an argument and say, “That’s so typical—remember that one time, when you did this?” They’ll never remind you of your sin in order to get the upper hand in the relationship. As far as they’re concerned, it’s gone. It’s over.

How free would you feel, going to bed at night knowing that this is the kind of relationship you’re in? How would you want to respond to that kind of love?

This should go without saying, but clearly it needs to be said, because we always think we’re the exception.

If God has given us faith in Christ, if we have repented of our sins and placed our faith in him, then we are now in Christ. This is language Paul used back in chapter 5: before, we were in Adam; now we are in Christ.

And for those who are in Christ Jesus, there is no condemnation.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in your past: there is no condemnation if you’re in Christ.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done today: there is no condemnation if you’re in Christ.

It doesn’t even matter what you will do tomorrow: there is no condemnation if you are in Christ.

Now of course, this doesn’t mean that there is no consequence for our disobedience against God; often there is. Even in ordinary, human relationships, sin has consequences. There may be things you have to do differently in the future, in order to protect the relationship.

But God uses every consequence of our sin to remind us of his no-condemnation love for us: he uses those results of our disobedience to help us grow.

So there might be consequence—but there is no condemnation if you are in Christ.

This is so much bigger than we want to believe. Many of you live your Christian lives feeling like God is disappointed in you. And when you’re profoundly disappointed with someone—when they’ve hurt you or when they’ve let you down—you can’t really be close to them, can you? Unless things change, there is always going to be that barrier between the two of you.

So because it works this way with us, we imagine it must work this way with God.

But no matter what you have done, no matter what awful things you might think about yourself, God is not against you. If you are in Christ, God does not condemn you. He looks at you, and he sees the perfect life of his Son which was given to you, and he approves of you.

Because that’s what “no condemnation” is. The opposite of condemnation is not indifference; it is approval.

If we are in Christ, God approves of us. There is no condemnation for us if we are in him.

Now the question is, How is this possible? Paul’s going to start wide, then he’s going to dig deeper and deeper as he goes along. V. 2:

2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

This is what he’s been saying these last two chapters: the law of the Spirit of life is the “law of the mind”, it’s the Spirit, applying God’s law to our hearts and minds; and the law of sin and death is the tendency of our old natures to be pulled toward sin. But here he reminds us of what he told us in chapter 6—although these two “laws” are both at work in us, the law of sin and death is far less powerful than the law of the Spirit of life.

Of course, he’s not saying that sin has no power of any kind; but sin’s main power is its power to condemn, and its power to control. And both of those powers have been broken. We have been set free from sin. It can weigh on us, it can influence, it can lie to us—but it can’t condemn us, and it can’t control us. Sin is no longer our master; we don’t have to obey it.

So now, Paul digs deeper. The next question is, How did God do this? V. 3:

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.

If you’ve been coming here for a while, you should know this, because we repeat it literally every time we gather.

The law of God—that is, the law of Moses—could not produce righteousness in God’s people, not because the law is powerless, but because we are. The law is good, but we’re unable to keep it. This was a death sentence for every human being, because every human being who ever lived is born in sin, and unable to keep the law. The only one who could keep the law is God himself; but that wouldn’t do us any good, because God’s not human.

So what did God do? He took on a human nature.

He sent his Son Jesus Christ to earth as a human man, in a body just like ours—a body that could grow weak, a body that could grow tired, a body that could be tempted to sin—and in that imperfect human body, Christ fulfilled the law. Christ never sinned—he never disobeyed God’s will. He lived the perfect life the law commanded him to live.

Only a human being could fulfill God’s law for human beings, and Christ did that.

Then on the cross, he took the sins of all his people on himself, and was punished for our sin, in our place. God poured out all of his wrath on Christ, and killed him in our place. Christ died, he was buried…and three days later, he rose from the dead, alive and glorified.

Only a human being could fulfill God’s law for human beings. And only God could suffer God’s wrath against our sin, and come out alive. And Christ did that too.

Christ “condemned sin in the flesh”—in his human body, a representative for his people—in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

Now we need to take a minute here, because this verse is often misread. We know that Christ fulfilled the law of Moses for God’s people, so that we don’t have to perfectly obey the law in order to be saved. That’s absolutely true.

But that’s not what Paul is talking about here. Read v. 4 very carefully once again:

…he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

Not “in his body. Not “for us”. IN us.

Christ put our sin to death, and fulfilled the law for us, so that the law might be fulfilled in us.

To put it another way: just because Christ fulfilled the law for us doesn’t mean that we’re no longer expected to do it ourselves. He perfectly fulfilled the law in order that we might follow in his footsteps, and that little by little, through a lot of trial (and maybe some error), we might fulfill the law, just as he did.

We know this is what he’s saying because of what he adds at the end of v. 4: Christ died

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.

Christ didn’t save us just to get us into heaven. That’s great, but that’s not all. He lived a perfect life so that we might learn to live the same kind of lives. We’ll be learning until the end of our days. But that’s where we’re going. That’s the progress we’re making.

He says it even more explicitly in v. 5-8:

5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

This is how we know that Christ has done this and is still doing this in us: before, all we wanted was to please and serve ourselves. But now, even if we’re not perfect, we no longer live as we used to; we live according to the Spirit.

And how do you know if you’re living according to the Spirit? Paul tells us: Those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

I know what you’re thinking: If you knew what was going in my mind half the time, you wouldn’t say I “set my mind on the things of the Spirit.” This could easily hit us with lots of guilt, because we know how seldom our minds are set on the things of God.

But remember what Paul showed us in chapter 7—we now have two forces battling it out inside us: the law of our minds, and the law of sin.

If we are “setting our minds on the flesh,” there is no battle; we’re content to just remain as we are. We hear God’s law, we hear God telling us to do things we don’t want to do, and we think, Why would I do that?

But if we “set our minds on the things of the Spirit”, that means we are fully engaged in the battle. Sin is pulling at us, yes—and we’re fighting it. We’re resisting the pull of sin. The struggle is hard, but it’s good. The struggle is how we know we are alive.

Sin no longer condemns us, and sin no longer controls us. It has lost its power to win the war against our souls. Christ died in order that the law might be fulfilled in us.

The question now is, what does that look like?

The Spirit gives power to us (v. 9-11).

To answer that question, we need to step back a minute: at the beginning of chapter 8, Paul is building on what he laid out at the end of chapter 7. In chapter 7, verse 25, he says:

So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Christ has changed our hearts and our minds by his Spirit, giving us new thoughts and new desires and new wills to follow him. But he hasn’t changed our bodies, our “flesh”—we still have the same bodies now that we did before. The whole dynamic of the end of chapter 7 was the discouragement we can sometimes feel, being born-again believers, set free from sin, still living in these bodies that pull us in sin’s direction.

Then, in the first eight verses of chapter 8, he has shown us why we shouldn’t listen to that discouragement: Christ destroyed the power of the sin in our bodies, so that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

And starting in v. 9, he answers this question (and we’ll actually be answering this question through next week as well): How is the righteous requirement of the law fulfilled in us? Answer: the Holy Spirit who lives in us gives us power to kill our sin.

The first thing we need to see here is that the Spirit’s power in us works first on the level of our identity. V. 9:

9 You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

I spoke with one of you last week after the message, because I said that often, because we see our sin so clearly, we feel like imposters. And the question this person asked was, how do two imposters speak to one another, knowing that we’re imposters?

The answer I gave last week is the answer Paul gives here: we’re not imposters. You feel that pull toward sin. You feel the attraction of temptation. You can clearly see your own weakness. But, Paul says, that is not who you are any longer. If God has given you faith in Christ by his Holy Spirit, you might feel like an imposter, but you’re not, because your sin no longer defines you. No matter how it might feel sometimes, you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.

And he presses that truth home even further in v. 10:

10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

The fact that Christ is in us does not mean that we never feel like sinners, that we never feel guilt over our sin. Our body is still “dead because of sin.” But it doesn’t matter. Those things are true—our bodies are still weak and pulled toward sin—but our bodies aren’t what defines us anymore. That’s not who we are.

Who we are is, in the Spirit; who we are is, Christ in us. And if this is who we are, then the Spirit gives us life—Christ’s righteousness is applied to us, fundamentally changing who we are, in two distinct ways.

It changes who we are before God—there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Sin can’t condemn us any longer.

And it changes who we are in our struggle with sin. If Christ is in us, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. Sin can’t control us any longer.

This almost always sounds too good to be true—like, Christ set things up…but he didn’t know me. He may have given me everything I need, but I’m still going to screw it up.

I feel the same way. But the promise of this text is that if Christ is in us, we won’t screw it up—not ultimately, not permanently, not eternally—because the Spirit is far more powerful than our sin. V. 11 (and this verse is key):

11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

We underestimate the power needed to achieve resurrection—particularly the resurrection of Christ. It’s not just the physical resurrection that is impressive, but the physical resurrection of the human being who carried the weight of the sin of all of God’s people—no human being has ever been more cruelly tried than Christ. Christ’s resurrection is the ultimate display of power.

And the same Spirit of God who raised Christ from the dead—the ultimate power in the universe—lives in us.

We get so discouraged and disoriented by the sin in our own lives. But we give ourselves far too much credit. Christ took that sin on himself; Christ paid for that sin; he died for that sin; the Holy Spirit raised him from the dead. And that same Spirit, our Savior, our God, lives in us, and is for us.

In a fight between our sin and the Holy Spirit of God, who’s going to win? Our sin doesn’t stand a chance.

Now here’s what that doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that the Spirit will take over our bodies and control us; he won’t stop our hand from reaching if we decide to reach. What he will do is give us everything we need to grow to be like Christ. We’ll get into this more next week, but in v. 13, Paul says:

13 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.

Pay close attention to what he says: by the Spirit, YOU put to death the deeds of the body. The Spirit gives you everything you need, and will be in your corner as you put to death the deeds of the body. We obey God by the Spirit, absolutely; we obey him through the Spirit’s power, absolutely; but WE OBEY. God won’t obey for us.

That can seem daunting, which is why Paul doesn’t start by telling us what we need to do, but rather that by telling us that it’s going to work. We won’t screw it up. The Spirit who dwells in us will give life to our mortal bodies, will help us to sin less and obey God more. And as we persevere in this, new habits develop; new ways of seeing the world; new ways of thinking. The Spirit proves his faithfulness to us by allowing us to see why what God commands us is good, and by enabling us to obey him.

Conclusion

Joe said two weeks ago that the goal of Romans 7 is realism: he says, this is how it feels to be a believer.

Nothing Paul says at the beginning of chapter 8 contradicts what he said in chapter 7. Chapter 7 describes what it often feels like for us, day in and day out; chapter 8 describes what is actually happening—not how it feels, but what is truly going on—and what will happen if we continue. Romans 8 doesn’t just have the past or present in view, but the future as well.

Today, it feels like a struggle, because it is a struggle. But the struggle is good.

We wouldn’t be struggling without the Spirit—the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. So no matter how painful it might be, the fact that you’re struggling is good.

What Paul adds here is how we struggle.

Before, we were like people trying to fight off a bear with a pillow. We can try all we want; it’s not going to work, because the bear’s a lot stronger than the pillow.

But now, in Christ, the Spirit has given us a sword.

There is no condemnation for us if we are in Christ, because he has set us free from sin—actually condemned sin in the flesh, so 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 Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in us, and will give life to our mortal bodies.

We’re no longer empty-handed in our fight against sin. We have a sword.

And next week, Paul will begin to speak about what it means to wield it.