Introduction
We need to begin by reviewing some crucial
terms.
The most important terms are "under law" and
"under grace." You can see Paul contrasting these in 6:14b (read). These
two terms summarize two totally different ways of approaching God. In general,
"under law" means that you do something for God; "under grace"
means that you trust Christ to do something for you (charis). Religion
instructs us to approach God under law; Christianity invites us to approach God
under grace. (Religion appeals to our intuitive sense about how to approach
God; grace is counter-intuitive--we have to be convinced of and get used to it.)
When
it comes to getting God's acceptance (justification), you can pursue this in on
of two very different ways.
You can pursue it "under law,"
which means you try to earn God's acceptance as a wage for your good works. Paul
spends the first three chapters of Romans refuting this by showing that God's
standard is so high that no one could ever attain it (3:23).
On the other
hand, you can pursue God's acceptance "under grace." This means depending
not on your works for God, but on Christ's work for you--letting him earn your
acceptance through his perfect life and atoning death. If you approach God in
this way, he gives his acceptance to you as a free and permanent gift (3:24).
(GOSPEL)
But what about serving God and pursuing his will for
your life (sanctification)? Isn't this important after you have been accepted
by God? Indeed it is--but you'll need to choose how you will serve God--in
one of two very different ways.
"Under law" says you
should serve God by your own moral will-power. Perhaps because you fear God will
reject you if you don't, perhaps out of gratitude for his acceptance--your job
is now to focus on God's commands and try as hard as you can to obey them.
This
seems obvious--but it is the wrong way! As long as we try to serve God in this
way, we will never understand or benefit from serving God under grace. This is
why before Paul explains how to serve under grace, he spend a whole chapter arguing
why serving God under law is a blind alley. He gives two reasons . . .
God
has already delivered Christians from the Law (7:1-6)
The first reason
is that God himself has delivered us from it! Read 7:1. The principle is that
death delivers us from law's authority. How many traffic cops do you see at the
cemetery trying to collect unpaid tickets?
This same principle applies to
marriage (read 7:2,3). Imagine a woman who is married to a demanding husband.
He is righteous, but never helps her. She is nevertheless obligated (under Jewish
civil law) to remain married to him, even if she has met a wonderful, loving man.
Only if her husband dies is she free to remarry the second man.
What does
this have to do with sanctification? Lots--read 7:4-6. Prior to meeting Christ,
we are "married" to the Law--obligated to try to keep it by our own
power. This is what Paul calls serving God "in the oldness of the letter."
But God delivers us from this obligation--not by having the Law die (it is eternal
as the expression of God's moral character)--but by having us die to the Law (through
our identification with Christ) so that we are now "married" to him
and can have his power work through us to bear fruit for God. This is what Paul
calls serving "in the newness of the Spirit."
This is radical!
Paul knows some of his readers are objecting at this point (as some of us may
be):"What's so bad about trying to serve God by the oldness of the letter?
Why do we need to be delivered from it? Are you implying that the Law is actually
evil?" Paul answers these questions in 7:7-24 by describing his own
experience trying to serve God under the law. I'm sure glad he included this,
because it helps me to understand some of my own deepest spiritual struggles.
I wonder if you can relate to what he describes. At any rate, he relates three
painful lessons he learned in "Law School". . .
3
painful lessons from "Law School" (7:7-24)
Read 7:7. The first
thing Paul does is to sweep aside any suggestion that God's law is sin. To the
contrary, the Law defines what sin is and exposes its presence in our hearts.
Over
against fluctuating cultural standards and consciences that can become seared,
God's moral law provides objective, absolute moral standards that define how he
has designed us to live. We can look to it for unchanging direction on our sexuality,
treatment of other people's property, etc. This is a wonderful provision!
But
the Law also personally exposes sin within our own hearts. Like an MRI, it has
the power to look beneath the surface and reveal more deep-seated, attitudinal
sins. This is what Paul is emphasizing in 7:7. It is significant that he does
not mention something external like murder or adultery or theft. As a Christian,
he is pursuing the very heart of God--and he runs up against a terrible realization.
His heart is full of coveting (Ex. 20:17). Coveting is an internal attitude that
gives birth to the external behaviors. This prohibition is the negative counterpart
to what Jesus says is the heart of God's Law--to love God with all your heart,
and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:36-40).
God
wants more from us than merely to not murder or steal or blaspheme him, etc. He
wants us to love him enough that we trust his care of our lives and thank him
for all things in our lives instead of internally resenting him because he has
burned us. He wants us to love others enough to pursue their good and rejoice
over their blessings--not to envy what they have and rejoice inwardly when they
fall or lose what we wanted. As long as my heart covets like this, I am fundamentally
at odds with God's heart.
God's Law will expose this kind of wickedness
in your heart--but it cannot fix it. In fact, if you try to fix it by yourself,
you'll discover another problem . . .
Read
7:8-13. The Law not only can't help you overcome internal sins like coveting;
it actually aggravates the problem by stimulating your sin-nature into more
devious activity.
When I simply try to stop coveting a friend's
situation, my mind becomes more focused on all that they have that I don't have--and
I find more and more reasons to covet their situation! I also find that my sin-nature
is remarkably adaptive; it is glad to become religious, as long as it can still
in control. It will stop coveting crass things like someone's car or salary--but
I will begin to covet other Christians' spiritual gifts, leadership position,
the way others praise and respect them, etc. It will become much more subtle--not
pouting when I don't get enough praise, but learning how to extract attention
and praise from others.
Merely becoming aware of it and trying to stop it
is a hopeless project. Listen to C. S. Lewis' experience in this area: "I
have found out ludicrous and terrible things abut my own character. Sitting by,
watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to
know the sort of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one out of every
three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had
its neck broken, up comes the thought 'What an admirable fellow I am to have broken
their necks!' I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day
long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for
his good, of course) and then suddenly realize I am really thinking how frightfully
clever I'm going to be and how he will admire me . . . When
you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It's like fighting
the hydra . . . There seems to be no end to it. Depth under
depth of self-love and self-admiration . . ."1
This
leads Paul to a painful but crucially important realization, which he relates
in 7:14-23 (read). Did you notice the conspicuous absence of any reference to
dependence on God or the power of the Holy Spirit? This is Paul's account of trying
to obey God's law by his own moral will-power.
The key lesson
is 7:18. As a Christian, I have the desire to obey God's will, but I don’t
have the power to do this in any deep-seated way. Instead, my desire to do God's
will is always thwarted by the cleverness and power of my sin-nature. Even though
my life is in many ways less overtly wicked than it was before, I realize that
my sin-nature is so wily and powerful that I will never be able to defeat it.
I am never going to be able to truly love God and others by my own strength.
Where
do you do from here?
Have you ever come to this realization about your
own life? If you have, then you know that you can't remain here very long because
of the cognitive dissonance it produces. You have to respond in one of three ways.
You
can be honest about your moral impotence, and just give yourself over to sin.
This is how many people who grew up in legalistic forms of Christianity respond.
This is a tragic response, because it will lead to greater damage in your life,
and because God has a solution to this, as we'll see.
Or you can dilute
God's law so that it consists only in relatively easy, superficial things
(EXAMPLES). Then you can compare yourself to others and convince yourself that
you are righteous. This is the self-righteous response, and I think that
many of us here (including myself) tend to do this. This will never attract others
to Christ, nor will it bring true freedom and fulfillment into our own lives.
Or
you can realize that you are on the verge of a great break-through and respond
the way Paul does. Read 7:24,25a. Instead of diving into sin in despair, instead
of becoming superficially self-righteous, Paul acknowledges his bondage--then
looks outside of himself and the Law for help from Jesus to set him free.
Just
as we must come to the point where we admit it is impossible to earn God's acceptance
by our good works, and turn to Christ to earn it for us--we must come to the point
where we admit it is impossible to serve God by our own power, and turn to Christ
for his power to do this.
When we do this, we discover that he will empower
us to gradually fulfill God's will for our lives through the Holy Spirit (8:4ff.).
This is serving God "under grace/in the newness of the Spirit," and
we will spend all of NEXT WEEK studying how to do this.
In the meantime,
I've asked my friend Ed Burgett to share his own experiences in this area . . .
Footnotes
Copyright
2000 Gary DeLashmutt