Sin, grace and freedom : Romans 7 and 8
Part 6: We have switched allegiance – from sin to Christ, and so are now on a new path
Our Christian faith does bring us freedom in the Holy Spirit. The whole point of God’s saving work – and where we began our exploration – was that we should be set free from the dominion of sin. Paul saw sin as a power, external to who he is, which had seized control of essential elements of his person, to trap his will into actions that denied the goodness of God and which over-ruled his central convictions of how it is right to live. Human action – the action of the human will – had proved insufficient to overcome this oppression. Therefore, God had acted in the person of Jesus (I think we will have to leave a close consideration of the method by which God achieved this to another time) to set us free. God’s grace has nullified the deadweight of sin within us and lifted us back up to be fully in his presence, forgiven all the effects of our failures, and extracted the insurgent force so that we are free to accept the redeeming presence of the risen Christ – which is Christianity’s way of expressing in particular form the general point of accepting the presence of God, so that we are now enfolded in God’s presence, both surrounded by him and suffused by him. In Paul’s language, we “are in Christ”. Trying to express the completeness of our union with God, Paul uses ideas that God is in us, and we are in God. This is the antidote to the problem of “sin being in us”.
Now, in my understanding of what happens next, we still have our everyday, common or garden, human nature – the very nature that had proved inadequate in the first place. The difference now is that we no longer give our allegiance to the power of sin within us, we are giving our allegiance to God. His grace has expelled the oppressive power and effects of sin within us, and made our hearts, minds and spirits the arena in which the will of God rules supreme. Empowered by the gifts of the Holy Spirit – those true gifts, rather than my one-time false hankering after an easy way out of temptation – we acquire a new ability to remain true to God, live in the way of Christ, and build his kingdom. As I have already admitted, we are not immune to the power of sin to “reinfect us”, but we always have the antidote to this in the grace of God. The Spirit is the medicine of our soul, and by him we are made well. In practical terms, the Spirit gives us wonderful new freedom to say no to sin because now we can clearly identify it as only superficially good – rather than the all-important good we previously desired – or to identify it as not good at all but bad, and so we do have a new ability to resist temptation. The Holy Spirit gives us freedom from the power of sin, because in his company we have found a strength stronger than even the monstrous power of sin, so that we are no longer slaves to do whatever sin tells us to do; instead we are free – because we have acquired the power, and ability, and will to do what the Spirit tells us to do. However the Spirit does not over-rule our will to take away our responsibility for choosing to keep in step with the Spirit and follow the way of Christ. Paul speaks very movingly of how he longs for perfect freedom – not that he would ever dare to claim that he had attained it. But the one thing he does is to forget what has gone before, and strive forwards to take hold of the prize for which Christ took hold of him. Life in the Spirit is perfect freedom – but only while we remain in step with the Spirit. We are never free from the danger of tripping up, but we are free to carry on, for whenever we trip up, God graciously picks us up and restores our freedom to live in communion with him. Sin is no longer a barrier between us and God, because his grace is always able to overcome the power and effects of sin.
Spiritual Devotion 