Sin, grace and freedom : Romans 7 and 8
Part 7: Jesus is Lord. Despite everything, he is Lord and he is our Lord
I think that sin is a challenge to the lordship of Christ – and in my own understanding, I see increasingly clearly that his lordship is the be all and end all. If Jesus is Lord – and he is, if we Christians are utterly devoted to him – and we are, then surely, surely that should empower us to overcome the power of sin within us. Hence Paul’s deep distress: “How unhappy I am, for the good that I want to do, I don’t do, but the very thing that I don’t want to do, the thing that I hate – that is exactly what I do”. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I am going to see a glimmer of hope in the fact that Paul wrote this after being a Christian for many years, and he was as inducted into the ways of the Holy Spirit as any Christian can be. Yet he is still wrestling. His lament might have, perhaps, made sense as a new Christian still learning the ropes, or as someone who had faith, but not the Holy Spirit – but this is not the case with Paul. So, what we have confirmed – at least for Paul, and I am never going to claim that I am a stronger Christian than him – is that even as a fully mature, dedicated follower of Christ, who has devoted his life to spreading the gospel, and having achieved more, probably, than any other Christian who has ever followed Christ, it is still not possible for us to be completely free from the power of sin. Paul sees sin as an alien, outside power that is oppressing him; I see it as a spiritual and moral failure to exercise our will power sufficiently to choose the path that we approve of, and so fall prey to our divided mind. Either way, the answer is to rely on the grace of God, shown to us in Jesus, and to continually pick ourselves up and recommit to following the way of Christ. In our inmost being, we are whole-heartedly devoted to him, and we continue to struggle to live that out in practice. That is the Christian way of life. It is a life of grace and faith and progress – for no fall is ever sufficient to erase the assurance of our salvation, because God’s action in Christ is sovereign: when we could not help ourselves, God acted to save us. Step by step, we do grow in grace, we develop our relationship with God until we are lost in adoration – and one day that adoration will be complete – and we, we who are so prone to weakness and failure, to betraying our Lord and lying subject to the power of sin, we play our part in building God’s kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ deals effectively, once and for all, and always, continually, to deal with the power and effect of sin within us, to set us free from our old way of life, and to introduce us to, and then continually encourage us on, in our new way of life, in which the freedom of the Spirit creates a new arena in which we can rejoice in the presence of God, and love and serve him. We, while retaining our standard human nature, and each one of us continuing to be ourselves – the person God created us to be, loves, and in Christ died to save – acquire a new freedom to live in communion with God, follow Christ and keep in step with the Spirit. Yes, we continue to trip up and fall, but we are not fallen. We are redeemed and set free to live with God.
Spiritual Devotion 