This is one of best sermons that I have heard on Romans 7-8.
Click on this link to watch:
The Six Week Journey - Part Two | The City Church
Judah uses The Message version:
Torn Between One Way and Another (Romans 7:14-8:17 MSG)
I can
anticipate the response that is coming: “I know that all God’s commands
are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m
full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I
don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act
another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to
figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious
that God’s command is necessary.
But I need something more! For
if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin
within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I
realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do
it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do
bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t
result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the
better of me every time.
It happens so regularly that it’s
predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up.
I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all
of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I
least expect it, they take charge.
I’ve tried everything and
nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do
anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
The answer, thank
God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in
this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart
and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally
different.
With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful
dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no
longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new
power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind,
has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of
brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God went for the
jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as
something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took
on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling
humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code,
weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have
done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on
sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for
but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling
our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with
measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it
in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s
Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these
matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open,
into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of
focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up
thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and
what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
But if
God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be
thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not
welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ,
won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in
whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of
sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason,
doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the
dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in
Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in
you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from
that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as
alive as Christ’s!
So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old
do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing
at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with
your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places
to go!
This resurrection life you received from God is not a
timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God
with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits
and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we
are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming
to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ
goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re
certainly going to go through the good times with him!
