If I’ve Received Salvation, Why Do I Still Struggle? Series

DEAD MAN WALKING: Dying with Christ is important because it means we’ve been freed.

- Romans 7:1-4a.

- Chapter 7 obviously flows from chapter 6. Last week in chapter 6 the big ideas we talked about were the (a) we are dead to sin and alive to Christ and (b) that we have to choose if we are going to live as slaves to sin or righteousness.

- In chapter 7, Paul continues his argument by first using an analogy from marriage to explain what situation we are in.

a. Marriage provides a practical example that death changes things.

- vv. 1-3.

- The example is a spouse who dies. If your spouse is alive and you go get married to someone else, that’s a big problem. On the other hand, if your spouse has died, then you are free to remarry and there is nothing wrong with that.

- The situation is different depending on whether a death has occurred.

- To go back to v. 1, the Law only has authority as long as that person is alive. When there is a death, things change.

b. The fact that we died to the Law means that the Law’s authority does not bind us anymore.

- v. 4a.

- Last week we discussed that we are “baptized into His death” (6:3), “buried with Him through baptism” (6:4), “crucified with Him” (6:6), and “died with Christ” (6:8). Those are not empty theoretical religious ideas but ones that speak to the reality of what Christ has done for us.

- Spiritually speaking, we died in Christ. To bring up a famous phrase from John 3, this is why we talk about being born again.

- We need to think of this as honest, accurate language about our spiritual reality. We are being instructed here by Paul on what the spiritual transformation is that has taken place.

- Verse 4 teaches us something else that happened in this transaction: we died to the Law.

- This is important to understand with regard to Law, grace, and the struggle that we continue to have.

- We often talk about how we can’t earn our salvation by works. We can’t follow the Law well enough to earn our relationship with God. This speaks to that. Those attempts to follow the Law to get close to God are dead. But because they are dead, it opens up a new opportunity.

WHERE THAT REBIRTH LEADS: Being freed means it is now possible we can bear fruit for God.

- Romans 7:4b-6.

a. The end of v. 4 tells us what opens up when we died to the Law: a chance for fruitfulness.

- We can now live lives that bear fruit for God. That’s an amazing change: we’ve got from not being able to connect with God to being able to live lives that honor Him.

- Unpack the idea of fruitfulness and that it is not optional for the Christian.

b. We used to bear “fruit” of death.

- v. 5.

- When we were in our natural state (before salvation), our lives bore “fruit” for death.

- That doesn’t mean we were out killing people or anything like that.

- No, it means that our lives were bearing sin and the result of that sin is death. See Romans 6:23. We see this in the news, with the unspeakable brokenness of the world we live in. We see this in the constant drama and problems in so many people’s lives. And we even see it when things are rather quiet in lives but the focus of that life is their own pleasure or mere entertainment or money or similar ends. Sometimes we just take all that to be just the way life is, but it’s really the way a fallen world is.

c. Our death to the Law opens up something new.

- v. 6.

- We were bound by the Law. But Jesus died in our place and freed us from that. Now we can serve in a new way that is characterized by grace and the Spirit.

- This is a way that isn’t just that we get justified so we can go to heaven.

- No, this is an open door to a new way of living. A life that allows us to bear fruit for God. A life that allows us to be close to God.

- The Spirit is crucially important to this new type of spiritual life because He is the one who will guide and direct. We will go into greater depths next week in chapter 8 about this, but the Spirit is directing, empowering, convicting, encouraging, and so much more in this new way of doing things.

DOES THAT MEAN THE LAW IS EVIL? No, the Law is good but rather than saving me it showed the evil in me.