No Condemnation
Just a show of hands please.
Who here wants to live a life of regrets?
Ok.
And a show of hands for who wants to life a life of rejection?
Anyone?
OK. How about a show of hands for who wants to have a life of pain and anguish?
What? No takers?
Hard crowd.
Ok, let me try another question.
Can I have a show of hands who wants a life of false starts and mixed blessings?
Hmm.
So <nobody>? Here wants to live a life of regrets, nobody here has opted for a lifetime of rejection, and nobody here has requested pain and anguish or a run-on life of false starts and mixed blessings.
Yet, that is the reality of the Christian life for so many of us.
So many Christians continue to live in regret. Regrets are, I might add, a form of unforgiveness – it is self-unforgiving that forms the core of a regret. I have some regrets as I’m sure many of you do, but I don’t dwell in them. I know it’s easy to see a pattern in our own lives – multiple failures of the same variety, constant nagging of what you should have done. Memories of things that didn’t go well, or things we didn’t do when we know we should have done them.
When we are attacked – and to be sure, there are many times in our lives when we have been and will be spiritually under attack – one of the tools of our common enemy is regret. This starts with the dragging up of old failures so that we can relive them in our minds and beat ourselves up repeatedly for the same failings.
Our enemy drags these old wounds and old failures around like trophies and will dance around, proudly parading them in a hideous circus of accusation, mockery and ridicule all aimed to tear you down. Aimed to draw you into doing something they want you to do – their will.
And the lie that is pushed at you is that everyone will be better off if you give up. If you quit. If you go away. If you aren’t around anymore. It’s a lie, an especially cruel one designed to separate you from God’s will.
Who is the champion of tearing us down?
Is it the neighborhood gossip?
Is it an old friend or enemy?
No. Its you. You are the champion ‘tearer-downer’ of self.
This morning I want each of us to really think this through carefully.
Our enemy has been around for several thousand years learning what it takes to really push someone’s buttons, and he attacks Christians -- even the stronger Christians -- in moments of weakness or failure. I stand before you as a fine example of someone who is very good at tearing himself down. There’s perhaps a lifetime of practice so I’ve refined it into a precision skill, but I’ve also learned that unmistakable signature of Christ’s voice when I read it in scripture.
One of the signature scriptures where I hear his voice is in Romans 8:1 where it clearly states, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” As old Pastor Dave used to say, when you see the ‘therefore’ you need to understand what it’s there, for.
It’s there for the subject of the conflict of the two natures as written the preceding chapter. As we know, the earthy penmanship of Paul with the authorship of the Holy Spirit wrote the book of Romans, and this short chapter in Romans details something that we must never forget. It’s the Christian condition of being saved from the law and from the slavery of sin, yet still living with it that presents a conflict. We’re called out of sin; saved from it by grace and the precious gift of salvation; the gift of salvation that is imparted to us by our savior, Christ Jesus.
Let’s pick up Paul’s written experience with this internal conflict and see how it is so masterfully articulated in just a few verses.
READ ROMANS 7:21-25
That’s what the therefore is there for. This is the conflict. So what is the cure?
READ ROMANS 8:1-8
When I tear myself down over something, I am conforming to the flesh.
And let’s be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t strive to be better – being upset with yourself because you didn’t get it right like you might have is the first step to improving. We can only improve when we first recognize that what we’ve done is incorrect.
There is by necessity, a measure of mental anguish that we employ to avoid making the same mistake again.
I learned to bowl this way. As a young lad, a bowling alley came to our suburb and it was a big thing back then. So, with my old friend Bill Jackson, we went bowling and watched how other people so effortlessly slipped that black ball down the alley to take out as many pins as possible.
We’d watch them and try to do the same.
As you might imagine, our first attempts were terrible. But after a few more times, both of us improved. How did we improve? Instant feedback. You learn by doing. You train your body to move in a certain way – the speed and angle of the arm, the timing of the release, the whole mechanic of how the body shifted and moved during the approach.
Oops.
Gutter ball.
Now what? Do we quit?
No, you go through a momentary self-appraisal. You take your eyes up off the floor, you perform an internal evaluation of what went wrong, then set your mind on getting it right the next time … embracing the glad hope of a strike.
Rinse, cycle repeat.
We didn’t have a whole lot of money back then but having had no other training I was able to bowl a score of over 200 several times and bowled a 255 once during a game at the Groton Navy Submarine base, much to the dismay of some friends I was with. Was it a perfect score? No. Could I improve? Yes.
Yet, if I had applied self-condemnation to my bowling practice, I’d have turned in my shoes and never played again. And so it is with our Christian walk. We’re not going to always get it right, and nor is anyone else.
Today I think it’s important that you and I take a reminder from the pages of Romans to consider and evaluate our actions and reactions to our own failures and to the failures of others.
If you’ve read Romans, you might well notice there are a lot of references to slavery.
Being slaves to sin means that there are no personal choices that can change your state or status; a slave – a real slave, has no real choice in what he or she does or can do. They are slaves, and in real terms and conditions it means bondage – a real kind of imprisoning. Being slaves to sin, they are shackled with real spiritual chains to that which defies their own will – to sin itself.
Paul wrote about real slavery – not the kind of slavery you might hear your wife, your husband, parents or friends jokingly use when they state, “I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day,” or “Man, these long hours on this project – the boss is being a slave driver!”
The real bondage of slavery isn’t the modern-day workforce scene or the kitchen cookery; both can voluntarily stop and go do something else. A true slave? Not so much. Real slaves cannot stop working if they did, were beaten mercilessly with whips and rods – even if they even slowed down a little.
Slaves who continually disobeyed or became nuisances were put to death; both because of defying their master and as a warning to others who might consider slowing down or disobeying. Some slaves in Roman times were beat and punished on behalf of something their master did. You could opt to have your punishment taken out on your slaves.
Tellingly, Christ did the opposite.
Slavery is the removal of self-determination and self-will, being forcibly replaced with the determination and will of another person. When we read in scripture about the slavery of sin, it is the real kind of slavery, not our 21st century watered down version of it. It is safe to say nobody in this room, and none of the parents of anyone in this room, even going back several generations has likely never experienced the real kind of slavery written about during the time of the Roman empire.
Being so removed from the reality of slavery tends to soften and modify the harsh, cruel reality of its terrible impact on people. The word has lost its power because we abuse the words and associate it with silly things and exaggerations so much that we’ve no real experience or idea of what real slavery is or how it affects people under its power.
But scripture tells us that those who are without Christ are slaves to sin.
Think about it.
That means those who are lost – those without the redemption in Christ are bonded into the slavery of sin from birth to death unless someone comes in to free them from their bondage. It requires an external action by an external agent of free will to release you from the slavery of sin. Slaves of sin cannot release themselves nor other slaves from their bondage. What else does scripture tell us about those who are without Christ?
It tells us that they are spiritually blinded.
They don’t even recognize that they are slaves to begin with. Let that sink in for a moment.
Unlike real slavery, the slaves of sin don’t see themselves as slaves or recognize themselves as slaves because they have no knowledge of the freedom found in Christ; they reject Him because they love the darkness. A great example of this kind of blindness can be found in the pages of the book of Acts of where we find Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee in Jerusalem on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians for their faith.
Most of you might recall that Saul was intercepted on the way as he and his companions were struck down by a blinding light. Now up until this time, Paul was a Pharisee of Pharisees – having been born to Jewish parents who possessed Roman citizenship, which was a very coveted privileged back then. He began an in-depth study of the law under the famous Rabbi Gamaliel, and with the full backing of the chief priest, began his zealous persecution of Christians who he saw as threats and as harmful influences to Jewish society.
Then he meets the one who he is persecuting.
What followed is one of the most dramatic conversions in church history. Saul of Tarsus became the Apostle Paul, an ardent and powerful missionary of Christ to a blind and unbelieving world. Saul wasn’t uneducated, he wasn’t willfully ignoring the law – he knew the law better than most, but he was blind to the truth and to the author of the law, God himself.
We are spiritually blind to the truth without the personal, indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Just as a dead person can’t decide to get up and live again, a spiritually blind person cannot just decide one day to see the truth. It requires the introduction of an external power; one with the authority over death to resurrect the corpse and unbind the chains of sin and death.
So, here’s another question for you.
Do we mock and laugh if we see a legally blind person trip over something and fall? Do we blame them for not seeing the obstruction they fell over? Do we go and harass them?
“Hey, idiot, why didn’t you avoid that stumbling block back there?”
I would certainly hope not.
Yet, as Christians we can often be found pointing out and ridiculing those who are spiritually blind, doing the things that the spiritually blind will do – and can’t help but doing, because they are slaves to sin. It is easy to forget that they just don’t see. Just because we may see and recognize the error, we assume they do as well.
But they can’t see, and they can’t recognize the error because they are BLIND.
Certainly, they have chosen not to see, as Romans 1 tells us, but before you climb on that high horse – remember that we are really no different without Christ, and it was Christ who provided us with the power of faith to believe – it wasn’t something we have or had better than anyone else; the saving faith is a gift all of its own.
Further, Matthew 7:1 warns us about being hypocritical and condemning when we judge others. Mockery, accusation and ridicule are not designed to encourage people to seek Christ and embrace His forgiveness for sin, rather, they’re employed to feed a sense of self pride and push people away and keep them at a distance in order to separate, categorize and see oneself as better than, and apart from the others.
As Christians, we are NOT called to do that.
If we are Christians, which incidentally means, “Christ-like” then we are to be reminded that Christ focused His ministry on sinners. He came to heal the sick and the wounded – His ministry was for sinners who inhabit a lost and fallen world – that’s US. It is important for us to view these verses as written for us and about us, because let’s be honest here - we tend to forget.
These bodies are subject to the law of sin – Paul called it the body of death that wages war against his mind which is conformed to Christ. Some of you might even remember the bible study we did on Paul’s use of the term, ‘body of death’ because it was one of the dozens of ancient Roman tortures. The sentence of a convicted murderer was sometimes executed by sewing or binding the rotting corpse of their victim onto the person who committed the murder.
Paul likened the war between his mind and body to that of a condemned man carrying around a corpse.
He longed for the purity and holiness of Christ, and we can read that he felt helplessly bound to the dead body of our sinful nature. Even though we know that we are new creatures in Christ, and that our physical bodies are not in themselves evil, the tendency to sin is always carried around with us. That’s what Paul articulated and if we a saved in Christ, that’s our condition.
We often do what we do not want to do, and we do not do the things that we want to do.
So today, I want us to be reminded of the antidote Paul found for his self-described ‘wretched man’ condition, it is in Romans Chapter 8 verse 1. He declares that through the forgiveness of Christ he is freed from condemnation – and if you are a Christian, this freedom belongs to you as well.
Because we are no longer slaves to sin, because we can choose between capitulation and courage.
Because we can choose to strengthen each other through encouragement.
Because we can choose what voice we listen to.
Because we can decide to lean on Christ and not in our own understanding and we can choose to get back up, dust off and go at it again until we get it right.
WHY?
Because I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
That’s why. We have the freedom in Christ to see and recognize evil for its true nature. And we can choose to step away from it and avoid it, and in doing so - in living a Christ-like example (not just talking it, but walking it,) we will help and encourage others to be overcomers in Christ as well.
I find it encouraging that upon someone’s salvation, upon their confessing Christ and believing on Him in their heart that they are not forced into real slavery with our Lord and savior. To be certain, there are some parallels – we are bought with a price. Slaves are routinely bought and sold between masters; they have no voice in the exchange. They are owned property.
Christ paid for our sin debt, all of it, so we are owned by God – purchased at great cost, yet we are free to follow Him or not. God does not bind our hands and feet and force us to obey Him like sin does.
God has set us free, and we are free indeed.
We’re free to go back to the old life of bondage to sin, or we can choose to obey our new master and follow in His steps into a greater freedom; for it is only in obedience to His word that we find ourselves free from fear, spared from our own inabilities or inadequacies and blessed with the promises that God has given to us if we choose to obey Him.
God doesn’t force us to obey – it’s a choice we now have. It’s a choice we can see, one that we can recognize and act upon. We are no longer slaves to sin; we are free to make good choices. We are free and un-blinded to the truth.
So, brothers and sisters in Christ; remembering now that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, I therefore encourage you to encourage one another.
Don’t tear yourselves down, don’t tear down your other brothers and sisters, don’t waste your precious gifts and time squandering them in the mud holes of gossip and idle chatter. Don’t be conformed to the world but to the renewing of your minds.
When you stumble, recognize the error – own it, talk to God about it, and know that when you honestly ask for forgiveness, God is faithful to forgive – even to separating your sin from his memory as far as the east is from the west.
So then, we know that when old memories and accusations begin surface, who the author of all that is; it’s not God, it’s from our common enemy. Don’t be fooled into the trap of condemning others or yourself, for we are new creatures in Christ. While we remain in these imperfect bodies in this fallen and sinful world, hold onto the hope of Christ and rest your understanding and your hope in His completed work on the cross.
In this time in these bodies, each of us will stumble and fall, but with Christ we can get up and help others up; for this is the calling that you and I have received.
Pray for one another.
Encourage one another.
Fellowship with one another.
Let’s pray.
