SET FREE TO BE THE BRIDE OF CHRIST
Text: Romans 7:1-6
Introduction
1. Illustration: Evangelist Fred Brown used three images to describe the purpose of the law. First, he likened it to a dentist’s little mirror, which he sticks into the patient’s mouth. With the mirror he can detect any cavities. But he doesn’t drill with it or use it to pull teeth. It can show him the decayed area or other abnormality, but it can’t provide the solution. The law is also like a flashlight. If suddenly at night the lights go out, you use it to guide you down the darkened basement stairs to the electrical box. If you had old wiring, when you point it toward the fuses, it helps you see the one that is burned out. But after you’ve removed the bad fuse, you don’t try to insert the flashlight in its place. You put in a new fuse to restore the electricity. In his third image, Brown likened the law to a plumb line. When a builder wants to check his work, he uses a weighted string to see if it’s true to the vertical. But if he finds that he has made a mistake, he doesn’t use the plumb line to correct it. He gets out his hammer and saw. The law points out the problem of sin; it doesn’t provide a solution.
2. Dr. Phil Williams said, “The law is the light that reveals how dirty the room is, not the broom that sweeps it clean.”
3. Proposition: Paul’s point in this text is that the only way to be released from the Law was to die to it, and to be united to Christ.
4. Paul talks about three aspects of this idea…
a. Released By Death
b. United In Christ
c. Free In The Spirit
5. Would you stand with me this morning as we read Rom. 7:1-6.
Transition: First, Paul talks about us being…
1. Released By Death (1-3).
A. Only As Long As He Lives
1. Again, let me say, that Paul major point in this paragraph is that in order to die to the Law we have to die to it.
2. He begins in v. 1 with, “Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives?”
a. There are two equal ideas here in this verse: first, is the lifelong bondage to the law, and second, liberation from the law that only comes from death. The second part is a huge key to this entire section.
b. By using "brothers" (or in this case brothers and sisters), Paul is putting his arms around the Roman Christians in order to draw as close to them as possible to assure them that they are justified and set free from the law.
c. He is speaking to them as ones who know the law, and in this case, he is not talking about Roman law, but rather about the law of Moses.
d. These Romans were not Jewish by birth, some of them were what they called "God-fearers" who were Gentiles who worshipped in the synagogue before finding Christ, and still others were taught the law after becoming Christians.
e. Paul's point was that they knew the truth, and that truth was that "the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives."
f. There are three things at play here; the law, sin and death. The law of sin and death controls us as long as we are alive, and only death can set us free from that bondage.
g. Paul's entire point here is that the believer has been transferred from the bondage of sin to God's kingdom because of Jesus' sacrificial death.
h. The only way in which Christians are freed from that bondage is by faith in Jesus, which makes us dead to the control of sin and death.
3. In vv. 2-3 Paul illustrates his point by using marriage as an example. He says, “For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.”
a. To illustrate this idea of lifelong control, Paul uses the metaphor of marriage.
b. Three times in vv. 2-3 Paul uses the term "law," and eight times in this section. Paul's point is the law, and again this refers to the law of Moses, and marriage is simply an illustration of the lifelong nature of it.
c. Some people try to use these verses to drag divorced people down and tell them they cannot remarry, but that is not Paul's point here.
d. He is not giving a teaching on divorce, he is simply using marriage as an example of the lifelong essence of the law.
e. There are two term that I want you to know about. The first, is the term exegesis, which means to "draw the meaning out of the text."
f. The other is eisegesis, which means to put meaning into a text that was never there to begin with."
g. To use these verses as a teaching against divorce is to do eisegesis.
h. To use these verses as an illustration of the livelong nature of the law is exegesis. Eisegesis is bad; exegesis is good!
i. In fact, you will notice that Paul says that "a woman is bound by the law to her husband, but if he dies she is released from the law of marriage."
j. This illustrates the legal aspect rather than the marriage aspect.
k. Paul is simply trying to paint a picture of the lifelong nature of the law, and using marriage to paint the picture.
l. The marriage vows bind a woman to her husband while he lives.
m. If he dies, however, she is free from her vows to him. However, if a wife leaves her husband for another man, she is committing adultery.
n. If this woman is widowed, she is free from that law to marry another man and does not commit adultery.
(Barton, 603).
B. Dead To Sin Alive To Christ
1. Illustration: When Standard Oil Company began to refine petroleum, there was a black substance, a by-product, that no one knew what to do with. It was black, sticky, and stinky. It couldn’t be buried because it would just find its way to the surface again. It couldn’t be burned because the smoke and stench would keep people from breathing anywhere near it. If that by-product was drained into a river, all the fish died. So Standard Oil offered a large reward to anyone who could come up with a solution to get rid of it.
a. One day, a chemist went into Mr. Rockefeller’s office and showed him a brick made from a cloudy white substance. It had no smell or other offensive quality. As a matter of fact, the scientist showed Mr. Rockefeller a long list of useful purposes it had. What was this substance? The scientist called it paraffin. And how do they make paraffin? They refine that black, sticky, stinky stuff that is a by-product of oil and make something useful and non-offensive from it.
b. We were dead in our sin. We were as useless and as offensive as that ugly, smelly, and lethal by-product. That was how we were before Christ.
c. Now let’s take a look at how we are after Christ. When Jesus comes into our hearts, He begins to refine us; to clean us up from the inside out. We start changing to be of a higher quality spiritually. In short, we become useful and saved by the grace of God.
2. When we die to sin by coming to Christ we are released from its power in our lives.
a. 1 Peter 3:18 (ESV)
18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,
b. Before we came to Christ, we were dead, dead as a doornail.
c. We were dead because of our bondage to the law.
d. We were dead because of our bondage to sin.
e. And because of this we were shackled to death, both physically and spiritually.
f. We had to die to these things in order to be alive, and this was something we couldn’t do on our own.
g. But that is why Jesus came; he came to die in our place so that we could be released from bondage
h. Because of his death we have been set free!
Transition: Because of being released from the law we are now…
II. United To Christ (4).
A. So You May Belong To Another
1. Here Paul shows the connection of being dead to the law and his illustration about marriage.
2. He says, in v. 4, "Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God."
a. Like the woman in vv. 2-3, the believer has died to the law and been united with Christ.
b. Here Paul uses a very simple statement that we have died to the law, and in this case, it was God who did the work, and now we belong to Christ.
c. However, not only do we belong to Christ, but it also means that we belong to a new kingdom and the power of sin and the law has lost its power in our lives.
d. This doesn't mean that the law has no place, but rather it teaches us how God deals with his people and what holiness means.
e. But thanks to Jesus the law has been fulfilled and we are no longer dependent upon to be saved.
f. Matthew 5:17 (NLT2)
17 “Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.
g. God has shown us how to be holy apart from the law by faith in Jesus!
3. Paul says we died to the law through the body of Christ, and this is how we are able to die to the law.
a. 1 Peter 2:24 (NLT2)
24 He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed.
b. Not only are we now married to someone else, but the one to whom we are united it the one who has been raised from the dead, which indicates that our second marriage will be eternal.
c. The purpose of this is so we can produce fruit for God.
d. Not only do we bear fruit, but it's good fruit. Like the Fruit of the Spirit we talked about last week.
e. We are united with Christ and set free for the purpose of serving him in all we do.
B. Bride Of Christ
1. Illustration: K. Edward Skidmore wrote, “When I was a janitor at O.B.C. there were two or three times I had the opportunity to clean the floors in the girl’s dorms. One thing that astounded me as I went from room to room was the large pin-up pictures and posters of brides on the walls. Some of these girls had pictures taken from BRIDE magazine all over their walls. I might add that some of these girls didn’t even have boyfriends yet. It didn’t seem to matter whether marriage was imminent or not, the idea of being a bride and wearing a beautiful white gown with a veil was the biggest dream on some of these girl’s minds. The Bride of Christ will wear a gown of pure white on that wedding day, too
2. Since we have been released from bondage to the law, we are now free to be the Bride of Christ.
a. Revelation 19:7-8 (NLT2)
7 Let us be glad and rejoice, and let us give honor to him. For the time has come for the wedding feast of the Lamb, and his bride has prepared herself.
8 She has been given the finest of pure white linen to wear.” For the fine linen represents the good deeds of God’s holy people.
b. The law and sin brought us nothing but misery, pain and death.
c. We were enslaved to its evil power and the guilt that came with it.
d. But now we are not only free from that bondage, we are now the Bride of Christ.
e. As such, we have all of the privileges that come with being his bride.
f. We have the power that comes with His name.
g. We have the glory that comes with His kingdom.
h. We have the purity that comes with being His spotless bride
i. And as a husband cherishes his bride, so we are cherished by Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God!
Transition: Because we are the Bride of Christ, we are…
III. Free In The Spirit (5-6).
C. New Way Of The Spirit
B. In these last two verses Paul sums up what the first four verses shows us, as he contrasts life in the flesh verses life in the Spirit.
C. In v. 5 he says, “For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.”
a. He talks about living in the flesh, and this refers to our sinful nature, or as the NLT puts it, "our old nature, sinful desires at work within us."
b. So, Paul means that the unbeliever is living in a world of sin and living under its power.
c. Before we found Christ, Paul reminds us that everything we did was controlled by our flesh.
d. The reason he gives for this is that our sinful passions were aroused by the law, and they were at work inside us causing us to bear fruit that lead to death.
e. So, the choice is clear, we can bear fruit for God or we can bear fruit for death.
D. Then Paul says in v. 6, "But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code."
a. But now everything has changed, because we have died to what kept us in chains. Here Paul says that we have died to sin and been set free from its power in our lives.
b. We are no longer bound by legalistic restrictions, and we are now free to live according to the Spirit.
c. This doesn't mean that the law was evil, but rather that it couldn't fix the sin problem; it highlighted the sin problem and showed us we were not right with God but it couldn't set us free it.
d. According to Paul it became an agent of the very thing it was written against.
e. Christ came to fulfill the law, and it was totally summed up in him.
f. To have faith in him was the essence of the law and the only solution to the problem of sin.
D. The Spirit Gives Life
1. Illustration: "Under the Old order it was simply impossible to do the will of God, and if that old order still dominates men’s lives, to do his will remains an impossibility. But those whose life is controlled by the Spirit, those who follow His promptings, do the will of God from the heart. Their own spirit, formerly dead and insensitive, is now in sync with the life which the Spirit of God imparts." (F. F. Bruce, Epistle of Paul to the Romans (TNTC).
2. The law brought death, but the Spirit gives life.
a. 2 Corinthians 3:5-6 (NLT2)
5 It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.
6 He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life.
b. Sin brings death, misery and shame, but the Spirit brings new life.
c. Once we were in the chains of sin and death, but now we are free in the Spirit.
d. There is tremendous freedom when we are walking in the Spirt.
e. Free to love.
f. Free to have joy.
g. Free to have peace.
h. Free to have patience.
i. Free to be kind.
j. Free to have self-control.
k. Free to be what God created us to be!
Conclusion
1. Paul talks about three aspects of this idea…
a. Released By Death
b. United In Christ
c. Free In The Spirit
2. THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER…
a. BY THE DEATH OF JESUS, WE HAVE BEEN RELEASED FROM THE BURDEN OF THE LAW, SIN AND DEATH.
b. BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN RELEASED FROM THE LAW, WE ARE NOW FREE TO BE THE BRIDE OF CHRIST.
c. AS THE BRIDE OF CHRIST WE ARE NOW FREE TO WALK IN THE NEW LIFE OF THE SPIRIT.
