Allow me to begin by saying what tremendous joy it gives me to be worshiping with you “at” Messiah once again. Even though we can’t be with one another physically, it has been a joy for Karen and me to be able to join with you virtually for your online services.
At the same time, I have to say that my heart has bled for you all over the events of recent weeks. Your experience of the novel corona virus has been far more severe than ours out here on the edge of the continent. But in your case to the fear and isolation associated with covid19 have been multiplied several-fold by the brutal death of George Floyd and then by the rioting and destruction that followed it. The sight of familiar and much-loved places lying in ruins has been heartbreaking. Needless to say, you are in my prayers regularly, but how much more in the wake of these dreadful events!
Here at our church in Halifax we have been making our way through the book of Job in recent weeks. In the midst of indescribable suffering—after the loss of property, family, and finally his health, plagued by constant, unabating pain, Job cried aloud to God, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” Perhaps there have been times when you have found yourself asking the same question.
Last week we heard a powerful sermon from Dave on the apostle Paul’s discussion of the power and inescapability of sin in Romans, chapter 7. As he concludes the chapter, Paul utters what seems his own cry of desperation: “Wretched man that I am!” he exclaims. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
By contrast, our passage this morning from Romans 8 begins with one of the most positive affirmations in all of Scripture: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
What Paul gives us here is not a suggestion. It is not a speculation or a theory or an idea. It is an unequivocal statement of absolute fact. I don’t know how to state it more emphatically! I love the way Eugene Peterson translated Paul’s words in The Message: “Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.”
One of my vivid recollections of our years in the Midwest is of those enormous thunderclouds that would gather and seemingly within minutes could turn a sunny, bright, warm day into the darkness of night—sometimes to the point where the streetlights would go on. Some of you may remember camping one year at William O’Brien Park when there was a tornado warning. We were all instructed to leave our campsites and gather in the restrooms until the storm had passed—hopefully without taking us with it!
What a relief it was when, after some pretty fierce winds and torrential rain and more than a few resounding claps of thunder, the clouds parted and we were able to go back to our tents! Maybe that gives us something of the picture that Paul wants to paint for us here, when he declares, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The clouds have passed. The rumbles of thunder have receded into the distance. The birds have begun to resume their evening chorus.
The cross of Christ rescues us from the penalty of sin
But we need to ask ourselves, how is all this possible? If we are incapable of rescuing ourselves (and this was the point that Paul was at pains to get across in Romans 7) what has happened to make the difference? I want to say that there are two things.
The first is that Jesus Christ through his death on the cross has rescued us from the penalty of sin. The story goes all the way back to the second chapter of the Bible, to the day when the Lord God brought Adam and Eve into the garden of Eden. As they gazed on its splendor and beauty, God told them that all this was theirs to tend and to reap. “But,” he warned them, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 1:17).
Well, we all know what happens in the next episode in the story. Adam and Eve chose not to put their trust in God’s word. Instead they chose to doubt his fatherly care and good purposes for them. And no sooner had they made that decision than the dark cloud of death began to overshadow them.
The letter of James speaks of the Bible as a mirror that gives us a true reflection of ourselves. As with so many of the stories in the Bible, we fail to see the meaning of the account of Adam and Eve if we do not see ourselves in it. Adam is me. Eve is me. And Adam is you and Eve is you. And the dark cloud that hung over them hangs over me and hangs over you to this day.
Back in the Dark Ages, when I was first ordained, there was a prayer we recited at funeral services that went back to the tenth century. It began like this: “In the midst of life we are in death…” “In the midst of life we are in death…” That is the tragic reality for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. So it is that we heard the apostle Paul cry out in chapter 7, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
The answer (like the answer always is in church, it seems!) is Jesus. When Jesus hung on the cross and uttered those words, “It is finished,” it was not that his life was ending. No, it was because in offering himself up in that one perfect act of sacrifice, he had vanquished sin and death once and for all. His was a cry not of defeat but of triumph. As Paul wrote elsewhere,
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! (1 Corinthians 15:54b-57)
So it is that, because of what Jesus has done for us on his cross, a shaft of bright sunshine cuts through the clouds that have hung over the world since the days of Eden. Sin and death are defeated enemies.
The Spirit of Christ rescues us from the power of sin
“Well, John,” you might want to say in reply. “Perhaps that is so. But the fact is that we still sin and we still die. So how have things changed?” Allow me to respond by offering what has been for me a very helpful illustration. It comes from an author and theologian named Oscar Cullmann, who lived at the time of the Second World War.
On 6th June 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the shores of France. By dawn on that same day thousands of paratroopers had also touched down behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history and the cost in lives was enormous. Yet by the end of the day, all knew for sure that the Nazi hold on Europe had been broken.
However, the Nazi powers did not finally capitulate until eleven months later, on 8th May 1945, the day we call VE Day (whose 75th anniversary was celebrated just a couple of months ago). During those eleven months the warfare continued to rage fiercely and the fatality count continued to rise. Yet all along the Allies were certain that victory was in their hands.
That, said Cullmann, gives us something of a picture (albeit very imperfect in many ways) of where we stand as Christians today. Our victory over sin and evil and death was assured at Golgotha. But we still await VE Day—the day when Jesus will return and all creation will be renewed. Between those two days the warfare continues to rage. We witness it all around us in our society today in what can only be seen as a mounting, almost frenzied, opposition to the Christian message.
Yet in spite of all that is going on around us, I want to affirm, both from Scripture and my own experience, that the primary battleground has been and always will be within the confines of each of our own hearts.
In this regard I have often found myself falling back to the words of the celebrated Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As many of you probably know, he spent eight years living amid the horror and brutality of a Communist prison camp in the Soviet Union. It was out of that experience that he reflected with these words:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And this is where Paul’s second point comes in.
Just as Jesus gave his life for us on the cross to rescue us from the penalty of sin, so he now gives us his Holy Spirit to rescue us from the power of sin. Paul will have a good deal more to say about the Holy Spirit in next week’s verses from Romans—and I certainly don’t want to steal from next Sunday’s preacher! But in this morning’s verses Paul sets before us a choice. And the options are clear.
In Paul’s own words in verses 4 through 8, we can choose to live according to the flesh; or we can choose to live according to the Spirit. How do live according to the Spirit? Paul gives us three picture-words to make what he is saying clear. The first is to walk—to walk according to the Spirit or, as he puts it elsewhere, to walk in the Spirit. What does it mean to walk in the Spirit? Surely it means having the Holy Spirit as our constant companion moment by moment in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It is what 17th-century monk Brother Lawrence called the practice of the presence of Christ—consciously seeking him and keeping him in our company throughout the day.
The second expression Paul uses is to live in the Spirit. That is, to allow the Holy Spirit to be the one who dwells at the center of our lives; the one who gives meaning, joy and purpose to our life; the one who stirs deep within us at the very core of our being, who animates us, who shape our character and makes us who we are.
Thirdly, we are to set our minds on the Holy Spirit: to allow him to guide our thinking. I don’t know about you, but it is very easy for my thoughts to go in all the wrong directions—to think in ways that are selfish, uncharitable, impure and unworthy. How much we need the Holy Spirit to take our thought lives—to purify them and to raise our sights to look upon Jesus, day by day!
Well, Paul has taken us over a lot of ground in this brief passage. One author has said, “It is no exaggeration to say that [these verses] contain a complete picture of the Christian life as Paul understood it.” May God bless you as you seek to live that life and to share fully in Jesus’ victory over sin and death—trusting in his sacrifice on the cross and living day by day in the power of his Holy Spirit!
