The Believer's Guide to the Law of Sin

What Happened?

Do you remember the day you were first saved? Do you remember a feeling of relief, of release, as if an awesome burden had been lifted from you? Guilt was gone and you were convinced that a new life had begun. The grass looked a little greener and the sky a little bluer.

If you were anything like me you may have thought to yourself, “Jesus has done so much for me that I feel as if I never want to sin again. Thank you, Lord.” And, if you are anything like me, it didn’t take long to realize that you were going to sin again and that sinning as a Christian was a miserable experience; far more miserable than sinning as a non-believer because now you knew better.

You started out so well, wanting to please God and do those things which you felt were satisfying to him. Then, invariably, you fell into your same old sin patterns over and over again. You repented, you memorized scripture, you tried to reckon yourself dead to sin, you tried to fight sin and rebuke the devil when you were tempted to sin. You did everything you knew to do and yet, like a dog returning to its vomit, you seemed to choose to sin time and again. (Proverbs 26:11)

At one point in my life I wished I had never known what it meant to be a Christian. I frequently wondered if I was a Christian at all. I read in the scripture that “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.”(1 John 3:6 ESV) I reasoned that if I was continuing in sin, I must not know him. But I was sure that I had known him in the beginning. I was miserable. So I re-committed and things would go well for a short time until I fell right back into my old sinful patterns again. I joined a 12-step group, gathered accountability partners. Anything I thought would bring me to the place where I would begin making right choices with my life. This seemed to work for a while, but then when any adversity would come I would return to my sin as I had done before. Peter describes people in this situation like this: “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.”(2 Peter 2:20 ESV) I felt that.

Scripture led me to understand that a believer should not be involved in continuing, ‘besetting sins’. Therefore I could reason two possibilities; I was not a Christian or I did not understand something about the process of dying to sin. Fortunately God came and ministered to me in my misery by showing me something very important that I had missed. There is a biblical principal called ‘The Law of Sin’ which brought me to an understanding of why I was doing the things I was doing. The problem wasn’t that I was choosing sin, but that I did not understand the choice I truly had to make.

The Law of Sin

At the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul identifies a human behavior that most of us are unaware of which he calls ‘the law of sin’: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” (Romans 7:21 ESV) The Christian understands that the Law of God is good and holy, and soon after the initial euphoria of grace wears off, he sets about the business of trying to keep that good and holy law. It seems perfectly logical to him that what God has done for him is to so change him that it has become possible for him to keep the law. In short order he discovers, as Paul did, that “…I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”(Romans 7:22-23 ESV)

Most Christians recognize the symptoms of this but fail to understand the underlying principles at work. This stems from a lack of understanding about the true purpose of the law. The law is not meant to be used as a means of establishing righteousness before God. It was never intended to be kept by human effort. On the contrary, Paul says “…by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”(Romans 3:20 ESV) In other words, the law can only show us what sin is but has no power to produce righteousness or counter sin in our lives.

Paul explains this back in Romans 7. The law helped him to realize covetousness as a sin, but did not have the effect of restraining it. “Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.”(Romans 7:7-8 ESV) In reality, the commandment had the effect of inciting the sin that lived within his flesh to all kinds of covetousness.

Wait a minute! Scripture appears to be saying that we cannot choose whether or not to sin because when we try to make right choices, the sin in our flesh will cause us to do what we know is not right! That is exactly the case. And Paul could not have given us a better description of what this is like than he does in Romans 7:15-20(ESV):

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

In other words, you do not have the choice of whether or not to sin. Try and do right by your own power and you will do wrong because there are underlying principles at work here that don’t even involve your will.

That makes no sense. I thought that when I became a Christian and the Holy Spirit came to dwell within me that I was invincible? That’s the way the Bible paints it: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13 ESV) This is true, if we are indeed being strengthened by his righteousness and not our own.

Sin – A Symptom of a Deeper Issue

Suppose one day you are driving down a street in a town where there is no established speed limit. As you pass a school driving 85 miles an hour, a police officer sitting in his cruiser in the parking lot politely smiles and waves at you.  He has no problem with your excessive speed because there is no speed law, so you are not in violation of the law.

Six months later you pass through that town again, but they now have established speed limits throughout. You smile and wave to the same officer in the same parking lot as you drive past the school at the same speed, but this time he pulls you over and writes you a speeding ticket. Because there is a speeding law, and you violated it, you are a criminal.

What we have just seen in action is what Paul describes in Romans 7:8: “…apart from the law, sin lies dead.” When you were not under any law, your speeding was not a crime. When you came under the law, you were condemned as a law-breaker for speeding. This is the counter-intuitive way in which God freed us from sin; by removing us from under the law. Our problem with sin is secondary to our problem with the law. We cannot meet the law of our own strength because as soon as we try, we come back under it and are exposed to sin, guilt and condemnation. In fact, the reason we cannot have a relationship with God outside of the atoning work of Christ is not that we sin (if that were so no Christian could have a relationship with God) but that we do not accept God’s remedy to sin. We are condemned not for our behavior, but for our insulting self-righteousness in trying to satisfy God apart from the savior. If we understand this we can understand why Jesus said: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”(John 3:18 ESV) He could have easily stated that humanity was condemned because of sin, but it is our stubborn refusal of the righteousness that can be found only in His son that truly leads to condemnation.
   

If we could satisfy God by our performance then why did Christ die? “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”(Galatians 2:21 ESV) The point is that we want to fight sin, thinking that God is displeased with us for sinning, when in fact it is the fight that displeases Him. He wants us to rest in the freedom from the law (and hence ‘the law of sin’, sin, guilt, condemnation and death) that’s already been established through His tremendous sacrifice for us. He wants us to know that as believers, the law has power neither to condemn us nor give opportunity to the sin in our flesh. When we try to keep the law for the purpose of righteousness before God, it is a tremendous insult to Him who lived, suffered and died to free us from the law.

This is exactly why we are never told to fight sin head-on in scripture. We are told to flee it and die to it, but not to fight it. We are, however, told to fight our tendency to seek the familiar shelter of the law.

Hardwired to Fail

Human beings are hardwired for law. We like a comfortable boundary in which we can operate that makes it easy for us to see how we are performing. Out of bounds = bad, inbounds = good. It looks like a very simple process. The reason people are like this is that the law of God is actually part of us, as Paul says in Romans 2:15: “…the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”

This being the case, legalism (religion) is our natural state and preference. Trying to keep the law satisfies our own sense of righteousness and makes us feel like we are ‘doing our part’. Though we may believe in God and have accepted Christ as our savior, left to ourselves we remain far more comfortable with Benjamin Franklin’s adage that ‘God helps those that help themselves’ than we are with Jesus’ statement  that “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”(Matthew 10:39 ESV) This is exactly what Jesus is calling for here – completely relinquishing our right to try to satisfy God by our performance by accepting his performance in our place. The Bible does not teach that God helps us to keep the law, but that we can only fulfill the law as we live by faith in that fact that it has already been kept by Jesus. The instant we try to step outside our identity before God in Christ and establish our own righteousness, sin overtakes us.

This is the problem that Paul faces head-on in the book of Galatians. The Galatians churches were evidently experiencing problems with sin. Paul lists a number of things that we can suspect were issues in those churches: “…sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” (Galatians 5:19-21 ESV) Paul calls these ‘the works of the flesh’. The word flesh implies not necessarily the sinful nature, but human effort. Paul indicates that these sins are evidence that the churches are living according to human effort and not according to the Spirit of grace which God has given them.

At the beginning of chapter 5, he states: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”(ESV) We might naturally assume that he is talking about freedom from sin, but he is not. Reading on he says: “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”(Galatians 5:4 ESV) Christ has set us free from the law – from trying to please God by our performance. He has set us free from walking according to the flesh under the law. The absence of intentional sin in our lives is evidence that we are not walking in the flesh, but in the Spirit.

God has literally removed you from the dominance of sin by declaring you righteous through faith in Christ as if you had already fulfilled the law. “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:14 ESV) As long as you walk in the Spirit in the grace of the Father and not by the flesh, seeking to establish your own righteousness, sin will not dominate you.

The Law of the Spirit of Life

In Romans 8, Paul goes on contrast the law of sin with what he calls “the law of the Spirit of life”. What is that? It is the law of the New Covenant that Christ established. It is not primarily commandments, imperatives or rules, but an announcement of what God has accomplished on our behalf that we call the gospel. Fulfilling the commandments of the New Testament (and for that matter the law of Moses) depends upon our moment by moment understanding and living by faith according to this 'good news'.

Remember back to the time when you first obeyed the gospel call. Remember how you felt and thought about what God had done for you. For some period of time in your early Christian life you probably felt that knowing what God had done for you was enough. It satisfied you and allowed you to live with more freedom than you had known before. That is the purpose of the gospel, to announce freedom to those in bondage to the law (and therefore sin).

Because we think the gospel is mostly for outsiders - a tool of evangelism -  we fail to remind ourselves of  what Christ has done for us as Christians. We are trained to think that once we are saved God moves us on to greater truths than the gospel, which we consider to be the basics of Christianity. But look at what Jesus says: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32 ESV) What is his word? What is the truth? The gospel. The good news that Christ has done for you what you could never do for yourself by setting you free from your slavish attempts at appeasing God's wrath. When we fail to abide (remain) saturated in the glorious truth of the gospel, we will inevitably slip back into bondage to the law. We, like Adam and Eve in Eden, suddenly recognize our nakedness again and will seek to hide ourselves from God.

If sin is truly our primary offense against God, why did Jesus spend his time with tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners as the scripture tells us? He must not have been offended by sin in those who recognized that they were sinners. But the religion of the Pharisees was a great offense to him. The worst sin that a man could commit was to try to please God by his outward behavior, his performance of the law. “You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” (Matthew 23:26 ESV) It was humanity’s pathetic and pretentious attempts to satisfy God by their performance which invariably offended the Son of God. He said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”(Mark 2:17 ESV) Christian, that sickness is still in you, and you still need a physician. Don’t kid yourself.

Though it is often taught that we cannot have a relationship to God because of our sin, Paul uses very plain language to describe what truly separates us from God. "Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith." (Galatians 3:23-26 ESV) This is exactly why Paul could claim to be an Apostle, called of God, and the chief of sinners at the same time; because even though sin still dwelt in his flesh, he was free from the law which allowed dominance of sin. He no longer related to God as a guardian, but as a father.  It also explains the apparent contradiction in 1 John between "No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him" (3:6 ESV) and "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." (1:8 ESV) Sin still resides in our flesh, but apart from the law "there is...now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."(Romans 8:1 ESV) We have become sons who have no need of a guardian.

Keeping the law, when attempted in the flesh, can have no other effect than to arouse our self-righteousness. That is why we are trying to keep the law, to prove our own ‘godliness’ and ‘holiness’. If we succeed then we will really have something to boast about, but not before God because God is not impressed (Romans 4:2). He has ordained only one way in which mankind can be declared righteous – through faith in the sacrifice of his son on Calvary. When we turn from grace to our performance in an effort to please God, we are denying Christ and offending God. We need to know that God is satisfied only by the life and death of his son, and without faith in the son, it is impossible to even know the Father let alone please Him. “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” (John 8:19 ESV)

While we cannot fight sin in our lives, we can fight the root cause of sin by standing firm in our resolution not to try to satisfy God by our performance. That is what Paul tells the Galatian churches in Galatians 5:1: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery [to the law].”

That’s Easy Believism

Jesus said “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15 ESV) You could take that two ways. You might hear him saying “If you want to prove your love for me, do what I say”, or as “When you come to the place of deep love and appreciation for me, you will be able to keep my commandments.” Do you see a huge difference between the two? The first is really all about us and how well we perform the things he gave us to do. The second is really all about his performance on our behalf, which enables us to keep his commandments. When we truly love him, we will bear much fruit for him because he becomes the source of that fruit. “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5 ESV)

So much of the church today is under the subtle spell of the ‘us’ mentality. It’s all about what we can do for God. We need to be doing his commandments. We need to be doing the things that please him. We think we are doing a great service for God. Faith without works is dead, we quote. (James 2:17) The problem is that works without faith is not only dead, but leads to death. Before we can be of any use to God, we need to do the one work that he demands:  “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”(John 6:29 ESV) Effectively, that is the one work we can do – to believe on Christ every day. To hear the gospel anew every day. That is standing firm. All the fruit of our lives that is pleasing to God flows from that one work. In the same way that the works of the flesh (self-righteousness) are sin, the fruit of the Spirit (Christ-righteousness) are works which issue forth from grace.

Here’s how Paul sums it up: “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.” (Romans 7:4 ESV) We can do “many wonderful works” in his name (Matthew 7:22) but we can bear no fruit until we are dead to works-righteousness.

Lawlessness

Of course Paul was charged by many with preaching lawlessness when he expounded the radical freedom that is ours in Christ. He was accused of teaching that the more we sin, the greater grace will abound in our lives. If analyzed in totality, the New Testament proves that this is a circular, self-defeating argument.

We recoil at the thought of absolute freedom from guilt, shame, sin and most of all self. So we automatically start to our fall-back position of “Without any law, people will take license”. That’s easy to think if you have forgotten what Paul said back in Romans chapter 7; that apart from the law, sin lies dead. Anyone who abandons themselves to the grace of God is dead to the law and to sin. Will they never sin then? No. We can still curse sometimes when we hit our thumb with a hammer. But the point is that the person living under grace is not under the dominion of sin, and is under no obligation to sin. The one who lives according to the flesh (and there is no magic spell that happens at salvation – believers can live in the flesh as much as unbelievers) is under obligation to sin. Speaking to believers, Paul says:  “For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Romans 8:6-8 ESV). The only way to defeat hostility toward God and submit to God's law is to set our minds upon His grace. When we do that, we may freely come out of hiding and admit to God and others what we truly are. We can let the fig leaves drop, so to speak, and stand naked before God once more without shame. 

The idea that grace is dangerous is the doctrine of demons. There is no doubt we hate this kind of freedom because a freedom that someone else purchased has nothing to do with us. We like our merit badges and we hate to give them up.

We might erroneously think that introducing a little law along with grace is not going to hurt. But, as Paul warns the Galatians, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”(Galatians 5:9 ESV) Jesus compared the self-righteousness of the Pharisees to yeast (Matthew 16:11). Even the tiniest amount of yeast added to a dough will eventually work through the whole lump. My wife the baker tells me that left alone, eventually the yeast will consume all of the other ingredients in the dough. Dabbling with trying to keep the 'weak and worthless elementary principles of this world' (Galatians 4:8-11) is like introducing a tiny amount of yeast (self-righteousness) into the dough of your life. Sooner or later, it will completely consume the grace that God has imparted to you.

Lawlessness is not something to fear. If someone lives under grace they will not continue in obligation nor make a habit of sinning. The ones who are consumed with sin are those who do not live under grace, and they will not only make a habit of sinning, but indeed are obliged to do so. They do not have the freedom of choice they think they do.

Gospel, Gospel and More Gospel

Want to start making right choices now that you know what the choices are? Try an experiment for one week. Before your feet hit the floor in the morning every day, think about what Christ has accomplished for you. Don’t think this way – “I hope when I lay my head back on this pillow tonight I have had the kind of day that pleases God.” Think this way – “Because of what Christ secured for me by his life and death, nothing that happens today will affect my relationship with God. He has secured my place with God.”

Preach it to yourself. Because Christ was perfect, I can be imperfect. Because Christ fulfilled the law, I need not struggle to do so myself. Because Christ has victory, I can embrace defeat. Because Christ is faithful, my unfaithfulness is of little consequence. Because Christ won, I can lose.

There is nothing that the world can throw at you that will cause you to second-guess your God when you live knowing that it is his performance only that matters.

It's Not About Us, Really

Now we've all heard time and time again that Christianity is not about us. We've heard that it's not about us because God has given us a purpose and we need to be fulfilling that purpose. No more lolligagging about church! Up and at 'em! It's the least we can do in veiw of the fact that God loves us. In fact, you were born to this purpose and you just never knew it. It's not about us, so let us do what God wants us to be doing.

Do you see how the message that it's 'not about us' becomes all about us when it's a message of how important we are to God and His purposes? News flash: God loves us but he doesn't need us to accomplish his purposes.

Here's the real reason it's not about us: we have nothing to do with who we are in God except for accepting it (maybe). Here's a great definition of salvation from Paul:

"In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory."
(Ephesians 1:11-14 ESV)

God had a purpose for us. That purpose was to send His only son to save us from the wrath we had incurred by our lawlessness. God sent some faithful missionary into our lives who preached the gospel carefully enough that when we heard it, we came to beleive in Christ. Then God sealed us with His Holy Spirit. The only part of that that we could possibly have been responsible for is the beleiving, but if we are honest we would have to admit that none of us would have beleived that God came to earth in the flesh, was put to death by the Romans on a cross at the insistence of the Jews, was buried for three days and then rose from the dead. It's ludicrous! So in all likelihood our beleif as well came from God too.

And that's why it's not about us. Not because we have chosen of our free will to stop doing things our way and to live according to God's percieved purposes, but because we didn't earn any of it. Christian, you are this very morning a child of God, fully redeemed by the blood of the lamb. That is your purpose. Walk in it and see where God leads you.

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Regeneration

I get farther and farther away from the 'magic wand' theory of regeneration every day. I do not doubt that we are made new creatures (first and foremost because scripture is clear on that point). Acceptance of the 'message of the cross' as anything other than foolishness is evidence of that. But I get farther away from the idea that being new creatures we are endowed with special powers within ourselves to combat sin and self-righteousness in our lives.

I spent so many years thinking that I was something completely different and wondering why in the world I could not live as if I were different. It all led to guilt and 'trying harder'. It was Romans 7 that finally dawned the light that sin is still alive in my flesh. Unbelievers have no concern about sin, they are just doing what comes naturally. The believer knows better and goes through torment as to why he can't seem to act according to that knowledge. I think that is what Paul is describing in Romans 7. All of the power we have to combat these things is external to us. It is by faith in Christ alone that we are being saved, just as it was by faith in Christ alone that we are saved. The Holy Spirit indwells us to remind us constantly to abide in Christ and what he has accomplished (1 John 2:27).

Patiently Enduring Evil

In the last couple of years I have gone through a long and painful, if exciting, process of change. Things have really opened up, especially the scripture. I know that of late I have come across as pretty rude and pig-headed at times, and I realize that I have not been very gentle in the things I have said. I have often adopted the attitude of Paul in Galatians where he writes of those who would draw the churches away from grace, "I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!" (Galatians 5:12)

But in so doing I have forgotten Paul's injunction to Timothy: "Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will." (2 Timothy 2:23-26)

I want to apologize for having allowed my sense of right to carry me into a place where I have disregarded gentleness. I do not say that it is self-righteousness that has carried me away, but a severe jealousy for the gospel and a true and deep concern for those who are unwittingly in the snare of the devil.

Our enemy is not omnipresent. I don't believe that Satan actually micro-manages each of our lives and causes bad things to happen to us. He doesn't need to. He has set the church on a course that makes it almost impossible, outside of certain circles, to come to a liberating saving knowledge of Christ. Realizing this, I know that the battle we must wage is not against flesh and blood, and we cannot make it that. It is against powers and principalities that we struggle.When I say some of the things I say, they come from the frustration I feel at seeing the bigger picture of what Satan has done to so successfully deceive the church.

So I often have knee-jerk reactions to things that I see around me. I am genuinely offended by many things that appear to be good things. I have not chosen to be offended by them. Many of them I would gladly have embraced two years ago, and it would be far easier to embrace them and stop swimming against the current. But in the course of the last two years I have come to see many, many things as a threat to the freedom that Christ suffered and died to bring humankind. I see these things as an affront to God, a snare to people, and as threatening the demise of the church. It is more upsetting to me than anything I've ever known.

Here's the deal though. "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence..." (2 Peter 1:3) Among those things are the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control. By faith all of these things are already mine. So by the grace of God I must become more patient in enduring evil. I need to be an encourager, not one who starts controversies and breeds quarrels.

Let me end this with an encouragement. There is nothing you can do of yourself to please God. You can not clean yourself up enough to make him satisfied. The holiness of God is unattainable by human effort. But there is one who has pleased God and satisfied all of His holy requirements. Only as you, by faith, accept his righteousness as your own do you fulfill and satisfy the holy demands of a holy God. And only then will you be free from the obligation to the flesh, self-righteousness and sin. Christian, place your faith in him anew today. Find that first love, the joy of your salvation, and walk in it today.

Good Bless 

When Words Speak Louder Than Actions...

Do our actions speak louder than words? Is it our walk and not our talk that really counts? This idea is prevalent across the entire demographic of the church. So is it true?

It is clear to me that the Bible places a great deal of importance on the spoken word. Beginning with the account of creation in Genesis, where God spoke everything into existence, the Bible tells us that words matter. Words are important. Very important.

We need to understand what New Testament writers are referring to when they refer to the word of God. For example, the popular verse "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12) What is meant by 'the word of God'? A little exploration reveals that the phrase 'word of God', as used here and elsewhere, is not referring to the canon of scripture (indeed scripture was not yet canonized) but to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For example, Peter writes in his first epistle "...since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God... And this word is the good news that was preached to you." (1 Peter 1:23-25)

The living and active Word is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel is 'good news' - an announcement of the redemption of mankind. The gospel cannot be represented by our actions, as it is not something we act out (though we do, hopefully, live it out). The gospel is words. Just as God spoke everything into existence, salvation comes by no other means than through that which God has given us to speak - the gospel. You see, no one can truly come to faith without the gospel because "...faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ." (Romans 10:17) The word 'of' here could just as easily be translated 'about'. So what we do is of little consequence in producing faith, as faith comes by hearing words about Christ.

Jesus was an example to us, but not primarily an example. Jesus came to be a savior. He came to live a life of perfect law-keeping and to die on the cross. We can hold him up all we want as an example, but when we fail to tell people of what he accomplished we are withholding from them the truth that is supposed to set them free. By grace we live a life that pleases God, not by trying to follow an example. It is the gospel alone that is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who beleives (Romans 1:16).

We so need to stop thinking that we are the gospel. We are not The Word. Jesus was The Word - the logos. We are sinners saved by grace through the hearing of the word about Christ. To lead people to believe otherwise is to endanger their souls. When we say that our actions speak louder than words, we are saying that we are a replacement for The Word. Even if actions do speak louder than words, the word of God (the gospel of Jesus Christ) speaks louder than both.

Richard Lovelace Quote

Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin, that consciously they see little need for justification. Below the surface, however, they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification….drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity…their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

Revisiting Law: The Power of Sin

REVISITING LAW: THE POWER OF SIN
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 15:56-57

So now that we have inherited God’s righteousness through faith in the completed work of Christ and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, are we done with sin? The answer is yes and no. In truth, sin is alive and well within our flesh and always will be until we are no longer in this flesh, but we have a choice of whether or not to feed it. 

The Law of Sin and Death

Paul discovered an odd truth about sin; it feeds on the law. The choice we will have to make every day for the rest of our lives is not “will I sin or not?” but “will I walk in grace or under law?” Am I “the old man or the new man”, as Paul would say? This is a critical decision because it will determine our relationship to sin and to God. In Romans chapter 7, Paul explains that “apart from the law, sin lies dead.”[1] He then goes on to explain the correlation between sin and law in the life of a believer.

First, as Paul did, we must dispense with any notion that the law is sin. The law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous and good[2].

“What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means!”[3]

What Paul discovered was not that the law itself was sin, but that when we try to keep the law the sin within our flesh seizes the opportunity to do good which is afforded by the law, and creates in us the desire to do exactly the opposite. Though we acknowledge with our minds that the law is right, we cannot carry it out because the sin within us wages war against our minds and causes us to break the very law we are trying to keep. In Romans 8:2, Paul labels this principal as ‘the law of sin and death’. This spiritual principle is every bit as binding as any physical principal, such as the laws of gravity or inertia. Just as I always expect a heavy object to fall downward and not upward, I should expect that any attempt I make to try to please God by my performance will fail because “when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”[4]

“The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.”[5]

What this means is that we cannot defeat sin by our own efforts, or even ‘with God’s help’. If you search the New Testament, you will find that while we are told to flee sin and to count ourselves dead to sin, we are never told to fight it. Jesus said, “And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.”[6] He does not say “Train your hand or foot not to sin.” Why? Because, as Paul discovered, we can’t fight sin. The good news is that we don’t have to. Paul makes this clear in Romans 8:3-4:

“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

Skipping a Step

By trying to face the sin in our flesh head on, we are skipping a step. While it seems intuitive that a Christian indwelt by the Spirit should have the willpower to keep the law and please God, we cannot precisely because of the law of sin and death. The answer, once again, lies not with us but with the atoning work of Christ.

This is a familiar scripture passage that is frequently misinterpreted:

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”[7]

We often assume that Paul is telling us that Christ has freed us from the yoke of sin, and that we should refuse to fall back into it. But it is not sin that Paul is speaking of. It is the law. As he continues, he has strong words for the Galatian churches:

“You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”[8]

The churches had come under the teaching of those who demanded that believers must be circumcised. To submit to circumcision, Paul insisted, was to be severed from the Savior and placed under obligation to keep the whole of the law. As with unbelievers, the instant we try by the flesh to keep any part of the law as a means of pleasing God, we bring ourselves under obligation to all of it. Many will argue that Paul was speaking only of the ceremonial law (including circumcision and the sacrifice of animals for sin atonement) but in Romans 7 the law he uses to illustrate his principle of ‘the law of sin and death’ is the tenth Commandment, part of the moral law.

Here is the choice we have to make:

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.”[9]

The last verse seems oddly placed, but with it Paul equates living under the law with walking in the flesh. The ‘flesh’ is that which is of human origin, that which we do by our own power. When we try, under our own power, to satisfy God by what we do (or don’t do) we come back under the law of sin and death. Regardless of our intention to do right, this amounts to self-righteousness, the very sin that Jesus was constantly speaking against in the Pharisees. When we do this we are in effect saying that Christ is not sufficient – the greatest of insults.

Self-righteousness is the underlying ‘disease’ that manifests itself in myriad sinful symptoms. Addictions to wealth, sex, power, work, possessions, and human approval (co-dependency) are actually an outgrowth of the self-righteousness of a heart that does not trust the sufficiency of Christ as expressed in the scriptural gospel. These are signs that deep inside we are still struggling to ‘get’ something we don’t have, not walking in the all-encompassing grace that we already have. Ignorant of, disregarding or unwilling to submit to the righteousness that is already ours in Christ, we re-double our efforts to establish our own righteousness, which brings us under deeper subjection to the law of sin and death. This creates a vicious, confusing and frustrating cycle, which Paul describes perfectly in the latter part of Romans 7.

The End of the Law for Righteousness

There is a particular and peculiar way in which Christ defeated the power of sin on the cross. He completely fulfilled the law so that we don’t have to:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”[10]

It is important to note that the law was not abolished but fulfilled. The law still has work to do in convicting the unsaved and expressing the moral will of God, but once it has driven us to Christ it cannot work righteousness in us and need not as Christ has already done so. As believers, we need to recognize the foolishness of trying to keep the law as a means of establishing righteousness before God. Paul states:

“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”[11]

Here it is again:

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’…”[12]

And again:

“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.”[13]

You might be recognizing a pattern here. Paul says that apart from the law, sin lies dead. The gospel tells us that Christ defeated sin in a very counter-intuitive manner; he fulfilled the law by his perfect life and death so that when we identify ourselves with him we also die to the law, setting us ‘apart from the law’ so that ‘sin lies dead’. Paul describes this process with clarity in Colossians 2:13-14 (ESV):

 “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

In effect, when we walk by faith in the righteousness of Christ and not by trying to observe the law, sin is deprived of its power and starves to death. If we set our minds on fulfilling the law by the flesh, sin will grow stronger in us day by day. As he expounds the law of sin and death in Romans 8, Paul states:

“For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

He makes no distinction here between believer and unbeliever, only on what the mind is set on. We all have essentially the same choice to make; will I try to please God by my performance of the law (which Paul says is impossible) or will I accept, by faith, the fact that Christ has fulfilled the law on my behalf and receive life and peace? Will I be a Romans 7 or a Romans 8 Christian? These are the wide and narrow gates that Jesus spoke of.

Oddly, we accept the fact that we need the grace of God to be saved when we realize that we can’t keep the law, and then after we’re saved we begin to try to please God by struggling to keep the law. Jesus kept the law for us, which means that the law is fulfilled in us only as, by faith, we receive what he has done on our behalf on a moment by moment basis. We need the gospel as a constant reminder of who we have become so that we continually recognize the futility of establishing our own identity apart from Christ. This alone can keep the monster of self-righteousness at bay.

We will readily believe that Jesus defeated death and sin on the cross, but shy away from his fulfillment of the law. We are, by nature, creatures which gravitate toward legalism. We want everything in a box; to know where our boundaries are because we expect to be rewarded or punished based on how well we stay within bounds. Grace demolishes that box. It says that we are not graded based on performance, but on relationship, free and unmerited. Grace is absolutely uncharted territory for us, so wild and undomesticated and counter-self that we are terrified of it! It truly frees us from the law of sin and death so that we might begin to fulfill the law in the new way of the Spirit.[14]

The Law of the Spirit of Life

Paul instructed the Colossians:

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”[15]

How did we receive Christ? By hearing and believing the gospel. How then ought we to walk in Christ? By hearing and believing the gospel.

Walking in the Spirit, keeping the law of the Spirit of life, consists of constantly bringing into remembrance the truth of the gospel. We need to understand as completely as we can the depth and the breadth of what Christ has already secured for us. It means an end to trying to perform well enough to garner God’s blessing or avoid his punishment by recognizing that Christ’s performance on our behalf has pleased God. A few verses later, Paul tells the Colossians what it is that they walk in:

“May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”[16]

There is no need to strive to qualify ourselves before God. Christ has qualified us. There is no need to struggle free of darkness. Christ has delivered us and transferred us to his kingdom. There is no need to try and redeem ourselves by our own works. Christ has redeemed us. There is no need for condemnation or shame. We are forgiven.

We have to make a choice daily whether we walk in all of this, which has already been accomplished, or whether we seek by the flesh to please God. When we focus on the box – rules, laws, principles and regulations – we lose sight of the truth that we are absolutely, positively, unashamedly, unreservedly free to draw close to and please God by faith in what Jesus Christ alone has accomplished. This, also, is the gospel truth.

None of us expects that by our own force of will we can achieve eternal life; that we can defeat death. None of us expects to be able to defeat sin by our own willpower, though we try without even realizing it. But many (if not most) of us expect that we can and assume that we must try to keep the law, which is the very power of the sin that we struggle against. These three things are actually interrelated in a domino-like fashion, death is dependent on sin, and sin is dependent on the law:

“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.”[17]

Apart from the law, the power of sin is gone; apart from sin, the sting of death is gone. In a very real way, our redemption from sin and our victory over death are largely accomplished by Christ’s fulfillment of the law. When you dismiss the truth that the law was fulfilled for the believer at the cross, you have a very difficult time reconciling the other two.

Conclusion

Scripture shows us that to keep the law by our own righteousness is impossible. The biblical answer to sin is to trust in the completed work of Jesus Christ and stand firm against the temptation to walk in your own righteousness, the worst of all sins. As we do this, we will begin to realize something really wonderful about the gospel; it is not just the door to Christian life, it is life itself.





[1]Romans 7:8 ESV


[2] Romans 7:12 ESV


[3] Romans 7:7 ESV


[4] Romans 7:21 ESV


[5] Romans 7:10-11 ESV


[6] Matthew 18:8 ESV


[7] Galatians 5:1 ESV


[8] Galatians 5:4 ESV


[9] Galatians 5:16-18 ESV


[10] Matthew 5:17 ESV


[11] Romans 10:4 ESV


[12]Galatians 3:13 ESV


[13]Romans 7:4 ESV


[14] Romans 7:6


[15] Colossians 2:6-7


[16] Colossians 1:11-14


[17] 1 Corinthians 15:56-57 ESV

More Amazing Grace

What a journey! I look back over the last two years of my life and see step-by-step where God has led me to a new understanding of what it means to grow as a Christian. Christian growth does not occur as we become something we are not, but as we become increasingly something we already are.

It started with evangelism. Through the Way of the Master I started to understand that salvation was about the righteousness of God more than anything else. The aim of the gospel was to show people that they could be righteous in no other way than through faith in Christ. I think through that realization, I either got saved or understood the need for grace for the first time in my Christian experience. I also understood that there was no righteousness or goodness in me and that to please God I had to rely solely on Christ's righteousness.

Then there was an in depth look at the law and the purpose of the law. Again, through Ray Comfort (by way of Luther, Spurgeon and others) I came to understand that the purpose of the law was to lead us to grace. By forcing us to acknowledge that we could not please God by what we do, the law pointed us to the only other alternative - the savior.

Then there was the dawning realization that the gospel is every bit as important to the believer as it is to the unsaved. That it is the only touchstone of God on earth. Jesus announced, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." It could easily be assumed that he meant that no unsaved person could come to the Father except through him. Little by little I came to realize that he did not distinguish between the redeemed and the lost. NO ONE comes to the Father except through him.

This left a final hurdle. What to do with the law as a believer? I had seen Paul's abuse of the law as the "principles of this world" in Galatians. Then there is Romans 10:4: "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." The emphatic call of Galations 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." In context it was clear that Paul was speaking about the yoke of the law. Further on he equates walking in the flesh with living according to the law. Romans 7 and 8, 1 Corinthians 15 - "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 15:56-57 ESV) It became increasing clear to me that the law had the odd effect of causing the sin within us to rise up and assert itself (Paul defines this principle as "the law of sin and death" in Romans 7).

I became convinced that the law was not necessary to the believer. As I began to speak confidently about such things, I was told that I had to be careful. Christ is the end of the "ceremonial law" but not the moral law. That I was preaching antinomianism and that was dangerous. We can't allow people to think that they, by the grace of God alone, have been freed from the law. They will go willy-nilly.

Which brings us to this week. I have had one of the hardest struggles of my life this past month. As my home church drifts farther and farther from the gospel and into asceticism, it is killing me. Sunday morning before the service I thought I might have to go to the hospital because I thought, quite frankly, that I was having a heart attack (this will be news to my wife, though I don't think she reads the blog - nobody does). What I didn't realize was that my biggest struggle was inside of me. It was a struggle between grace and law. Here is what was going on, from Galatians 5:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.(Galatians 5:16-18 ESV)

So yesterday I came to the conclusion that what Paul means by 'not under the law' is actually 'not under the law'. I can prove nothing to God by keeping or breaking the law, because by faith Christ is proof enough for God. In fact, I feel I have nothing to prove to anyone. Nothing to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of. I recognized that my identity before God and man is completely dependent on Christ. You see, it is never about what we can do or not do to win God's approval. Christ won God's approval, and God says that faith in Christ is enough for me to be approved as well. No more law. I remains to be seen if I go willy-nilly. But why would I ever trade this FREEDOM for that old yoke of slavery again?

Forgiveness

While doing evangelism on the square this past weekend, I ran into a person who was so violently apposed to the gospel that I was taken aback. Actually, she never got to hear the gospel because she stormed off saying that "all we have to do is ask God to forgive us and we will go to heaven". I tried to tell her that she was partially correct, but she would have none of it. Her statement begs a question; if all we need do is ask God to forgive our sins, why did God send his son to die for us?

Though much of the church would deny it, she is expressing something which is common to the gospel that most of us preach. Just ask God for forgiveness and He will forgive and give you eternal life. The cross has become, in some ways, a sideshow. Ask God to forgive you and invite Jesus into your heart. Jesus died for you. What does that even mean?

You see, we are by nature slaves to sin. We break the Commandments. People disregard God's holy law and use his name as a cuss word, go about in the ignorance (even hatred) of God, and we tell them that Jesus loves them. He does. He loves them so much that he died a horrible death and suffered unimaginable spiritual consequences on their behalf. But we don't tell them that. We tell them that Jesus loves them.

God expresses His love to humanity in one way - "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8). Look to the scripture. Is there another way by which God shows his love to unsaved humanity? Is there a way by which someone can approach God aside from the grace which is by faith? Not in the Bible. God's love for humanity is historical fact, not emotional pandering. We need to get past the idea that God goes around begging people to return to Him. He has once for all shown His love to humanity and put a church in place to point humanity to that fact. We are failing.

If God were to forgive us our sins simply for asking, he would be acting contrary to His nature. God is perfectly holy and just. God does not let lawlessness slide. He can't. He says "This is the standard. Break the standard and there will be hell to pay." His justice must be satisfied. He demands nothing less than perfection. Jesus said "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."(Matthew 5:48) Until you are perfect, you have no basis from which to ask for God's forgiveness. The bad news is you can't make yourself that perfect, so forgiveness is beyond your grasp as a human being.

Here is one of our favorite scripture soundbites to use while sharing the Gospel, Romans 3:23; "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23 ESV). Here it is in context:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.(Romans 3:21-26 ESV)

What does it mean that God put Christ forward as a "propitiation by his blood"? It means that sent his son to die that He might be appeased by the blood of Christ. So the death of Christ pleased God. It appeased His wrath. What does that mean to us? It means that in order for God to be pleased with us, to have any relationship with this holy God, we must in some way be identified with Christ. In what way? By faith as verse 26 says. By faith in what Christ did on the cross, we become identified with him and God looks on us with pleasure. God forgives us not because we ask Him, but because He has been propitiated by the blood of Christ on our behalf. This is the only path to forgiveness that the scripture describes. We don't invite Jesus into our hearts. We place our faith in him knowing there is no other way to please God, no other way to be declared righteous.

I was very saddened by this encounter on the square. It is heartbreaking to see someone so violently apposed to that idea that God is just and holy and will punish for sin. What kind of God would set forth rules and consequences and not follow through? More importantly, what an incredible God we have that sent his only son to die that we may be declared perfect in His sight? I will pray for her and hope that someday, someone will get the truth through to her.