The Key to the Spiritual Life: The Holy Spirit
Romans 8:1-5
We are in Romans 8 and since it's been a while since I was here I'm going to do a little bit of review. Now Romans 6, 7, and 8 is the best and most detailed or logically developed explanation of the spiritual life within the epistles written by Paul. The first epistle that Paul wrote was the epistle to the Galatians. Galatians contains in sort of a seed or seminal form a lot of the basic teaching that we find here in Romans 6, 7, and 8 although by the time Paul wrote Romans he has developed his thinking much more and he's writing a different kind of letter to the Christians in Rome. He's laying out in an extremely logical manner the foundation for Christianity.
First he deals with the problem of sin in the first couple of chapters. And then the problem that if man is unrighteousness then how does man get righteousness. Man gets righteousness by having it given to him by God: justification by faith alone is the doctrine. Righteousness is imputed or reckoned or given to the person who believes the promise of God, specifically in this age, the promise that Jesus Christ is the Savior, the Messiah, the One who died on the cross for our sins. So as we walk our way through Romans we see there's a tight, logical progression. Sin, then justification, Romans 3, then Romans 4. Romans 5 begins to work out the benefits of our justification because we have been justified by faith, Paul begins in Romans 5:1. We have, as a present possession, peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. As we get into Romans 5:12 and following, Paul is setting up the transition from talking about how to be justified to the topic of Romans 6, 7, and 8 which is how does the justified person live.
So the issue in Romans 6, 7, and 8 isn't how to move from spiritual death to spiritual life. The issue isn't how to become justified. The issue is how does a justified person live. So when we get into passages in Romans 6, 7 and 8 that talk about death we have to remember that isn't talking about the spiritual death of the unsaved person. That would mean the solution is justification, regeneration, but the true issue is the death-like experience of the believer who continues to swim in the stream of carnality. As long as we are living according to the flesh, which is the term Paul will use, then we experience the same consequences of sin that the unbeliever experiences who is spiritually dead.
The believer does not become spiritually dead once he is made alive in Christ but he does experience a death-like existence because he's not benefiting from the life-giving blessings and benefits that God has already given to us as believers. As we have studied in Romans 6, 7, and 8 connected to what we've been studying in Colossians Paul approaches the Christian life the same way by going first and foremost to what happens in the legal realm before the throne of God at the instant the person believes in Jesus. There is a transformation that occurs at that point in time, a transformation that not only involves a declaration of justification and not only involves regeneration but also involves not only that doctrine that is misunderstood today also, called the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
We studied that that should be more accurately interpreted or translated as the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. It's an identification that occurs at the instant that we trust in Christ, at that instant when you say, "I believe that Jesus died for me, will save me, that Jesus is the One who paid my penalty". As soon as we trust in Him, at that instant, God the Holy Spirit, is used by Jesus to transform us and to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection. It is through that identification with His death, burial, resurrection that we enter into Christ.
This is a doctrine or theology often referred to as positional truth because it refers to the truth of our new position in Christ. Paul goes back to this in Colossians 2 and 3. Everything he says about the Christian life is based upon our understanding of this radical thing that happens. We don't experience it. The only way you can learn about the baptism by the Holy Spirit is by reading about it in the Scripture and coming to understand it in these passages. It's not something that knocks you off your feet when you trust in Christ. It's not some inner feelings. You don't get butterflies in your stomach or the rosy glow. You don't have any kind of external manifestation. There's no experience that goes with it.
You might have the flu as a friend of mine who had mono. The only thing he could get his mind around when he was down flat on his back was a book called The Late, Great Planet Earth. He was reading through that and finally decided after years of being witnessed to by his uncle, a guy named Bill Munderlin, that some of you knew. Finally at the age of 32 he trusted in Christ and he said he just rolled over and went back to sleep. But at that instant he was baptized by the Holy Spirit and placed into Christ.
That's what Paul says in Romans 6. I'm just going to read this again for review. He says in 6:3, "Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus [entered into his death, burial, and resurrection] were baptized into his death?" When we have water baptism it depicts this abstract doctrine. That's one of the things that is a real tragedy in the history of Christianity. People haven't really understood baptism. Baptism is just like the Lord's Table; it is a visual symbol to help us grasp an abstract reality. And so in the ritual of water baptism, someone is taken and they are plunged into the water and that is a picture of our identification of Christ in His death.
At Christ's death what did he do? He paid the penalty for sin so sin is dealt with at that point so our identification with Christ in his death has to do with the application of that payment of the sin penalty to us. Being under the water is analogous to Jesus being in the grave for three days and then when we come out of the water that is a picture of Christ's resurrection to new life and that we now have a new life because of our identification with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection. So Paul says, "Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus [that's everyone who believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sins] were baptized or identified into His death. Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."
It's in that verse that Paul says that it's in that verse that we learn how to walk in newness of life. It's not a methodology. You're not going to get it because you come to church and you hear five points on how to be a victorious Christian or ten points on how to live the Christian life, how to walk the Christian walk. Paul says that the way you're going to live as a Christian is that you have to get it inside your head the fact that you're not the person you were before you were saved. You're a new creature in Christ. You have a new identity in Christ. There are new realities about you and you have to learn these from the Word. You're not going to get them from experience. It's not going to be based on how you feel about your relationship with God. It's not going to be based on how you feel about sin. It's not going to be based on any kind of experience. It's going to be based on the fact that you understand in your head that something has changed. And then because you understand that new reality you're going to live differently. Now there are people who just have a hard time doing that.
Let me use the illustration of immigration. Back in the 19th century, if somebody immigrated to the United States, and they came from Eastern Europe or Southern Europe or they came from Western Europe or even if they came from Africa or Asia, when they came to the United States they wanted to be an American. They left behind most of their cultural identity. For a while they may live with others who came from their background because that was someone similar but as they came to understand America and English they came here to be an American. Many families that came here never had their children learn the language of their homeland. It was never taught to them because those parents understood that they had a new identity. They weren't Germans any more. They weren't Swedes. They weren't French. They weren't Russians anymore. They were now Americans. They weren't Greeks; they weren't Italians. They were Americans. And so they had a new identity and they had to learn to live in light of that new identity as defined by this new culture.
In the Christian life, it's that same way. We get a new identity and we have to quit using the language we used in the old country when we were spiritually dead and we were carnal. We need to quit thinking according to the cultural norms and standards. In the old country they were under the tyranny of a king or a dictator or an absolute ruler, just as before we were saved, we were under the tyranny of the sin nature. They have to learn to think in terms of everything they are now in this new country. Then they have to live in light of that.
But what we have today is we have people who come over from many countries but especially from Moslem countries, from Saudi Arabia or Somalia or other Arab countries. They come here and they go into apartment complexes or other areas, like a ghetto, where they're separated from America. You get people who come up from Mexico and they live in a community where everyone speaks Spanish. There may be one, two or three generations that never learn English. They don't learn to function as an American. They don't want to take on the new culture of being an American and leaving behind the culture of what they were.
That's like most Christians. They want to continue all of the ways they had before they were saved. They just want to make sure they're going to go to Heaven. But what Paul says is that you have a new identity and once you capture that new identity you're going to have freedom and learn to enjoy freedom. Just like historically people would come to America because they wanted to be free, not to do whatever they wanted to do but they wanted to be free from the intrusions of large government, big government getting into everything in their life.
I'm going to give a commercial now so if you don't want a commercial from the pulpit take a vacation mentally. Some of you know that last June I wanted to take some kind of gift with me for the people speaking to us in Israel, something from Texas. We waited until the last minute because there was so much going on and we finally decided it would be great to give them a little tin of various kinds of nuts with an outline of the state of Texas. It was too late to order them from a place in Austin where we'd get things like this before so I looked around in Houston. I found a place called the Houston Pecan Company and it's just a little warehouse kind of place over in the Gulfton ghetto area in Bellaire. We went in and I immediately recognized that the lady who seemed to be running everything was Jewish. I told her what I wanted it for, that we were going to go to Israel. That immediately established a connection.
Myers was with me and he was looking at something on the wall. It was an article from the Houston Post back in the late 80's or early 90's. It was the story of a man who had been a Holocaust survivor because of Oscar Schindler. That was the father of the lady helping me. He was the little guy who kept coming in and out in his walker. We had a great visit with him. Well, today I went back over to visit with them and to get some nuts for gifts for Christmas. There was another guy there who is an Israeli artist. I met him and got to visit with him. He was at this Israel event I spoke at about a week ago. He said, "I knew you looked familiar but I just didn't recognize you in a sweatshirt and blue jeans." When I pulled out he had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said in large letters, "The bigger the government..." Then I had to get very close because the rest was in very small letters and said, "...the smaller the citizen." I thought that was a great way to put it. We've got a lot of very conservative Jews in America who, as one Jewish writer puts it, "Israelis are Republicans and American Jews are liberals." So that sort of shows the difference between the two.
Anyway, when you have big government like people had in the old country before they came to America, it was the tyranny they left. The bigger the government, the less freedom we have. The smaller the government, the more freedom and the larger the citizen is. So when people came to America they had freedom and that fits the analogy that I'm using because when we're free from the sin nature, when we trust in Christ, that's the freedom Paul is talking about in Romans 8:1-5. It's what Paul is referring to in Galatians, chapter 5, verse 1, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage."
Freedom isn't the ability to do whatever you want to. Freedom is the freedom from the tyranny of the sin nature so we can do what God wants us to do. We're always under some sort of authority. It's either going to be our placing ourselves under the authority of the sin nature and Satan or placing ourselves under the authority of God but there's no neutral ground where we're just under our own authority. We deceive ourselves in arrogance into thinking well we're just going to live our lives my way. No, when you say I'm living life my way what you're really saying is I'm doing it Satan's way. People just ignore that particular aspect to it.
Romans 6 lays this down and says the purpose for that identification of Christ in the baptism by the Holy Spirit is for the purpose that we walk in newness of life. Now let me connect the next dot for this. I want you to turn over to Romans 7:6 which addresses the second issue here which is that not only are we delivered from the tyranny of the sin nature but, as we've seen, we're delivered from the tyranny of the Law. Paul says, "But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died [see, there's this same use of this concept of death, that identification with Christ in His death means we're dead to the sin nature, dead to the Law] to what we were held by so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the Letter."
So in Romans 6:4 we're to walk in the newness of life, now we're to serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the Letter. So the newness of the Spirit is the life we're supposed to have. But as I pointed out last time in Romans 7 where Paul is addressing the Law's relationship to sin and death he points out that the Law reveals this sinfulness of the sin nature. The more God says, "Thou shalt not" the more we want to. The more the Law says, "Thou shalt do this" then we're not so concerned about that. We want to do what we're not supposed to do. So the Law brings this out from inside the person.
The Law reveals the sin nature and the sin nature is the cause of spiritual death and it is the cause of a sort of experiential carnal death, I would add for the believer. And so Paul raises and answers these questions in Romans 7:7, "What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary..." The Law brings sin out and exposes sin in your life and Paul, as a Pharisee thought that he was able to do everything in the Law and he would impress everybody and God but what actually was happening was that he ultimately discovered that on all the externals he could deceive himself into thinking that he was accomplishing it but when he got to the last commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," he couldn't deal with the fact that he couldn't overcome mental attitude sins.
His answer is that the Law is holy and reveals sin in verses 7-12 and then in verses 13-25 he points out that the Law tells us what to do but doesn't impart the ability to perform. We know what the requirement is but there's the frustration of not being able to meet the requirement. So we do what we don't wish to do and we do not do what we want to do, which is, as a believer, to obey Him. And then we have the solution which is the Holy Spirit and at the end of chapter 7 he utters this statement, "O wretched man that I am." Why is he so frustrated? Because he can't figure out how to meet the requirements of the Law, how to live a holy life, that is how to live a life that is set apart to the service of God and all he ends up with is fulfilling the lust of the flesh which brings just failure and temporal or carnal death or operational death into his life. He has a death-like experience. He's not experiencing the joy, the happiness, the fulfillment, the significance, the meaning that should be his in Christ.
Then you see the shift in his thinking from the negativity, derision, and defeatism of verse 24 to gratitude. Gratitude and becoming praise oriented is the first step in any level of spiritual growth. Thanking God is the starting point of any kind of grace orientation. Recognizing that God did everything and that we simply have to respond to it. So in verse 25, Paul says, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the Law of God but with the flesh the law of sin." Here he's talking about serving the Law which is fulfilling the mandates of the Law but it's because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Then I spent some time on Romans 8:1. This is a very well-known textual problem which means there are some manuscripts which include the last phrase and there's some ancient manuscripts which don't so the question is whether this is really a part of the Word of God or not. If you have a King James or New King James version then that is included in your translation. If you have a NASB, NASB95, NEV, NIV, ESV or any of the others its not there and it involves two different ways of handling textual problems. I believe the Majority Text which is similar to the text of the KJ or NKJ is the more accurate, more critical version. We went over this in detail last time.
The Critical Text which is what is behind a lot of the modern versions is only based on two primary ancient manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus from the 4th century. The Majority Text, that is the majority of translations that we have plus Alexandrius which is also an early North African text from the early 5th century and is very similar to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and the corrected version of Sinaiticus include it. I think it should be included on the basis of just the external evidence here but also because of the context.
People will say, "Well the scribe just copied it in the wrong place. It's located down in verse 4." There's no reason that God the Holy Spirit wouldn't repeat Himself. He does that several times in the Scripture just to get our attention. But here it's defining what 's going on in Romans 8:1. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus..." If the verse stops there as it does for many people who want to limit this to talking about no condemnation because we're justified, we're in Christ Jesus. But all throughout this section, those who Paul is talking about are not under condemnation. We'll look at that word in a minute. The word is further defined as those who "do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."
((CHART)) So the relative clause as I point out in the bottom paragraph of this slide, defines further those Paul is talking about in the phrase "those who are in Christ." They are the ones who do not have the condemnation and the ones who are also walking according to the Holy Spirit. It hinges on the meaning of the Greek word for condemnation. I pointed out it is only used 3 times in the New Testament. It's the word katakrima and all three uses are in Romans. Two of them are in Romans, chapter 5 and that tells us that it's in the post-justification section of Romans. It's not in the section where he's talking about the sinners back in Romans 1 and 2. It's not in the section where he's talking about justification and being justified from condemnation. It's in the section where he's talking about how justified people live. And justified people are able to live for the Lord only when they walk by the Spirit and they're free from condemnation which relates to punishment. That's how the word should be translated as punishment and it's not punishment in terms of eternal punishment but temporal punishment or consequences for sin in a person's life. Greek dictionaries talk about its meaning to judge someone as definitely guilty and thus, subject to punishment. So the idea is guilt and punishment. The Arndt and Gingrich dictionary says its not merely condemnation but the punishment following a pronouncement of legal guilt. So the focal point of this word is on punishment so it's really functioning on the Divine discipline that comes in the life of a believer who continues to walk according to the flesh. The emphasis is not on eternal punishment but on the consequences of sin in the life of a believer and so the issue here is on the believer's spiritual growth.
In terms of summary, I said that what Paul has been saying is that we're no longer under the judicial penalty from the Supreme Court of Heaven which is back in the early part of Romans, that as a believer in Christ we've been set free from the judicial penalty related to future punishment and from present spiritual death but if we're not walking by the Spirit we still act like we're dead spiritually so there are consequences to that which is present time punishment.
The arena of application here is related to those who are already in Christ. That means they're already justified. It's not to those who are unsaved but to those who are saved. The key word in this passage that we run into is the word flesh. It's going to come up so this is just a little review of the sin nature and the diagram I'm using here because this term flesh comes up and is juxtaposed to Spirit many times in Romans, chapter 8. It's introduced here in the first verse, "… those who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." Paul recognizes something here, something that a lot of modern Christians don't want to admit. That is, that it's either one or the other.
How many times in life have you heard someone say, "You know, I don't like so and so because for them everything is either black or white; it's either yes or no and there are just so many shades in between." Well, that's why they don't like God. God sees in terms of His way or the highway. It's God's way or man's way. It's either walking by the Spirit or walking by the flesh. You can't have your right leg walking by the Spirit and your left leg walking by the flesh. Notice I put the right leg walking by the Spirit and the left one by the flesh. I just didn't want you miss that was intentional!
The sin nature is called the flesh. The term 'the flesh' in Scripture refers to the physical flesh, the physical bodies of animals or the flesh of man. But then it is taken metaphorically to refer to the moral condemnation of man with the sin nature itself, that which is tied to man's temporal situation and his temporal failure. And so the term, 'the flesh' isn't just talking about just something physical but is used to refer to that which energizes and animates the fallen condition of man, which is the sin nature. I think it's interesting how the Bible uses this as a phrase. Very few people really try to probe into the metaphor here and why Paul uses this metaphor. I think it's because the very DNA structure of our physical bodies carries the corruption of the sin nature and it gets transmitted from one generation to another.
((CHART)) So we have this sin nature represented by this black diamond and at the very center of the sin nature is something that drives it. Everything comes back to this. If you can get a grip on the dynamics on the sin nature then you have a great tool to use in understanding what is going on in the world, why it happens, why people do the things they do. It will help you from being overly disappointed in people who fail. It will keep you from being overly disappointed in yourself when you fail. It will help you to understand there are basically two ways of looking at life. There's the way of looking at life from the standpoint that man is inherently corrupt because of Adam's sin and those who look at mankind as being basically good, just flawed. He doesn't have basic faults; he just has a few problems. He's not dead; he's just a little bit sick at times so that's the difference.
Thomas Sowell in his book The Conflict of Visions has an excellent historical analysis of this, showing how this impacts how people looked at society and how people look at government and how people look at the role of people and the role of those in government. He shows historically that the people who tend to think that man is perfectible and that society is perfectible are those that think that man is basically good. Those who think that man is not perfectible but that man is inherently corrupt and therefore our government needs to have checks and balances on itself because it's comprised of human beings, checks and balances on the citizenry, that they understand that man is basically evil. We use different terminology for these two groups. The group that thinks man is basically good are the people called liberals. People who think that man is basically evil are called conservatives and that's been the historical designation and historical truth. Sowell does an excellent job of developing that. Only someone who is a believer in Jesus Christ who understands the Word of God and the nature of sin can understand that.
Many of the Founding Fathers understood this concept whether they were actually born again or whether they were of a sort of Unitarian theology as some were among the founding fathers or whether they were a more dedicated orthodox believer. They were products of a culture that had a strong Christian theistic orientation and they understood that man was basically evil. Therefore you can't give very much power to any human being because if he's evil, he's going to take advantage of that power and enlarge his own power. So they created a government in the Constitution with checks and balances to try to keep government small and they created a government where it was designed so that there would be opposing forces so it would keep the government from doing very much. Because in their view of government, a government that did very much and was efficient in accomplishing its ends would eventually take freedom away from the people. Because they understood that man was basically a sinner, they understood that sin had to be controlled by law and by society and by punishment.
We live in a world today where the idea of sin has been forgotten and disposed of. Sin is antiquated. I read a book by Robert Schuller about forty years ago. Robert Schuller was the one who had the drive-through church originally out in Southern California and then he had the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County. One time you [George Meisenger] and I went out there just to see the sights at the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller came out with a book which he sent around a free copy to pastors all over the country and it was called Self Esteem: The New Reformation. It was a fitting book for its age because in its introduction he said that back in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, early 1500s, there was a belief that man was basically a sinner. Now that was all right for that time. They interpreted the gospel as Christ dying for sins. That was all right for that time but now we're more advanced and we understand from psychological research that man's basic problem is that of self esteem. Man doesn't think very highly of himself and we need a gospel that Jesus died so you can have a good self esteem. Sin is just an antiquated concept, it just doesn't work anymore. So that was his gospel.
The Bible teaches that we're all sinners and until the moment you're saved (this is what Paul goes into in Romans 6) everything you do, whether its something good or something bad, everything comes from the sin nature. It either comes from an area of weakness or an area of strength. The area of weakness produces sin. The area of strength produces what we call human good. But it's all motivated by this core thing that I've always called the lust pattern. Today psychology is trying to redefine this. We don't like sin any more so it's not that people are sinners, they just have disorders. It's also known as syndromes. People like those words because it softens it. You've got a syndrome. It's not your fault. It's not because you're making bad choices because you're choosing to follow the dictates of your sin nature. You just have a syndrome. It's not really your fault. You're okay and I'm okay. Wayne Dyer came out with that psychological framework back in the seventies. The Bible says, "You're not okay and I'm not okay" and God is going to judge us by eternity in hell unless we do what He says. So we have these syndromes or addictions. We have chemical addictions, sex addictions, and food addictions and addictions to laziness and Facebook and Twitter and the Internet and your cell phone. We have addictions to everything.
We used to call them bad habits. The trouble with bad habits is that it's your fault because it's your volition. You choose to do this. If it's an addiction, it's not my fault. It's something within me. I'm just a victim. And so it produces a victim mentality. But the Bible doesn't say you're victims of anything except your own volition. The only solution is to submit to God but we like to think we have addictions or emotional illnesses. You just have an emotional problem so now everybody is addicted to pills to take care of their emotional problems. The Bible says you've misidentified the problem so you've misidentified the solution. The problem isn't a syndrome or disorder; it's not an addiction. The problem is, you're a sinner, you're corrupt. And the only solution is first and foremost to recognize that Jesus died for your sins and you've become free from the tyranny of the sin nature and then to learn the Word of God and learn Bible doctrine and apply it and implement it in your life day to day and all these things will be taken care of and eventually they will be flushed out of your life but only because you've replaced the garbage in your soul with the truth of the Word of God. As long as you're majoring in the garbage in your soul all that's going to come out is garbage. Garbage in – garbage out.
The lust patterns produce both relative good and relative sin. I always love the line when Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says, "How then you, being evil give good gifts to your children?' It's a great line. Jesus is talking to his disciples. Now I try to get away with it here but in most churches if a pastor walked in to his Board of Deacons and said, "You guys are all evil but you're giving good gifts to your children", he might have a problem. But Jesus told his disciples that their basic problem is sin. We're all evil.
One of the things that makes a person a hero isn't because they have sterling character and it isn't because they're always making the right decisions. If we look at Hebrews 11 at all those great men of faith that are highlighted there, there are a couple of things we ought to remember. Number one, none of them were free from the tyranny of the sin nature because that didn't happen until the Day of Pentecost. They're not like us. They're still slaves to the sin nature even though they were believers. Number two, they all failed miserably most of the time. Not unlike us. But what made them heroes of the faith was that at critical times they rose above their sin nature, they rose above their carnality and they chose to follow God and to trust God at a critical time. That's what makes a person a hero.
As a conservative I can look at the Founding Fathers and say they all had feet of clay because we all do; we're all sinners. And what I want to focus on is what made them great. What were the elements that caused them to rise above the flaws of their sin natures and the corruption of their humanity because that's what made them great. We're all subject to the same failures and flaws that they had. The liberal thinks that because they're a hero they were always good. But let me show you about this affair and that affair and this problem and that problem. See, liberals want to tear them down because these people had a lot of failure.
The issue in life isn't failure. We're all failures most of the time when it comes to God's standards. What makes heroes is those who rise above their failures, rise above their sin nature, and trust God at critical times throughout their life. That's what makes heroes, heroes. Not that they do what comes naturally but on occasion, they did what did not come naturally. That was what was unique. So even as sinners we do relative good but we're still flawed sinners. We produce what we call human good. There are many wonderful moral people out there, who give to many good causes, who help people who are wonderful, kind, and generous and give of their money and give of their time and give of their talents but it's all done from the sin nature. It has no eternal value.
((CHART))But then on the other side, at the bottom of the triangle we have our personal sins, our areas of weakness when we commit sin, overt sins such as outbursts of anger, or murder or thievery or we have sins of the tongue: gossip, slander, all the gossip when you pass on undocumented e-mails which tell something negative about someone else and you don't know whether it's true or not but you would like to believe that it's true about that person because they're just such a horrible politician. That's gossip, that's slander, that's not Biblical. So we have a new area of sin called computer slander and computer gossip.
The lust patterns can manifest themselves in a couple of different directions that are sort of opposite to one another. These are trends and I've called it desire trend because it's lust expressed through a desire in one direction or another. Lust drives it either toward aestheticism which is the idea that somehow if I just live according to a rigorous moral code I'm going to impress the God or gods or fate or the universe and things will go well with me. And so there's a trend toward aestheticism which is the idea that if I just give up things that's going to impress God. If I dedicate my life to my religious system that's going to impress God. Legalism is the idea that what I do is the basis for blessing from God and that leads to a moral degeneracy like the Pharisees. That's what they thought. They were very moral but they rejected God's offer of righteousness for their own righteousness. So they were moral degenerates.
And then on the other side we have the opposite. Those who are licentious, lascivious. They follow all their lust patterns. You know Jesus preferred to hang out with this crowd because the other crowd doesn't think they need his help. So he hung out with the publicans and the prostitutes and the sinners and got judged by the Pharisees, those on the other side for that. But people who are licentious and lascivious, they know that they need grace. There's no pretension there. They know they're desperately in need of grace. But if you live in the sin nature that leads to an immoral degeneracy Immoral degeneracy is no better, no worse than moral degeneracy. They're both degenerate. That's the problem.
Now as we look at what Paul is saying here in Romans 8, he's talked about the eternal realities, that at the instant we trust Christ as Savior we are identified with Christ, we're placed in Christ by the baptism by the Holy Spirit. That's our new identification. So we're in Christ. We are His. But in terms of our day-to-day temporal reality, moment-by-moment in time we can either be operating on the Word of God, being filled by the Holy Spirit, and walking in the light, or we can walk in the darkness according to the sin nature. When we do that, we're walking in darkness and we're experiencing the same results as the unbeliever.
We have a life of death and corruption, of unhappiness and misery because we're operating on arrogance and the only way to recover is through 1 John 1:9. So as I pointed out last time as we get into that first verse in Romans 8, "There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus ..." [in Christ Jesus; there's no condemnation, no punishment] "...for those who are not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." And then he's going to explain this in the next verse why we can say there's no condemnation, no punishment.
He says, "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death." So you have a contrast here between two laws: the law of the Spirit of life and the law of sin and death. Now in that first phrase it talks about the law of the Spirit of life, it shows the source of that law. We're still under a law. It's not the Mosaic Law but it's absolute realities. It's absolute standards and it comes from the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. He's the Spirit who produces life. That second genitive there, "of life" should be understood as a genitive of product. It's the law from the Spirit who produces life in us. That life comes from the Spirit and it is in Christ Jesus. It has set us free from the law of sin and of death. So, again, we have these contrasts. It's either one or the other.
Now when we look at what Paul is going to say in Romans 8, I want you to observe about 4 things here. ((CHART)). First of all that the word translated Spirit with an upper case as pneuma is used thirteen times in Romans 6 through 8. Now the word is used a couple of other times meaning other things but in terms of meaning the Holy Spirit it's only thirteen of those times and twelve of those are in Romans, chapter 8. There was one in Romans 7:6 that we were set free form the Law that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and everything from Romans 7:7 to 25 was a digression. Romans 8:1-2 he comes back to what he means to serve in the newness of the Spirit. Isn't that interesting? The Holy Spirit is not mentioned at all in Romans 6 and only once in Romans 7 but it's twelve times in Romans 8.
The second thing we should observe is that spirit is contrasted with sin once in Romans 8:2, "where the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the Law of sin and death." See the contrast between the law of the Spirit and the law of sin and of death. The rest of the time it's contrasted with flesh. Romans 8:4, 5, 9, and Romans 8:13. My point is that sin and flesh are synonymous. Paul prefers to use most of the time the word 'flesh' to describe the sin nature because it permeates our entire life, our entire body, our entire person so he contrasts either one or the other. It's that black and white thing again. You're either walking by the Spirit or by the flesh. You can't do a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. There are no mixed motives. It's either one or the other.
Spirit in this passage is connected to life and contrasted to death. This is one of the major concerns of Scripture, going all the way back to Moses in the Torah. He says, "I set before you this day, life or death." Are you going to follow the Torah and experience the benefits of life or are you going to disobey God and experience death? There are consequences to our decisions. If you make the right decisions based on God's revelation, they you'll experience the fullness of blessing from God and if you don't then you're going to experience the ongoing punishment and condemnation in life from God. So in this whole chapter we see a stark, rigid contrast between flesh and Spirit, between life and death. It's one or the other.
We see this in various passages such as in Romans 8:12-13 where Paul says, "Therefore brethren, we are debtors or under obligation ..." Now that's an interesting word because there are lots of Christians who think that if we're obligated to do anything after we're saved then we're legalists. Grace says I can do whatever I want to do but the Bible says, no, we're under obligation. There are responsibilities that come with our privileges in the Royal Family of God. We're a new creature in Christ and there's a purpose for our life. We are not to waste it. We are to live our life for the Lord. "... we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh." You're not obligated to your sin nature at all. But for 8, 10, 30 years you lived like the sin nature was the boss so it's real hard to say no. That's because you've got a really bad habit and so do I. Not doing what the sin nature says every time can't be done without grace and God the Holy Spirit.
So "… we're under obligation, not to the flesh [sin nature] to live according to the flesh [sin nature]. For if you are living according to the flesh you must die ..." Now, wait a minute. We're not going to lose our salvation. That's not what it's talking about. It's not saying you're going to have spiritual death. Remember there are 7 different kinds of death in the Bible. There's physical death, spiritual death [everyone is born spiritually dead, Ephesians 2:1], sexual death [Abraham was sexually dead and he was past the age when he could father children.]. There's positional death which occurs when we're identified with Christ in His death. That's our positional death. There is carnal death when we are living according to the sin nature. There's temporal death when we're experiencing the consequences of that in our life. Then there's the second death which occurs for those who rejected Christ and they go to eternity in the Lake of Fire.
So when he says you must die he's not talking about physical death, he's not talking about future eternal punishment, he's talking about experiencing the death-like consequences of living according to the sin nature. But in contrast, "… if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body ..." Notice he's switched from talking about the flesh to the body. Paul constantly using terms relating the sin nature to our physical bodies because it's through our physical bodies that the sin nature expresses itself in what we say and what we do, where we go, and those kinds of things. So we have to remember that this passage is addressed to the brethren; it's not addressed to unbelievers. He's warning believers so that we can have life rather than a death-like existence.
Second, believers have been given eternal life but they can still experience carnal death so then in Romans 6:16 and 21, Paul laid this down. That either we live our lives as slaves, we're all slaves, but we're either slaves to sin resulting in death. But he's talking to believers; he's not talking about dying spiritually. We're talking about experiencing the death-like results of living on the basis of sin so we're either live as slaves to the sin nature, which is self-destructive, or we live as obedient slaves to God and that results in righteousness in life. Righteousness and life are seen as two sides of the same coin. In Romans 6:21 he says, "What fruit [benefit] were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed for the end [outcome] of those things is death?" So that's what he's talking about.
James 1 gives us a dynamic on how the sin nature operates. He says, "Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am tempted by God". See we think of temptation only when we've yielded to it. I'm not tempted unless I yield to it. No, that's not the Biblical view. If you go on a diet and you wake up in the morning and you have a satisfying breakfast and thirty or forty minutes later someone offers you a donut, you say, "No, I'm satisfied, I'm not very hungry." But if you get up in the morning and you're running late and you don't get to have your breakfast and someone offers you a donut and you bite their hand off getting it. You were tempted by someone else both times. Just because you didn't yield to it or feel attracted to it doesn't mean you weren't tempted. That's the external or objective sense of temptation.
Anybody who has ever been hunting knows a wild animal is going to be tempted by the bait in the trap. He'll come up and sniff around and walk around and look at it, back away and look at it. Then finally they decide they're not going to go for it. See, they've been tempted by the bait in your trap but they didn't yield to the temptation. We often think of temptation only in the sense of yielding to it but the Bible talks about it in both senses. So each person is tempted externally. Here he talks about moving from that external temptation which is the word used in James 1 but it becomes subjective and enticed by your own lusts. This is when all of a sudden you decide you're going to yield to that external test and now you want it and you're going to go for it and grab it.
"When the lusts [internal desire] has conceived it gives birth to sin ..." What happens then? When sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. This is for believers. This is what happens in our life. We can have a life characterized by the blessing of God or we can have a life characterized by sin and corruption. This is the contrast. It's our decision. Are we going to pursue life or death? So in conclusion, let me just give these two definitions. Life is to be understood as capacity to life and experiencing the joy, peace, contentment, and happiness in any and all circumstances based on the fact that God the Holy Spirit is filling us with His Word. There's a fullness in His Word and we're walking by the Spirit and advancing to spiritual maturity. But death, in contrast, is the loss of blessing in time due to the failure of executing the plan of God for our life. It is based on attempts to live life on the basis of our own desires, our own terms, really rejecting Scripture as the authority for life. The reality is in Romans 6:18, we've been set free from sin but we've become slaves of righteousness. We're always slaves of either sin or righteousness. We've been set free from sin and enslaved to God and the result of this is eternal life. Not life everlasting which refers to the qualitative aspect of life as much as the eternal ongoing aspect of life. This is the freedom we have in Christ. "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." This brings us to Romans 8:3 and we'll start there next time.
