Romans Chapter 7 verse 4 – Chapter 8 verse 4

Romans Chapter 7 verse 4 – Chapter 8 verse 4

Next Sunday is Advent Sunday and we shall be taking a break from our series of talks on Paul’s letter to the Romans. I realise from conversations that some people have enjoyed our series and found it very useful – taking home and working through the study questions to help them even more. Others apparently have not; so there’s next Sunday to look forward to!                       

But especially perhaps for those who have not, who still question why Joe and I bother to explain Paul’s letter and to show why it is so relevant for everyone today, albeit almost some 2000 years after it was written, I would like to begin this morning by telling you about two men, some years ago now, with whom I had two very different conversations.                                                                      

The first explained to me that it was through reading Romans, and chapters 7 and 8 in particular, that he came to what he described as ‘a real faith and effective discipleship’. He told me that he had been a regular churchgoer for a number of years, believed Christianity and the claims of Jesus Christ to be true, but had found it almost impossible – depressingly so at times – to be His disciple in any way that made much of a difference either to his life or to the lives of those around him. He attended church to be forgiven, to take communion, to be reminded of Jesus and of his call to discipleship, and to enjoy the fellowship. 

But he had found it such hard going – trying to be the person he knew Jesus was calling him to be: and all this despite the fact, as he acknowledged, that he was very well regarded by other people. It was not, he said, until he had understood what St. Paul was explaining in these chapters, that he realised what he had failed to appreciate and why he was finding being a Christian so difficult. Let me turn to the other man.                                                                                   

This chap had been a fairly regular churchgoer until he was made unemployed, when he stopped attending. I went to see him and got quite a shock. Being an Anglican – even an Anglican vicar – I don’t like to pry into other people’s spiritual lives but I am always ready to listen and to advise if I am asked. He told me that he had stopped coming because God had let him down. He had come to church fairly regularly; he had tried to live by the rules; he had done nothing wrong: but then God had allowed him to be made unemployed. 

This was not fair he said; God could not be trusted to look after him. Now it was blindingly obvious to me, and I said as much to him, that he was treating God as a kind of insurance policy. He did not disagree. It was all rather like when you go on line for an insurance policy, you don’t actually speak to anyone, there’s no personal relationship involved: you fill in your details, you pay up, you’re insured. Actually this chap had not really played any part in the life of the church family; he had not volunteered nor made any financial contribution even though he knew that this church only survives through people’s help and donations. 

Three months later he got a job, a far better job; but he did not come back to church. When I asked him if he thought that God had had a hand in the whole process, he said ‘no’ and that he had got the job by his own efforts and talent. I would like you to bear these two men in mind as we turn to our passage this morning.                                                                                     

Now in order to understand clearly what Paul is saying here and its relevance for us today, we need to appreciate who the recipients of the letter were. They were largely Jews in Rome who had come to believe that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. Their problem, then, was what to do with the Law that God had given to Moses in order that they might know what it was God expected of them in their behaviour and dealings with Him and with one another. 

What, they were asking, is the place of the Law in Christianity if Christ has brought in a new era, a new covenant? This Law is mentioned in every one of the first fourteen verses and thirty-five times in the whole passage. To the Jews the Law was very precious indeed (see Psalms 19 and 119 for example); it told them how to live: but because no human being can ever succeed in obeying the Law, it cannot be the way of salvation, of getting right with God and being reconciled to Him. 

The only way this can be done, by the grace of God, is through faith in Jesus Christ. But the question remains: once reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ, how do we come to terms with and indeed overcome the sinfulness within each of us in order that we can grow to maturity in faith and become effective disciples? However much we want to ‘do good’ v19 and ‘delight in God’s law’ v22, the reality of our nature v14 makes us do the opposite? V15 ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.’ 

And what the sincere and well-intentioned Christian discovers is what we might call the ‘law of human nature’ v21 ‘So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand’ and v23 ‘but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.’                                                             

This is exactly what keeps us from becoming the people we want to be; fallen human nature. Even if a person is not a Christian and has devised his or her own moral code from a smorgasboard of religions and philosophies, the same holds true: people do not live up to even their own moral codes. For Christians, we simply cannot become the effective disciples we are called to be and, I hope, long to be..... unless we allow God, once again, to come to our aid.      

Just as God sent Jesus to give his life so that whoever believes in him and in his paying the penalty for our sinfulness may be forgiven, acquitted, and reconciled to God, so God offers His Spirit to us inorder that we may overcome the reality of sin that is part of our human nature. It as we ‘walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ v4 that we are able with God’s power to overcome what v14 Paul calls ‘the slavery of sin’.

If I can return for a moment to the first chap I mentioned at the beginning. What he realised, having read and understood this passage, was that he had quite simply not accepted God’s second gift of grace - His Spirit, into his life to help him overcome the sinfulness with which, like all of us, he was struggling and which was not only preventing him from enjoying effective discipleship but also depressing him. 

He loved God, he knew God’s commandments to be the blueprint for healthy human beings and healthy communities: as such he had been ‘born again’ in his outlook on life: but he had continued to try to keep God’s commandments without God’s help, which is why he had continued to struggle in keeping them and in being an effective Christian. ‘I wasn’t even a good Christian let alone an effective one’, he told me. 

‘These verses of Romans’, he said, ‘hit me with such power and clarity: they explained perfectly why I was finding it all such a struggle. I simply wasn’t letting God into my life to enable me to do what I couldn’t do on my own. I hadn’t realised just how much the Christian life really is a partnership.’ Or as somebody else once said, ‘We can be Christian enough to delight in God’s Law, yet not Christian enough to obey it. We make the mistake of looking to the Law, instead of to the Spirit, as the way to holiness or sanctification.’ 

We have to learn – and it really can only be through personal experience – that left to ourselves in our fallenness we cannot keep God’s Law, however much we agree with it and delight in it. It is only by allowing God’s Spirit to work in us and through us that we shall be able to become, bit by bit, not only more law-abiding Christians but more effective ones. The distinction Paul has in mind here is the two covenants, the old and the new: the one written externally by Moses on stone tablets; the other written by the Holy Spirit on our hearts. Does this mean we are free to discard the old Law and do whatever we like? Not at all! 

We have been freed from sin for serving the One whose service is perfect freedom: and we discover this freedom to be perfect because He loves us more than we can conceive of or imagine. And anyway, the motive for our service and the means of our service have changed. The motive has changed because if we have been ‘born again’, that is to say, we have humbly accepted our need to be saved from sin and reconciled to God, and have put our faith in Christ, we are no longer trying to convince or impress God, others, or ourselves with our ability to keep God’s Law, or to be seen as ‘good’ people; we simply want to express our love for having been saved and reconciled. 

Also, the means of the service which expresses our love is that we do so in cooperation or partnership with God’s second gracious gift, His Holy Spirit. The Christian life is serving the risen Christ in the power of the Spirit. This passage, I freely admit, is full of difficult ideas: but take as the starting point for our understanding of them what God has done for us and given us in Jesus and in His Holy Spirit, and it will begin to make sense – especially if we start to put it into practise ourselves. 

In verses 7 – 13 Paul shows – admittedly complexly for modern Westerners! - that the Law is good: but in verses 14 – 25 he shows how it is weak in that it cannot make us holy or effective as Christians. Romans chapter 7 is the preparation and groundwork that is needed so that in chapter 8 Paul can go on to describe what we must call ‘the normal Christian life’, that is, life as intended, promised, and offered to every Christian. But it is a gift; and gifts have to be received and opened or acted upon. What the whole of this passage describes is the very real conflict within those who have not yet welcomed God’s Holy Spirit into their lives and begun to be lead by Him. 

They are people who show signs of new birth – in, for example, their love for the Church and for the bible, and in their concern for, their ‘good neighbourliness’ towards, others: yet their religion is still law, not Gospel; flesh not Spirit; the ‘oldness’ of slavery to rules and traditions, not the ‘newness’ of freedom in Christ through the indwelling Spirit. 

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, so let us walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit: let us be not Old Testament Christians but New. It really is all about opening our hearts to the One who has already shown us the extent of his wonderful love for us.