So…one of the things that just comes with the role that I have in preaching/teaching is that I sometimes get feedback on something that I’ve said. And a lot of times it’s positive…someone is just sharing how the Lord used the message to grow them in some way and deepen their faith in Christ, but there are other times when the feedback I receive is from someone who wants to make sure that I am aware that I was preaching a false doctrine and they go on to show me what the real truth is, at least according to them.
I got one of these kinds of emails a few years ago that said something to the effect of, “I’m sorry but I am writing to let you know that we will not be coming back to your church b/c we need to be a part of a church that teaches the truth of the Bible.” And I thought, “Wow, when I preach most of the time I am just reading verse by verse through the Bible and teaching through it…”
And so I continued to read and basically it was about grace…they were worried that if I kept preaching grace then people were going to be misled to live a life of sin and not a holy lifestyle that is pleasing to God. And then I noticed that they had included a link to an article, so I clicked on it and it was basically all about making sure that we were teaching people to obey all the O.T. commandments.
Now, there was some mention of grace…that people were actually not saved by obeying the commandments, that we are only saved by grace through faith, but that once we are saved by His grace, we have to start making sure that we obey all of the O.T. and N.T. commandments in order to live a holy lifestyle and please God.
In other words, it was about how we are saved by grace but we live the Christian life thru law…through obedience to the law & God’s commands.
And you know, this is what honestly, a lot of us think is true. That we are saved by grace…we are forgiven by God through faith b/c of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sins, but that now we are supposed to live by following all of God’s rules.
This grace thing can only go so far…if we continue to talk about God’s grace after someone becomes a Christian then we are just going to have a bunch of people running around sinning all the time, dishonoring God & giving Him a bad name…so we need to make sure that everyone understands the rules and how to live a holy life.
And so listen, as we’ve been going through Romans this summer, we’ve already seen Paul address part of this grace and sin thing already. In chapter 6, Paul knew that all of those who would be reading this letter, after hearing him go on and on about grace and how we are saved by faith in Christ that some people would be thinking “Oh well that just means that I should go on living my life the way I want to & go on sinning since I’m forgiven & eternally secure.”
And so since he knew some people were going to be thinking that, he went ahead & tackled their question head on. And do you remember how he responded? “By no means!” “May it never be!” “Don’t you know???” “Don’t you know who you are now???”
You are those who have died to sin…the old you, w/a sin nature running through you has died when you put your faith in Jesus and now you’ve been united w/Christ and given a new nature. You WERE locked in a cage, a slave to temporary pleasure / satisfaction, BUT NOW you’ve been set free from the cage and given real, abundant, satisfying, and fulfilling life in this new union w/Christ…so Paul is showing them that it’s actually grace that sets them up to be able to not sin and now enjoy the life that God’s always intended for them to live…but Paul knows that some will still think that this new life is best lived by law, following the rules…so he gets into that next in Romans 7…
Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives?
In other words, imagine that you die are being transported down the road in a hearse. Now somewhere along the way, the police see you and they pull the hearse over on the side of the road. The police walk up to the car…and don’t go to the driver, but rather to the back of the hearse and open it up and start to pull your dead body out of the car.
Now, at this point the driver jumps out of the car and runs back there and says, “What are you doing? Why in the world are you taking this dead body?” And the police officer says, “man it’s simple, this person (you) broke the law…they have some outstanding parking tickets that have never been paid, and there is a warrant out for their arrest, so I am taking him to jail.”
I mean that would be crazy, right? Because everyone knows that while you were alive, you were under authority to the law. And if the police came knocking on your door with outstanding parking tickets that they had every right to take you to jail.
But everyone also knows that if you are dead that the law has no authority over you anymore and the police can’t take your dead body to jail…because you’ve been released from the authority of the law.
So it’s a simple principle: the law has authority over someone, Paul says, only as long as that person lives. Now he gives his own ex…
2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. 3 So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.
So another simple illustration of the principle he claimed in verse 1. Marriage is meant to be a lifetime deal, right? “Till death do us part…” So if this woman cheated on her spouse while they were still married then she would have been guilty of committing adultery. But if her spouse has died, then she is not committing adultery if she marries another man now.
Okay, so Paul has made a statement in v. 1 about a principle: The law has no authority once a death has occurred…and then he illustrated the principle to make sure his audience got the picture, and now he is going to make his point…the reason he brought the principle up in the first place, v. 4
4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law…
Let’s stop here. I want to go kind of slow thru this verse b/c it is the main point that Paul is trying to make here, and I don’t want us to miss it. [So first, Paul claims that we died to the law.]
Now remember, Paul has already taught us about how when we put our faith in Jesus for salvation that we experienced a death. The “old us,” Paul said died w/Christ. And Paul’s already mentioned one thing that we died to…or have been separated from, do you remember what that was? “To sin,” we died to the power of sin in our lives.
So…here Paul says that the second thing we died to is “the law,” which means that it has no authority of us any longer. Remember Paul’s principle: the law has authority only over people who are alive…AND YOU ARE NO LONGER ALIVE (the old you…in Adam).
The question becomes, “why?” “Why did we have to die to the law and its’ authority over us?” And Paul is going to answer that here, but first he makes sure that we know how we died to the law…look at what he says…
4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ,
“Through the body of Christ” here is a reference to Jesus’ death on the cross. So the question is, “How does Jesus’ death on the cross make us dead to the law?” And the answer is that he satisfied the demands of the law on our behalf.
The law condemns everyone of us…it shows us that we cannot measure up to the standard of a holy and perfect God. We all fail in our ability to keep the law and stand condemned by it as guilty sinners. But look at what Paul says about Jesus in Co. 2:14…
14 (Jesus) canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.
So Paul says here in Ro. 7:4 that we died to the law through Jesus’ death on the cross which satisfied the demand of the law…He fulfilled it for us. Okay, so let’s keep going…b/c next Paul shows us the purpose of separating us from the law…
4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead,
So Paul is saying in a sense, you were married to the law…you belonged it…you were a slave to it…you were in bondage to it and condemned by it…so Paul is saying that the purpose of you dying to the law was so that you would be free now to be married to the living Christ…united to Him. BUT… why did we need to be united to Jesus?
4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.
Jesus is the only Source which can produce fruit.
Jesus said in John 15 that He is the vine and we are the branches and as we abide in Him we will bear much fruit. Fruit gets produced NOT from the branch, but FROM the life-giving stuff in the vine that flows through the branch…and that life giving stuff was not in us to produce good fruit.
With the law, we were under a system of externals. We were trying to follow the rules and be good so that godly fruit would come out of our lives…but how can godly fruit come out if God is not in there in the first place?
So God had to remove us from the system of externals which produced nothing…we had to die to that…so that God could put Himself in us…& now w/life flowing through the vine, we as a branch can actually bear fruit. And Paul goes on to show us that next…
5 For when we were in the realm of the flesh,…which is the realm of no God in us…the realm where sin was our master and it was up to us to make our own way... “when we were in that realm…the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.
IOW, Paul says that the law actually aroused sin in our lives…that’s why we had to die to it! In our flesh we respond one of two ways to the law…we either rebel against what we are told not to do (don’t touch the stove…so it makes us want to touch the stove)…so we either rebel against it… OR in our flesh we fill up with pride as we pour our strength into obeying it… We look down on everyone who is not able to carry out the rules as good as we are.
So either way, Paul says the fruit we bear is for death…it’s meaningless, evil. We either break the law and sinful fruit is produced, or we stick our chests out & the fruit we bear is pride & judgementalism. So this is why we had to die to the law. V6
6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
We are no longer slaves to the law…we have been set free from what once bound us, and now since we’ve been changed and regenerated into a new creation…one with life-giving stuff flowing in us, we can actually produce godly fruit as He works in us and thru us.
So because that is true, we serve in the way that this godly fruit will come out, and that is by the Spirit not by the law. It’s thru the Holy Spirit that we are united to Jesus and Paul said in verse 4 that we were separated from the law so that we might belong to Jesus in order that we might bear fruit.
The Christian life is lived by the power of the Spirit living in us and through us.
Do you remember in Ro. 6:13 where Paul said “to offer every part of yourself to God as an instrument of righteousness?” This is what He is talking about.
As you make yourself available to the Holy Spirit living in you, He will manifest Christ’s life thru you so that there is visible fruit.
IOW, Paul has been saying throughout this entire letter that you cannot be saved by works…it is not by the works of the law that you are saved…it is only faith in Christ, but here he goes further and says “not only is the law incapable of saving you, the law is incapable of producing righteous and holy living.”
The law, while holy and good, highlights our sin and it even passively promotes sin, but just like we are justified apart from the law, Paul is saying that we live the Christian life apart from the law.
Okay, so how does this then specifically apply to us today? Well, first of all, if you are here and you’ve never received Jesus into your life, then this shows us that it’s impossible to make yourself into a better you by following rules and doing good things.
You can’t change a broken, sinful heart on the inside by getting better at living by external rules on the outside.
Which is why we need a whole new heart…and Jesus went to the cross to die for your sins which caused your broken heart in the first place so that you could be forgiven…and when you put your faith in Him, he will forgive you & your old heart will die, & He will join Himself spiritually to you, giving birth to a new heart inside of you, which now has the capacity to produce good fruit b/c you have a new Life Source in you, working through you…will you receive Him today?
Now for those of us who have received that new heart, Paul says that we now serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. So, for us the application is to make sure that we are not focused on the law and combing through the O.T. to find out what all the rules are and then trying to do our best to follow them in order to be more holy and make sure Jesus is proud of us.
NO, we trust in the Spirit now to guide us to where He wants us to go…He will show us what to do when we get there…and not only that, He will empower us to do it…
It means that we are careful when we study the O.T. to do it through a N.C lens and remember what Paul says here in Ro. that we serve in the new way through the Spirit.
Over and over again, we are told to fix our eyes on Jesus…we don’t fix our eyes on “do this and don’t do that.” (external)…we focus on Jesus and He will lead us in His ways and produce good fruit through us.