1.  In Romans 7, Paul is addressing two sets of believers. He is speaking to Gentiles who have made their own moral law the standard for being good and accepted by God. But, he is also addressing Jewish believers who have been under pressure to stay inside the Law. It is difficult for us to understand because I am not sure there is a similar situation for us. When they gave up The Law they were giving up much more than a set of rules and regulations. They were handing over their whole identity and becoming outcasts and people without a country. They were traitors to everything they knew. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That was the decision Paul was asking them to make. They were not switching from one denomination to another. They were giving up family and a certain kind of standing in the community. Jews were respected. Christians were scorned. Jews had rights. Christians were hunted down and killed. Jews had certain privileges and Christians were virtual outlaws.

In verses 7­-13 Paul argues the intent of the law. I am reading from The Message:

7 “But I can hear you say, “If the law code was as bad as all that, it’s no better than sin itself.” That’s certainly not true. The law code had a perfectly legitimate function. Without its clear guidelines for right and wrong, moral behavior would be mostly guesswork. Apart from the succinct, surgical command, “You shall not covet,” I could have dressed covetousness up to look like a virtue and ruined my life with it.

8-­12 Don’t you remember how it was? I do, perfectly well. The law code started out as an excellent piece of work. What happened, though, was that sin found a way to pervert the command into a temptation, making a piece of “forbidden fruit” out of it. The law code, instead of being used to guide me, was used to seduce me. Without all the paraphernalia of the law code, sin looked pretty dull and lifeless, and I went along without paying much attention to it. But once sin got its hands on the law code and decked itself out in all that finery, I was fooled, and fell for it. The very command that was supposed to guide me into life was cleverly used to trip me up, throwing me headlong. So sin was plenty alive, and I was stone dead. But the law code itself is God’s good and common sense, each command sane and holy counsel.

13 I can already hear your next question: “Does that mean I can’t even trust what is good [that is, the law]? Is good just as dangerous as evil?” No again! Sin simply did what sin is so famous for doing: using the good as a cover to tempt me to do what would finally destroy me. By hiding within God’s good commandment, sin did far more mischief than it could ever have accomplished on its own.”

The purpose of the law was to teach us what sin is and to give us the ability to recognize it for what it is. It is not a quirk or just being human. It is separation from God and over the course of 400 years of bondage and false religions they had lost the ability to understand the nature of sin. They were miserable slaves and happy pagans at the same time. There was no moral core. What did the Hebrews say to Moses when he stepped in to stop a fight? “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” We face the same issues today. What is right and what is wrong? What is normal and what is not? What gives anyone the right to be the judge over anyone else and their behavior? What right does anyone have to call anything a sin? It is far easier to erase the whole notion of sin. What does a Gospel of grace have to say to a culture that does not recognize or accept the notion of sin?

There is a difference between conviction and condemnation, I believe. Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save the world. However, without the conviction of sin and the recognition of the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit there can be no salvation – only more delusion. We live in a world with an increasing ignorance of sin and, ironically, a rise in condemnation. You are condemned for the wrong set of moral beliefs. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to convict the world of sin (John 16:8) but not to condemn the world. Sometimes we have lost the distinction. Condemnation is hopelessness. Conviction is the first step to repentance. Sometimes the gospel comforts and sometimes it convicts. It is important that we do not lose the ability to convict in our desire to comfort a lost world. When the gospel ceases to convict it ceases to love – but it cannot condemn. Unfortunately, people are reacting to a gospel of condemnation, a gospel of rigid categories and perfectionism. We need a gospel of conviction that leads to repentance and reconciliation.

I saw an interesting article on churches that are offering free beer to draw people in. It is titled To Stave Off Decline, Churches Attract New Members With Beer. Here is one quote from the article: “”I find the love, I find the support, I find the non­judgmental eyes when I come here,” she says. “And I find friends that love God, love craft beer.” What are we to make of that? Clearly, we have swung to the other side of the spectrum from how many of us came to church. Is it pandering? Is it lowering the bar so low that it makes church just another social activity. Or, on the other hand, is there something to it that allows people to come and not find just comfort and “non­judgmental eyes” but conviction as well. Is it possible?

In some ways, we have not held up a mirror to people to enable them to see their sin. We have held up pictures of what we consider sin. But a picture is not a mirror. A picture is what we imagine sin to be and it may have nothing at all to do with what is separating the other person from God. The beauty of the law is its ability to be a mirror but it is an unforgiving mirror. The beauty of the gospel is not throwing out the mirror but replacing the image we see with the one God sees. More on that in a minute.

2.  Paul is not arguing for a life without law or boundaries – even though that is what some thought he was proposing. He wants them to understand the bondage of a life with The Law that kept them from freedom and put them under the constant condemnation of sin and shortcoming. We all need conviction, repentance and reconciliation but that cannot happen under the despotism of The Law. The Law’s purpose was to be a tutor but not a tyrant.

Second, the purpose of the Law was to show the truth. For instance, I am living with the belief that I look like Robert Redford and am happy with that until someone hands me a mirror. I can then choose to accept the truth or say I would rather live in a world with no mirrors. In a sense, that is the choice many people have made. They are not searching for truth as much as they are searching for a world with no mirrors or anything that would make them question their assumptions and beliefs. We have the ability to look into the lives of other people through microscopes and the ability of seeing around the world through telescopes but we have become self-absorbed instead of self-aware. We don’t want to look into a mirror. When we look into the mirror of a perfect moral standard we can either refuse to believe, break the mirror or accept the truth. Now that I know the truth I am never free from knowing I am not Robert Redford and can never be in blissful
ignorance again. The mirror is “holy, righteous and good” and without it I would have never known how far off the mark I am. But that also leads to condemnation and resentment and judgment. I cannot live up to the standard but have lost my ignorant bliss that allowed me to ignore the standard.

For some, that means becoming judgmental of everyone else to excuse themselves.

Albert Camus wrote The Fall to illustrate the power of guilt to do just that. Jeanbaptiste Clamence sits in a bar in Amsterdam and listens to the stories of strangers under the guise of being interested. However, what he is really looking for is the sin in their lives that will make them guilty – and, therefore, disqualified to judge him. “No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.”

Why? Because he let a young woman fall from a bridge and did nothing to save her and he longs to be judged but is determined to allow no one with any guilt to judge him. He is looking for the innocent man who can rightfully judge him but not condemn him. He is looking for grace in a bar in Amsterdam and as long as he can find fault with everyone else he is free from judgment himself. He is convicted of sin but refuses to accept either judgment or grace.

3.  In verses 14-­25 Paul describes the futility of wanting to please God and earn his love and acceptance. It is a general description of life before grace but also our desire to return to pleasing God and earning his love. It is what happens when we look at ourselves and lose our trust in God’s acceptance of the finished work of Christ. We still want to live up to an impossible standard or find excuses and reasons to believe the standards are unjust. We either double our efforts or, like Adam and Eve, hide from God. We have lost our confidence because we have gone back to our own efforts and stopped trusting. We are like the foolish Galatians. Having found freedom we return to the bondage of a new form of law – legalism, piety, pride, perfectionism.

Paul was not what I would call a Romans 1 sinner. Most likely, neither are you. You are not haters of the truth who have been given over to their worst imaginations. We are more like Sisyphus – the mythological Greek king who was punished by the gods and condemned to roll a large boulder to the top of the hill – only to see it roll back down and have him start again. For some of us, we hide the rock we are pushing or we refuse to accept the grace that allows God to push the rock over the top. We love the rock. We don’t trust God’s ability to roll the rock away. But, like Sisyphus, we are chained to a never ending repetition of almost succeeding and then starting all over again.

That is why Paul says in verse 24, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” What is the answer? That is found in Chapter 8. Let’s read part of it. Again, I’m reading from The Message by Eugene Peterson.

The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms

8 1-­2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being­-here­-for-­us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-­4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

5­-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

9­-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive­-and­-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

12-­14 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-­it­-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

15­-17 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-­tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us — an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

4.  Everything before Chapter 8 describes life without the Spirit. There are only two mentions of the Spirit but suddenly there is a flood of references to the Spirit – 20 times in this chapter. Why is that? Because that is the only source of life and genuine confidence. Up until now Paul has been describing lives without the Holy Spirit. Those lives may be wretched as in Romans 1 or they may be orderly as in Romans 2 but they are both lives that have been captured by the power of sin. Up until now Paul has been describing death and the effects of sin but now he is turning toward what new life looks like.

We are no longer trying to look like our idea of what God wants or how to do our best but we are being conformed to the image of Christ. Our image in the mirror is being changed into His and that is what God sees.

We are becoming what some have called “little Christ’s”. The Spirit of Christ is growing in us and transforming our minds and our natures. By that, they mean we each have our own distinct and created personalities but the Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ. We don’t all look alike. We don’t have contests to see who looks like the perfect specimen. We don’t compare ourselves to each other. We are growing into what we were created to be and the person God loves.

Paul’s question is also the question of the Philippian jailer. “What must I do to be saved?”

What must I do to be saved from a life of judging others to keep them from judging me?

What must I do to be saved from a life of trying relentlessly to please God but feeling condemned and frustrated?

What must I do to be saved from a life of comparison to others?

What must I do to be saved from the weariness of my own struggle with perfection and self-­absorption?

What must I do to be saved from redoubled efforts?

What must I do to be saved from wanting and trying to please an impossible to please Father?

What is Paul’s answer to that?

“Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing.

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us — an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!”

That is the answer to Paul’s dilemma – and ours. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is to bring us into truth – not goad us into truth. It is to comfort…and to convict. It is to help us allow the life of Christ to grow daily. As Paul says in Ephesians, “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”