Paul's Key To The Christian Life - ROMANS SIX TO EIGHT

I have been a persistent searcher after God’s truth for years, and Romans, chapter six, seven and eight, have been well worn in my Bible. I think now, at seventy-five years old, I have a working focus on what Paul is saying. So I am writing this for those who, like me, are after the key to the Christian life.

I will assume that we are already born again as children of God by God’s Spirit (Rom. 5:5). As confessed sinners, in our guilty and lost condition, we found “peace with God” through Christ as Savior and Lord.

Now we come to the practical question of Romans 6:1, as up to date today as when it was first posed. “How do we go on from here? What can keep us from sinning more?” So in these chapters he begins to explain himself, and we will follow along.

Paul starts by taking for granted his readers have a deeper quality of spiritual understanding than most of us today had at our new birth. “Don’t you know,” he asks, “that when our Lord Jesus Christ hung on that cross, He represented us all, and therefore His dying there means you and I died there?” Water baptism – our being immersed beneath the waters and lifted out again – is a symbol of the fact that when He died on the cross and was buried in the tomb, by faith we died, were buried, and then were raised with Him (Rom. 6:3,4). And as the Holy Spirit entered the resurrected Jesus’ body, which represented all ours, the same Spirit has entered us, delivering us from Satan, whose sin nature had entered our bodies and taken us over because of the Fall (Rom. 6:5,6).

Therefore we have died in Christ’s death to the indwelling and operation of Satan’s nature in us: we are “dead to sin” (Rom. 6:7-11). Sin, however, isn’t dead to us as an operating power in our world, and thus we experience its pressures on us. But in our spirits we have died to its false claims to be still dwelling in us and thus expressing its self-for-self nature by us. Equally now, Christ has come to dwell in us and live His quality of other-love by us. Thus, we are containers and expressers of God’s holy nature, just as formerly we were containers and expressers of Satan’s sin nature (John 8:44).

“So,” Paul says, “based on the historical fact that Christ settled the sin question once for all” (Rom. 6:9,10), “we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God” (Rom. 6:11). This is strong meat packed into a few sentences. But does it really work out in our lives?

A much deeper problem needs to be solved in order to make workable the life of being dead to sin by the Life of God through Christ. We must be dead to law, as well as to sin! But why? Isn’t the law a safeguard to keep us from running into loose living? “No,” Paul maintains. You have a much deeper reality to learn – THAT YOU HAVE NO INDEPENDENT HUMAN ABILITY TO KEEP OR NOT KEEP THE LAW.

Paul slips in a statement here which sounds startling, but which turns the key in the lock for us when we know it. “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” he states, because you aren’t under law, but under grace” (Rom. 6:14). But what does that mean?

Many would ask, “Isn’t the law the standard for right living, announced by Moses in those ten commandments and demanded of us by God, with the penalty of judgment and condemnation if we disobey it? Isn’t the law the means by which God exercises His control over us and by which we endeavor to live? Obviously, we would go wildly into lives of self-gratifying license if the conditions of the law were removed.”

But this is our ongoing error. We have been under the Satanic delusion of being independent selves who can and must respond to law. And while we think this, we are actually still listening to Satan, who influences us either to try and fulfill or to resist God’s laws, thereby obeying his own law of sin and death. So the more we work to obey God’s law, the more Satan is aroused to make us break it. And we will always have this problem while we blindly think we are independent selves who can keep the law.

At our new birth in Christ, we were still too blind to recognize the depth of Satan’s deceit in dealing with us. We thought that as saved and new creations in Christ, we could still take a share in managing ourselves.

Paul is showing that it is meaningless to say that we are now dead to sin and alive to God while that root deception isn’t yet out of us and we think we are more than a people managed only by the deity nature in us as vessels, branches, temples, slaves, or wives. It must become real to you that Jesus’ dying for and as us, and His rising by God’s Spirit for and as us means a change of deity ownership. But we never did own ourselves. Satan owner is out for keeps and Christ owner is in for keeps. Now we know our true nature is Christ-managed, never self-managed, and no longer Satan-managed.

The outer law of God is now meaningless. We are dead to it because our “I” is truly the nature of Christ’s Life; and He operates His laws and nature spontaneously in us, by us, and as us. That is our answer to every false claim in this Satan-infected world that Satan has a hold on us. Christ in us IS OUR LAW; and He fulfills it by us, just as Satan used to fulfill his by us.

Paul then begins to lay a foundation for this assurance in Romans 6:16 to 7:6. Paul here presents one strong evidence after another that there is no intermediate, “independent me” unless we foolishly think it.

“First,” he says, “we were always slaves; and a slave just obeys his owner.” We had allowed ourselves over to owner Sin-Satan, to express his sin-nature. “Put it this way,” Paul explains. “We were free in our sinning, with no response to God’s law. Now we are free in our right living, with no response to Satan’s laws.” And there is no “you”, with an in-between or independent life of your own (Rom. 6:16-20).

Next Paul introduces a second illustration: a fruit-bearing tree. He describes how we are now producing right, good fruit in our lives, whereas we were ashamed of the former fruit (Rom. 6:21,22). He wants us to understand that we are only branches who have changed trees! We never produced fruit without a tree!

In Romans 7:1-6 Paul uses one further powerful and convincing illustration – the law of marriage, which he speaks of here as the “law of the husband” (Rom. 7:2). The wife is legally bound to her husband so long as he lives, and he is her “lord” (1 Peter 3:6), she receives his seed, conceives by it, and produces their family.

We humans were “married” at the Fall to our Sin-nature husband and became his sin family, he working in us the “motions of sin” which produced “fruit unto death” (Rom 7:5). We had to do this according to the law and demands of marriage, as any change of husbands would have been an “adultery”. It looked hopeless; our husband was not going to die.

But there was One, representing the whole human family, who died as us. So the marriage was dissolved because we died “wherein we were held” (Rom. 7:6). The dissolution of the first marriage and release from that husband meant that in Christ’s resurrection we were immediately married to another, our risen Savior, and are now under His law. We have never been widows conceiving without a husband!

Romans 7:6 completes Paul’s illustrations of slave, branch and wife showing how a new nature in Christ has replaced the old sin nature.

NOW COMES A NEW BURNING QUESTION: If the new relationship has replaced the old, and given us our fully-satisfying life, happy service, rich fruit, living union and communion, and the conscious ability to be who we long to be and help others to be the same, WHY DOESN’T IT HAPPEN? What is wrong? Where is this completion in Christ, loving as He loved, walking as He walked with the faith that overcomes, being more than conquerors, easily living out the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus said we would, as lights in the world? Hasn’t Paul made it plain to us that we have been crucified, raised, and ascended with Jesus and inwardly confirmed by the Spirit? Then what is the snag? What is holding us back?

This burning question has caused many sincere, born again, Bible-rooted Christians to use a nice little cliché: our position in Christ is one thing, but our condition in its outworking is quite another. And they usually add, “Of course, our condition doesn’t level up to our position.” But this is precisely what Paul says DOES LEVEL UP! Our position in Christ and our condition in living this Christ-Life are one and the same.

Next Paul reaches the least understood and most misused section of his Roman letter, or of all his writings. This section extends from Romans 7:7 through 7:25.

Paul turns from general statements about salvation and new birth to the strictly personal. How do I find that the Christian life works? How do you? To explain this and to identify with us all, Paul does a big thing. He deliberately backtracks from his actual present experience as “dead to the law,” and aligns himself with every born again believer, using the present tense of “I,I,I.” He starts with his new-born experience, then shares with us his early years of spiritual adolescence, and finally his searchings and wrestlings right through to the final answer for himself, and thus for all of us.

Paul’s use of the present tense about himself, in sharing what he had long left behind, has been misunderstood through all these succeeding years by millions of sincere believers, who have themselves not entered into Paul’s final knowledge. Thinking that the furthest a believer can know in life is humiliation, struggles, and constant failures under sin’s apparent domination, they have falsely deduced a “two-nature” condition. They see it as if we humans are permanently caught up in the opposing strife of sin and holiness natures. If, as they say, these natures were both a part of our very selves, then we would have to oscillate despairingly between them and take them for granted as our normal experience.

The truth is that our God-created human self is merely a neutral vessel, or container. In Romans 7:19 Paul described it as being in itself neither the good nor the bad, which he was discovering back then was the external influence of sin and not his true nature. Paul is saying, “I see myself with you. I am back with you confronting that old outer law, to which in actual fact I am dead.”

In order to underline that final necessary confrontation with the law by Paul, and by all of us, Paul describes in detail his past dramatic experience. It was the sudden impact of that tenth commandment, with its “You shall not covet”, which so rudely awakened him. He had been blissfully ignorant of its having any personal impact. “I was alive without the law once,” he says (Rom. 7:9); and that is how all the world lives until confronted by the law. Paul had been “delighting in the law” (Rom. 7:22), as everyone born anew of the Spirit delights. But under the influence of the lie of independent self, when that “You shall not covet” struck him, he blindly thought, “No, of course I won’t and don’t.”

Then the blast hit him. Paul found an inner uprising of the mind over which he had no control, which he named sin and which “produced in me every kind of covetous desire” (Rom. 7:8). He was devastated, not that there were these sin drives, but because he thought he ought to be able to control them. That was his condemnation and bondage.

Paul pondered, “In my newly-born and responsive condition, in which my whole desire is to fulfill the law and produce the fruit of the Spirit, there is this disturbing experience that when I want to do good, there is an evil presence influencing me (Rom. 7:22). Yes, I want to live by God’s law. I would do the good and not the evil (repeated in verses 15, 16, 18, 19, and 21), but I am driven by this humiliating condition to say that something grabs me and uses me.”

“Here is the law, which I delight in, hammering at me with its godly standards. But I find myself helpless and hopeless. I have the will but there is nothing in my human makeup which has the capacity to combat this negative power influence, which gets me in its grasp (Rom. 7:18). I am a wretched man! (Rom. 7:24); newborn, but still grabbed by sin! Where lies the trouble? Is there a remedy?”

Paul’s good self-efforts to combat his uprising sin thoughts, unknown to him, were still Satan at work by external influence and not internal control over him. What a universal deceit in all us humans, and what an exposure and deliverance! The shame and humiliation of Paul’s defeat was just the necessary negative God used to make him desperate enough to find the answer, and thus that final usefulness of the law in exposing the lie of self-effort.

Have not I, like Paul, vainly thought there should be some way in which I could combat and overcome this evil influence on me, a Christian? Doesn’t the whole world operate by doing its own stuff? Isn’t “I must,” “I can,” “I will” or “I’m going to” the sole absorbing incentive of human living? Yes, that is humanity’s vast, lost blindness. Everyone in the fallen world, with no exceptions, really lives by that Satan lie with which we were inoculated.

NOW WE MOVE WITH PAUL INTO ROMANS 8. Here he comes right out with who he IS. What he said he had “reckoned” on in Romans 6:11, he now says he “realizes” (Rom. 8:2). The governing principle, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” has set him free. In “reckoning,” you SAY it is so; in “knowing,” you KNOW it is so. And in Galatians 2:20 he proclaims, “I have been crucified with Christ – nevertheless I live- yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

Now at the summit there is no condemnation. We are freed from that false self guilt – we are Spirit people in outer bodies. There is nothing to condemn (Rom. 8:1). Now we are under Christ’s law with no escape. There is this change of governing principle controlling our lives.

On Calvary, Christ put the old indwelling sin nature on death row from where he is able only to shout at us. That old law standard, which had seemed unattainable, is now our natural way of living – “the righteousness of the law fulfilled in us” (Rom. 8:3,4).

Paul lays unique emphasis on life being the Spirit in us. Nowhere else in the New Testament is this said in such plainness. There are fifteen mentions of the Spirit in Romans 8, in place of those many “I’s” in the previous chapter.

Paul says, “Get this clear: we are now Spirit people. Christ is living our life. We are walking His way (Rom. 8:3). We think His thoughts” (Rom. 8:5,6). He in us counteracts those former self-for-self thought patterns.

Paul says, “IF the Spirit dwells in you…”, for he could not speak our word for us. But speaking for ourselves we say, “SINCE He dwells in us…” Paul says, “IF you walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh…” We say, “We DO live by the Spirit” (Rom. 8:11,13).

Certainly there are flesh pulls or material pulls – sin’s self-for-self influence getting at us through leftover thoughts in our minds from the past and from the world’s atmosphere around us. But we don’t resist them by any false self-effort. We recognize and admit them, but then we affirm who we ARE and know we are – Christ in our forms; and our faith affirmation puts to death those “deeds of the body” )Rom. 8:13).

The normal background to our daily lives is the Spirit’s witness that we actually are God’s children (Rom. 8:16). By the Spirit we are at home now with our Father/“Daddy”, which is very different from our former fears of Him in our old self-condemning life (8:14,15).

From the moment in Romans 8:17 when he opens up the incredible destiny of us humans being co-inheritors of the universe with God’s Son, Paul changes the tone of what we are to experience in our daily lives. This talk of sufferings comes as a shock until we see at the end of the chapter that those are the devastating condition in which we, as sons, operate TRIUMPHANTLY as Christ people.

Face it, Paul says, the animal and material creation around us is engulfed in suffering – living in tension. And that, Paul continues, is a God-ordained necessary opposite to the “glorious liberty” which will swallow up the “groanings.” The deliverance will come through the sons of God, but the methods aren’t explained in detail (8:19-22).

Paul says, “Let’s not fool ourselves on the physical level. We “suffer” with all the creation, and our “salvation” on that level is by hope, not faith. It is a prospect not within our present reach (8:23-25).

Added to that, we live in a sea of frustration of every kind about which we don’t even know how to pray for deliverances (8:26,27). But we must have one solid unshakeable confidence that, however totally confusing, ALL THESE THINGS are actually working out FOR GOOD. Meanwhile we love our Father, trust our brother Christ, no matter how painful the situations, because we know the security of our calling, with outcomes always GOOD, GOOD, GOOD! What a word of faith is Romans 8:28!

Then Paul goes a glorious step further. He opens up the hidden purpose behind our sufferings and disturbed conditions. “You destiny is to be a Co-Son with THE Son in His glory. So these are necessary TRAINING YEARS on earth. But we must not confuse God’s soul transforming operations, taking place in us through our constant trials and pressures, with the total basic transformation of human spirit already taken place. Growth in conforming us to the image of Christ, which Paul is now speaking about (8:29), is the daily spontaneous development of trusting in our Christ union. We are being conformed marvelously through our new birth even to present glorification (8:30). Where anything does disturb us, let our contribution be faith in God-in-action (8:31-34).

Do we wilt? Do we question, “Why does God allow that?” Do we murmur and harbor more disturbed feelings than enjoyment and praise? Paul uses just one word: “conquerors” (8:37).

And then that glorious chapter ending verse of total security – we will be forever enveloped in the love of God as His child and NOTHING “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

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