Buck To Basics

What I find frustrating as a Christian is that I know what Paul says about the Spirit in Romans 8 but it doesn’t seem to be happening to me. 

I read in Romans 8:13, for instance, that the Spirit enables us to “put to death the misdeeds of the body,” so how come I still mercilessly condemn other people’s driving habits? And I read in Romans 8:15 that the Spirit ends my slavery to fear, so how come I still worry that I’m not doing enough as a Christian? And I read in Romans 8:39 that nothing in this world can separate us from the love of God, so how come I still wonder if God loves me when bad things happen?

Paul talks of the Spirit being “life and peace,” but I’m still riddled with bad habits, fear, worry and confusion – which shouldn’t be happening to a Christian, right? So how come they’re still happening to me? I feel like Paul when he cried out, “What a wretched man I am!” because I can read what the Spirit does for us, but circumstances crop up that overwhelm me, down the tubes I go, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. It’s frustrating. I know what the Spirit does, so why doesn’t he do it for me?  

But then I read in verse 26 that ”We do not know what we ought to pray” – or what to pray for, or how to pray properly. Oh, so maybe that’s my problem: I don’t know how to pray, and in not knowing how to pray, that’s why the Spirit isn’t helping me in my weakness. Is that how it works, then, that once I know what I ought to pray and I start praying properly, then the Spirit kicks in?   

That isn’t, however, how Paul finishes off verse 26. He doesn’t say we need to learn to pray properly for the Spirit to work, he says “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” The Spirit isn’t waiting for us to pray just right to get things rolling for us, he’s working on our behalf all the time regardless of how we pray. And if we can’t see that, God certainly can, verse 27, “for he who searches the hearts knows the mind of the Spirit.” He can see the Spirit at work.

And, Jesus promised in John 14:17, WE can “know him (the Spirit)” too, “for he lives with you and will be in you.” In time, therefore, the evidence that something remarkable is living with us and in us will be clear to us. It’s a promise.

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So we let the Spirit guide us (following up on “The new way of the Spirit,” May 18/12) – but how do we know it’s the Spirit guiding us and not our own ideas and motives?

Can we know the Spirit is guiding us? Yes, Galatians 3:2. Paul’s asking a group of Christians when they received the Spirit. But why would he ask such a question if they had no clue what he was talking about? Well, of course they knew. As soon as they’d believed the message about Jesus Christ, they’d experienced the Spirit kick in, and from that moment on they’d trusted the Spirit to guide them, verse 3. And not surprisingly either, because obvious miracles had begun to happen to them, verse 5. Oh, they knew when the Spirit was guiding them. There was clear evidence they could point to, and Paul knew it. That’s why he could ask them when they received the Spirit. He asked because he knew they knew.

The writer of Hebrews is just as blunt. Why on earth, he’s wondering, would Christians revert back to their old selves when they’ve “tasted the heavenly gift” and “shared in the Holy Spirit,” Hebrews 6:4? They knew what it was like to be guided by the Spirit. They’d tasted it, shared it, and personally experienced “the powers of the coming age,” verse 5. They had all kinds of evidence of the Spirit at work in their lives. So they knew, too.

When the Spirit guides it’s obvious. Once we’ve “been enlightened” and “tasted the goodness of the Word of God,” Hebrews 6:4-5, and we’re hanging on to the message of Jesus Christ for dear life, Galatians 3:1-2, 5, then, guaranteed, we have the Spirit’s guidance, with obvious miracles as proof of it. What obvious miracles? All those listed in Galatians 5:16-26, for a start. The Spirit will happily deal with all the junk in our lives that wrecked our relationship with God and ruined our relationships with people. He’ll happily replace it with lovely qualities instead, the obvious fruits of which will be great relationships with God and people. And we won’t need the law to keep us in line anymore (verse 23) because the Spirit is “crucifying our sinful nature,” verse 24.

So let the Spirit guide, because what we need and long for is what the Spirit does for us. Ever so gradually and ever so gently the Spirit “transforms us into the likeness of Christ with ever-increasing glory,” 2 Corinthians 3:18. So gently, though, we may think the Spirit isn’t guiding us, but if we’re hanging onto the message about Jesus Christ, the Spirit is at work, guaranteed, Galatians 3:1-5.

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What frustrated Paul so much was not being able to do what he so desperately wanted to do – and isn’t that the problem that frustrates all of us? In our inner beings we’d love to do good and make our world a better place. Barack Obama’s stirring call “Yes, we can!” struck a real chord, because “Yes,” we’d love to make a difference.

We see it in our huge drive of late to “go green.” We’d love to band together to save the planet, reduce pollution, end our dependence on fossil fuels, keep the Earth beautiful, livable and able to renew itself – but – our efforts are constantly being hampered by the self-interests of governments, large corporations and people who put their own lusts ahead of the right thing to do. It’s so frustrating. We want to end poverty and disease, make cities safe, see girls get the same opportunity as boys in Afghanistan, but there’s always something holding us back, be it weird religion, stifling tradition, power-hungry maniacs who care for no one but themselves – and our own personal excuses, too.  

Our experience as humans tells us so clearly we have a problem: We want to do good but we just can’t do it. Paul discovered the same thing happening in himself, too – “in my mind I’m a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin,” Romans 7:25. In his mind he desperately wanted to do good, but there was this other power inside him constantly working against him making the good he wanted to do so difficult. It was always an uphill battle, just as it is today trying to get anything good going that would improve life on this planet.

If only the entire world realized, then, that “Yes, we can” do the good we so desperately want to do because God sent Jesus to make it possible. How? By dying for us, first of all, because his death “condemned sin in sinful man,” Romans 8:3, literally knocking the legs out from under our sinful nature, releasing us from its grip. He also gave us his Spirit – and it’s this marvellous “Spirit of Christ” (verse 9) that “gives life to your mortal bodies” (verse 11).

What gives life to our desire to do good and make it possible is Christ’s Spirit living in us, because “by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body,” verse 13. It’s the Spirit in us that keeps the legs of our sinful nature knocked out, so that finally, at last, “Yes, we can” do the good we so desperately want to do. 

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The monster within us, this sinful nature we’ve got that has us completely captive to “sin and death,” was in for a shock when God sent Jesus.

Up to that moment, it had complete freedom to do whatever it wanted with us, because anything we threw at it was useless. Our determination to obey God’s law, for instance, only gave our sinful nature more ammunition to condemn us, because all the law did was show us, to our embarrassment, just how many laws we were breaking, and our powerlessness to keep them all. That’s why God released us from trying to fulfill the law’s requirements by our efforts, because our efforts were no more effective than shooting paintballs at a tank. They had no impact on our sinful nature whatsoever. It rolled on regardless, without a dent in sight. It was unstoppable.

Until, that is, God sent Jesus to be a “sin offering,” Romans 8:3, the effect of which must have startled our sinful nature as it frolicked away inside our heads, because Jesus’ sin offering “condemned sin in sinful man.” It was like a massive great fly swat swishing out of nowhere, whacking our sinful nature to the wall. But how was Jesus able to do that for each one of us? How was he able to get inside everyone’s head with the fly swat, hunt down the monster and destroy it?

He didn’t have to because all sin could be destroyed by just one man being a sin offering. Paul explains why that is in Romans 5:12, 19 - “Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man…so also through the obedience of one man the many will be made righteous.” Since sin came into the world by one man, it can also be destroyed by one man. So, anyone saying it wasn’t fair that Adam’s sin condemned us all, would also have to say it’s not right that Jesus’ sacrifice saved us all, too. God’s fair. It’s one for one. “For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” verse 15.  

“Consequently,” verse 18, “just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.” Jesus’ sin offering, then, covers everyone who ever sinned since Adam. The power of sin, that gave our sinful nature control over us, has been broken. Neither it, nor the law, can condemn us any longer (Romans 8:1) …. (continues in Part 4)   

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Paul was probably looked up to as a good man before he became a Christian, because, as he said so himself, “I am a slave to God’s law,” Romans 7:25. I imagine in his own mind, then, he thought he was a pretty outstanding chap, a paragon of virtue among his peers, the best of the pack, because his obedience to God’s law was immaculate. There wasn’t a thread out of place.

But that was only the outward image of himself that he presented to others. Inside his head, meanwhile, a battle raged, because for all his dedication to God’s law, “in the sinful nature I’m a slave to the law of sin.” Outwardly, he looked good. He sounded good too. But the effort it took to maintain that image was excruciatingly painful, because he knew it was all a sham, a fake image of himself that told nothing of the real thoughts going on in his head.   

From a distance he probably looked fine, though. He wasn’t reeling like a drunk or waving his arms around and yelling obscenities. He could walk and talk quite normally, which gave the appearance of a man under complete control of himself. But he knew he wasn’t in control at all. His law-keeping kept his outward actions under control but it couldn’t control his thoughts. He was having a terrible battle, therefore, keeping up his public image.

But out of it all he realized that “what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his Son,” Romans 8:3. Paul now knew by hard experience that keeping God’s law wasn’t the means to making a man good through and through. It required more, and that’s when he came to realize it was never in God’s plan for his law to save us, because we humans have a nature far too powerful for any law to contain.

It was never up to us, then, to reel in this monster in our heads, wrestle it to the ground and stab it to death. God sent Jesus to do that for us. But HOW could Jesus do that for us? By coming “in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering,” verse 3. He would come to this Earth as one of us, take upon himself and into himself the awful raging mess of thoughts that we are, and kill it off on the cross. He came to completely eradicate it, so it could never mess up our thoughts again.

Our sinful nature was clearly in for a shock! …. (continues in Part 3)

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It would do us all good if, today, right now, in one great universal cry of anguish, we could cry out as Paul did in Romans 7:24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” 

And wouldn’t it be great, if at one of these endless and useless meetings of world leaders, someone (at last) got up and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is wonderful that all of us are here to put our heads together in a valiant effort of unity to change our world for the better. But let’s just admit we have a very large problem. Human history has demonstrated over and over again that we are all prisoners inside bodies bent on our destruction. That’s how desperate we are. There is, therefore, no solution to our human problems from within ourselves, because of this law at work waging war against our best intentions, and the harder we try to fight it on our own strength, the more frustrating it becomes as we realize, to our horrified embarrassment, that we live in bodies that won’t let us do what we’d love to see done.”

“But there’s hope,” he continues, “because when the apostle Paul cried out, ‘Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ he answered his own question. He said, ‘Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ In other words, Paul found a way out of the prison of his body, a secret passage round the sleeping monster, and he passed the secret on to us. We have a solution, therefore, my friends. And it’s not more rules and regulations governing our behaviour, or even God’s laws, either. It’s what God supplied us in Jesus Christ, a ‘new way of the Spirit,’ as Paul called it, that totally ousts and replaces our sinful nature with the nature of Christ himself.”

And there is such a voice crying out to humanity – it’s Paul’s, begging us to accept reality, that we have a problem we can never deal with on our own. No system of human laws (or even God’s “written code,” verse 6) can solve this problem for us, either. There IS a law, however, that can rescue us from the law of sin at work inside us. It’s “the law of the Spirit of life.” And what that law did for Paul, Romans 8:2, was “set me free from the law of sin and death.” The battle in his mind was over, in other words. Never again would his old nature get a look in, because there was another law and another nature that now governed his thoughts and actions  …. (continues in Part 2) 

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