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Discussion Forum : Articles and Sermons : Freedom in Christ

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KingJimmy
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Joined: 2003/5/8
Posts: 4419
Charlotte, NC

 Freedom in Christ

This is a lengthy essay, but, I think you will find it very edifying just the same.

## Freedom in Christ - [url=http://www.iamadisciple.com/articles/freedominchrist.php]http://www.iamadisciple.com/articles/freedominchrist.php[/url] ###

The discovery of electricity revolutionized the modern world. In its discovery, man found an amazing source of power. Through the power of electricity, immovable objects suddenly became animated and full of life. Its discovery made a radical impact on the world, and has made a difference in the life of every single person therein. In Romans 1:16, the apostle Paul says that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation for everyone that believes it. Like the difference electricity has made in the world through its power, so God looks to make a difference in your life through the gospel. For the gospel is His power.

In the first five chapters of the book of Romans, Paul explains the gospel of Jesus Christ, and how through it we are saved on the basis of faith alone, because of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. As we shall now see, in the next couple of chapters of Romans, Paul continues to expand on his gospel message, as he describes the powerful effect the gospel has on the lives of the people who have believed it. Through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the chains that once enslaved man to a life of bondage are broken, and he is gloriously liberated to experience a life of freedom in Christ.

Before we begin to explore what Paul said in Romans 6-8, I just want to say a personal word. I pray the Lord speaks to your heart through these words. If you are struggling with any sin or addiction in your life, I believe the Lord wants me to show you how you can experience victory over these things in your life. The gospel isn’t just a message designed to save you so that you can have eternal life and go to heaven. Rather, it’s a message that is so powerful that not only will it save you for all eternity, but I believe it will make a tangible difference in your present life, right here, and right now. I can testify that I have personally seen this very power of God at work in my life through the gospel, and believe it will make a difference in yours, if you only believe it.

### Romans 6: Freedom from Sin ###

In his closing remarks on the doctrine of justification by faith, in Romans 5:20 Paul talks about the abundant grace God had towards us even though we were nothing but sinners who kept multiplying sin upon sin. Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Or in other words, God didn’t let our sins get in way of His loving of us. Indeed, His great love for us was demonstrated in the fact that no matter how big our sins were, or how frequently we did them, Jesus Christ still died for you and me so that we could experience the salvation God wanted to bring to our lives.

With this said, it is only becomes logical to ask: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” (6:1, NASB) Doesn’t that make sense? If we experienced the saving grace of God in our lives in spite of adding more and more sin into our lives, shouldn’t we just continue to go on sinning so that we might experience more of this grace and love from God? If that’s how things worked before we got saved, then shouldn’t we just continue on doing those very same things so that we can get all the grace and salvation that we can?

Paul says that while you might be tempted to make such a conclusion, and though such a thought process seems like the logical outworking of the gospel message, the truth of the matter is, such a belief is utterly and entirely at odds with the gospel message. Such a belief, while taught in some theological circles today, is ultimately a belief that shows one has not understood the gospel message. Paul answers this line of questioning that he raises here, with the loudest “no” in all of Scripture. “God forbid!” (6:2, KJV) As Paul will demonstrate, there is a complete incompatibility with claiming to live under grace while continuing to live a life dominated by unrepentant sin. Such claims are mutually exclusive to one another. You cannot claim to live under grace while continuing to live in unrepentant sin.

Why is this? What is Paul’s reasoning? Simple. The reason that continuing to live a life of sin has no room in the life of a believer, is because of the experience we have ultimately had in Christ. Paul explains in Romans 6:2-7 that the reason we cannot continue to live in sin is because of our spiritual union with Christ. In that union we have with Christ, we were united with Him in His crucifixion, death, and resurrection. Thus, when He was nailed on the cross, we were nailed there with Him. We He died, we died with Him. And most importantly, when He came back to life, we came back to life with Him. Now, the life He lives, because of our union together with Him, we get to experience that life, and walk with Him in it.

Thus, Paul says, “How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (6:2) What possible room is there in the life of a believer for unrepentant sin? For when Jesus Christ died on the cross, “He died to sin once for all.” (6:10) Thus, His death to sin on the cross in His body was for our benefit. For, “our old self was crucified with Him in order that our body of sin might be done away with so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” (6:6) And having been crucified with Christ, and having died with Him, through the power of the cross, we are “freed from sin.” (6:7)

Jesus Christ died not only to forgive us of our sins, but to liberate us from the power sin had on our lives through our fallen nature. As a Christian, you don’t have to follow through on the sinful impulses that reside in your body. You can resist temptation and live free from sins’ hold on your life. You no longer have to walk according to your old life and its sinful ways. You no longer have to swear, cheat, lie, steal, use drugs, or burn in lust. For in your salvation, you have been crucified with Christ, and having died with Him, you can now “walk in the newness of life.” (6:4) As Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and lives in accordance with His resurrected life, so you who have been raised up with Him can live the very life He lives, right here, and right now.

Thus, the apostle Paul exhorts us, in light of this great work of Christ in our lives, to “consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (6:11) Don’t go on thinking you are just some old sinner saved by grace. For though you are an old sinner saved by grace, that grace has made a difference in your life because of the power of God unleashed in your believing of the gospel message. You are indeed an old sinner, but that old sinner was crucified with Him. So with that work done, don’t become a new sinner. Rather, present you life to God as one who has been made alive from the dead. Live your life just like Jesus Christ lives. He doesn’t live a life dominated by sin, and the good news of the gospel is, you don’t have to either. For through the gospel, God has liberated you, and set you free. And he whom the Son has set free, is free indeed.

### Romans 7: Freedom from the Law ###

Do you know what it’s like to have that one vice that you just can’t seem to get over? You resolve to quit. You swear to yourself, to your family, and to God that you are going to stop. Yet for all your resolutions, for all your willing, and all your swearing, you still find yourself doing the same thing over and over again. You really want to stop, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it! If this is you, then I believe if you rightly understand Romans 7, you will come to understand why it is you are in such a rut, and as a result, will learn how to escape from this never ending cycle of stumbling.

In Romans 7, Paul continues his discussion on sin as it relates to the believer. Thus far in Romans, Paul has established all men everywhere have sinned, and deserve to be punished for those sins. But through God’s grace and the power of the cross, those who believe in the Lord have been liberated from the power of sin. Indeed, the believer is said to have died with Christ to sin, and is said to have been freed from its power.

But if that is all that Paul would’ve told us, he would’ve only told us half the story. For in Romans 7, we learn that when we died with Christ, not only did we die to sin, but we died to something else altogether. And what else did we as believers die to? Not only did we die to sin, but we also died to the Law of God! And this death to the Law of God was necessary if we as believers are to walk in the freedom that Christ has called us to walk in. Otherwise, as we shall see, we would still in bondage, and slaves to sin. For sin gains its power through the Law. (7:11)

It comes as a shocker for many Christians to hear this very thing. It almost sounds blasphemous and heretical. Not only have you died to sin itself, but through the death of Christ, you have also been made to die to the very Law of God. And by this Paul isn’t merely talking about the ceremonial aspects of the Law, or its dietary restrictions. Rather, he is talking about the entire body of God’s Law, not only as revealed through universal and natural law, but as also revealed in the very Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

Paul opens up with an illustration. In Romans 7:1-3, he asks us to consider marriage. As long as one is living, a woman who is married is bound by the law to be faithful to her husband, and to have sexual relations to him alone. But, if her husband should die, the law no longer has jurisdiction over her life, and she is free to marry whomever she wants without being considered an adulteress. But so long as her husband remains alive, the law has jurisdiction over her life, and should she have sexual relations with another person, then the law can speak to her predicament and judge her as an adulteress.

In the same way then, when you as the believer were crucified with Christ on the cross, you died to the jurisdiction the Law had over your life. We who have been crucified with Christ have been “made to die to the Law through the body of Christ.” (7:4) The Law cannot rule over the dead, but rather, only the living. And your death with Christ on the cross broke the claim of the Law had to oversee your life. Having now been freed from the jurisdiction of the Law, you are now free to be “joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead,” (7:4) and are now free to live as one who has now been united to Him.

It is very crucial to understand these things. For though the Law of God is holy, righteous, and good (7:12), you in your sinful flesh are everything but good. You are carnal and stink of hell. Thus, because of your carnality, when you become aware of the demands of God’s holy Law, you rebel against God and sin. The Law says, “you shall not covet,” but your sinful flesh, because of its rebellious nature, feels provoked to do the very opposite of what God says to do.(7:7-13) Such can be likened unto a mother telling her child to not press a red button. The mothers’ command is good, but everything within that child screams at him to press the red button. Why? Because that is what children do! And Paul’s argument thus far is that we are all like such children!

Thus, for those who live a life under the jurisdiction of the Law, we see a great struggle between God’s Law and our sinful flesh. If we read Romans 7:14-23 in its proper context, we will see that Paul is describing the conflicting life of a man living under the jurisdiction of the Law, and the ultimate bondage Law based living brings. On one hand, you have the Law of God telling you the good thing God wants you to do, and you mentally agree it should be done. But on the other hand, you have your sinful flesh disagreeing with the Law of God. Your sinful flesh is telling you to do the exact opposite of what God’s Law says, and ultimately drives you to do something other than what you want to do. In your sin, you may admit God was right in what He said in His Law, but such proved to be worthless to you, for instead of producing “fruit for God,” (7:4) you sinned and produced “fruit for death.” (7:5)

Reading of this great struggle and conflict, it is no wonder Paul throws his hands up in the air and declares: “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (7:24) Can you hear that? This great despair and anguish of heart that Paul expresses over his own humanity is ultimately what God desires to bring every man to see of himself. God wants us to understand that in and of ourselves, we are without hope, as our condition has trapped us in a vicious cycle that we have entered into, and have no hope of ever escaping from. God says don’t sin, yet we sin, and sin all the more! We find that we have a will and desire to serve God, but that our will is ultimately broken and unable to do what we know to be right. We find in this cycle, all we can do is continue in our addiction to sin.

Paul recognized that he had the need to be delivered from this way of living. In this way of life, he realizes there is a futility to living a life based on the Law of God. As great as the Law of God is, Paul found it had the inability to produce victory over sin in his life. Instead, the Law of God brought out the worst of his fallen humanity, and indwelling sin began to dominate him. (7:8) Instead of the Law giving him life and provoking him to obedience, he realized the commandment only provoked him to sin. The problem is not with the good commandment, but the problem is with the wickedness of our flesh. Thus Paul realized our only hope is to be found in Christ, who alone can set us free from this vicious cycle (Romans 7:25). The way in which Christ liberates us from this cycle, is not only to cause us to die to our sin, as we read about in Romans 6, but through Him we are made to die to the jurisdiction of the Law in our lives. And instead of living our lives based on the Law of God, having died with Christ and having been raised from the dead, we can find victory in our lives over sin if only we would walk in “the newness of the Spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” (7:6)

Without being set free from the Law, you and I could never truly be set free from the power of sin, and the deadly effect it has on our lives. Indeed, many Christians today fail to live the lives God would have them to live, because they are still living their life as if it were subjected to the jurisdiction of the Law. They wake up every morning and say, “I will do this, that, and the other… Likewise I will not do this, that, and the other.” They are living by rules and regulations. Some of those rules and regulations are man-made. But some of them even have their origin in God! But, God has never intended man to live his life in such a manner.

Some of you might be asking at this point, “Jimmy, I’m confused, are you saying that I don’t have to keep the commandments of God? Where does personal obedience come into play? We are supposed to obey God, right?” And this is a great question, to which I’d answer yes, we as Christians are to keep the Law of God, though we are set free from its jurisdiction. But by keeping it, I don’t mean waking up every day with a mental check list of things you are going to do or not do. As Christians, our keeping of the Law isn’t found in striving to obey individual commandments and precepts, rather, our keeping of the Law is something that originates out of experiencing a regenerated heart that has been set free by the Spirit to love God, and to walk accordingly.

It’s about living a life not empowered by a checklist of commandments, but rather, it’s about living a life empowered by the indwelling Spirit. I love God and love my neighbor as myself, not because I’m resolving to do so with all of my mind, to obey the Law. Rather, I do such as simply living my life by the impulse of the Spirit. Obedience therefore, simply comes naturally, or rather I should say, supernaturally in my life. As the Spirit of God moves in my life, I follow Him and His Divine impulse. If I rely on the Law of God to serve as my stimulant, I will find that I act upon the impulse of the flesh, and in doing so, will only find my flesh provoked to rebel against God, and to live a life of sin.

Therefore, the reason many believers continue to walk in bondage to sin, and carry around with them that one nagging vice they never seem to master, is ultimately because they are living their lives as if it were under the jurisdiction of the Law. So long as you do such, your Christian walk will be a very frustrating one, and will resemble the man of Romans 7:14-23. You will resolve and will to do what you know God wants you to do, but you will fail every time, because of a broken will, the weakness of the flesh, and the weakness of the Law. If you wish to overcome the sin in your life, you must consider yourself as one who not only has died to sin, but as one who has also died to the Law of God. And instead of walking according to your flesh, and walking according to the Law, you must walk according to the life giving power of the Holy Spirit.

### Romans 8: Freedom in the Spirit ###

Having been saved from a life dominated by many forces, through the gospel a believer is rescued from these forces so that he may now live a life of freedom, dominated by power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 8 is arguably the greatest single chapter in all of Scripture of what it looks like to live a Spirit-filled life. It serves as the climax of what Paul has said in Romans 6-7, and shows the type of life God has provided for those who by faith, have been justified, and are the recipients of God’s saving grace. It spoils once and for all the notion that those who are saved may continue to live in unrepentant sin, and asserts the contrary: those who are saved will live a Spirit-filled life.

It is the Spirit-filled life that God wants us to live. He doesn’t want us to live by our own strength, our own power, and our own resolve. Such will only bring us back into the bondage we have been freed from! Law based living must be eradicated, as the Law, great as it is, is made weak through the flesh. (8:3) The conflicted man of Romans 7:14-23 isn’t the place where we as believers are fashioned to live. For the Spirit of God has set us free from “the law of sin and death.” (8:2) He did this by giving us giving us new hearts and minds through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, who leads us and guides us in the way we should walk.

In us, “the requirement of the Law” is fulfilled, not through striving to keep the individual commandments of God, but rather, through the spiritually changed nature we have received. (8:4) I don’t need a commandment that tells me not to murder, because through the Spirit of God, I am no longer a murderer. Instead of being a murderer by nature, I have been made into somebody who loves God and loves his neighbor. Thus, instead of seeking to destroy the image of God in another person by my taking of his life through violent force, I now supernaturally seek to love that same person, and make a difference in his life for the good. I don’t need any commandment to tell me not to murder anymore than a bird needs a commandment to tell it to fly. A bird flies because that is what birds do. Murderers murder because that is what murderers do. Saved, Spirit-filled Christians love, because that is what Christians do!

Can you get a picture of this? Can you catch a revelation of it? “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” (8:1) because we are no longer the people we used to be! The grace that abounded to us in our sinful state changed us, and has forever made a difference in our life. Our sins have been forgiven, which means murderers are no longer murderers, liars are no longer liars, and thieves are no longer thieves. We cannot continue to be the same people we once were, because through the work of the cross and the power of the indwelling Spirit, we are no longer the people we once were. Oh, no doubt, in our bodies still dwell nothing but sinful desires. “Yet,” our spirit has now been made alive because of the righteous relationship we have with God. (8:10)

As a result, we are no longer “under obligation” to live according to the desires of our flesh (8:12), for as children of God, we are now “being led” by His powerful and life-giving Spirit. (8:14) We have experienced a spiritual revolution and transformation that is nothing short of a miracle. It has changed us from being the sons of Adam into the sons of God. No longer is hell the inheritance laid up for us, but rather, we eagerly await by the Spirit of God, “the redemption of our body.” And we look forward to this redemption of our body via the resurrection from the dead, because of the spiritual resurrection Christ has brought to our lives in the present. “Having the first fruits of the Spirit” presently, we long for and “groan” for this event to be played out in redemptive history. (8:23) Why? Because we have tasted the freedom that is available in Christ, and as a result, long to experience it not only in every aspect of our present life, but in every aspect of creation.

The liberating power of the Spirit in our lives has transformed us from being a people who set their mind on the flesh, to a people who set their mind on the Spirit. (8:4-6) The result of this transforming power causes us to become a people who are a prayerful people. (8:26-27) And we are a prayerful people because we realize the weakness of our humanity, and acknowledge our complete dependence upon God to move mountains. We realize that not only do we need His strength and power to live our lives, but we need Him even to help us pray. Thus, our prayers instead of sounding like a Psalm of David, may take the form of unintelligible groaning, as we find our words are too finite and pitiful to even utter before God.

In all this, through the Spirit we come to realize that “nothing will separate us from the love of Christ.” (8:35) Why? Because if we fail we know Christ still loves us anyway? While in a sense that is true, that is not what Paul is saying here. We know nothing will separate us from the love of Christ, because through living the Spirit-filled life we find that, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” (8:37, KJV) To make Romans 8:35 a verse used to excuse substandard living in the Christian life is to bring us back to the experience we had at the introduction to our faith as outlined in Romans 5:20.

Here, Paul is not talking about the abundance of grace we received and initially experienced prior to our salvation. Rather, now he is talking about the victorious life that we as Spirit-filled believes have been made to experience as recipients of God’s saving grace working in our lives. Through the power of the Spirit, we have gone from being a people who were overwhelmed and conquered by the forces in this world, to a people who now overwhelm and conquer these same forces by the power of the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit-filled life, we have come to experience abundant grace that grants us the freedom becoming to being children of God. We know nothing will separate us from the love of Christ, because of the difference that love has made in our lives.

### Conclusion ###

It is my hope and prayer that this essay has forever changed how you view the Christian life. Far from being a life marked by slavery and the domination by sin, we see that God intends all those who have become recipients of His saving grace to experience a life that is entirely different from the life they lived prior to this great salvation. God’s grace didn’t merely forgive us of our sins, and make no distinct mark on our life. Rather, God’s grace towards us should prove to be nothing more than revolutionary, transforming us into people that live a life that is in keeping with our risen Lord.

Having received this grace, through the work of Christ on the cross, we have been freed from the power of sin in our lives, and the bondage the Law of God brings fallen humanity into. Through our spiritual union with Christ, we died with Him to our sins and the things in this world, and likewise, were made to experience His resurrection with Him when He was raised from the dead. Now, we are to live our lives as people who have died to sin and are now made to live a new life, empowered by the Holy Spirit. We are no longer to made to walk as old sinners, but as children of God. For the gospel we received is the power of God unto salvation, and that salvation has changed us forever more.


_________________
Jimmy H

 2010/2/13 19:48Profile
KingJimmy
Member



Joined: 2003/5/8
Posts: 4419
Charlotte, NC

 Re: Freedom in Christ

Just a one time bump. It's a lengthy essay. Perhaps I should've posted just one portion of it. For the brave readers out there, be blessed.


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Jimmy H

 2010/2/14 16:06Profile





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