Romans 8:1-4

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through 4 today. But before we begin,
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I would like to remind everyone that these chapter breaks are for references sake.
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We call it chapter 8 because it makes it easy for us, but we should remember that this passage has been cut in half.
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We covered part of it last week. As Spurgeon says about this, the division into chapters has only been made for convenience sake.
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It is not a matter of inspired arrangement. I may add that it that it has been clumsily made, not with careful thoughtfulness, but as roughly as if a woodman had taken an axe and chopped the book into pieces in a hurry.
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It was a very unfortunate thing that the axe dropped down just here, so as to divide a passage which ought to have been kept entire.
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We once heard a friend say, I have got out of the seventh of Romans into the eighth.
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Nonsense. There is no getting out of one into the other, for they are one.
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The field is not divided by a hedge or ditch. I thank God with all my heart that since my conversion
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I have never known what it is to be out of the seventh of Romans, nor out of the eighth of Romans either.
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The whole passage has been solid through to my experience.
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So what we're going to do is we're going to back up chapter 7. I'll start in verse 21.
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It says, So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.
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For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind, and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
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Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?
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Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then
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I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
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There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the
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Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
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For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, by sending
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His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh for sin. He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the
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Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the
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Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the is life and peace.
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For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law.
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Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please
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God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the
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Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the
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Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the
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Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the
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Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised
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Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
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Moving back to verse 1. There is therefore now no condemnation.
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If we stop right there, the world would cheer us and agree, gladly claiming to be
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Christians. Many false teachers basically do exactly that. Universalists who have would have you believe that there is nothing that comes after this statement.
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They would prefer it that way. Many false converts believe this wholeheartedly.
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They applaud and proclaim that there is no judgment today and that this...
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but I want to point out that this is not a new idea. Paul dealt with this.
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Paul dealt with people claiming that this is what he was teaching. Spurgeon says this, the doctrine of no punishment for any man is popular this day and threatens to be even greater in the future.
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I'm sure you're familiar with when he was alive. This is not a new idea.
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Some would use this to claim that many live however...
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I'm sorry. Some would use this to claim that you may live however you want to live.
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Walk an aisle, pray a prayer, accept Jesus into your heart.
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Others could use this to prop up their idea of the afterlife or annihilationism, being able to repent after death or earn your way to heaven from a place called purgatory.
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All of these are false teachings. All of these are perversions of the gospel. We could try and lay the blame, and we do very often lay the blame of false teachings at the feet of the teacher.
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However, don't forget that their churches are full of people for a reason.
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Those goats that seek out that teaching want it just as bad as the teacher wants to teach it.
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I'll give you one more quote from Spurgeon on this section. Though these evil doctrines have done incalculable mischief in many places so as almost to paralyze the energies of the church, yet some professed
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Christians boastful of their culture would move heaven and earth to spread these delusions.
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This we need to be aware of, and we need to be able to refute these claims when we come across them, whether it's teacher to teacher or congregant to congregant in places of business or in places of work.
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This is why reading Scripture as a whole matters. Taking a verse in a devotional day by day is not enough, because if we just read the sentence, we lose its meaning.
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We do not see the full truth. But verse one continues.
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Verse one says, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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There is no condemnation for the saints and the saints alone.
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I also want to point your attention to condemnation. First of all, let me point you to the word now.
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Paul's referring to this new state, being in Christ. Here it's for now.
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This is a present state that continues to now, to this very day. No condemnation.
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Condemnation. The word there in Greek is rather difficult to read unless you spell it out phonetically.
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Katochroma is the word. The meaning of that word properly is the exact sentence of condemnation handed down after due process.
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What Paul is referring to is final judgment, result of God's righteous judgment against mankind.
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When the final judgment takes place, and rest assured it will, though some of us, a lot of us in the church disagree on when or how exactly the events leading up to that will take place, we all agree that it will happen.
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While the rest of the world has only their merit to rest on, the saints have
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Christ. When we stand before thrice holy
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God, we will have Christ to look to, not ourselves.
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There will be only one people who escape damnation for their sins, for the evil that they've done.
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He continues, for those who are in Christ Jesus, how so?
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Well, for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
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Paul here uses the law in two separate ways. The first is referring to a principle as he did in chapter 7, here the principle of life, that being the life that is in Jesus.
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In him we have been set free from the moral standard of the law and the consequences of not keeping it.
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God's moral standard for eternal life is moral perfection, period.
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In Genesis 2, we see what the
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Word of God says, starting in verse 5, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the
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Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and the mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.
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Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust, a man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
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The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground the
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Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant the sight and good for food, and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
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The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good.
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Delium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gahon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.
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And the name of the third is the Tigris, which flows from the east of Syria. And the fourth is the
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Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it, and the
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Lord God commanded the man saying, You may surely eat every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat, in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
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You see here in verse 15, the first covenant. We refer to it as the
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Adamic covenant. The covenant that God makes with Adam is one of works, that work being obedience.
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Adam is to do what he has been made to do, and he is to obey God. Adam fails at this terribly in chapter 3, but we can see here in our...
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if we look in our confession in chapter 19, we see in paragraph 1 it said,
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God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart, and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with the power and ability to keep it.
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Later, as I said in chapter 3, we see Adam disobey God and allow himself and his wife to eat of the tree, and by doing so brought upon himself and the rest of humanity sin and death, corrupting not only us, but that which he was placed in charge of.
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Scripture is broken down in many different ways, depending on how you're studying it, how you're looking at it covenantally, into narrative and poetry and history, books of wisdom, the
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Old Testament, the New Testament, chapter verse, but looking at it through the eyes of the gospel, you can break it down into two sections.
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Genesis chapter 1 through 3, and the whole of the rest of it. Chapter 3, we see in verse 14, we see this.
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This is when the Lord God is cursing the serpent. It says,
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Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all beasts of the field.
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On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between you your offspring and her offspring, and he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
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Right here in verse 15, we see God's plan to rectify what the first Adam has done.
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We see the first instance of the promise of Christ. God's plan to redeem humanity.
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Bringing us to verse 3 in Romans 8, For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.
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While the law is perfect and it is holy, it is left unfulfilled by humanity.
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We cannot keep it. Our natural state is one of a desire for sin.
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God did this by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to condemn sin.
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God sent his own Son, Paul says, in the likeness of sinful flesh. Notice that he says likeness.
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We've covered similes, similitudes, things that are similar but not the same.
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Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin. He is truly human, but unlike the rest of humanity, he has no sin nature.
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He was born with the ability to obey like Adam in his original state.
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He could actually obey because he is truly
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God. This is vera homo, vera deus, truly man and truly
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God. And just as he says in Matthew 5 17,
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Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.
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This is what he's talking about in that passage. He came to do what couldn't be done by everyone else.
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What Christ is talking about there is the inability of Adam and his progeny to complete what ought to have been done and his ability to do so.
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That which is what Christ says in Matthew 22 is this, to love the
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Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, with all of your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
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On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. Verse 3 continues,
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He condemned sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the
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Spirit. Christ drank the entire cup of wrath that God had toward sin, toward our sin, and on the cross he bore the punishment that that sin deserved.
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In doing so, our sin was imputed to him and his righteousness was imputed to us.
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Sad that I have to make emphasis on the word imputed, but I do.
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This is what Paul is referring to here in verse 4. Christ alone has made a way for his people, those that walk according to the
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Spirit. Not everyone. Those who do not have the
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Holy Spirit still walk according to the flesh. Their lives are still directed by their desire for sin, but those of us who walk according to the
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Spirit of God, those of us that are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we walk according to him.
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We have new desires. Desire to be obedient, most prevalent.
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Paul says in Galatians 5 verse 24 and 25, And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
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If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the
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Spirit. We cover this in our
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Confession in the process of sanctification. It's in chapter 13. It's only three paragraphs.
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I'll read them. Paragraph one, it says,
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They who are united to Christ, effectually called and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created in them through the virtue of Christ's death and resurrection, are also further sanctified really and personally through the same virtue by his
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Word and Spirit dwelling in them. The dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts of it are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the
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Lord. We cover this quite in depth in chapter 7, and we'll continue to cover it because this is
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Romans. Paragraph 2, it says, This sanctification is throughout the whole man, yet imperfect in this life, there abides still some remnants of corruption in every part wherefrom arises continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the
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Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, in which war, although the remaining corruption for a time, may much prevail.
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Yet, though the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying
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Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part does overcome.
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And so the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God, pressing after and heavenly life in evangelical obedience to all the commands which
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Christ as Head and King, in His Word, has prescribed to them.
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As we continue through Romans 8, we will see why Paul has been laboring this point.
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This point of distinction between those who are being sanctified, those who are not being sanctified, and the true nature of our relationship with God as saints.
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Romans 8 truly is, as one who has said before, the glint on the shining jewel that is
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Romans. Romans is Paul's magnum opus.
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It is his largest epistle, and it is the most in -depth.
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8 is the wonderful encouragement to saints.
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I'll leave you with one more quote, not from Spurgeon. It's from John Calvin, and it's about this passage.
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Those who walk after the Spirit are not such as having wholly put off the emotions of the flesh, so that their whole life is redolent with nothing but celestial perfection.
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We covered that a couple weeks ago. That's not a thing.
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But they are those who sedulously labor to subdue and mortify the flesh, so that the love of the true religion seems to reign in them.
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He declares that such walk not after the flesh, for wherever the real fear of God is vigorous, it takes away from the flesh its sovereignty, though it does not abolish all.
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Next week, we'll be on 5 through 11, so feel free to read ahead, but I'll leave you there.