Systematic Theology (part 39)

This is not just a study of Romans. The question of the hour is, what's the confession been this week?

What's the confession today? What have you been rehearsing? What have I been rehearsing these days?

And that rehearsal includes rehearsal aloud, as we have already discussed.

How about this? Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

In love He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which

He has blessed us in the Beloved. All of that is just, here's how it is.

This is just reality, but it's the reality that we need to be rehearsing each day.

And by the way, that business of adoption is very precious. I haven't adopted, son. Some of you who were around a hundred years ago will remember the little blonde kid that couldn't sit still running around all over the place,

Bethlehem Bible Church, now an over -the -road trucker. And he came to us,

Todd came to us in foster care, and finally we adopted him.

But from foster care to adoption in the state system is about a two -and -a -half or three -year rollercoaster ride.

Okay? Now you're going to adopt him? No, you're not. Now you're going to adopt him? No, you're not. And all of that.

And so, if you have adopted children, you'll understand what

I'm going to say. If you don't, I'm not sure you can really get a grip on this. The adopted son is every bit as much the son as the children born to us naturally.

During that time, that rollercoaster ride that was going on, a friend said to me, this was a near -not -spiritual experience, a friend said to me when we thought, well, we were going to adopt him, now it's all in the dumper, we're not going to adopt him.

And all of that. My friend said, well, you know, if it doesn't work out, he's not yours anyway.

And that came very close to being maybe the end of a friendship, but also a not -very -spiritual experience.

The adopted child is every bit as much the child in the family as the children born naturally.

Those of you that have adopted children, you may understand that. That doesn't mean that that's easy, by the way.

In fact, that deal wasn't easy. We were gone from here by the time he got to be about 13 or 14, and that was a ride for a while.

Anyway, that we are adopted into God's family.

If I am loved by God, considered by God to be adopted into His family as I understand the adoption of my own son into my family, that is a precious, precious thing.

And it is permanent. For those of you that from time to time are concerned about whether or not you're in the family of God, you have been adopted.

And that's not something you did because you became wonderful, a spiritual giant, and all of that.

You are adopted. And once that adoption is done, I don't know if you know this, but when you adopt a child in Massachusetts, they change the birth certificate.

Okay? Todd is shown in the town hall in Gardner, wherever they keep that stuff, as born to Judy and me.

And that's how permanent the whole adoption process is. So if you're in the family of God this morning, you're in, and you can't get out.

So be encouraged with that, but rehearse it. Let your mind be set there, okay?

So I thought that would be a good place to start. Well, let's have a word of prayer, then we're going to jump into Romans.

Heavenly Father, we ask this morning that as we look at the book that you address to yourself, we pray that the

Holy Spirit who inspired the book, who dwells in us by your declaration and those of us who are your adopted children, we pray that that same

Holy Spirit would bear us along to understand the word this morning, to be encouraged by it, to be challenged by it, to be loved by it, to know that we are loved by you through it.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. Now we're looking at Romans chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 because they are the basis for, they are a good exposition of the basis of our position in Christ, which we are to be rehearsing.

Don't forget, this whole deal that you have me up here is that it's about the confession of the believer.

It's about getting the mindset straight by the confessions that we make. And let me say this again,

I want to be very, very clear. This is not the confession that you're seeing on television every other day, okay, where you just confess whatever and you get to do it, you know, if you confess you can fly, you can fly, that kind of thing.

This confession is bounded by the word of God, okay, and does not go beyond the word of God, it is the rehearsal of the truth as found in the word.

But get this, our problem is not that we so often rehearse the things that are beyond the word of God, we don't rehearse the things that are clearly in the word of God and we don't reach up to that, okay.

So Romans 5, 6, 7 and 8 move us in that direction. Well Romans chapter 6 tells us that we have died to sin, that we are alive to God, that we are slaves to righteousness, that we are no longer slaves to sin and we are not any longer under a regime of sin as we were before we came to Christ.

Now Romans chapter 7, the Apostle Paul turns and he's going to talk about something else that we are not under and it is we are not under the law.

Does that mean we become lawless? No, he would blurt out at the beginning of chapter 6, God forbid that we should be lawless, that we should sin our heads off just because we are dead to sin, that we are no longer under the law and so on.

Well he begins that discussion with a story. He starts a little story here but he doesn't end the story and for that reason and several others

Romans chapter 7 is one of the books in the Scriptures, one of the chapters in the Scriptures that is open to all kinds of interpretations, alright.

And we are going to get to that little problem briefly. I am not going to give you a hundred different ways that this has been understood and that people understand that,

I am going to give you the way that I think is correct, alright. So anyway,

Paul begins this chapter with a little story. I am not going to read it all because Paul doesn't finish the story so I will finish the story for you and you can understand where this goes.

Do you not know brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives.

Now that is important, you have got to start thinking, Romans chapter 6 and the end of chapter 5 as you read this little story.

For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.

Accordingly she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies she is free from that law and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

Then Paul jumps at verse 4 right to the application and maybe if he was in our homiletics class, probably unlikely that the apostle

Paul would be in our homiletics class, alright. We might say, Paul, don't just jump to the application, okay, fill out the story so that people understand.

In fact, I did this with the Bible study on Sunday night a while back and they went, wait a minute, that's not what that says, well, what

I'm going to tell you is what it says. Here's the story. We have a woman and what Paul doesn't say as he starts out here is, this woman is married to a husband, okay, and this husband is absolutely the worst.

He is, it is impossible to please this husband. You know, if the toast is not dark enough then why are you giving me raw bread?

If the toast is too dark then why are you giving me burnt toast? And it doesn't matter what she does, it doesn't matter what she does, she cannot please this husband.

But because of the law she cannot separate herself from this husband because if she does that she will be called an adulteress, she can't leave the guy and so here she is stuck in this situation where she is kind of waiting for him to die, you know, maybe tonight will be the night that this guy dies and then

I will be free, all right? But that doesn't happen and so it goes on and on and on, life goes on, this guy is absolutely unbelievable in his demands and unpleasable when she tries to meet his demands and so the only out for her is for him to die except there is one other that's not stated here so explicitly and that is this, if she dies then she is no longer under that law.

You say, well that's a great solution except for one little problem, okay, and that is she's dead, all right?

I get that. So Paul just starts out, likewise my brothers you have also died to the law through the body of Christ.

Well, here is the deal, the unpleasable husband, the husband whose expectations never could be met, that is the law in this story and you and I know from our own experience that when we look at the law, when we look at what is codified in the

Scriptures beginning with the Ten Commandments perhaps and with all of the other lists in the New Testament of what unbelievers do and what believers should not be doing, we know that when we set out to do that in our own strength that those demands are unpleasable and unfulfillable on our part no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we try.

So the solution is for the wife to die. The solution for us is to die and happily we read this, don't we, over in Romans chapter six, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?

We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the

Father, we too might walk in newness of life. The ultimate solution for the wife with the husband who cannot be pleased is for him to die, but he's not dying, okay, and the law isn't dead even today.

The law is not dead, all right? The answer is for her to die, but the end of the answer for it to be effective is for her to be resurrected from the dead, no longer subject to that law.

And that is what Paul says is exactly what has happened to the believer.

You say, well, you know, when I come to Bethlehem Bible Church on Sunday mornings, it doesn't look like a bunch of resurrected people to me.

And when I talk to some of them and when I have to deal with some of them, it's really difficult for me to think that these are people that have died to the law and are resurrected to something else, to be slaves of righteousness and all that.

I get that. And Paul is going to launch off into that whole problem, that we cannot behave like what

God says we are. But the reality is that God says we have died in Christ, we are buried with him, we are resurrected with him, therefore, the issue is no longer how well we keep the law.

The issue is what Christ has done and how God regards us.

That's the issue of reality. And that's what we need to be rehearsing. That's where the whole matter of the confession of this comes into play.

Likewise, my brothers, you have also died to the law through the body of Christ, Romans 6, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead,

Jesus, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the

Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. When he gets to verse 7, in fact, verses 7 through 25, he begins to talk about his struggle with that.

I have a quotation here. Well, I did have a list of things

I do. All right, this is good. Dr. John Hart, who teaches at Moody Bible Institute, has given seven characteristics, seven qualities, if you will, of the believer who is still under the law.

He said, well, how can believers still be under the law when God says believers are not under the law?

The problem is we act like we're under the law. That's our problem. And so we set out in our own strength to solve the problem of doing or not doing all that the law has to say.

So no matter how you're doing this morning or how I'm doing this morning, the reality is that God says we are no longer bound to the law.

We are instead bound to Christ. Now, listen to these seven qualities of the believer who still is under the law.

You say, was Paul ever under the law? Well, there are a lot of ways that the next verses that we're going to consider have been interpreted.

And the big question in those verses, 7 through 25 of Romans chapter 7, is who is the

I that Paul is talking about in those verses? And it has been understood in a lot of ways in 2000 years.

It's Israel. It is it is Adam. It is

Paul before he ever knew Christ. It is Paul after he knew Christ. But how could that be?

There's a hundred different things. Here's what here's what I think is the most reasonable explanation for what is to follow here in a moment.

The struggle of one who is no longer under the law, when would that have happened in Paul's life?

You know that Paul was converted to Christ on the road to Damascus. All right. And then he was and then he went for years out in the desert where he conferred not with fleshing blood, he says to the

Galatians, but where he where he was taught the way of the spirit.

Now, don't forget, Paul is a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He was advancing more than any of his peers in the matter of Phariseeism, in the matter of keeping the law.

And so I think it's the reasonable explanation. John Hart, incidentally, believes this also.

The reasonable explanation is that after Paul was converted, just like us,

OK, he then set out to be like Christ. But because he was a

Pharisee of the Pharisees, because he was well schooled in the law, he at some point had the conflict of doing what should be done according to the law in his own strength and finding it, as we will see, finding it agony because he couldn't do it.

And we're going to look at that in a moment. But listen to these characteristics of the believer who still behaves as if he is under the law.

One, he has a greater stress on the outward expressions of faith than on inner character.

In other words, there are people, I'm sure, that may even show up here today that are doing that so they can demonstrate that they are believers.

Here I am. I didn't want to be here today, but here I am. You know, that kind of thing. To a focus on the negatives, the don't commands, don't do this, don't do that.

Paul addresses that in Romans 14, rather than on the positives, like love one another, a distinction between various kinds of sins.

You know, there are these sins and then there are these sins. And oh, man, there are really these sins. And you don't want to be involved in that.

Now, yesterday, Judy and I went to Hartford and we went through the Mark Twain House and Museum.

I don't know if you've ever done that. If you haven't, you ought to. OK. In fact, Time Magazine characterized the

Mark Twain House in Hartford as Downton Abbey's American cousin.

And if you go into that thing, you will see that there's a lot that that covers.

Anyway, in this visitor center and not in the house, but in the visitor center, when you walk down any hallway, here are all these pithy

Mark Twain expressions. And I thought this one fits into the idea of the believer who still tries to behave, still behaves as if he is under the law.

Twain said, nothing needs reforming like other people's behavior. I get it.

And if we still keep ourselves under the law, we may find ourselves with that attitude.

You know, if these guys could just get their act together, I could be a wonderful member of Bethlehem Bible Church.

You know, it's kind of the it's difficult to soar like an eagle, you know, when you're flying with turkeys, that kind of thing.

All right. Fourthly, a conscious or unconscious neglect of the ministry of the

Holy Spirit for daily Christian living. That's what we're talking about in this little series.

A consciousness of the fact that the Holy Spirit indwells me, a consciousness of the fact, as in 8 .10

of Romans, that my body is dead because of sin, but my spirit is alive because of righteousness, the imputed righteousness of Christ.

Though the rehearsal of those things gives us and provides for us a consciousness of the fact that the

Holy Spirit is in us and is ministering to us and through us to produce

Christ likeness, the believer that is under law misses that point often.

And that includes, I'm sure, all of us. A spirit of exclusiveness and superiority.

So Paul talked about in the first part of first Corinthians, you know, some of you say I'm of Apollos. I am a

Paul. Oh, yeah, that's good for you guys. But we are of Christ, you know, that sort of thing, that exclusivity.

And may I say, I thought of this as I looked at this list. From the very beginning,

Bethlehem Church has placed a high priority on the

Word. In the very beginning, when some of you were not here, but a few of you were, you know that we got a lot of heat from the

West Boylston community because we did not do the ecumenical thing. All right.

And we took that position, I was going to say,

I presume, I won't presume anything. We took that position because we took it from God's Word.

We took it from the fact that even though we are living in a section of the country and in a society now that is increasingly secular, even in the churches and in a hot bed of theological liberalism and so on, that we, to remain true to the

Word, we're not going to be involved lending our credibility to every group down the road that just wants to join together to join together.

Back in those days, back in the 80s, 1980, OK, back in the 80s, it was a very big thing to be ecumenical.

That was the essence of Christianity. Just get together. As long as we're together, then we all know that we're

Christians. We get together, we sing Kumbaya and all that stuff. And we didn't do that. And we got a lot of heat for that.

Do you know what? There is a danger when we take that kind of a stand that we will begin to think and behave as if and have an attitude that we are superior in some way or other to all of these folks that we disagree with about so many things in that area.

I suppose that warning is good for us this morning because Bethlehem happily has remained a church that places a high, high view of God and of His Word at the very top of the list.

But we must not become feeling like we are superior or have an exclusiveness about us because of that.

Instead, we need to reach out to folks that need to be taught the Scriptures and the words of Acts more adequately.

All right. Six, there is a focus on steps or formulas for Christian living and spiritual victory.

You walk into a Bible bookstore these days and you will find shelves filled with all of the different things that you ought to do, you know, about how you can fly with Jesus and all of that.

OK, 30 steps for this, seven steps for that, 14 steps for this. Do it this way.

Do it standing on your head. Read the Bible upside down, whatever. There's all kinds of ways to grow in Christ.

Most of them, many of them, maybe not most, maybe, go beyond the

Scriptures or don't match up to the Scriptures. Instead, there is a formula. And I've talked about the one, no

Bible, no breakfast, you know. And someone came in the next week and said they were starving to death.

Anyway, and then finally, a greater stress on the separation from sinners than on a compassion to reach them.

Ah, these pagans that we live around, man, we just need to huddle in here. We just need to huddle in here and behave as if they don't exist at all.

Anyway, I thought that was an interesting list from Hart's commentary. So let's go to verse 7 of chapter 5, of chapter, verse 7 of chapter 7.

I can do this. All right. What then shall we say? That the law is sin because it cannot be kept?

By no means, God forbid. Yet if it had not been for the law,

I would not have known sin, for I would not have known what it is to covet. If the law had not said, you shall not covet.

Now, that tells me that Paul in his Phariseeism, especially as he thought about the Ten Commandments, he could say about certainly the first night, hey,

I've done them all. And then he got to 10, covet, which covers all the rest.

All right. Covet is kind of the umbrella over all the rest of the commandments. See, if you don't covet your neighbor's wife, you're not going to commit adultery.

If you don't covet your neighbor's stuff, you're not going to steal things. If you don't covet your neighbor's person, you're not going to kill him.

If you don't covet, see, it overarches everything. Covetousness is at the root of all the rest of this.

So Paul says, well, here I was, the Pharisee, and I got to covet and I realized something.

You shall not covet sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment.

Now, we all know about this. Those of you that are parents understand exactly what it is that will make your child say no.

Okay. Or I want to do something else. And that's when you give the command, don't touch that stove.

Oh, yeah. Going to touch that. We had a little episode like that in our own life.

Our oldest son, Jeff, who's not here this morning. So I don't have to give him a buck or whatever that is that Mike does with his kids.

All right. When he was little, I mean, just barely little enough to walk.

He finally got so he could walk to the television set. And so he would walk up to the television set while it was on, while people were watching it, and shut it off.

All right. Said, Jeff, don't do that. And it finally came to the day when he would walk up to that television set and Judy was saying, don't touch that, don't touch that knob.

And he looked at her and went, and then she slapped his little hand.

Okay, I know she should be in jail. She slapped his little hand. All right. All right.

Then, and took him away from there. If you think she should be in jail, my mother would be in prison.

All right. Okay. And he walked right back to the

TV set. She said, don't do that. I don't know how many laps of that they went through, but she was nearly in tears by the time

I got home. And you know what it is that causes that sin to blossom.

It is the commandment. Well, that's what Paul says here. Sin seizing an opportunity through the commandment produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

All of a sudden I was coveting everything when I realized and heard and learned that I was not to covet.

For apart from the law, sin lies dead. If you don't give the commandment, then there's not quite the impetus to sin.

Now we know from Romans chapter 5 that sin reigned from Adam to Moses, and we know that because people died.

So there is an impetus to sin that's not, that's not 100 % tied to the commandment.

All right. I once was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and it killed me.

So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. And the law still is holy and righteous and good.

And one of the things, frankly, that we are losing in our culture is that any law that I don't endorse is not righteous.

It's not good. It's no good. And so on. I am my own law. We've become lawless in our culture.

Our people in general have become lawless, but the law has not changed. It still is right.

It still is good. And it still cannot be successfully kept. So he says in verse 13, did that which is good then bring death to me?

By no means. It was sin producing death in me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.

We've talked about this already, but let me remind you. I told you about our little conversation with the

Barry policeman. Didn't I tell you about that? Now, when you come down to our house in the metropolis of Barry Plains, suddenly the the speed limit changes from 40 to 20 like that.

And that's a common thing in New England towns, I discover. OK, so one night we were coming home from Bible study and coming down our street and we were talking about what had gone on.

Judy and I were talking about what had gone on at Bible study and all of that. And then I turned the corner to go to our house and then

I realized a car was following me and it wasn't one of the neighbors and it had blue lights flashing.

OK, and the guy now he came to the window and he looked at me and he thought, oh, this is probably my grandfather.

I got I got to go kind of easy here. OK, so did you realize this was 20 miles?

Yeah, I did. We've just come from Bible study and we were talking and all of that. But if there had been no speed limit sign there whatsoever, then

I would not have been speeding, would I? No, I would not. I could have been coming down there 80 miles an hour.

I wouldn't have been speeding. You say, well, you sure would have. That's not true. Hey, look, the blue lights would not go on if there were no speed limit signs that said 40 and then 20.

That would not happen. And that's exactly what the law is about. The law not only not only spurs us to sin, but it codifies our sin and demonstrates how sinful our sin can be.

All right. Verse 14, we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh.

That's that's an interesting word. Next, when we get to Romans chapter eight, we're going to see that to be of the flesh and to be in the flesh, those are not the same things.

Those are different things. But he says, I am of the flesh, sold under sin, for I do not understand my own actions, for I do not what

I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now he's beginning. Now, here's where we get into all of the interpretations that I talked about.

Who is I here? I don't do what I want. I do what I hate and so on. And so who is that?

It's one interpretation is it's every believer. Well, guess what? I don't think that's unreasonable either, because we have all struggled with that very same thing.

The very thing that I hate, that's what I do. The very thing that I want to do. I don't do that.

I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing

I hate. Now, if I do what I don't want to do, I agree with the law that it is good.

Here we come. To one of the very controversial verses in Romans chapter seven.

And it is this verse, it is this verse that makes this chapter of the scriptures at once depression and at the same time elation.

Because it speaks to exactly what the situation is, as God sees it, we all understand the struggle that what

I that I want to do. I don't do that, which I hate that I do. We get that. OK, now

Paul comes to a conclusion. So verse 17, now it is no longer

I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

Now, if I do what I do not want, watch it, he says it again. It is no longer

I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. I was teaching this at Elmbrook Church in Milwaukee and a hand went out and said, wait a minute,

I don't think I like what I'm hearing here. This is Paul trying to get himself off the hook for the sin that he does and to relieve himself of the responsibility.

Nothing of the sort. But he is making what I would call, probably wouldn't write this in a book, but what

I would call a little sacred schizophrenia. OK, he's talking about that. All right.

And it is this, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Who's the I? See, that's the interpretive problem here in this passage of Scripture. Well, here's a little help to help us understand that.

Now, I'm not a good enough Greek student to really do this off the top of my head, but I do know a little more about Spanish enough to get into some serious trouble in some cases.

All right. But I can explain this to you, I think, using Spanish. And some of you have had a year of Spanish, so you'll get this.

English is a synthetic language. In English, we string things together to decide who's speaking, what the action is, and all of that.

So we synthesize thoughts by stringing words together.

On the other hand, there are inflected languages. New Testament Greek is one of them. Spanish is one.

All those romance languages are inflected languages. And so what you have is a word stem, and then you change the ending, usually, the ending, and that tells you who's speaking.

Now, probably you remember this from high school Spanish, okay? In Spanish, hablar is the infinitive, the infinitive verb to speak.

But you don't know who's speaking. You just say hablar, who knows who's speaking.

But you change the ending, hablo, I speak. Okay, hablas, that's the familiar form, the way you speak to God, to children, and to dogs, all right, in the familiar form.

Hablas, you speak. Habla, you speak, not familiar. Hablamos, we speak.

Hablan, they speak. Okay, that identifies who's speaking. Now, look at Romans chapter 7.

You all have English Bibles here, I presume, except those of you that are following in Greek. All right.

In Romans chapter 7, I think there's about 40 personal pronouns I. See, our problem in English is we cannot speak without using the personal pronoun to identify who's speaking, because we string words together to do that.

But in inflected languages, like New Testament Greek or Spanish, okay, you change the ending, and you get the who's speaking.

Now, all of those I's that you see in there in Romans chapter 7 in English, most of them are just conjugated

I's. You know what I mean by that? They are hablo, I speak, and so on. Now, in Spanish, if I'm talking to one of my kids, and he doesn't seem to understand that I'm speaking, you parents will understand how that works, all right, and I want to say to him, hey,

I am speaking to you, I would add to hablo, not hablo really, but we can do it that way, all right,

I would say estoy hablando, I am speaking to you, all right, not just I'm speaking, okay,

I add the personal pronoun to emphasize that I'm talking to you.

I am talking to you. All right, so that would be estoy hablando a tu, all right, in Spanish.

I guess if you're really a Spanish speaker here, forgive me. All right, now, in Greek, it's the same deal, and here's what's added, and it is added eight times in these verses that I have just read.

The personal pronouns that are translated I this, I that, I understand,

I don't understand, I do the very thing, all of that stuff, those are all conjugations, but when it gets to verse 17, so now it is no longer

I who do it, he includes the personal pronoun ego, and that is used to emphasize, and what he's saying is, it is no longer

I, the new creation in Christ. If I were to ask you this morning, does the new creation in Christ, you, does the new creation in Christ sin?

I don't know what you'd answer, but the answer is no. Say, what? That's what

Paul says. It is no longer I, it is no longer the real I, it's no longer the

I that is going to live eternally, it is no longer the I that is tied to Christ, it is no longer the

I who has died in Christ, buried in Christ, risen in Christ, no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me, and the me also is the form of ego, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh.

When he gets down to verse 20, now if I do what I do not want, there it is again, this is all now the emphasized form, speaking of the new creation in Christ, now if I do what

I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. Now, I don't have time to camp on this, all right?

There's plenty of camping to do, however, I would say, but here's what he's clearly doing.

He is not absolving himself of responsibility for sin, but he is distinguishing between Paul, the new creation in Christ, and Saul outside of Christ before that happened, all right?

And he's making the point that the sin that besets the new creation in Christ, he makes a separation of that from the real me, all right?

So I don't know who you think the real me is this morning, who I think the real me is, but I know who

God thinks the real me is, because the Scriptures are full of it, and I need to rehearse who

God thinks the real me is, so that I get that, because when I'm walking in the dirt

Monday through Saturday, it's hard for me to understand that the real me does not sin, but that the me walking around in this flesh does sin, but there is a separation that is made here, and Paul clearly makes it.

Let me try to finish here. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

Do we recognize that? Do all of us recognize that experience? I should hope to tell you, if you don't recognize that experience, you're lying, and you've broken the law, all right?

For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, there's the emphasis again, 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.

Wretched man that I am, by the way, wretched is only used one other place in the New Testament, and that is in Revelation, where Paul talks about the wretched church at Laodicea, who is lukewarm, thinks they have everything and doesn't, and that is wretched, wretched.

And Paul says, and we understand this from our own experience, what Paul is saying, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death, all right?

Now let me amplify that just a shade. The Romans were people that came up with all kinds of hideous forms of execution, including crucifixion, impalement, putting you in a sack and dropping you in the river, okay?

I think with a serpent, a squirrel, and whatever else. Anyway, those are different ways that they performed executions, but one of them was this.

If you are guilty of murder, they would take the corpse of the victim and tie it to you, and that was your sentence.

You carried around the rotting corpse of the person you had murdered until the rotting corpse of the person you had murdered finally infected you because it was in a state of decay, and you then got the death penalty.

But it was slow, and it was agonizing. Interestingly, there was a particular tribe near Tarsus, think

Saul of Tarsus, okay? A particular tribe near that place that practiced this very form of execution for murderers.

Several commentators suggest that that may be what Paul has in mind. Here I am, the new creation in Christ, but I am dragging this corpse around of sin that was common to my life before I knew

Christ. Who will deliver me from that? And the death penalty was exacted, by the way, for anybody that cut that corpse off of the murderer, okay?

Then you got another corpse, you know, that kind of thing, all right? So who will do this for me,

Paul says. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So then, I myself, here is the emphatic personal pronoun again, autos ego, ego.

I myself serve the law of God with my mind. We who are believers can say,

I think with confidence if we're really believers, I myself with my mind serve the law of God.

Me, the me that is in Christ, the me that is expressed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, the me that is becoming more

Christ -like, I myself serve the law of God with my mind. But with my flesh,

I serve the law of sin. Great conflict. So what's the answer?

Now here's a place where the chapter wasn't divided right, in my opinion. The answer is

Romans 8 .1. There is, therefore, now, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Interestingly, the King James translates, for those who are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh, but after the

Spirit. It's almost as if a scribe somewhere down the line couldn't believe that there's just, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ, period, the end.

But that is what the manuscripts say. The Textus Receptus, revered by so many, includes the works.

You see how worksy we get? Well, yeah, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ if you're walking after the

Spirit and not after the flesh. That'd be good. So all of you who are walking after the Spirit, you get over here on this side.

All of you who walk after the flesh, you get over here on this side. You guys are not condemned. You guys have some work to do.

Say, no, that's not what's being said here. What's being said here is we struggle with this sin that we are so familiar with from before we knew

Christ, that we are so familiar with that, that's hanging on our back. Who will release us from that?

The Lord Jesus. And there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, no matter how it's gone last week, no matter how it will go this week.

No condemnation. That's how heaven looks at us. Okay, next week we're going to pursue that further in Romans chapter 8 and see what that is.

I need to tell you this has been a great rush, for there are several sermons in Romans chapter 7, actually several weeks of sermons in Romans chapter 7, but I hope you get the idea.

You are a new creation in Christ. You, the new creation in Christ, serves the law of God with your mind.

The Holy Spirit dwells in you, and the Holy Spirit will express in you the life of Jesus over time.

That's why the writer to the Hebrews in 10 .14 writes, those

He has made perfect forever, those who are being made holy.

This next week we're going to have a little being made holy, all of us, all of us.

But we have that being made holy built on, He has made perfect forever. Paul expresses it.

It's great that we see here a person trying as hard as he can, and it's impossible for him to do it, because that's right where we live.

And so something else has to go on, and that something else, as I've been saying all these weeks, is the rehearsal of all of the truth of God about who

I am, about who Christ is, and about who I am in Christ. Let's pray. We've got to get out of here.

Thank you, Father, for the time together. Thank you for your Word. We pray that you would help us to rejoice in the fact that we are new creations, and that we, as new creations with our minds, serve your law.

We want to do right. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are slaves to righteousness.

Now grant, Father, by the indwelling Holy Spirit and by the power of Jesus, that this week, as we walk in the dirt, that we find that, in fact, we are becoming a little more

Christ -like. We pray that you would set our minds on things above, not on things on the earth, that we might look increasingly like Jesus.