Christ Life In Us Romans 7:12-16 Sold into Bondage to Sin

Well, good morning. Glad to see you all here this morning. We are working our way through Romans again. We've been in Romans for a while. You hear the odd comment, you know, is this all we teach here? Is Romans it? Well, no. If you are interested in some of the other things we're teaching, we have the Sunday school hour, or whatever you want to call it, first hour, We've been working through Galatians. The other class just finished up First Timothy this morning.

I'm going to be going into a series on grace, God's infinite, matchless grace. Great song, by the way. But Romans is important. very, very critical truths presented in this epistle. And that's why we've gone back to go through these few chapters again before we move on from the Book of Romans. And so, important stuff, important things that we're gonna be looking at this morning here. So glad you've joined us this morning on this point.

And something that was in my mind here during the Sunday school hour, if you were in the Galatians hour, that was great. Who enjoyed that? It's okay to have some differences of opinion on the text. The Lord's teaching us, right? I was reminded this week we were reading a missionary story. Alyssa likes to read missionary stories to the kids after mealtime. And I'm one of the kids, so I enjoy that too. We were reading about a missionary to Papua, New Guinea.

There was a young man, the first young man who came to Christ in this tribe, in this village. And the story of this was now, you know, several years later as he was growing, the missionary was seeking to teach them, you know, deeper things in the word of God. And they had a translation that translated scripture into that tribal language. This young man, they reach Romans 6, and this young man comes to the missionary and says, what does this mean?

And I found his response incredibly valuable. He said, pray about it. Take your Bible, sit, read, and pray about this. And him and the other men in the study did. I should say all of a sudden, I think this took some time. The young man gets up and he comes to mission. He says, I see it, I get it. He says, I was in Christ when he died. I was in Christ when he rose. I thought, how interesting that we can take such an academic, intellectual approach to the text.

The Lord can teach us. The Lord can teach us what his word means and what it says. Anyway, as we get into sometimes some issues that are challenging, like in Galatians 5 there, and in some of this text here in Romans, we need the Lord to teach us. We need his work in our hearts to illuminate his word to us, and we need to depend on him for that.

So let's pray as we begin this study. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you've given it to us for our sake, for our benefit. so that we might know you, so that we might know the truth. And Lord, I pray that this morning, as we spend this time in your word, that you would be the focus of our attention, that we would be doing this, would be studying independence on you, not independence on our own fleshly ability to comprehend, but depending on you to illuminate the truth of your word to us, the written word this morning so that we might know you better. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So Bob's read the verses for us. Sorry, not Bob, Jim has read the, we have too many Bobs around here. Jim has read the verses for us this morning. No, we don't, we love our Bobs. Thanks Jim for reading the text this morning. Important verses, and as Jim said there, There's a kind of a challenging thing to them. You know, the seventh chapter of Romans is incredibly practical and very critical for answering some fundamental questions about the Christian life.

And Paul's telling us about this conflict that rages within believers. And it's confusing to us when we come up against that, like Jim was saying. We have this desire, but we can't fulfill it. We can't walk according to it, and we wonder what's going on. And so Paul is explaining what lies behind that conflict so that we know what we're dealing with, we understand what's going on here, and we have the ammunition to handle this in our lives. And without Romans 7, we would be very confused about the Christian life. If we had this experience without having Romans 7 to explain it to us, I think we'd be very confused. You know, Paul describes this struggle between the desire to do and what he actually does. And I think we've probably all experienced that.

Sometimes you just kick yourself and think, why did I do that? In the moment, I just reacted, but then, the sober second thought begins to settle in and we're just really disgusted with our own actions, our own behavior. Why do I always tear other people down? Why do I always get so proud and so self-defensive? Why do I give in to that self-centered desire?

Why did I say that? Why did I do that? It's not really what I want. Why does it happen? And how do we get free of this struggle? Or can we? Do we? Is there freedom from this struggle? And that's the struggle that Paul is describing here, and it's a very real struggle. And it's an important struggle as well. And so we need to understand what it's all about and what's going on. And unless Romans 7 is properly understood, it can be perplexing scripture to us. There are some notable misinterpretations of this text. that we should talk about. One is that many believe that Romans 7 is describing the state of an unbeliever.

They don't believe that the Christian has a sin nature anymore. So they take this as a description of a person before they were saved, before they were born again. But what's the problem with that? Unbelievers don't struggle with sin. Believers do. The unbeliever may not always like the consequences that come from their sinful decisions, but they never think about their sin as sin. The unbeliever only has one nature. The unbeliever only has the sinful nature, the old Adamic nature. They're not wrestling with it. They're perfectly consistent within themselves. That's the way all of us were before we came to Christ. There's no tension there because there's only one controlling nature. It's as believers now that we have this tension, this conflict within ourselves.

And the unbeliever always does what they do because it's what they want to do, and it's because it's what they think is best for them in that situation. If we look in the context here, look back at verse 9 of chapter 7, Paul says, I was once alive apart from the law. But when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died. Now that can only be said of a believer, a justified born-again believer. The believer is alive.

The unbeliever is dead in transgressions and sins. So it's a mistake to think that this is talking about the unbeliever. It's gonna leave you really confused if you think that this conflict exists in the unbeliever and that as a believer you now are free from kind of having this conflict because when you experience it, you're not gonna know where it's coming from. It's gonna really be troubling. Okay, so this is the real experience of a believer. And as we saw there, this is Paul's experience. He's talking from his own experience as a believer. Okay, so that's very important to clear that up up front.

The second error that often comes in here is looking at this passage as if it's describing the normal Christian life, as if we should expect the Christian life to be one long struggle against sin. Now, I've said this conflict in us is the case for believers, and it's normal in that sense, we have this conflict.

But you'll hear a lot of preachers say that it's this struggle against sin that gives you assurance that you are truly saved. So they'll admit that Christians do sin, but then they'll turn around and say the proof that you're a Christian is that you are fighting back against sin or you're struggling against sin. And you've got to keep struggling against sin, or maybe you never really were saved, right? And so the best that you can hope for is an unending struggle, no rest, with the idea that, well, if we keep struggling against sin, then maybe we can have some gradual increasing victory over sin.

And so though the conflict is real, the struggle described here in this passage against sin is not the normal Christian life. This is not what the Christian life is made up of. So I don't believe Paul is teaching either of these two views. The struggle described in chapter seven doesn't lead to victory, as Paul describes it there, it leads to defeat.

Right, what does he get to you in verse 24? He says, wretched man that I am, who will set me free from the body of this death. So the conflict exists in us, but as we try to struggle and overcome the power of the sin nature, the only place we wind up is defeat, the wretched man that I am. Okay, so this conflict is real. If you're a believer, you're going to face this. It's unavoidable.

And it's a conflict that the Lord intends for us to experience, intends for us to feel in our lives. He's very intentional about that, right? He didn't have to, when we were born again, he didn't have to leave the sin nature in us, but he did. He's very intentional about the way he's done that. He actually intends for us to come to that point of defeat. So why is he doing that? What's his point?

Well, let's examine this morning's verses and see if we can come to some answers, some conclusions about that. Paul begins verse 14 with the word for, the Greek word gar. It's a little word that connects us back to what he's said before. So what has Paul said, and how does it connect? I hope you've got your Bible open, because I'm not gonna have all the scripture on the screen. But if you look back to verse 13, you'll catch what Paul has already said. Verse 13 says, therefore, Did that which is good, and in context he's talking about the law or specifically the command, specific command, but we can take that in the sense of the law is good.

Therefore, did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be, rather it was the sin, this is articulate, it was the sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin, effecting my death through that which is good so that through the commandment, the sin, would become utterly sinful. So I believe as a relatively young believer, at some point earlier in Paul's Christian life, Paul had the experience where though he was alive, he was born again, when presented with God's righteous law, his immediate response was sin.

And that was perplexing, that was confusing, right? Why did God's perfect righteous law cause me to sin? But what Paul tells us is that it's not the law that caused him to sin. It's not the law that's his problem. It's the sin nature. The law didn't cause sin, but my sin nature took hold of God's command and used it as an opportunity to sin. And so the law shows just how utterly sinful the sin nature is.

The word there for utterly or exceedingly sinful is huperbole. And you actually, you could turn that into English, it's hyperball. It means to ball, ball, or to throw, okay? So it means to, we get the English word hyperbole from that. And it means to, literally means to throw over or to throw beyond. And it's being applied here in the sense that the sin nature is beyond sinful. The idea is that the flesh is completely sinful, not just partly sinful. And we often have this confusion because we see that in the flesh we can do good and we can do bad deeds.

But from God's perspective, everything that the flesh produces, everything that comes out of our nature is utterly sinful, totally contrary to him. So human good? is filthy rags, right, as scripture says. So Paul is making it very clear that sin or the sin nature would be shown to be utterly sinful or completely sinful, totally irreparable. There's no fixing the sin nature. Sometimes you get the idea that, well, we need to, like we were talking about earlier, we need to push back or fight against sin and suppress the bad works and try to increase or encourage good works. The problem is all of that is just coming out of the flesh, the sin nature.

And so the law, God's righteous holy law, shows us or proves the total, utter sinfulness of our own nature, the nature that we were born with, the nature that we inherited from our father Adam. And whenever we come up against some imperative command from scripture, the response of the flesh, the response of the sin nature proves that we still have a sin nature. If we didn't have the sin nature, we wouldn't respond in sin the way we do. So every time we come up against an imperative command, our fleshy response proves to us that the sin nature is still very much present, still very much alive and active, and still thoroughly and utterly sinful. And this is what Paul explains in verse 4. He uses the word for to answer the question why.

Why is it that when I come up against God's righteous law, I always respond in sin? Aren't I a new creation in Christ Jesus? Where is this coming from? Haven't I died to sin? And Paul says, for we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to, and again, it's the sin, articulates the sin nature. I'm sold into bondage to the sin nature. So that's the problem. It all has to do with the fact that my flesh is in bondage to sin. And Paul is showing a distinct contrast between the law and the flesh.

We have here the law, which comes directly from the Spirit of God and addresses our spirit, okay? That's what it means when he says the law is spiritual. The law comes from the spirit. The law is directly from the spirit. That's why it's spiritual. And the contrast is between the law that is spiritual and the flesh, which is enslaved to the sin nature and turns the law of God into an opportunity for sin. So Paul's contrasting those two things. And at the root of the, this is the root of the conflict right here. The spiritual law and the sinful flesh.

And so while every believer has been spiritually reborn, all of us here this morning are still living in fleshly bodies. If you're not, never mind. These bodies are the dwelling place of the sin nature, okay? Verse 17, this is just a few things in the context. Verse 17 says, the sin, again the sin nature, which dwells in me. Verse 20 repeats exactly the same phrase, the sin which dwells in me. And then by verse 23 we have the sin which is in my members, which is the parts of the body, so to speak. Paul is making it abundantly clear that the sin nature dwells in your body, your physical flesh and blood body.

What we have, really, as believers, is we have two sovereigns, or two masters, both dwelling within us, and they are totally contrary to one another. And what do you have when you have two masters seeking to have mastery of the same individual, right? Are they going to peacefully coexist? Are they going to share the territory? You don't say, well, you can have this part and all, but I got this. No, this can only lead to conflict.

And in verses 22 and 23, Paul is going to lay out the two sides of the conflict. He says, for I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man. But I see a different law or a different principle in the members of my body waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin, which is in my members. So we've got the inner man and we have the members of the body or the flesh as we have it in verse 14.

And so we've been spiritually reborn. as Christians, that's a fact. That's what Romans 6 is all about. We're new creations spiritually in Christ Jesus. And Paul refers to this new creation as the inner man. We read in chapter eight, verse nine, that the spirit of God dwells in us as believers. So it's the spirit of God who enlifes our human spirit with the life of Christ. And with the Spirit indwelling our inner man, we have the same desires as Jesus. That's what we need to understand about the Spirit's ministry and the Spirit's indwelling.

He indwells us in order to produce or reproduce the life of Christ in you and I, which means that these desires that are contrary to the desires of the flesh are actually the desire, we could even put it in the singular, of Jesus Christ, because Jesus has one desire, one aim or one goal, and what is that? is to do the will of the Father, to please Him in all things. As we've really been seeing in the book of John, the gospel of John, you really see it apparent there. That Jesus' sole aim, purpose, goal, desire is to do the will of the Father, to be pleasing to Him in every respect. And because we have Jesus living in us by his Holy Spirit, we have that same desire. That is the new desire of the new creation man. So we desire to live wholeheartedly for God.

But we find out that there's something getting in the way of that. And it's the sinful nature that dwells in the earthly body, this earthly tent, the flesh. And so though I'm judicially freed from the power of sin, the power of sin has not let go of me. It still dwells in me, and it wages war in order to take control of me. And that's the conflict. It's the conflict between the life of Christ, which is ours by the Spirit, and the desire of the sin nature that operates in my flesh.

And Paul states this very clearly in Galatians 5.17 where we were just last week. Total opposition, totally contrary to one another. And this is why you and I as believers experience the internal conflict and confusion that Paul refers to in the next verse, verse 15. When we first come up against this experience, it's terribly confusing, as we've said.

How can I have two competing desires in myself? That is a strange thing. And the answer lies in the fact that we have two natures indwelling us that are totally contrary to one another. We have the sin nature, which still indwells our flesh, but we also have a new nature, because Christ indwells us by the Holy Spirit.

Look what Paul says, or what he's going to say in the next chapter, in chapter eight, verses nine through 11. He says, however, You are not in the flesh, but in the spirit. By the way, that's very interesting to know, right? In verse 14, He says, I am of the flesh, sold into bondage to sin. And then in the next chapter he says, but you are not in the flesh.

So we are of the flesh, but we are not in the flesh. Now we need to understand what that means. But it has to do with what is, what has authority over you? You still have your flesh, you still have the sin nature, but does it have authority over you? And that's the difference between being of the flesh and being in the flesh. So he says, however, you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit. Ah, the Spirit has authority over you.

It says, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you, and that's assumed true. If you've placed your faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior, then the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him. If Christ is in you, again assumed true, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the Spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you.

Four times in three verses we read that we are indwelt by Christ via the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we kind of think of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as just being about the Spirit. But the Spirit is never just about the Spirit. The Spirit is always about the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Spirit indwelling you is for the purpose of Christ living his life in you. We never want to separate out the persons of the Trinity too far. Christ indwells us by his Spirit. And right there in verse 10 of chapter 8, we have the two sides of this internal conflict.

Though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. Well, who's righteousness? Not a human righteousness out of the flesh, because we see that in scripture. Paul talks about a righteousness of my own based on law. It's not that righteousness.

The Spirit is alive because of Christ's righteousness. That's why the Spirit isn't dwelling us, in order that we might have Christ's righteousness as our life. So the sin nature dwelling in our flesh is leading to sin and death. Christ dwelling in our hearts is leading to righteousness and life.

And if we reject the fact of either one of those two natures indwelling us, that are actively waging war in us, then we'll never accept God's deliverance. We'll never understand it. We'll never really know the need for it. We can easily head off into one of two errors. If I don't understand that I still have a sin nature, then I don't accept what God has done about it. If I don't have a sin nature, then I don't need a solution.

Or, if I don't understand the new nature that I have in Christ, then I will forever be trying to overcome the power of the sin nature in my own strength. But the healthy, growing Christian recognizes that there are these two contrary natures that dwell in him.

And that prepares the believer to receive God's provision by faith. Now verse 16 builds off of verse 15. In verse 15, Paul describes this weird experience of doing the very thing that you hate, and it's rooted in having these two indwelling natures. And then in verse 16, he says, but.

If I do the very thing I do not want to do, if I see that conflict that's real in me, if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the law, confessing that the law is good. In other words, the fact that I hate the things that I'm doing in the flesh proves that I have a new nature. You wouldn't have that conflict otherwise. If I didn't have this new nature from Christ, then I wouldn't have a desire in my heart that is contrary to the desires of the flesh.

The unbeliever doesn't have that. You as a born-again Christian has that. The Christian has this new nature because Christ indwells him by the Holy Spirit. So, it's Christ's own nature in us. And because it's his nature, it's perfectly consistent with God's righteousness. As we say, Christ desires always to please the Father, always to do the will of the Father. And that's the nature that we have in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And that's important.

The fact that we have this new nature in us means more than just having new desires. If that's all it meant, then we'd be left in a state of conflict, never to be released until the rapture or the resurrection body, right? If all we had was a new desire, it would conflict with the desire of the flesh and we'd be stuck in between these two desires, never able to actually fulfill or do the desire of the new nature in Christ Jesus. But we have to understand that we have this new nature because of the person who indwells us.

The Lord Jesus as a person indwells us by his spirit. And we don't just have his desires, we have him. We have the whole person, the whole man, Jesus Christ. We have Jesus indwelling us as our very life. And that is what we need. That's what we desperately need. Because He is the only means of a righteous life. We'll never overcome the power of the sin nature in our flesh without His life, without Jesus Christ in us as our life.

So we've looked at these three verses, we've kind of talked through them a little bit. Let's see if they've answered some of our questions. We said that the conflict described here is a reality for every believer. And we said that the Lord intends for us to experience this, to go through this, to feel this tension. And we said that not only does he intend for us to experience it, but he intends for us to come to the point of self-defeat. And we asked, why is he doing this? What's his purpose? Is it a good purpose? Is it a mean purpose? What's God doing? Why does he allow this? And we understand now from this chapter that we have two different natures indwelling us. We have the sin nature and we have the nature of Christ because we have the person of Christ.

And we understand that these two natures are totally contrary. They don't line up at all. And that's a very important lesson for us to learn. If we never see that our nature, our sin nature, is totally contrary to the life of Christ, then we'll be inclined to think that we have the ability to live the Christian life on our own. So, through the conflict, the Lord is patiently teaching us about the difference between our own nature and the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why he has chosen to allow these two natures to coexist, so to speak, in the believer. So that we will come to see and recognize the difference between who we are in our old sinful nature and who the Lord Jesus Christ is.

And that is a long, slow process. The Lord is bringing us along through all of this in order to bring us to the point of despair, but despairing of ourself. Okay, despairing of ever living the Christian life on my own. But that's not the end of it. That's not the end goal, right? He's not just bringing us to despair of self.

The Lord brings us to this despair in order to teach us that the only hope of a righteous life is through the Lord Jesus Christ. And only once we've reached the point of despair are we ready to receive the victory that he has already provided for us in the Son.

Why does it require that despair? because we're so convinced that we're able to do what we can't do, okay? We're so convinced that we're able to live a life that is pleasing to God, and we see the imperative commands, and our first response is, yeah, I can do that, that's what I wanna do. And then we find out, no, I can't do that. I fail, and I fail, and I fail. And so we have to despair of ever arriving at that righteous life.

And so the whole purpose of the conflict is to teach us that if we're ever going to live the Christian life, it's going to have to be lived by Christ and not by me. That's what the Lord is leading us to. And so struggling and striving against sin does not lead to victory, it leads to defeat. which is very important so that we despair of doing what we never can do anyway. And that experience is very important to prepare us for a victory that's by grace and not by works. So how is this practical? This needs to be practical to us.

How do we respond when we experience this conflict between the sin nature and the new nature, the nature of Christ? As we said, it's a mistake to think that struggling against sin is the normal Christian life. The conflict between the two indwelling natures is real, and we feel that, but we will never overcome the sin nature by struggling against it. The Christian life is not a constant struggle against sin. at the end of this chapter and into chapter eight, we're gonna come to God's provision for that, but I'm not gonna leave you hanging until then, okay? We have to come to the point of despair, realizing that I will never live the Christian life in my own strength, and when we realize that the only hope is for Christ to live his life through me, then what?

What do I do? How do I respond to that? It's very, very simple, but it's a lot harder for us than we might think. It's the same principle that we relied on when we were born again. I came to the point of realizing that I was a condemned sinner before God. I realized that I would never be acceptable to him, and I saw the truth that Jesus died for my sin on the cross. And what did I do? How did I respond to that? I had to rest in that finished work by faith. I had to accept it as true. That's the principle, to rest by faith in an accomplished work. Now, as a born-again Christian, I have a new need. I see that my nature is contrary to the Lord's. I know that I have a righteous standing before God. but I find it impossible to live a righteous life. The more I struggle, the more I fail.

And I discover that the old nature is still very much alive in me. And then I'm introduced to a new truth. I find out that on the cross, not only did Jesus die for my sins, but I died with him. I find out that the death of the cross separated me from the power of the sin nature that still indwells me. And I find out that I've died to the law so that I might be joined to the Lord Jesus Christ as my life.

And what do I do? It's the same principle. I need to rest in that finished work to accept it as true that Jesus indwells me by his spirit in order to live in me. Can we rest in that fact? We can rest in that fact just as surely as we could rest in the fact that Jesus' death on the cross was for our sins. It's the same principle. We rest in the truth by faith.

The Christian life that God intends for you and I is a life of rest, simply depending on him for it. And when we're struggling to live that life in ourselves, we're not trusting him. We have to depend on Christ as our new life. We have to rest by faith in Christ to live in us a life that we can't live.

And this quote from The Hungry Heart, February 10th, really states this well, this principle that is the same when we're born again as well as in our Christian walk. It says, after the believer enters into life by faith, new birth, resting by faith in Christ's death for our sins. After the believer enters into life by faith, he wonders why it was so difficult for him to see that it was all of grace, the humble reception of a finished work. And yet, he goes through the faithless struggle once again. before he sees that his daily Christian life is also a finished work, complete in Christ.

And so the Lord takes us through this discouraging journey of inner conflict and self-discovery described in Romans 7. And it's ultimately a very good thing. It brings us to the point where we're done with self. And we see the flesh the way God sees it, and we're convinced of our own wretchedness. And by the way, that's not necessarily a one and done conviction, because the Lord brings us on in stages, step by step.

We're going to come back again to the flesh and find out, oh, there are other areas in which the flesh is very much active, and we come to that point again. I'm done with self. There's no righteousness there. There's no ability there to live this Christian life. And we're again reminded afresh of the finished work to provide for a Christian life, which is unlike new birth.

When we put our faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior who died on the cross for our sins, there's a once-for-all transaction that results in eternal life, a standing before God that we can never lose. Here we're talking about our day-to-day walk, and this is an ongoing daily experience where we learn the inability to live a righteous life in ourself, and we learn anew and afresh and in greater and greater ways the ability of the Lord Jesus to live a life that we cannot.

And through all of this, we're prepared to allow Him to do the living through us, and that's a really wonderful thing to be brought to, and it's the Lord's purpose. It's the Lord's plan and program that He has each one of us on. If you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ this morning, this is what He's doing and working out in you, and we can trust Him with it. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the work that you are doing in the life of each one of your children.

We thank you that you have, in your wisdom, seen fit to allow this sin nature to remain, to indwell these fleshly bodies until the day that we receive our new resurrection body, so that we can come to see the contrast between our own nature and the life of your son, Jesus Christ, his perfect nature. And so that we can learn the power of that new life, which is able to overcome everything of the old man and able to produce in us a righteous life that is not of ourselves, but is of you. Lord, I would just pray that you would continue to teach each one of us these critically important truths so that your son would be glorified, so that it'd be his life is seen in each one of us as we go about our day-to-day, as we interact with our families and our coworkers and our friends, so that there be a visible manifestation of a life that is absolutely, totally different than the life that exists in this world, in the flesh, in mankind.

This selfless, wonderful, righteous life. Lord, we need it. We need your son as our life. Remind us of that each day and teach us that we can trust you for it, we can depend on you for this life. And that though there is this ongoing, there will be this conflict in our beings until the day that we are resurrected, that we are never subject to the power and the dominion of the old man, we're never enslaved to that old man unless we so choose to be. And that we are free to allow your son to live in us. Lord, we just thank you for this wonderful gift of grace that's free for us to receive by faith. In Jesus' name, amen.