Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. As we come to realize that it is not we who live, but Christ who lives in us, that he is our true self, we can slowly let our compulsions melt away and begin to experience the freedom of the children of God.
~Henri J. M. Nouwen
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and 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 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 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 Spirit is life and peace.
~ Romans 8:1-6
There is a stunning truth in the Gospel. We are free. We are absolutely, completely, gob-smackingly free. G_d has, in His great grace and mercy set us free from the penalty of our sins. We do not owe for them any more – and neither will we be paid the normal wages for those sins. For the death that is paid to work like this has already been paid to Another instead, and on our behalf.
But it gets better.
We are freer than this.
Can we see it in the passage above? We have been set free from both the penalty of the law – and even the need to try and carry it out on our own. The absolutely impossible task of living out a code of righteousness has been lifted off of our shoulders and is now carried by the Author and Finisher of the same.
But it gets better.
We are even freer.
Oh beloved. Not only are we not condemned, and not only are we freed from the responsibility of trying to keep behaving properly on our own – we have have been freed from sin itself. And as most of us most surely know – sin is not just something we do. Sin, rather is something that we are. Sin is us. Sin is “I.” And it is this dreadful I in each of us from whom we have been freed. And it is in this realized triple freedom that we can set our minds on something other than ourselves and set them on the only One in the universe who can bring true peace to our lives.
So yeah, we could go back to our old selves and sin. But why? Why go back to the bondage that masqueraded as the freedom we have already now found?
And as our minds become truly set on the Spirit, we do indeed begin to see that the old yucky “I” in us has indeed come to a place where it no longer even lives – but rather the Person of the Spirit within us does that in us, and through us.
This is very good news!
So yeah, we could go back to our old selves and sin. But why? Why go back to the bondage that masqueraded as the freedom we have already now found?
And as our minds become truly set on the Spirit, we do indeed begin to see that the old yucky “I” in us has indeed come to a place where it no longer even lives – but rather the Person of the Spirit within us does that in us, and through us.
This is very good news!
Sin is sovereign till sovereign grace dethrones it.
~Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)
