The Power of the Holy Spirit – part one: 8:1-11

Welcome to this next episode where we are going to discuss the beginning of Romans 8. This is one of the most famous passages in the whole New Testament - popular, widely read, and widely appreciated.

Recap and Background

We have been looking at Paul’s explanation of how to live the Christian life effectively. What is the power that enables us to live for Christ in this world? In the last few episodes we have looked all the way through Romans 5, 6 and 7 in order to reach the point in Paul’s argument that we have today. It started in Romans 5 when Paul explains the extraordinary power of salvation, justification by faith, being made right with God through Jesus Christ, and how it influences our past, present and future. He went on to explain in more depth what the nature of the power of sin was, and how we need to think clearly about the fact that we are no longer under the control of the patterns of behaviour that controlled us before we became Christians. It appears that Paul thinks that most Christians have a lack of understanding of their salvation; most Christians, in Paul’s mind, have a superficial understanding of what it is that Christ did for us.

He spent the last few chapters trying to help us understand the greatness of our salvation and the terrible power of sin that was overcome by Christ. In Romans 7, he focuses for the last time in great detail on the power of sin and the need to break free from it. In the last episode, Paul very dramatically told his own story all over again, of how he before he became a Christian. Despite being very religious in Judaism, he was controlled by sinful tendencies, unable to really love God with all his heart, and filled with sinful thoughts and actions. He felt trapped despite every possible human effort. Towards the end of the last chapter, the breakthrough moment came which we are going to build on in this episode. He asks himself the question ‘What a wretched man that I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?’ This question relates to what he felt like before he was a believer. ‘Who is going to rescue me from this sense of failure all the time?’ The answer, ‘Thanks be to God who delivers me, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Paul experienced personally, and very profoundly, Jesus Christ delivering him from sin. It happens very dramatically on the Damascus road - something that we have referred to on a number of occasions during our study in Romans, and was also described very fully on three different occasions in the book of Acts, which I have covered in The Spreading Flame material that you can find on the Word Online website. Christ miraculously revealed himself to Paul, and Paul suddenly understood his terrible mistake in not realising that Jesus had died for his sins on the cross. Paul knew about it, he was in and around Jerusalem at the time but he had been unable to understand the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection. As a result of his encounter with Christ, he suddenly came to realise what the Christian message was all about and it totally changed his life which he describes in Romans 7: 25, ‘he delivers me from sin’. Paul was utterly thankful to Christ for what he had done for him.

In Romans 8, Paul is going to give us the vital key to understand the power of living the Christian life - the power that enabled him to do incredible miracles, travel to many places, preach to many people and plant many churches. Where did this power that Paul had not known beforehand come from?

A New Experience

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.”

Romans 8:1-4, NIV

These are majestic and wonderful words and they start with one simple and important word, ‘Therefore’. In other words, everything that follows is based on what he has said up until this point: he has described the power of sin and its control over the entire human race; he has described what Christ has done and the greatness of what he has done and as a result of all these things, if we believe, Paul says, we are literally entering into a new realm of reality - a new experience, a completely new life The result is, ‘There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’ This is a very powerful statement, especially if you compare it with what Paul described in Romans 7, where he felt condemned all the time by his failures in his past life. Now there is no condemnation. This means a current experience of sins forgiven. This is the extraordinary mystery of the Christian life. That ever-present sense of guilt and shame and fear that people live with, can be broken entirely.

Jesus had spoken about similar things in the Gospels. One of the most vivid moments when this becomes clear in the Gospels, is the famous story of The Prodigal Son in Luke 15, which describes the process of ‘no condemnation’ in a very clear way. I have used this parable several times to illustrate different points that are made by Paul, but I want to use it again. Many of us will be very familiar with this story. The father who owns a farm has two sons. The younger son wants to take his inheritance in the form of cash before his father dies - a very unusual thing in those days, and somewhat disrespectful but he was granted his inheritance. He left the farm, went to another country, spent his money, and got himself into trouble. Eventually he decided he wanted to return home; he realised he had made a terrible mistake. The story goes that, as he approaches the farm, the father sees him coming and welcomes him, greets him and then decides that they are going to have a family feast to welcome the son home. The older brother, who had been working faithfully on the farm is angry that the younger brother has been treated so well. The father has forgiven the sins of the younger son. He had done wrong, hurt the father and it cost the father a lot of money which was given to the younger son and was wasted. There was a price to pay in the family but he has been forgiven. Paul’s language about this is ‘no condemnation’. When the feast comes in the family, you can imagine the father and the mother with the two sons on either side being treated equally, even though one of them had been disobedient, disrespectful and selfish, and had hurt the family - ‘no condemnation’.

That is how God looks at you, if you are a Christian believer and you have truly turned to Christ. Concerning the things you have done - they may haunt you but they don’t trouble God anymore because his forgiveness is a total forgiveness for the things done in the past; he doesn’t ever bring them back to your attention by way of making you feel guilty again. He says ‘no condemnation’ - forgiveness. That is a very powerful reality that Paul wants to emphasise here. There is a total break with the past. He has expressed it in a number of other images earlier on - the image of being delivered from slavery; the image of marriage, where a woman escapes from what appears to be an unhappy marriage when her husband dies and she is set free. He uses these powerful images to show the fundamental change that has taken place when we become believers. There is ‘no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life, has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

The Holy Spirit Brings Change

Paul introduces the Holy Spirit as the agent of change. This becomes tremendously important in Paul’s thinking. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes these things real in our experience - not just in our head but in our hearts. Paul has been talking a lot up to this point about what goes on in your head - what you think - and he says that is very important but now he is going to talk much more about the heart - what happens inside. What does the Holy Spirit actually do within us to bring about this incredible change? The power of the Holy Spirit is sufficient to break the control of sin in the lives of believers.

We need to pause here and think about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Jesus explained at the beginning of his ministry that one of the most significant things that was going to happen through his preaching was the coming of the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist understood this as well when he baptised Jesus, as recorded in Luke 3: 16. John said,

“I baptise you with water but one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Luke 3:16, NIV

When Christ came and when the Church started on the Day of Pentecost, the reality is that the Holy Spirit is given to all believers as a powerful agent of change in their lives. We are baptised, or filled with the Holy Spirit, and that brings fundamental change. The word ‘baptise’ in the time of Paul and Jesus was used of another process - the making and colouring of clothing. When clothes were made in the Ancient World, in order to have a particular colour, other than the natural colour of the fabric, some dye was placed in in a bowl, or in a pot, and then the garment was dipped in the dye - submerged completely - and it stayed there for a short period of time so that the dye could be absorbed into every fibre, and then taken out and dried. In the Ancient World this was described as ‘baptism’. The clothing was ‘baptised’ in the dye. This tells us something of the power of baptism because that garment became something totally different as a result of being dipped in the dye. It had to be totally dipped. It is no good having half of the garment that didn’t go under and into the dye. Likewise with us.

Jesus and and John the Baptist tell us that the Holy Spirit will come and fill us and empower us and it wants to take over and change the whole of our life. That is the sort of power that Paul has in mind when he describes ‘the Spirit who gives life,’ in verse 2.

Jesus’ Death - Atonement and Sacrifice

This all comes about through the work of Jesus. God did this by sending his own son in ‘the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering’ - another example of Paul describing the atonement of Jesus, his death on the cross, which I described more fully in Paul’s thinking in some earlier episodes in Series 1 and Series 2. Let me illustrate Jesus’ death in another way. The death of Jesus, so central to Paul’s thinking, was based entirely on an understanding of sacrifice, atonement, and substitution that came from the Old Testament animal sacrifices in the Law of Moses. The Jews understood that when an animal was killed, there was a transfer of the guilt of sin, from the people the animal was representing, to the animal. The animal died so that the people could no longer be guilty. This came to a climax in the Jewish calendar every year with a special day which is in the back of Paul’s mind in his description here - Jesus as a sin offering. The Day of Atonement, which happens in the autumn of every year is described in Leviticus 16. On this day, the Jewish High Priest, the most senior religious leader in the country who oversaw the animal sacrifices, would take two goats which were going to be used to represent the animal sacrifice for the sins of the whole country. The Day of Atonement was a day when they asked God to forgive them for the sins of all the Jewish people in the whole nation, and around the world.

The first goat would be taken as a sin offering as described here in Romans 8, and would be sacrificed. As the animal was sacrificed, the High Priest would pray a number of different prayers and this would be a symbol of an animal sacrifice for the sins of the whole nation. But there was a second goat. The second goat was not to be killed immediately. It was called the ‘scapegoat’. The High Priest would lay his hands on the goat and would confess all the sins of the nation out loud, in the hearing of other priests, and as it were transfer the guilt of the nation to this goat. Then an attendant would take the goat out from Jerusalem into the countryside, into the most remote place. In fact, there was a nearby desert area - the Judean desert - and the goat would be taken out as far away from civilisation as he could and be left there, all on its own with the likely expectation that it would die in the desert. These actions were very much in Paul’s mind when he thinks about the death of Jesus; the sacrifice of the first goat represents the death of Jesus and the taking away of sin; but the scapegoat represents how God separates us from our sin. You can see what happens. There is the sin on the goat in Jerusalem and the sin goes with the goat to another place and the symbol is separation. We have been set free from the past; we are literally separated from our past - it is no longer our reality today.

Christians or non-Christians

“Those who live according to the flesh have their mind set on what the flesh desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God”.

Romans 8:5-8, NIV

Paul is drawing a distinction between non-Christians and Christians. Those who are in the realm of the flesh, in his thinking, are unbelievers. They are following the old sinful nature; they can’t possibly please God. They might do good things morally but they won’t please God. There will be all those contradictions in their life; the power of sin pulling them away from God, causing them to live independently of God. But Paul says, by contrast, believers are living according to the Spirit. Notice how many times here he refers to the Spirit. In fact the Spirit is referred to twenty-one times in Romans 8 and only once in Romans 7. This is the chapter of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who leads us. He is the one who shows us how to live the Christian life.

The Defining Feature of a Christian

“You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Romans 8:9-11, NIV

Paul concludes this section by describing the total change when salvation comes. A Christian is defined in Paul’s thinking as somebody in whom the Spirit of God lives. He says, that if you don’t have the Spirit living within you then you are not really a true believer. This points out the fact that there can be nominal believers - people who attend churches who have never had an experience of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in their lives. That could be you and this is your invitation to enter into the reality of full conversion and full acceptance of Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit into your life.

Paul uses a powerful image to describe the presence of the Holy Spirit in our life in Ephesians 1: 13, when he says,

“When you believed, you were marked in Christ with a seal - the promise of the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession, to the praise of his glory.”

Ephesians 1:13, NIV

The Holy Spirit is like a seal on a document, or like an engagement ring that a woman might wear between engagement and marriage - a promise that God will fulfil his purposes for us completely.

Reflections

This is an amazing passage and as we come to the end of this episode, I want to reflect on a couple of things. This passage - particularly the first two verses- is like the fourth great climax of the book of Romans, or what I like to describe as a summit. As we are walking along a ridge of hills, we keep reaching a high point where we can see really clearly. The first one was in Romans 1: 16 - 17, where Paul briefly outlines the gospel. The second one was in Romans 3: 21 - 26, where he gives a much fuller explanation of the gospel. The third one was at the beginning of Series 2 in Romans 5: 1 - 2, where he describes the new life that we are in and now in Romans 8: 1 - 2, he describes how the Holy Spirit is the power of our life.

Our reflection here is that at this point in the book of Romans, we need to think more deeply about the person and the work of the Holy Spirit - God himself living within us. Paul will say more about the work of the Holy Spirit further along in Romans 8, in the next episode. But the Spirit is a dynamic person living within us who can change our whole lives in many and wonderful ways. I would encourage you, as we end this episode, to remember the fact if you are a believer, the Spirit lives within you, and invite the Spirit to reveal more to you about what it is to live the Christian life effectively.