Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.”
the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ
|
Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.” the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ |
|
|
Spirituality
Succeeds Where Religion Fails
Romans
8:3-4
Have
you heard this before? “I’m not into religion; I’m into spirituality.”
It
was said to me a couple years ago when I was talking to a person at a local
Starbucks. I was inviting her and her family to
When
you hear that, what is your reaction? Some of us will just role our eyes and say
that she was just making a cop-out; that she was just making excuses for running
from God. But I didn’t. I told her I agreed with her 100%.
I
said that I, too, had it up to here with religion—man-made rules, trying to
look the part of righteousness, playing games of churchiness for the sake of
some institutionalized crap that is called Christianity—religion that has very
little to do with the true Christ. For far too long, those who
claim to be “Christian” have not done too terrific of a job in articulating
and then actually living out a truly spiritual life. Even when we individually
experience the true spiritual conversion into Christ, we go right back to living
in the power of the flesh. We fall away from grace and we become religious.
But
that is not what God wants for us. He wants us to experience the spiritual life.
This new spiritual life in Christ is not just a superior religion. It is God’s
alternative to human religion! Religion tries to enforce morality—it makes
rules and punishes those who break them. But human religion can never change the
heart—and real goodness must come from the heart.
So
God does something that religion cannot do—he invades our heart, and liberates
us from the failure of religion, and he re-creates us in the very image of Jesus
Christ. He takes us out of Romans 7 Christianity (a life of trying to live up to
the Law, only failing time and time again), and transfers us into Romans 8
Christianity (a life of liberation under the power of the Holy Spirit). He takes
us from institutionalized “religion” to a “more spiritual experience of
God.”
In
Romans 8:3-4, God, through his apostle Paul, explains to us why his grace will
succeed where religion has failed.
Let’s
review the big picture of what the Bible is all about:
God
gave the Law through Moses to the Old Covenant People of God (the people in the
“Old Testament” or the “Old Covenant”), that is, the people of
Paul even makes it personal in Romans 7: 7
"What
shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known
what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting
really was if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the
opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous
desire.” (Romans 7:7-8)
So,
God made a New Covenant with the People of God—he determined that he would do
supernaturally what the people could not do naturally. The “New Covenant”
was announced through Prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, was fulfilled in Jesus
Christ, and was recorded in the “New Testament.”
Where
the Old Covenant was weakened by humanity’s weakness, the New Covenant will
succeed through God’s grace. God says, “I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts" (Jeremiah 31:33); “I will give you a
new heart and put a new spirit in you” (Ezekiel 36:26).
Now
we look at Romans 8 and discover how this New Covenant was accomplished! “For
what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature,
God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin
offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous
requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to
the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:3-4)
Let’s
break this down—and try to follow the logic. The passage makes four points.
1.
What the Law was powerless to do.
2.
Why the Law was powerless to do it.
3.
What God did to overcome this lack of power.
4.
What that means for us.
1.
What the Law was powerless to do: To make us righteous.
“For
what the law was powerless to do…” (v. 3a)
We
know that the law was powerless to make anybody truly righteous! Paul’s agony
of trying to live up to the righteous requirements of religion is recorded in
Romans 7. He wanted to be good, and, in fact, was “faultless” when it came
to “legalistic righteousness” (Philippians 3:6). As we just read, he says
that the law that says “Do not covet” only made him covet all the
more—“I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For
what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this
I keep on doing” (Romans
This
is exactly what the person at Starbucks was resisting. She wanted nothing to do
with a religion that made a bunch of rules—a bunch of hoops to jump through in
order to appear righteous. She saw right through the hypocrisy of that—a bunch
of sinful people trying to look righteous in their own power through the keeping
of religion, and then pointing fingers at others and calling them sinners for
not playing the same game. Jesus met some people in his day that were very busy
trying to do just that: the Pharisees. What did he say about them?
“Woe
to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like
whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are
full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the
outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of
hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matthew 23:27-28)
The
Pharisees were doing everything they could to keep the Mosaic Law in their own
strength. They even came up with all sorts of extra rules to try to be safe from
breaking God’s Law. But, in Jesus’ analysis, they looked good on the
outside, but it only covered over what was rotting on the inside. Much of what
passes for Christianity today is the same—a bunch of people whitewashing their
outer appearance through the keeping of religious rules, but they are rotting
away on the inside. And the hypocrisy of it all turns the people of the world
off.
2.
Why the Law was powerless to make us righteous: Our sinful nature.
“For
what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful
nature…” (v. 3 continued)
The
word in the original Greek is flesh, which the NIV rightly translates as
“sinful nature,” for it is not just our skin, and it is not just our sexual
lust (that is what most of us think of today when someone says “flesh”). The
term represents all that is “this-worldly” in us—all our selfishness and
weakness mixed with all of our best intentions to do what is right in our own
strength. The flesh is what we can accomplish as natural people.
Admittedly,
a lot of good is done by fleshly people in the world, but in the midst of all
the good is always, to different degrees, selfishness and hidden pride. Goodness
in our own strength, in the end, only conceals the real sinfulness inside. I
know of a lot of quote-unquote “good people” doing “good things.” And I
thank God that people of all faiths or of no faith at all feel the great urge to
do good for the sake of other humans or for the environment, or for animals, or
for many other just causes. But these very same people will brag just a little
about it, or slip into a little bit of haughtiness about the good they are
doing.
But
none of us are above that! We all have the “sinful nature” lurking within
us. And all the good that we think we can do in our own strength is always
weakened by the sinful nature. The same should not be true for those who follow
Jesus Christ, but it is.
We
have not yet grasped what it means to live a spiritual life as opposed to a
fleshly life. That is why the apostle Paul blasts Christians in Galatians:
“Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now trying to be
perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3) The Galatians (and most of us
still to this day!) thought that they could be better Christians by their own
“human effort” (as the NIV renders it). We very easily slip into trying to
be good by being more religious. But when we try to be good in the power of the
flesh, we find ourselves falling way short, for that very flesh only weakens the
effort! Modern Christianity often has more in common with ancient Pharisaism
than it does with true spirituality! We need something powerful to break this
weakness! Or someone…
3.
What God did to overcome this lack of power: The sacrifice of Christ.
“For
what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature,
God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin
offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man…” (the rest of
verse 3)
God
has replaced the best of what we can do with the best that he can do! We are
limited to our good intentions in our naturalness, but God goes way beyond that
to do something supernaturally. God sent his Son Jesus Christ in the likeness of
sinful man. Literally, the verse reads, “by sending his own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh…and so he condemned sin in sinful flesh.” In other
words, since it is the flesh that is dragging us down, weakening our ability to
keep the Law of righteousness, Jesus Christ became a man—in the form of that
very sinful flesh—in order to conquer it from within!
It’s
like when an American spy became a Nazi to infiltrate the Third Reich in order
to topple the evil regime from the inside out. The American never stopped being
an American, but in order to do his work, he fully became a Nazi as well—up
to, but not including, doing the evil a Nazi would do. He ate with Nazis, he
joked with Nazis, he wrestled with the same issues that each individual Nazi
did. For all intents and purposes, he was a Nazi. But, at the same time, he was
still an American. He did this for a grand purpose, to destroy the Nazis from
the inside out.
God
came in the likeness of flesh, never giving up his deity or sinlessness, but
also becoming truly a human being—the term “likeness” does not mean a
“copy,” but more like “form”—Jesus had a very real participation in
all that it means to be a human being in the “flesh.” Being “in-fleshed”
(“in-carnate”), he exposed himself to the power of sin, even to death. But
on the other hand, Jesus was not imprisoned by the flesh as we are—he was able
to take on its form, participate in it fully, and yet be without sin. Only God
can do this! And this is the genius! For only God could defeat the “flesh”
by taking the form of “flesh!” Only God could defeat that enemy from within!
This
is the very reason why “there is now no condemnation for those who are in
Christ Jesus!” (Romans 8:1)
Christ
Jesus, in the form of flesh, offered himself as “a sin offering.” In the Old
Testament, God’s people were commanded to offer a sin offering—a bull or a
lamb (as you can read in Leviticus 4 and 5). The animal’s blood substituted
for the blood of the humans that sinned, since the result of sin must be death.
But
in the New Testament, we find that the ultimate sin offering was offered in the
death of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament is not obsolete—it is consummated!
The blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, washes away sin in the ultimate way! He is
the “sin offering!”
God
overcame the lack of power of religion through the sacrifice of Christ.
4.
What that means for us: No Condemnation! And Spiritual Living!
“…in
order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who
do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.”
(verse 4)
What
that means for each and every one of us is this: God, in Christ, performed what
the righteous requirement of the law demanded for us—as our substitute. The
law requires perfect obedience, perfect righteousness. And none of us is capable
of doing that. But Jesus was perfect! He fulfilled the law! So, for those who
are “in Christ,” we also fulfill the law—not in what we do, but in what he
did. Because of Jesus Christ’s perfect righteousness, we who place our trust
in him are pronounced “righteous” and are free of “condemnation” (Romans
5:1-2; 8:1).
This
may be hard to grasp at first. Look at the verse—“the righteous requirements
of the law” are not met in what we do. No, we are passive in this
verse—Christ’s sacrifice was in order for the requirements of the law
“might be fully met in us.” This is not something we are to do, but
something that is done in and for us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As
our substitute, Jesus satisfied the righteous requirements of the law.
The
law is summed up like this: Love God and love others. Jesus perfectly loved God
by submitting to his Father’s every command. Jesus perfectly loved others by
dying for them. And when he died for us, Jesus satisfied the righteous
requirement of the law that states that anyone who does not live up to the law
must die—he dies as our substitute; the condemnation that should be ours is
laid upon him instead.
And,
amazingly, God’s grace results in our being able to live the spiritual life!
Look at the next clause in verse 4: “who do not live according to the sinful
nature but according to the Spirit.”
Some
will mistakenly presume that this verse has the word “by” in it. It does
not! Look closely! It does not say, “…in order that the righteous
requirements of the law might be fully met in us by our living according to the
Spirit.” We naturally think it should say that, for that puts us back on the
performance treadmill. It puts us back into living the religious life: “All
this is true only if I live according to the Spirit! So get to it! Start living
religiously!”
No,
that is not what the verse says—it says the exact opposite!
“…in
order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who
do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.”
It
is descriptive! It states, matter-of-factly, that those who have been declared
righteous through the sacrifice of Christ are characterized by a new way of
living—we no longer live life merely in our fleshly strength, we now live life
in the Holy Spirit’s strength.
So,
as I said to that woman at Starbucks, with Christ we can have true spirituality!
No more institutionalized religiosity that looks the part but is full of
hypocrisy! We can be in the “vanguard” (the front edge of a trend or
movement) by committing to not living in the weakness of human religion! We can
live authentic spiritual lives that do not project to the world a mushy picture
of Jesus—the Christ-mixed-with-human religion-mess that many of us have been
living for far too long! We will live as loving, spiritual people, not
hypocritical, religious people.
The
spiritual life is accomplished by those who have genuinely experienced
conversion, but they must allow themselves to be directed by the Holy Spirit of
God, and they must put to death the old, human, fleshly, sinful nature.
This
is true spirituality: living by the Spirit—in prayer, in worship, in
submission to God’s direction; desiring righteousness more than desiring
worldly pleasure; seeking God’s Kingdom more than my little kingdom.
This
is true spirituality: Loving God and loving others. Not forcing loving acts so
that we might look righteous, but lovingly doing things with a love that
genuinely flows from the Holy Spirit, for the fruit of the Spirit is ultimately
what? Love!
And
even if I do the greatest things that look religious, but do not have genuine
love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal, I am nothing, and I gain
nothing (1 Corinthians 12:1-3). But if I yield to the Holy Spirit, he will bring
forth his fruit in me: Love (Galatians
Now
that (THAT!) is genuine spirituality! |
|
Ministry Transformation- The Emerging Church Personal Transformation- Spiritual Formation World Transformation- Social Action Interact with Bob Robinson about the emerging church, spiritual formation, or social action by e-mailing vanguard church with your comments. |
