Those Who Are in Christ Jesus

Jesus Is Lord
Imitating Jesus
Full Life in Christ

Romans 8:1-5

The Message

The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms

8 ^1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

^3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
^5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life.

For Reflection

Command and control, that is what the law is all about.  It is limited by the frailty of human nature and its inherent inability to account for all possible circumstances.  The law is not necessarily about truth and justice.  Rules can some times take a life or their own bearing no resemblance to the real world or even to the rationality for which they were designed.  The law is about punishing violations and violators.  It is not about restoration or the transformation of the human condition.

This is not to say that the law is of no value.  Without law Chaos reigns. However, the law is not effective with out its counterpart, reconciliation.

Pray

that you are obedient not only to the law of God, but also, to the intent of the law.  Pray for the reconciliation of all people to God.  Pray that the wind of transformation in the Lord will blow in to every corner of the universe.