Living toward Holiness

Remember that, for Paul—he’s entirely convinced of this, staking everything upon it—Christ’s death and resurrection have absolute, definite consequences for us because, by grace through faith, his death and resurrection join us to Christ.  In Christ’s death is also—mystically but truly—our death; thus, there at the cross in the body of Christ, sin’s power over us perished.  There, we also died to sin.  For those who have faith.  Christ’s resurrection is—mystically but truly—ours, alive to God.  This is what makes The Lord’s Supper, for us, so much more than a mere remembrance of something Jesus said or did: when we celebrated Communion last Sunday, we were celebrating our true, effective spiritual union with Christ, in his dying and rising.  United with Christ, we participate in his life, his suffering, his death, his victory, his eternal glory.  We are in the heart of Jesus—Amen!  We are in his life, and his life is in us, by grace, through faith.  He is the one who cannot die, who will live always.  And by God’s grace, through faith—God’s grace-gift in us—we have now and will have Christ’s eternal life, by which to know and enjoy God, always.  God makes Himself a promise and, by God, He follows through.

Paul has been wrestling not only with the fatal fact of sin but also with the matter of the law.  For Paul, the two are inseparable.  Both are resolved in Christ.  The fact of the law may not feel like an especially large problem for us, but it was at the time, especially for those who had come from Judaism to faith in Christ, including those pagan Gentiles who had initially been drawn to Judaism by the premium it placed upon a clear, high morality, quite unlike practices of daily life in the Roman Empire.  Anyone who has come to saving faith in Jesus out of a life of which they are now gravely ashamed understands the importance of the law—the moral law, walking God’s way.  We, also, are obligated to do the law—the first law, the law of the law: the law of love, life God’s way.  With Christ, we died to the law given through Moses; with Christ, we live by the law of God’s love, being restored to God’s original creation order.  The law of God’s love is not embodied in a written code, as the law given through Moses; ours is a lived law, a living law, a law of life.  Love has a standard, beloved.

Writing for his fellow Jewish-Christians as well as for the gentiles who had embraced Judaism because of its strong emphasis upon a God-honoring morality, Paul reminds his readers that law is for the living.  Those who have died are no longer subject to the law given through Moses.  It would be absurd to arrest and prosecute a dead person—no need to take the fifth—but hey, locking one away for life would be no problem, and would cost the state next to nothing.  And no endless complaints from the incarcerated about the spotty cable TV service and lack of internet.

We’re a month out from Easter; Paul continues to remind us that Christ’s dying and rising change everything entirely.  These events bring with them earth-moving, life-changing power—he calls this power grace.  We get plugged into that power through faith.  We don’t access the power by first making ourselves into moral paragons: we cannot be moral paragons.  That was the mistaken thinking that came out of taking the law as the means to life, a covenant of works: work your way in to God’s love; work your way up in God’s love.  Remember that, at the same time God gave the law, He gave instructions for sacrifices for atonement.  God already knew we would be unable to do the law, so He provides the way of grace: the law is there always to point us to grace.

More than a list of meritorious deeds deserving recognition and reward—as if we could make any such claim upon God—more than a sterling resume, God wants a relationship.  Relationships are anchored in the heart.  Relationships can be bumpy, Amen?  The law was never our means to life.  The only means to life there ever was and ever can be is righteousness, which does not come by performing a set of enumerated actions.  Righteousness is not in doing such and such things.  Righteousness is the grace gift we are given through vital relationship with God.  The law could not cause that relationship; the law only served to tell us when we had busted out of the corral.

Death brings release from the law under which we are already condemned.  By way of illustration, Paul imagines the case of a woman who becomes a widow.  Now, if she had chosen to go to bed with another man before her husband died, she would have been guilty under the law, regardless of whatever rationale for her choices and actions she may plead at trial.  But if she remained faithful to her husband, then remarries after he dies, nobody regards her as an adulteress; that would be absurd.

Paul next reminds us that we “died to the law through the body of Christ” (7:4).  Let’s stick close to Paul’s words: the body of Christ—the body of Jesus was like the first husband.  That death frees us from further legal obligation.  Well, Jesus died on the cross, but Paul adds something, here: he says the body of Christ died.  Well, what of it?  What was God doing with the body of Jesus on the cross?  He was accepting the unblemished sacrifice: the sin offering, the sacrifice for sin that saves us, body and soul.  That sacrificial body was for the atonement of the blemished.  The death becomes the means for a new relationship, a new union.

The law required, demanded, that the animal offered for sacrifice—the body—be without blemish, unstained, untainted.  God wants our very best, and our blemishes are not that!  The blood of the sacrifice, the life, restores the broken, disordered relationship.  Under the law, these sacrifices were ongoing, for nothing of earth, no matter how beautiful, complete, unblemished, could fully atone, and, just like us, every Jew knew the sorrow of walking out of the Temple only to stumble once again.  Temptation doesn’t care about us, beloved; sin doesn’t care about us.  The old dominion surged up, once more.   Satan is dead set on bringing each believer down.  Only God, who does care, could end that, once for all.  He did, sending the one of God to be the cleansing sacrifice for those of earth.  May the cost of our redemption never be far from us.

The old dominion died when the body of Christ died on the cross: “It is finished,” Christ said.  That debt of that relationship came to an end, there; we “also died to the law through the body of Christ” (7:4).  So that—so that we “might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead” (7:4): Jesus Christ, raised through the glory of the Father, Jesus glorified and alive to God.  The perishable, raised imperishable.  The former life is gone.  A change of ownership; a new union.  New life, Christ-life, has begun.  Maybe we don’t feel it, don’t know how that’s supposed to feel.  It never has been about feeling.  It is about faith, beloved.  We walk by faith, not by sight.

For Paul, this new life is not a metaphor, not a pretty word-picture but an actual, effective, mystical, spiritual reality.  The new life is not primarily a sudden, renewed morality.  United with Christ by faith, what was died on the cross, and we are, with and in him, a new creation.  Jesus died and was entombed as a mangled, torn, bloody mess.  By his own choice for his own reasons, the marks of his crucifixion remain with him.  After his rising, every time he appeared to his faithful ones—still bearing the marks of his atoning self-offering—he appeared bright, clean, whole, vital, vigorous: full of grace, glorified.  His new life is new life for us; our sin-broken bodies have been claimed by God, and He will raise us, anew, on the appointed day.  We’re staking everything on that.

Until then, while we still have God’s breath of life, we live “in order that we might bear fruit for God” (7:4).  Now, while we’re still here, while we have the gift of time, we start living into holiness.  Christ died for us to claim us for his very own, to cultivate us in vital relationship with God.  We become fertile for a God-glorifying life.  Godliness, holiness—the world scoffs at such adjectives, saying it’s all a scam, all a sham.  Yet, if you’ll believe it, there is nothing better on earth than godliness and holiness.  The good works commanded under the law become for us the law of love, which we are now getting by heart by grace because Christ lives in us and we are now temples of indwelling Holy Spirit.  We’re claimed for a purpose: God’s purpose to be glorified and to have His glory testified to by those who are His.  We testify the glory of God in bearing fruit for God.  Godliness never points to itself; holiness does not parade itself, and holiness shows.  Holiness is not perfect; holiness grows.  We won’t be surprised by sin; we will always rely upon God’s grace being poured into us through the Spirit ever drawing us home.

We testify the glory of God as we bear fruit for God.  So, that feels like some pressure, and pressure can produce anxiety.  Pressure and anxiety do not feel like the freedom we’re being told we now have in Christ.  But Paul, like Jesus, never specified any quantity of fruit—we haven’t produced enough!  Haven’t met your quota—sorry, you’re out!  Some of you are still close enough to the land to remember that some seasons bring bushels and others a scant basket.  And sometimes the bushels are filled with fruit without much flavor while the meagre basket bears fruit so good that it’s memorable even years after.  You and I, we are not the final judge of the fruit.  That’s for God.  It is not our mandate to judge the fruit, even our own, but rather to be fruitful for the Lord—let Christ live in you, and let God be God.  And give Him the glory.  We live each day in humble trust, awaiting the Lord our Savior.

I’d vastly rather produce one beautiful, memorable apple than warehouses of cold-stored fruit for death.  “[W]hen we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death” (7:5).  We might just remember some of that malicious fruit: sweet enough, I suppose, for a moment on the tongue, but toxic in the stomach.  Deadly Nightshade . . . groves and valleys of it!  And the sinful passions don’t go away, do they?

Paul continues to wrestle with the problem of the law, which in our disordered state is the problem of self-righteousness: the thinking that says we don’t need God in order to do what is good; the thinking that God must reward whatever good we do—that He owes it to us, regardless of how we live the rest of our lives or whatever other deeds we may do.  This is to be in the realm of the flesh: ruled by sin, thinking and values under the dictatorship of fallen, disordered desire; we see it all around us, on parade.  To be in the realm of the flesh is to care not at all about any law of God or any God making laws.  To be in the realm of the flesh is to live to indulge and serve the arousals of the sinful passions: the flesh lives to indulge itself; then it dies.  Well, all that may sound rather dramatic.  What it amounts to is effectively removing God from the equation of life, oh, maybe not in principle but definitely, consistently, habitually, in practice: putting Him aside, oh, maybe to get back to Him later, after.  All that such living can get anyone is death.  And some are okay with that.  Live it up!  Who lives his or her life each day with God as the constant focal point and reference?  Yet, if we would only remember God and call on Him, there, in our weak, wavering moments, when the slip starts, what a difference it would begin to make!  But who cries out for God, anymore?

Christ died and, by grace through faith, we died, too.  The throne of sin was cracked at the cross.  Paul tells the Corinthians that “Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died” (2 Cor 5:14).  We know the old compulsions.  We need a new, better compulsion: we need Christ.  Faith unites us with Jesus Christ, mystically, spiritually, actually, effectively, consequentially, eternally.  Not all at once perfectly, no.  “[N]ow, by dying [with Jesus] to what once bound us [sin], we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” (7:6).  Released for service.  Unbound.  The new way; the living way.  In the Spirit, through the Spirit, by the Spirit.

Where we are, now, is not like where we once were.  We don’t always see or sense the difference.  The difference is faith.  Faith makes a difference.  Faith is not mine, not my work, not even my choice.  Faith is the gift of God, by grace: God’s grace-gift in us.  Faith is the voice of the living Christ, in us; put even more strongly, faith is Christ alive in us.  Paul had written the Galatians, years earlier, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).  The body that lives by faith may yet sin—old habits die hard!  The body of sin has no faith, wants no such faith, and dies.  Faith sees the sinful passions in us and calls them by their true, God-given names.  Faith does not call them by any other name.  Faith now alive in us causes us to remember the old fruit of disobedience; the shame remains, doesn’t it?  Faith doesn’t forget the taste of the fruit for death.  Once we’ve tasted faith, we, also, know the difference.  Not perfection but penitence.  The old Christians spoke of mortifying the flesh, but that doesn’t sound very attractive.

I’ve spoken of the law as a corral; among other things, a corral keeps the herd together and affords some protection and safety.  In Europe, long ago, they built castles—high, heavy, thick, strong—for protection.  As I see pictures of them, especially in their current condition, they always seem dark, heavy, dreary, like prisons.  In safe keeping.  The law, the old written code, each line of writing, could also feel like the bars you find in a prison window or prison door.  So close yet so far.  The air, the light—oh, you’re safe in the prison, but not free.  In many major urban areas today, you can find neighborhoods where windows are covered with bars; some companies manufacture metal security doors for the home.  It may be comfortable, inside, but the message is that to leave home is to take your life in your hands.  Some people live this way, like prisoners.  Saddest of all are the happy prisoners, happy to be in prison.  God did not make us to be prisoners.

The death of Jesus brought release.  With our hellbent sin nature growling, howling, we had been in safe keeping under the law, in lock down.  The death of Jesus does not mean the law goes away.  God’s Word stands.  But as Jesus dies for us, he fulfills all the law, including its penalty, for us.  We can enjoy his fulfillment as we receive Christ as our Savior, and Lord.  The law is not our Lord.  Christ is our Lord.  Christ is the law of living love—love in Spirit and truth—giving us a pattern of teaching.  In receiving him, we receive life for service “in the new way of the Spirit” (7:6).  Not the holding cell of the law but the liberty that comes with the Spirit—living toward holiness, our walk in righteousness with the Righteous One.  Thank God, individually and together, we are becoming holy people.  That is grace, amazing grace.