The Greatest Chapter - Romans 8:1-4

This is ERC Sundays, the messages at Emmaus Rd.

Church in DeWitt, Iowa. ERC is a Church of people

striving to grow in Jesus and make him known to others through

our faith, words and actions. Find out more about our church

at emmausrdonline.org. Here's this week's message.

Romans 8 called by many scholars the the greatest chapter in the

Bible, meaning that it wouldn't just be then the greatest

chapter in the Bible by default, it would be the greatest writing

in all of human history and in literature.

If that's true, I what do you say?

How do you how do you even start that, Matt?

Maybe you should have let out. Well, how about this, I suppose

that we could say we could start out by saying that if a person

were to examine this word and by faith they take that into their

heads and their hearts. I can promise you and I can

guarantee that that person would be different by the end.

You would not leave the same as what you've arrived.

If you spend time in Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

And, and the reason why that's true is because the overarching

theme of being in Christ, well, that is quite possibly the most

important concept that we can ever get into our heads and our

hearts. Why?

Because in Christ we become free, in Christ we gain

forgiveness, and ultimately in Christ we gain life and we gain

life everlasting. So, man, I got to tell you

again, Romans chapter 8, kind of a, a huge thing to swing at, but

Romans 8 · chapter mention

I'm, I'm excited to do this with you.

And so I guess, you know, for me to say that I'm happy that

you're here to, to, to start this process of Romans 8.

And I hope you come back every single week to mine the depths

of it. But for me to say I'm happy

would be a massive understatement.

I really do mean that for each and every single person in this

room right now and and who will come during the second service.

Because I understand that this chapter, not only can it change

our lives right now, but it has the potential as God word, as

God's words penetrates our hearts.

It has the potential to change eternity as well.

And I'm not being dramatic when I say that I know it has that

much power in it. And so therefore today we will

kick off this series not by going slow, not with a very long

winded introduction. In fact, I'm just about done.

We are going to Sprint. We are going to Sprint into the

fire. We are going to run towards the

a hard reality that I think a lot of us don't necessarily feel

comfortable dealing with. And as the person who has to say

this to you, I probably feel less comfortable than you.

So you're lucky. Congratulations.

But here's the reality that we have to deal with.

The reality that we have to deal with is often times we want what

sin offers or what we think sin offers more than what?

More than we want God. Let me say that again, maybe a

little bit more clearly. We often times want what we

think sin will offer us more than we want God.

And that is a real problem. That is a problem that makes us

captives. That is a problem that draws us

into slavery and holds on to us and, and puts chains around us

and creates a bondage in our lives that is not easily broken.

And in fact, it is not broken at all by self help books or, or

any, you know, popular psychology.

It's not broken by any of those things.

It's only broken by the gospel. And so as we examine this today,

I want us to break free a little bit.

And some of you are already there.

Praise the Lord, you're already there.

You're already walking with the Lord.

And, and although there is sin present in your life, you still

walk in freedom because you know that there is no condemnation

for you because you're found in Christ Jesus.

Amen. Good.

I'm glad a lot of you are already there.

But for those of you who are not, you're about to get hit by

a pitch. So we are going to start

actually in Romans Chapter 7 and we have to start there because

Romans 7 · chapter mention

the beginning of Romans chapter 8 starts with the.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Therefore, anytime you see a therefore in the Bible, you

ought to immediately look backwards and say therefore,

from what? From what?

So we actually have to start towards the end of Chapter 7,

and we will be picking it up in 721, and then we will read only

four verses in chapter 8. And that is too much content.

It's too much material. So as Kristen so squarely

pointed out, please listen to Leftovers for for more insight

into that because we don't have time today.

Here's what we do have time for today.

And I think this is a clear line of logic that we get through

this text, first and foremost, that we are in fact captives of

sin. Second of all, that will draw

out the conclusion that there is a serious problem with our will,

but then finally that there's a solution in that we can have

freedom in Christ. OK captives to sin a problem

with the will and freedom in Christ.

That's where we're going. So if you have your Bibles, Oh

my gosh, I just remembered in this moment.

What page is it on? You guys are good.

You're really good man. He's really good.

I, I just, you know, I did, I have the filter is gone.

If you guys keep me higher till I'm 70, Lord knows what's going

to happen. It, it may go over, it may get

really weird, but if you, if you want to pull out a Bible from

behind the chairs, it's on page 944.

And so you can follow along that way or please, if you're not

doing that, please check into your Bible app.

I have not forgotten and I hope that you've not forgotten that

Lord willing, we will have 30,000 daily check insurance on

that Bible app, meaning that we are daily in the word of God

together. So page 944 in the Pew Bibles or

your Bible app or your personal Bible, however that works.

But we start in Chapter 7 verse 21, and we read all this in

Jesus name. So I find it to be a law that

when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

For I delight in the law of God in my inner being.

But I see in my members another law waging war against the law

of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in

my members. Wretched man that I am, who will

deliver me from this body of death, but thanks be to God

through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself serve the law

of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

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.

Here ends the reading of God's Word.

A long time ago there was a young ish merchant woman and her

name was Mary. Mary was well respected, well

liked in her village, known by everybody who knew her as

somebody who was honest and kind and good.

Well, problematically for Mary, the shop, the the booth that she

worked in, it had not been doing terribly well lately.

The economy was kind of down in, in her little part of the world.

And so her family was really struggling.

I mean really struggling. And it was well known by

everybody in that village that the king of the land had decreed

that there would be severe punishment for any merchant who

used a false scale or false weights.

And so as Mary stood there, stressed out about her family

and anxious about what the day might bring, she was grabbing on

to this little lightweight in her pocket.

She was just kind of moving around with her hands.

And she thought, man, I, I, there's nothing in me that wants

to deceive these people. I love the people who come here.

I love my community. But my family needs help.

I need help. And so, seemingly before she

even could stop her hand, before she could even agree or disagree

with her hand, her hand quickly came out of her pocket and

switched the weight on the scale, making it ever so

slightly imbalanced. Well, as the day went on, it got

busy, and her booth and, and the wares that she was selling, it

got really busy and the coin purse kept getting more and more

full and more and more heavy. And as the day wrapped up and

she kind of drugged that coin purse home and she was counting

it, my goodness, she had the best day that she'd had in more

than a month. In fact, she'd made more money

in that one day than she had in three weeks.

But there was something wrong. There was something, some

darkness, some tension welling up inside of her, and she

couldn't even enjoy the fact that her family was going to be

doing better now. Something was brewing.

She couldn't quite put her finger on it.

Well, the next day she goes back to the booth and she sees the

steward of the king walking around.

And from about 20 or 30 yards away, the steward makes eye

contact with her and he makes a straight line for her.

And he stands next to her. And he just looks at her for a

little bit and then he says this.

The king does not watch your scales to see your profit, but

to see your heart. A dishonest measure may enrich

your purse, but it impoverishes your soul.

You see, The thing is, I believe that just like Mary in that

little parable I just told you that we have all experienced

something similar to what she experienced in that.

Not precisely the same, but what I mean is, we've all experienced

a movement within our hearts and our minds and even our bodies to

do something that we know is wrong.

We absolutely know it's wrong, and yet we find ourselves ever

so slowly moving towards it until eventually we have just

straight out arrived at the conclusion of the wrong thing

and we've done it. And I'll tell you what, the fact

that that is such a common experience, it's what we would

call the common human sin experience, that although we

know what's right, it's not a knowledge issue.

We know what's right, We don't do it anyway.

And when we know that something is wrong and we don't really

want to do it, we end up doing that anyway, which not only

hurts us, but it hurts our family, it hurts our friends, it

hurts our community. It has a wide effect that we

probably don't even understand completely.

And so here's what I want to do. I want to point something out to

you that I think will help make this make a lot more sense.

Paul says that there is a war raging in that we have become

captives to it. Now, I think in the most literal

sense, the most obvious sense, most of us probably don't

actually, or we haven't probably experienced war in captivity in

that literal sense. However, that doesn't mean that

it's not real and that doesn't mean that it's not happening to

all of us on a daily basis, right?

If, well, let me make an aside for a second.

If that war, if that fight isn't happening in you, there's two

options. You are either Jesus himself

resurrected and you're doing a great job of hiding, or, or you

have completely subverted the law of God.

You have so quenched God's law inside your mind and in your

heart. You have burned his conscience

out of you. And just like Pharaoh, who was

flirting with the fires of hell as his heart was hardened

against God and against his people over and over, if that's

you, if you are not in a fight, you are flirting with hell

itself. Now modern psychologist, they

would probably call a person who's kind of like that.

They would just call that person like a narcissist, right?

They only think about themselves.

They only care about themselves. They don't, they don't really

worry about what happens to other people.

It's all about me, me, me. That's what a narcissist is, and

that's what a modern psychologist would call the

person I'm describing. However, the Bible would more

aptly tell you that that person, without repentance and faith

getting in their way, they are on a road straight to hell.

Now, I hope that's not you. If it is you, the Lord help you

because you need him to drop a Mack truck on your head.

You need a change. You need to feel the weight of

your sin. I hope the Spirit does that.

Now for the rest of us who do struggle with sin, who do, who

are in the fight, we have to, I think we have to ask, what are

we really dealing with here? How does this work?

Well, the Greek word here that's translated as captive, really

what that means in its most literal sense is that we have

become prisoners of war. You have become a prisoner of

war in the fight against sin. You have somehow been brought

into bondage. And The thing is, as we

understand this word in its original language, this is not

just like, hey, there's this casual temptation to sin, and

sometimes I mess up. No, absolutely not.

This is far more serious than that, because this is so serious

that it goes against your very will.

Even when you will yourself away from the sin, it always finds

you and you act on it anyway. This is a serious problem.

This is a very serious problem because it works against our

will. And that actually brings us to

the question, why can't we just will ourselves to be better?

Why can't we just do that? Why can't I hear enough Ted

Talks? Why can't I get enough

motivation to just pull myself up by the bootstraps and say I'm

not doing that anymore? Why doesn't it work that way?

I mean, that would be awesome. That would be so cool.

In fact, I think it was like 2 weeks ago, Pastor Matt said

something. He's like, just stop sinning.

And all I wanted him to do was to walk off the stage and be

done. Not because he was saying

anything bad, but because I'm like, wouldn't that be great if

that's how it worked, that he could just tell us just stop

sinning and we'd be like, oh man, you're right, I should

totally not do that anymore. Good deal.

But that's the thing. We have a problem with the will.

Let me let me say it this way. The will follows the heart, not

the other way around. Take that in for a second,

because it took me a minute too. The will will follow the heart,

not the other way around. Augustine said this.

He said that your love, your heart, determines the direction

of your will. Just as gravity pulls a body

downward, love pulls the will toward what the heart desires.

That's interesting, isn't it, man?

He also goes on to say that the will is in fact desire, and a

man does not will what he does not desire.

So think about it. When you are sinning against

your will, all you're doing is chasing what your heart wants

anyway. So we have a major problem,

don't we? We have a problem that the, the

I, that the will cannot overcome the idolatry on its own.

And here's the thing, because it's a heart issue, we have to

address that and we have to attack that first.

And, and what does that actually look like?

First of all, it's acknowledging that we love a lot of things,

right? We love big, but it's when the

order of our loves is out of whack and they're out of place

that everything goes sideways, right?

There is a very real reason why the very first commandment that

God gives is that you shall have no other gods before me.

Because the Lord knows that when we have any other God before

him, that lowercase G God will turn us into a slave.

We will become captives to the will of whatever that thing is.

And my goodness people, I'm being honest.

We love a lot of good things. I don't think most people love

bad things. You would have to be a sociopath

hoping there's none here because then they'll probably come to my

house later. Lord help me.

But honestly, like people don't generally love bad things, but

we do bad things and it's because the the the loves of our

heart are disordered. It's because we have not put God

first. I have not put my relationship

with with him first. I have not loved him with my

heart and my soul in my mind. I have instead loved money or

comfort or my family or a job or something else.

I have put something else 1st and it causes my heart to be

corrupt and then my will moves towards my corrupt heart.

Do you see the problem of the will?

It doesn't work. John Calvin rightly said that

the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols, meaning that

we constantly elevate created things, good things, into

ultimate things, which we become captives to.

We we are prisoners of war and The thing is our will.

It cannot dethrone idols. It can't, since the will follows

the position of the heart. Our will cannot resist the

idols. Now here's the thing.

I understand that you might be able to resist that sin

temptation for a little while. Believe me, I'm preaching to the

choir. You might be able to do it for a

little while and you might even have a streak on your phone, but

at some point, if your heart is not changed towards Jesus Christ

and towards the gospel, your will will break because your

will is still following your heart and it will not work.

You will not be able to resist what your heart is chasing.

And so we have to ask the question, what can we do about

it? What can we do about it?

How? How do we have any hope when our

will fails us? Because our our heart is just

constantly making idle after idle after idle?

Well, as it's been said elsewhere, not by me, the

solution comes when we accept the fact that we cannot change

by willpower alone. We can only change by worship.

Let me say that again, because it's smart and I didn't come up

with it. We cannot change by willpower

alone. We can only change by worship.

And so we can become free and our hearts can become liberated

when by the power of the gospel, Jesus Christ becomes the love of

our life, the love that we constantly seek after.

And it is only by the power of the gospel that that happens.

Now, I want to pause here just for a moment before we get to

our last point because I need to make it ridiculously clear that

it is through the power of the gospel, because here's what I

think you could walk away with. And I've been thinking about

this for days based on what I've said you could walk away with.

All right, Pastor was good today.

He said some things. I don't remember what it was,

but I do remember I need to love Jesus more.

I need to love Jesus more. I need to love Jesus more.

Oh, I'm going to love Jesus more.

Do you know what you just did? You just went back to a

willpower thing. Because at that point it's not

about a heart change, it is about the fact that I'm going to

will myself to love Jesus more. Good luck with that.

It won't work. So what are we going to do?

Well, let's read a little bit through the power of the gospel,

through the power of the Word, through the power of the Spirit,

God can change us, and He does. And I know that because I am one

of those changed people. So let's read this one more time

because there's power in His words.

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 with 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.

It says that he condemned sin in the flesh.

What is he talking about? Well, here's the thing.

If a phony, false, terrible trial was not enough, if

spitting on him, if kicking him around, if punching him when

they when they blindfolded his eyes, if that wasn't enough,

before Jesus went to the cross, they lashed him over and over

and over again. 39 lashes exposing muscle, exposing

tissue, exposing bone, him bleeding out everywhere, only

then to be taken and hung on a cross by his hands and by his

feet. This is the condemnation of sin

inside the flesh. This is how God has taken your

condemnation that we constantly activate in our flesh and he has

made payment for it. That's how 39 lashes in a cross.

That's how he did it. And, and the reason why he had

to do that way is because we in ourselves can make no atonement.

We can pay no price for the sins that we commit.

There is not a thing we can do to make that better.

We can't pay that price. So therefore, God through Jesus

Christ paid the price in His body, and He was condemned in

the flesh. And because He was condemned in

the flesh, there is therefore now no condemnation for those

who are found in Christ Jesus. Because in Christ Jesus we have

been declared innocent from the punishment of the law in Christ

Jesus. We have been given the Spirit of

God to move through this life, not in thoughts according to the

flesh, but in leading by the Spirit, loving God and loving

our neighbor. And in Christ we obtain life.

We obtain life because Jesus was not held down by the grave.

Jesus beat the grave on the third day and because he has

life, because that was His reward for faithfulness, that

reward is credited to our account.

Therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are

found in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Friends, if we want to walk in the Spirit, if we want to not be

held captive by bondage of sin, man, it's going to take a heart

change. Not heart change comes from you

going straight to God, not to me.

You can talk to me, but I'm not what you need.

You need Jesus Christ, you need a friend who will pay the

penalty for you. And that only person who can

stand up for you in that way is Jesus Christ alone.

Let's pray our Father in heaven, you are good and you are

gracious so far beyond what we deserve.

Lord, it is by the gospel that you have set us free.

I pray, Lord, that through Your Spirit You would convict us deep

in our soul of our sin, but Lord, that we would not stay

there, That because of the power of the gospel You would set us

free, that we would know that there is no condemnation for us

and that we would live accordingly.

Lord, help us to change. Help us to move away from that

which holds us so tightly. Lord, we want to be held tightly

by You. We want to be held tightly by

the truth of the gospel. So Lord, work through your

Spirit in each and every single one of us to make that a reality

in our hearts that we might move through that in our lives.

Father, we pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ, who is our

Lord and our King, Amen. Thanks for listening to the ERC

Sundays To support the work God is doing and Amazed Rd.

Church, visit amazedrdonline.org/giving.