fruit for death

So a crow's flight in a sense through the epistle to the Romans, an epistle so complex that it would actually take years to extract all its content and all its teaching.

But we are like this, touching on the primordial themes of this wonderful epistle that the Lord inspired the Apostle Paul to leave us and we are in Chapter 7.

Chapter 7, epistle to the Romans. Last Sunday.... well, let me before going into too much summary, let me just take two or three verses that summarize the content of this Chapter.

Let's go to verse 7, Chapter 7, Romans. It is more or less representative of the content of the entire passage. Verse 7, Romans 7 says, "...what shall we say then?"

What have we said, when you see the word 'so', refer to the above and you will see that there is a relationship between one thing and the other and we are going to see that in a little while.

“...what shall we say, then, the law is sin? In no way. But I did not know sin.....”

And here begins something very interesting, let me tell you. That 'I' that the Apostle Paul uses, I would call it a 'rhetorical I', although it is also a 'personal I'. It refers both to the Apostle Paul, but it also refers to the human race in general: to the Hebrews, for example, who were recipients of the law; to us by extension that we are heirs of the Abrahamic tradition. But the Apostle Paul is using that 'me' and he is going to use it several times in this Chapter 7 as a representative me of the human race. It is like saying 'one', one did not know the law, but in reality he is also identifying with that 'I', because the Apostle Paul did that many times. He used himself as an illustration, and not in a very often flattering way, but in a negative way related to sin and other things, as he does here. So watch out for that 'rhetorical self,' which he uses several times in this passage.

He says: “.... but I did not know sin except through the law, because I would not know covetousness either if the law did not say 'Thou shalt not covet' –one of the great commandments of Scripture-. .. plus sin....

It's almost like now, he personalizes sin, turns it into an almost conscious force, a personality because of how powerful sin is.

It says “..... plus sin taking occasion by the commandment – that is, taking advantage of the commandment. Someone has said that the word used here, translated taking occasion, in the original Greek, is alluding to how the territory that an army uses as a point of launching an attack, is like a platform to attack and to undertake an offensive operation. .

“.... plus sin taking advantage, using as a starting point or profit, the commandment produced in me all covetousness..... –in the case of the commandment. The commandment ironically arouses covetousness- ......because without the law sin is dead. And I.... -again that generic me-, without the law I lived at one time but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And then I found that the same commandment that was for life in its origin, in the mind of God, turned out to be death for me, because sin taking an opportunity –again, taking advantage, using the commandment as a reason to live and rise up- ..... taking the opportunity by the commandment he deceived me and by it he killed me, so that the law is truly holy, and the commandment holy, just and good.

If that sounds like scribble and theological math to you, it's complex, but let's try to unwind it a bit because it has a lot, a lot to teach us about... a key theme in all of Scripture that I I already mentioned a while ago.

But we're going to the beginning of Chapter 7, and we actually have to go back a little bit to Chapter 6. We've taken, I think we've taken two or three sermons to talk about Chapter 6, this mysterious concatenation, that relationship that exists in the mind of the Apostle Paul directed by the Holy Spirit between these concepts of baptism, death, resurrection, freedom from sin, bondage to sin, surrender to sin or rebel against sin, which means sanctification.

These concepts are playing a lot in Chapter 6 and remember what the Apostle Paul says that we identify ourselves with the death of Jesus through baptism and with his resurrection by coming out of the baptismal waters, and that in reality we have to consider ourselves dead to sin. We have to die to sin in order to actually be freed from its influence, from its controlling power.

And we've said about that, the only way one can really fight, against sin, and we're implicitly talking about the sanctification process, right? when we come to Christ, we are not supposed to stay in the old practices, in the habits, in the emotional ties, everything that is sin, it does not have to be seen only, in fact, with immorality, sin is all the negative that remains as a residue of the fall in the garden of Eden. Sin is everything negative, everything that smells of death, everything that is dark. That is a sin. And when the believer enters into the administration of the Gospel of Christ, he is supposed to be freed from all these things, in the ontological sense of the word, in the spiritual sense of the word. There is a struggle that takes place at the level of our daily existence, but the judicial, spiritual, legal level, the control, the domain of sin has been broken. You understand?

Then our life in Christ, from then on, is putting into practice and carrying out in the world of time and space that sanctification that has already been given in the mind of God. God has already declared to us what? a new creature in Christ Jesus. Old things have passed away, it does not say they are going to pass or will be passing, it says they have passed, all are made new. In the mind of God, in the cosmic world, that is a reality. We here in our daily life are in the process of carrying out that sanctification that God wants for us but the dominance, the control of sin, has already been broken, it has been broken.

Now we are emancipated to fight against sin and we have the power of Christ to help us, right? And the key to that emancipation, to that liberation, is to die or at least, as Paul clarifies later, to consider ourselves dead to sin. And we have said that this is why many people do not enter into that fullness of life, we do not enter into that fullness of life, because I believe that it is like the mind refuses to die.

One of the most powerful instincts in the human being is the survival instinct, yes or no? Psychologists will tell you that: the survival instinct. If you are there, for example, and I'm looking at you and I just do that to you, you immediately tense up and blink and your whole being... although you know that I, I hope you know, that I'm not going to to hurt But there is an instinct already in your genetic code that you immediately react protectively. This is inscribed in our biology and that is why it is so difficult for us to do what God asks of us, which is to die, in a sense, commit suicide, using that word very lightly, when we enter the Gospel. The old man has to go, the old habits, the attitudes, the disfiguring wounds of the past, all of that has to be destroyed. God has a deadly enmity with the old nature in us.

And, brothers, what I want to tell you is that for the believer there is no reform, for the believer there is simply the option of transformation. God does not want us to be reformed, God wants us to be transformed. God is not interested in meat that is a little more well dressed, more well decorated. No, God is not interested in a corpse with a lot of cosmetics, because it will always remain a corpse. There is a saying among us that says, 'even if the monkey is dressed in silk, the monkey stays'. And the flesh, no matter how much you want to reform it and... that's why for the carnal man, no matter how many ethical commandments and more ethical education is given in the universities, and all of that, today, is taking place a lot of ethical education in the universities, a lot of morality, and clarification of values and all this kind of thing. Universities have realized that modern man needs that, but not wanting to go to Christ they have wanted to make their own system.

And you know what happens? That there is even more sin, more corruption, more problems in the world because the flesh will never be reformed. The meat has to be transformed and has to die. We have to surrender our body to Christ Jesus. We have to go through a process of self-indoctrination, in a sense, in the spirit, of saying 'I'm dying, I'm dead.' And baptism is a very graphic way of promoting that kind of identification with death.

You know that in fact it is said that suicide bombers, those who commit suicide with bombs, etc, one of the ways to train them, do you know what it is? Very curiously this occurred to me a moment ago. One of the ways that they train a suicide bomber as something so terrible requires, which is to commit cold suicide, they bury them, allow them to breathe, but they put them in a box and bury them for a while so they can adjust. his mind to the idea of dying. They are already dead. Make it easy for them to transition to the idea of killing themselves. They are, in a sense, devilishly practicing what God gave us through baptism.

When we are submerged in water, we die to the world. And when we come out of the water, we rise to a new life. helping us rehearse death. And through this study of Romans it has become clear to me as never before in my Christian life how powerful the baptismal symbol of that dying process is, and also how important the concept of death is throughout Scripture, and of resurrection in Christ Jesus.

These are not just metaphorical, poetic things, but are absolutely key concepts in the entire Christian theological edifice. Dying, we have to die, is the only thing we have left to be able to truly be free of the sin that is in us. We have to understand that the old life is no longer for me, I can no longer go to visit the places that I used to visit, do things and I speak metaphorically of 'visiting'. To visit is to frequent any area, any practice, whatever, the Lord asks me, 'No, you have to leave that.'

So there is a process of death that has to take place. We have to die and that is so important even not only for the defensive part of the Christian life but also for the offensive part. Many people are not useful in the Kingdom of God, they are no longer used by God, they do not give more to the Lord, they do not give more of themselves because they are still clinging to carnal, human, superficial life. ‘My time is mine, my money is mine, my clothes are mine, my wife and children are mine, my house is mine, my car is mine, my bank account is mine.’ That me that persists in staying alive. Now when the man, the woman says 'I already died to this world', as the Apostle Paul says, right?

Our life is hidden with Christ Jesus, we already died. We have to get used to that idea. Now what I live, says the Apostle Paul, I live in the faith of the son of God. That means that everything I have is dispensable, I can give it, I can deliver it to the Kingdom of God, because this man already understands that he has lost his validity for this world. This woman and what we have here is simply a waiting room for eternity.

And when we can live life like this, as people who have died to the world, then it becomes very easy for us to let go of things, because we have already given everything to the Lord. So that concept of death is very important.

Now, how does that come into Chapter 7. Actually Chapter 7 is a further development of this concept of death and resurrection, and death that gives life and death that gives liberation from negative things of the life.

In Chapter 7, which Paul actually, remember, didn't write with Chapters or verses, he just wrote a logically unified, concatenated treatise. He is just continuing to develop that theme. But look how he does it: again, in Chapter 6 he talked about all that: we're dead, we're like...

Look at verse 22, Chapter 6, “....more now than you have been freed from sin and made servants of God, etc....” So here in Chapter 7 in these first 6 verses, he develops a very important principle and I see that time is already betraying me. The Lord rebuke those clocks. I don't know who invented them, but, listen to me, if anyone had a stone now they would throw it in the name of the Lord.

But, here in these first 6 verses, he now looks at the concept of death in a different way. In the previous Chapter he is looking at the death of the believer in terms of his liberation from the yoke of sin, the slavery of sin, the negative, the terrible of sin. Now he sees him as a redeemed Pharisee and as a Pharisee who is aware that he is writing to many who were Jews before or to Gentiles who are aware of the entire Judaic apparatus and on several occasions the Apostle Paul, as if referring to the law to explain exactly how this new Christian system fits in with the whole system that God had established up to then, which was the Judaic system.

Remember that these are totally new things, when Paul is writing them. For us they are two thousand years old but when he wrote them they were revolutionary concepts, completely new, scandalous in a sense and terribly provocative and provocative for many Jews. He was building a whole new system in a sense. So he kind of had to explain things and anticipate arguments that could come from his imaginary audience, with whom he is locking his intellectual sword, as he writes this.

So, preventively here he responds to a very important question, it is, well, what is the relationship of the Christian with the law and with this whole concept of law, of justice, through the law and All this? So look at what he says here.

When one dies in Christ and identifies with the death of Jesus, and one experiences death on a spiritual level, not only is one freed from the power and grip and slavery of sin, but one is also he is freed from the power of the law and from the condemnation that comes through the law, and from a mechanical, rigid, ritualistic life that has to please God only by the robotic mechanism that God established through the law. And the Christian now jumps into a very different dimension of relating to God.

That is, the believer's death frees him from sin, but also frees him from condemnation and slavery to the principles of 'don't eat, don't touch' or keep this, keep that, wash your hands; If you ate in a pot where milk was boiled, you can't also make meat there, a lot of things. the Jews were enslaved, tied up like Gulliver, like this being from European literature, tied up by some dwarfs by a hundred thousand threads that prevented him from moving. And so the man is bound, the woman of God if she does not emancipate herself from the law and religion. Religion is a terribly domineering mom, worse than any domineering mom. I'm not going to say more so as not to get into trouble, but... the fact is that one of the things that death in Christ does is that it frees us from the rigidity of the law.

And Paul uses a very interesting illustration, the illustration that is an illustration that is a bit complicated because it is not totally applicable, but he says: look, one of the things that frees a person from the law human, legal, is when you die. Yes or no?

Brothers, let me tell you something that you are going to celebrate a lot. When you die, no matter how much you owe on your card, they can't catch you, you're free. Say, glory to God. Amen. Hallelujah! That is our hope in some of us. Because I assure you that the credit card companies are not going to set you free while you are here on earth, they are going to want to enslave you well. But when you die they have to go look for you in another place because there are no more ships, thank God, for there. The internal revenue department can't reach it either. Glory to the Lord. Hallelujah!

I'm going to go into blessing any minute, speak in tongues right here right now. When there is death, there is dissolution of the law and Paul uses the example of marriage. When a woman, he says, is widowed, she is already free from her marriage. Sisters, glory to God, please do not say, no, no... when there is death there is liberation in the sense of the law.

What Paul says is that the experience of death liberates, breaks legal, judicial ties in whatever way. So he is using that as a self-righteous illustration, to say in the sense of an intellectual, theological argument, and he says: death frees man from the slavery of the law.

That is, if we die in Christ, if we identify ourselves with death in Christ, we die, not only to the slavery of the flesh of sin, but also to the slavery of the law. We are already free of all that judicial tangle and that is why he says here then, "....are you ignorant, brothers, since I speak with those who know the law?"

See, he is referring to the Jews who are going to read this treatise that he is writing. "....that the law dominates the man as long as he lives....", because the married woman is subject to the husband by law, while he lives. But if the husband dies, he is already free from the husband's law.

Verse 4, “...so also you brethren have died to the law....”. Do you see that 'you have died'? “......through the body of Christ....”

What is the instrument used? The body of Christ, the blood of Christ, the death of Jesus, his crucifixion. By identifying ourselves with Christ, we identify ourselves as Christ becomes me and I become Christ, and the benefits of Christ become my benefits, and his holiness also becomes my holiness. Say glory to God, too.

“....through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another, to him who rose from the dead....”

What's wrong? I am a widower in a sense, yes because of the law that was dictated to me, but it is not that I am now left as a lawless goat, as they say out there, jumping through the mountains all happy and doing what I want. No, immediately there is another husband who is coming, and that husband does not abuse me, he does not speak badly to me, he does not... that husband is Christ Jesus. Now, he expects me to be faithful to him, you know?

I mean, what we do is transfer from an authoritative being to a benevolent being, but we're still, we're married now, but in a different way. Christ has made possible the liberation from the bondage of the law and so now... and that idea of transferring a negative thing to a positive thing is very important. Many Christians simply stay in what they left behind and don't put on Christ. They get rid of the old man but they don't put on the new man that is Christ Jesus. And you have to undress but you have to dress too, right? We have to no longer surrender our bodies to sin, but surrender them to Christ Jesus, to God.

“.... present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, for which reason it is your reasonable worship”.

So, remember that, my brother, my sister, that God has freed you, yes, from the yoke of the law, from that mechanical, ritualistic, religious, sterile, mechanical life, but now God expects you to you live in the freedom of Christ Jesus to be good works too, to live in holiness. But you no longer do it like a robot, like a creative being, lubricated by the grace, the love, the mercy, the wisdom of God.

How beautiful is life in Christ Jesus! What I said before, right? The holiness of the son of God is not a sterile, dry, all-serious holiness, there monastic, sterile in the dead sense of the word. The holiness of the son of God is a holiness of joy, joy, peace, blessing. Glory to the Lord. Amen. To enjoy life, to know that ok, if I fell short at the end of the day, my Dad pays the debt and I can sleep peacefully because I am in the grace of the Lord. I did what I could, I gave myself to the Lord, I worked, but I fell short, but the Lord pays the deficit because Christ paid it. So I don't have to live in guilt.

We are going to see in Chapter 8 that it says, “....now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit”.

That's our big card at the end of the whole thing. That is why we can be free. The Christian life is a life.....

God has freed me to live in holiness. I do not live in holiness to be free, but by being free then I can live in holiness. Glory to the Lord. I am not holy to please God, but because God loves me, I am holy. See the difference? There is a big difference and many people who are trying to please God and to do this, not do that, go here, not go there and everything is mechanical, compulsive, psychological, carnal. And that is not the Christian life.

The Christian life is a person who has received emancipation, has received his letter of freedom. He is free, he is destined for eternal life, and then while eternal life comes he lives in holiness for the Lord and obeys the Lord and rejoices in the Lord because he has been set free. The debt has already been paid. That is very important, the difference. There are many people, many churches that are preaching to people that they have to live in holiness so that God accepts them and is pleased with him, instead of saying 'No, you are already acceptable. Now as a consequence of that, he lives in the holiness of God. So it is a very different sanctity, very beautiful, very beautiful and death has to intervene for that to happen.

Actually, verse 4 is a tremendously revealing verse: "...even so you also, my brethren, have died to the law as you died to sin, through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, whose He rose from the dead.... -for what?- ...so that we might bear fruit...”

Say 'fruit'. The Bible talks a lot about fruits of justice, right? fruits of holiness, fruit for God. And here then he goes into an illustration:

“...for while we were – look what it says, while we were – in the flesh….”

Oh, there's many people who are still alive and well in the flesh, but the Bible always speaks in terms of the past regarding the Christian and his experience of the flesh, although it is a reality that is unfolding in us, but God calls the things that they are not what they are. In the spirit world these things are already a reality. God already sees you sanctified. God sees you clean. God sees you fruitful. God sees you free. God sees you powerful. All we have to do is grow into that image and fill it in the mind of God because it is already a reality in the mind of God.

It says here, again, I got so excited that I even lost where I was: “....for while we were in the flesh -verse 5- the sinful passions which were by law... –Here comes a very interesting topic- .... that were by law acted in our members.... –'members' is also a key word- .... bearing fruit for death...”

See the play on fruit, 'fruit for life,' 'fruit for death,' 'fruit for God,' and 'fruit for the devil and for the flesh.'

".... but now we are free from the law for having died for that in which we were subject so that we serve under the new regime of the spirit and not under the old regime of the letter."

We're not really going to have time to develop more and that's a terrible shame, but what he's saying here is, again, very important. We have been freed from the law to bear fruit for God because while we were in the flesh sinful passions... What he is suggesting here is the following and we are going to have to develop this later: the law, strangely, ironically, it was an instrument that God used to judicially create the concept of sin in the human economy.

Do you remember what I told you about the famous STOP sign? How many remember that or were asleep? Remember that if you cross a street and there is no STOP sign you can cross it without any problem, but since they put up a STOP sign, if you cross that street without stopping, you are breaking the law, yes or no? The STOP sign creates, in a sense, a potential violation.

That is, there can be no immorality if there are no commandments. Yes or no? It's interesting. There can be no condemnation if there is no law. That is to say, when man lived simply without any kind of moral system from God, he lived free to do what.... that's why humanity lived in that way, 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', death, savages killing each other wherever they want, the caves fleeing from each other. The world was a total decay. God sent the law and this is a theme that we are going to have developed much more in that Chapter 7 and it is a theme that you must learn because it is revived several times throughout the Scriptures. We've said that Romans serves as the starting point for many powerful teachings throughout Scripture, and that's why we're taking the time.

I'm going to beg the musicians to stop by so you can feel hope that this will end soon.

Brethren, God used Judaic law to set a legal precedent before mankind and to.... He was looking forward to Christ's coming and preparing the ground. God is a systemic God. God is a strategic God but he thinks on the scale of thousands of years and hundreds of years.

That is why Paul says, with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as one day. The Lord was already thinking about what he was going to do, because the salvific plan is a 360-degree plan and God has been developing that plan since the Garden of Eden, indeed since before the creation of the world.

And so in that plan, God before Christ came in order to save mankind by grace, he first had to lead mankind into the blind alley of damnation through the law. Man had to recognize that he could not save himself and that is why God established these signs: don't do this, don't do that, don't go there, eat this, don't eat that. And he put a lot of STOP and STOP signs all over humanity and trapped humanity.

And then he told the Jewish people that he was as we have said, as a microcosm of humanity, as a symbol of all humanity, he established his experiment, his laboratory with the Jewish people representing all humanity and He turned these poor Jewish devils loose to see if they could live by the law.

And the Jewish people proved miserably incapable of living by the law. And then God used the law as a mirror, God used the law as an instrument to show man his sin, to define what is sin, so that man would stumble upon the law. Everywhere he went he was bumping into the law and realizing that he couldn't because of the law, he couldn't live by himself. He could not be saved by his actions because everywhere he stumbled and fell.

So, that's a very important concept and Paul in Chapter 7 is preparing that concept, and developing it, and that's why he says here, understand the meaning “...for while we are in the flesh, the sinful passions that were by law... –in other words, that manifested and were in force because the law existed-.... worked in our members bearing fruit for death.”

When the man is in the flesh, the law and the morality, the only thing that serves is to frustrate and entangle him and show him that he is a mercy and that he is worthless, he is worthless. That is why we cannot, if as it says, if Christ had not come, we would be the most miserable, if he had died we would be trapped, we would be pigs in a pigsty wallowing in our own mud, and from there we would never come out. That is the law, every time we raised our noses, we looked at the mirror of the law and saw all the mud. Excuse the graphics, the illustration, and then Christ came with his precious cloth and wiped our noses and everything else and told us, 'now you are clean. What's more, you're not a pig anymore, you're an eagle, you're going to fly.', so that the metaphor is completely good.

But the law was used as an instrument and Paul is going to develop in Chapter 7, he is going to shut up those who say 'ah, well then the law was bad then, because if it created sin, Well, then the law doesn't work. Why did God give man something as bad as the law? Paul says, 'No, no, no, it's a good thing, because it led man to understand who he is and paved the way for our great and greatest deliverer who is Jesus Christ. Glory to the Lord.

Very deep, brothers. Great teachings. How cute is God! And how deep is the Lord. How wonderful is God!

That is why Paul in Chapter 11 of this epistle releases a hymn of praise to the Lord, before entering Chapter 12:

“Oh, the depth, he says, of the mysteries of God and his salvation. How wonderfully complex the Lord is! And he has expended all that energy to prepare that for us, that precious delicacy, which is salvation through Jesus Christ. Glory to the Lord.

I hope you leave here this morning excited about that beautiful God that we have. Amen.

Stand up. Glory to the Lord. We praise the man of the Lord and give thanks because he is good and his mercy is forever. Glory to the name of Jesus.

There take a moment to feel free. Glory to Jesus. Free from condemnation, free from the chains of sin. Free from the dead religion of the sterile commandments. Free from religious compulsiveness. Free to feel like oh, my interest went up again and now I don't have to pay.

You know, without Christ, that would be it, the debt gets bigger and bigger, not smaller. At the end of the day the debt went up and the interest went up and you never get out of debt. What a blessing it is when you end the day and God tells you, clean slate, we are going to start again tomorrow fresh. It's more during you're going to sin, even at night I'm going to bless you too.

Glory to the name of the Lord. How wonderful is the insurance that God has for us! Complete. Full cover. Say 'Full cover'. Those who drive know what I'm talking about. Glory to the Lord. That's good, right!

That's what Christ has made possible. He has freed us from sin, from death, from the law, from the religion of dead works, and we can celebrate. Glory to the name of the Lord. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Thank my Lord. We praise you, we bless you.

Celebrate and tell him, 'Father, because you've been so good to me, you're going to like me, I'm going to live the life you want me to live. I am going to honor you. I am going to live so that I honor the values of your kingdom.'

I love you, Lord. We love you, Father, thank you for investing your cosmic energy in our favor, Father. Thank my Lord. Thank you for taking the trouble to look down on us with mercy, on this rebellious planet, Father, and send your grace in the form of Jesus Christ.

Today we identify with his death but also with his resurrection. Hallelujah! And his power over the flesh, over sin. Begin with me, Father, and make the life and victory of Jesus real in me and in my brothers on this day. We love you and we rejoice in you God. Thank you Jesus.