Getting
out of the hole...
And ascending the thumb of God!
Romans
8:1-39 (MsgB)
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.
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.
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. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's
Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with
self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us
out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the
self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed
in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God.
That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't
pleased at being ignored.
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can
hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course,
who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the
Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for
you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still
experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience
life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if
the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves
into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in
Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes
in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered
from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body
will be as alive as Christ's!
So
don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one
red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best
thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new
life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places
to go!
This
resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending
life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike
"What's next, Papa?" God's Spirit touches our spirits
and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know
who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get
what's coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through
exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times
with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times
with him!
That's why I don't think there's any comparison between the present
hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself
can hardly wait for what's coming next. Everything in creation
is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation
and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same
moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation
deepens.
All
around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times
of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's
not only around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing
us within. We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and
barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That
is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes
a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course,
don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger
we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
Meanwhile,
the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right
alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray,
it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer
out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far
better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and
keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that
every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something
good.
God
knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from
the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the
same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the
line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended
shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision
of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling
people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a
solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established,
he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he
had begun.
So,
what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we
lose? If God didn't hesitate to put everything on the line for
us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst
by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn't gladly
and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing
with one of God's chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger?
The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is
in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us.
Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between
us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not
hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying
threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We're sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I'm absolutely convinced
that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic,
today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely
nothing can get between us and God's love because of the way that
Jesus our Master has embraced us.
HOLES
