Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

Welcome to the third message in a series called When Life & Truth Collide. In this series, we’ve been talking about things that a lot of churches, and preachers, and Christians don’t want to talk about. And that is that there are actually times in our lives when life and truth collide.

There are times when the Bible says one thing, but life seems to say the opposite. There are times when life seems to contradict the inspired, inerrant Word of God. The Bible says this, life says that. Life and truth collide.

Today, we’re going to talk about the king of these collisions. If you’re a Christian, then you have dealt with this. You are dealing with this. And you will continue to deal with this for the rest of your life on this planet.

Today we’re talking about the collision of ongoing sin. Let’s pray as we get started.

The collision of ongoing sin. This is going to make some of you squirm in your seats. Truthfully, it should make all of us squirm. You should feel uncomfortable at some point this morning. If you don’t feel uncomfortable, then you’re not being honest with yourself. And more importantly, you’re not being honest with God.

We’ve got a lady here at Amelia that will occasionally come up to me after a message and say, “Will you please come and take the cameras out of my house?” Aren’t there times when it feels like I’m talking straight to you? Aren’t there times when you think, “Man, he must have been spying on us last night?”

Well, I’m not. I’m not Bill Belichick. I’m not videotaping your every move. (Sorry. I know we have a few Patriots fans here.) I don’t spy on anybody. I never preach to any one individual. I just don’t do it. So when it feels like something is aimed right at you, give God the credit, or the blame, however you want to look at it.

Today, I think everybody here is going to walk out saying, “That was for me.” Because this collision of life and truth is something that every single disciple of Jesus deals with every single day of their lives.

Let’s explore the collision. The Bible says in 1 John, “No one who lives in him (meaning Jesus) keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” (1 John 3:6, NIV)

This is the truth. It’s in the Bible. The Bible is the holy, inspired, inerrant Word of God. This is the truth. “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” (1 John 3:6, NIV)

Here comes the collision of life and truth: I don’t measure up to this verse. Your pastor doesn’t hit this mark. The truth says that, “No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” The problem is that I do continue to sin. Life and truth are colliding head on.

I didn’t say that I don’t love God. I do. More than you can imagine. I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I didn’t say that that I don’t want to follow Jesus. More than anything in my life, I want to please him, honor him, serve him, worship him, obey him.

I love God. I want to follow Jesus. And yet, I sin. And you do, too. For Christians, this is our dirty little secret. Not that I have sinned. Most all of us will readily admit that we sinned, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. That’s not the secret. The secret is that I sinned last night. I sinned in the car on the way to church this morning. The secret is that I think things that I shouldn’t think, I say things that I shouldn’t say, and I do things that I shouldn’t do. The dirty little secret of every believer here today is that we have ongoing sin in our lives. Well, I’ve got bad news for you…your secret is out. The Bible has already called you on it.

Earlier in the 1 John, John writes, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8, NIV)

We constantly live in this collision of life and truth. The truth says that we can’t say that we live in the Lord if we keep on sinning. But life says that we can never fully overcome our sinfulness. If this were the end of the story, then every one of us would crash and burn. We wouldn’t be able to survive the impact of this collision.

But the gospel of Jesus is good news. There is hope in the midst of the collision, and that hope is what we’re chasing after today.

We’re going to spend most of our time breaking open some words that the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 7 & 8. Romans is widely considered to be the deepest, most theologically rich book in the Bible. There are some parts that are pretty difficult to understand. When you’re reading Romans, you’re running with the big dogs. It’s the major leagues. And yet, in the middle of this deep, profound book, comes some of the most down-to-earth, honest words of hope that you’ll ever find in the Scripture.

We’re going to pick it up in Romans 7:21. Paul writes, “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” (Romans 7:21, NIV)

Can anybody else relate to that? When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. It’s like the old cartoons where you’ve got the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other shoulder and they’re both trying to convince the character what to do. “Don’t do this.” “Do it!” “You mustn’t.” “Do it!” The angel always sounded wimpy and the devil always sounded tough, right?

A lot of us feel like that every day of our lives. There’s this tension, this constant tension between right and wrong, between righteousness and sin. But what we see from the Bible is that even Paul, the Apostle Paul, the man that wrote 1/3 of the New Testament, even he struggled with this tension.

Paul wrote, “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” (Romans 7:21-23, NIV)

Paul lived in this tension. If you are a Christian, you live in this tension. Paul said, “I delight in God’s law. I want to please God. I want to live a righteous life…but.”

“There’s another force that is active in my life”. Sin. Paul said that his sinful nature is waging war against his desire to live obediently for God.

You ever feel like there is an all out war going on inside you? There is! The Bible says it plainly. There is a war raging inside you.

Guys, you ever feel like there’s a war going on inside you when one part of you wants to please God by guarding your eyes, but there’s another part of you that wants to surf Internet porn? Does it feel like a war inside you? There is.

Ladies, doesn’t it seem like there’s a war happening inside you when part of you wants to honor God and restrain your tongue, but another part of you wants to let the gossip fly? Do you feel that war inside? It’s happening.

But we need to try to understand why it is happening. Why is this battle raging inside all of us? To really understand it, we’ve got to explore the theology behind it. But this isn’t some high brow, way-over-my-head type theology. This is so practical. Once you understand this, everything about your relationship with God and your battle with sin is going to make a lot more sense.

Let’s read what Paul said again. “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” (Romans 7:21-23, NIV)

There are two laws that are waging war inside us. One is the law in our body. The other is the law in our mind. Here’s what it looks like.

I want to please God. I want to live a righteous, holy life. God has renewed and recreated my mind. My mind tells me to please God. To honor God. To obey God. But my body has a hard time keeping up.

Here’s why…as a Christian, the cross of Christ has transformed your mind and your soul, but it has not yet transformed your body. This is why Paul talks about the war going on between his mind and his body. Because our minds have been renewed. They’ve been redeemed. They’ve been recreated by God. You want to please God in your life because your mind has been transformed.

The war happens because, although your mind has been recreated, your body hasn’t. Your body remembers your old habits. Your body craves the sin of your past.

This is why Paul cries out in the next verse, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 6:24, NIV)

Paul recognized that his body is a “body of death.” His mind has been transformed, redeemed and recreated by God, but his body has not. In his body, there was still sin and death.

Your body has not been transformed by God…but the good news is that one day it will be. You ever hear the old cliché, “Be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet?” It’s true. He’s not finished with you yet. And he won’t be finished with you until you’re on the other side of eternity. That’s when you will receive a new body to go with your new mind.

1 Corinthians 15 tells us, “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44, NIV)

Your new body will dwarf the one you have now in every way. Some of you are really excited about that. You can’t wait to trade in your current body for a new model. Guys want one with more hair. Ladies want one with less…anyway.

The point is that your body will be transformed to match the new mind and soul that God has already given you. If you wonder, “Will I be perfect in heaven?” the answer is yes! You will be perfect because there will be no more war raging inside you. Your soul, mind, and body will all live in complete synergy. You will be perfect because there won’t be anything pulling you back toward a sinful lifestyle.

Doesn’t that put your spiritual walk in perspective? Once you get this, doesn’t everything make a lot more sense? Isn’t it good to know that you’re not actually schizophrenic, wanting to please God but struggling with sin? Doesn’t everything make more sense now?

One day your body will actually catch up with the renewal that has already happened in your mind and soul. That’s what we have to look forward to…but what about now? What about the days, weeks, months, and years, however long it is, from now until eternity? What do I do about that?

We fight on. Hebrews 12 talks about “your struggle against sin.” (Hebrews 12:4, NIV) Your struggle against sin. It may be a losing fight, but we fight nonetheless. If we just take the route of, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it, so why try,” we are completely missing the point.

We can never achieve perfection in this life. The Bible makes that very clear. But that can’t be taken as an excuse for not trying, not fighting against our sinful nature.

Paul wrote in Romans 6, “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?” (Romans 6:1-2, NLT)

The grace of God is so radical, so revolutionary that Paul has to make this point very clear. God’s grace is a free gift to you. No strings attached. You can’t be good enough to earn grace. God’s love and forgiveness are lavished on us freely. We do nothing to deserve it. We simply receive it as a free, undeserved gift.

But the radical nature of God’s grace can’t be understood as a license to continue on in a sinful lifestyle. If God will forgive me anyway, then I’ll just do whatever I want. That completely misses the point.

The point is that Jesus gave his all for me on the cross, therefore he deserves my all in return. He deserves my worship, my devotion, and my obedience. I don’t live to please Jesus so I can be saved. I live to please him because I’m saved.

This is why Paul asked, “Should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not!” In other Bible translations, it says “By no means!” or “May it never be!”

My favorite translation of these verses is in the old King James Bible. “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.” (Romans 6:1-2a, KJV)

I love that translation because I think it best captures the urgency of Paul’s words. The phrase “Of course not!” or “God forbid” is the strongest negative phrase in the New Testament.

The point is that, as people who are saved by the radical grace of God, it is simply unthinkable for us to wave the white flag and continue in our sinful lifestyle without even putting up a struggle. God forbid that we would ever take such a cheap view of God’s grace.

So we fight. We struggle against sin. We fight the war that is raging inside us. But what do we do when we lose?

I lose this battle a lot. For example, I want to please God in the way I treat my wife, but sometimes I don’t. This week, something happened that really got me hot under the collar. And instead of being the husband that God wanted me to be, I took it out on my wife. I snapped at her, I was pretty nasty in the way I talked to her. And at one point, Nicki looked at me and gently, but very directly, said, “You’re not mad at me. You’re actually mad at this other person, but you’re acting like you’re mad at me.”

She was right. She had nothing to do with the situation that angered me…and yet she was the recipient of my anger. Did I please God in this instance? Was I the husband that he called me to be? Not by a long shot. Did I sin against him in my misplaced anger? Absolutely. The war was going on inside me and I lost.

What do we do when we lose? We armor up to fight another day. How do we do that? We run to God in repentance. We seek his power and strength, not our own. We find people who will hold us accountable in our walk with the Lord. We hide the word of God in our hearts. In other words, we pull out all the stops to armor up for the battle.

But ultimately in this battle of ongoing sin, it all comes back to Jesus. Let’s go back to what Paul wrote in our text.

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. [It’s the battle between the renewed mind and the sinful body again.]

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.” (Romans 7:21-8:3, NIV)

Let me read that last verse again. Romans 8:3 says, “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.” (NIV)

“The law” refers to the Old Testament law that God gave the people of Israel. It was an incredibly detailed code of conduct and worship. It was so detailed and so burdensome that no one could follow it. No one could keep the rules.

And that’s the point. The reason that law was powerless is because we can’t keep the rules. They couldn’t do it then, we can’t do it now. It’s why Jesus came. It’s why there had to be a cross.

In this verse from Romans, Paul tells us that Jesus did what we can’t do. He lived a perfect, sinless life. And then he died as a sin offering, to take the punishment for the rest of us who couldn’t keep the rules.

And the result is that, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2, NIV)

No condemnation. No judgment. No guilt. Jesus came to set us free from the law of sin and death. I don’t know what you see when you look in the mirror, but if you are in Christ, I’ll tell you what God sees when he looks at you: perfection.

There is no condemnation. No pronouncement of guilt on your life. Instead, when God looks at you, he sees Jesus. He sees the perfect, sinless Jesus.

We’ve got to remember this in our battle with ongoing sin. You know what Satan wants you to feel more than anything else in this battle? Guilt. He wants you to become so wracked with guilt over your sinfulness that it paralyzes you spiritually. I am convinced that guilt is the worst of all human emotions. Intense guilt is crippling. And we all have those sins, the biggest, blackest sins hidden in the closet of our lives, those constant reminders of how sinful, how messed up we really are…Satan wants to do nothing more than keep reminding us of them.

He wants to whisper in our ear, “You know who you really are. You know that you’re a loser Christian. Look at what you’ve done. Nobody else is as bad as you. All these people at church, they’ve all got it together. You don’t fit in here. You don’t belong here. Look at your life. It’s a mess.” See how guilt stops us from moving forward?

But contrast that with the words of Scripture. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2, NIV) Through Jesus Christ, we are set free. Set free from sin. Set free from death. There is no condemnation on us, no judgment for us. Does that sound like God wants us to remain in the stranglehold of guilt? No way! Jesus died to release us from guilt and to free us to live for him.

A lot of times we have this picture of God as this angry old man who enjoys kicking us when we’re down. Don’t get me wrong. There is an angry, wrathful side to God’s nature. But remember that the most common title for God in the Bible is Father.

As a father, I had the experience of watching my son, Ryan, learn to walk. I look forward to the same experience with Brock. As Ryan was learning to walk, he was wobbly. He fell down a lot. You know how it goes. Every time he fell down, I got angry with him. I yelled, “Come on, you stupid kid. Get up. You keep falling down. You’re worthless! Maybe I’ll just push you down myself. It’ll save time.”

I obviously didn’t do that, and you know why? I’m his father. You know what I did when Ryan was learning to walk? I celebrated with him. If he took three steps and then fell, we didn’t focus on the fall. We celebrated the three steps!

In this battle of ongoing sin, you will fall. But God won’t focus on the fall. He’ll celebrate the steps. And he’ll pick you up, dust you off, and get you walking again.

The next time you feel Satan reminding you of your sinfulness and dragging you back into the muck and mire of guilt, remember what the Bible says.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work.” (1 John 3:8b, NIV)

Not to hamper the devil’s work. Not to hinder the devil’s work. Not to slow down the devil’s work. Not to throw a wrench into the devil’s work. Jesus Christ came to destroy the devil’s work! That was the plan from the very beginning.

The very first prophecy about Jesus in the Bible is in Genesis 3. This prophecy was written some 1400 years before the birth of Christ, and yet the very first prophecy about Jesus told us exactly what his mission would be.

God was talking to Satan about Jesus. He told Satan, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15, NIV)

Satan would strike Jesus on the heel, but Jesus in turn would crush his head. It’s a prophecy about the crucifixion. It would initially appear to be a victory for Satan. The Son of God would be killed. Satan would strike his heel.

But Jesus would crush his head because his death and resurrection would destroy the devil’s work and would give us all the hope of grace, forgiveness, and eternal life.

This first prophecy about Jesus came right after the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sin had entered the world, it looked as if Satan had, won, but God promised that he would deal with our sin and he would hand Satan a crushing defeat…and it happened on the cross.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work.” (1 John 3:8b, NIV)

Not just his work in our world, but Jesus came to destroy his work in our lives. Are you strangled by the guilt of your past? Jesus came to destroy that! Are you struggling with a sin you just can’t get over? Jesus came to destroy that! You will lose some battles. You will fall short. You will sin. But even when we lose a battle, remember that the war is won.

Paul said it best. “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25a, NIV)

Mike Edmisten

Tags: When Life and Truth Collide, grace, sin