Chapter 8:1

Comforting Words of Peace

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

This has been a troubling week so far in North America. We are trying to restart the economy; many like myself are going back to work and beginning the drudge of rebuilding companies and as with me in the case of sales, getting to learn to sell cars a new way. We have less contact, no handshakes and a lot of emails. We are in the middle of a perceived racism scandal with the police force in Minneapolis and the fallout from that. We are beginning to see more clearly the treasonous actions of the former administration in the US with regard to the sitting President, and we have a slew of Governors who are stepping outside of their constitutional authority to impose restrictions on anyone they choose and, in a willy-nilly fashion.

At the same time, we here in Canada have seen our Federal Government set out a plan to restrict rather suddenly the lawful ownership of many guns. And, as if to add gasoline to a raging fire, the proverbial plaster has been ripped off the wound of Long-Term Care here in Southern Ontario. The LTC information hits close to home as my wife has been working in LTC for the better part of 16 years and has often spoken to me about the lack of resources and personnel. It would seem that heads are going, and maybe some will be arrested.

When we come through a week like we just did, we need to have some words of comfort to get us through. We need a sure word that calms the storms and put things into the right focus. I had several persons write to me last week about their struggle with their faith. Amen. It is okay to have struggles and to have internal fights. It is okay to at times want to leave. Even the Apostle Peter quit once (see John 21), and he was going back to fishing. Just this week a young man, the lead singer of the Christian band Hawk Nelson, announced that he was no longer a believer in God. This happens to a lot of young people who grow up in pastors’ homes.

They know the right answers and know how to act, they know the jargon, but many never even truly come to faith. This is rampant even in the scriptures, Aaron’s sons were rebellious, Samuel’s kids were useless for the ministry, and Israel used their inabilities and corruption to ask for a king. In 1 Samuel 1 and 2, we find out that Eli’s sons were corrupt and brought shame to Eli’s name. I do not know the heart of this young man; he may just be going through a phase like Peter did and he wants to walk away. But what I do know is that if one is truly saved, he or she cannot deny that Jesus is the Christ. We find this in 1 John 2:22.

So far in this study, we have looked at some harsh truths: Romans 3:10, “There is none righteous, not one”; 2:23, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”; 6:23, “The wages of sin is death,” and on we can go.

Last week we looked at the battle that rages within the saved person’s body and mind – the fight between the spirit and the flesh. It can be physically tiring and mentally exhausting. I want you to recall that it is us that added the divisions to the Bible to make it more readable. The Holy Spirit-inspired author – in this case, Paul – simply wrote a letter. So, we can see that Romans 8:1 was a needed salve to the wounds inflicted on the saved in the previous chapters. Talk of our sinful state before salvation, talk of the price of our salvation, and then the battle that we live in, day in and day out. And so, the Holy Spirit via the pen of this great apostle offers us a bit of light, a ray of hope, a sense of relief and a source of joy that overrides the pains of the previous chapters.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” If one, if you, if I, if we are truly saved, we have heard the Gospel, been convicted by the Holy Spirit and then have called on the name of Jesus, believing that He is God in the flesh, that He is the Christ and that He is raised from the dead, the death He paid for our sins – my sins, your sins and the sins of the whole world – then to us, there is no condemnation before God. Even when we have that struggle; even when, like Peter, we may decide in a moment of struggle to go back to fishing, there is no condemnation.

The word condemnation is defined as the expression of disapproval; the act of punishing or sentencing in regard to wrongdoing. But, in Jesus, to those of us in Jesus – those covered in His blood and whose multitude of sins have been washed away, cast into the depths of the sea according to Micah 7:18-19 – we have no condemnation from the Lord. We, by virtue of being saved, walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh. We have received a new heart, a living heart, not a dead one; and we have become living stones (1 Peter 2:5); we have no condemnation from God to us.

What more do we really need? What else can calm the soul, still the mind and bring peace to the man struggling with the flesh? What peace we have in Jesus; peace with God and the peace of God in us. And so, in this tumultuous week – this week that has caused so much stress and pain, this week that has shaken the trust of so many and hurt the already raw nerves of many people – take some time to rejoice in Romans 8:1. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face and the things of earth (not just the silver and gold, but the troubles and trials too) will grow strangely dim in the Light of His glory and grace.

If you are not a child of Jesus – if you are not saved, redeemed and counted amongst those written in the Lamb’s Book of Life – then take a good look around you and enjoy the world as it is. Why, you ask? It is about to get worse as mankind spirals downwards towards the return of Jesus and the final judgment. If you want some hope, if you want some Romans 8:1 in your life, to help, to carry, to help you focus and to help you through, then you need Jesus.

I leave you with John 14:6,

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.'”

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding

Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Mississionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca

Chapter 7: 7-25 

The Battle Within

“⁷ What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’ ⁸ But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. ⁹ I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. ¹⁰ And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. ¹¹ For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. ¹² Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.

“¹³ Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. ¹⁴ For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. ¹⁵ For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. ¹⁶ If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. ¹⁷ But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. ¹⁸ For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. ¹⁹ For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. ²⁰ Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

“²¹ I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. ²² For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. ²³ But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. ²⁴ O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? ²⁵ I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.“

The study of Romans really hits me to the core. It dives deep into the very heart of being a Christian and brings us face to face with our selves. I surrendered to the ministry in the spring of 1984. I was 17 years old and had plans to go to a University here in Ontario to become an accountant or something else. But the Lord had other plans. In September of 1984, I was in seminary in Florida; and the rest, as they say, is history. I was saved as a teen (just 14 years old) in Barbados, my homeland. One Monday night, standing at the National Stadium, having heard a sermon by a preacher who was on a Billy Graham-style crusade in the Caribbean, I asked Jesus to forgive me, save me and put my faith in His death, burial and resurrection.

Over the years, I have heard a lot of people talk about repenting of one’s sins; and in truth I understood I was a sinner and that I needed a Saviour. However, I had no understanding of the depth of my sin. From the conversations I have had with the many saved people that I have known and know, I have come to understand that most of us have no real concept of how sinful we are until after we are saved and the Holy Spirit begins to deal with us.

1. The Sinfulness of Spiritual Leaders, Hebrews 7:27 

Under the Law, the High Priest was required to offer a sacrifice for his own sins before he could offer a sacrifice for the sins of the nation of Israel. This very thing is reconfirmed for us in Hebrew 5:3. He has to offer sacrifices for his own sins and then the sins of the people. We can see that even Aaron, the first High Priest, had sin issues and required forgiveness often. Now, I am not equating the office of a Pastor with that of the Jewish High Priest. But what I am saying is that human spiritual leaders have to deal with their own sinfulness first, and they, we, need to be honest about it. Aaron, or the High Priests that succeeded him, offered sacrifices for their sins publicly; no one was astonished that they were sinners. All of us are sinners.

Sadly, we have built a culture of perceived sinlessness in the pastoral community. Many of the pastors I grew up with kept a very tight rope as to how close they let people get to them and their families. They tried to keep an air of perceived spirituality and not let the scrutinizing eyes in. I know many pastors whose children did not follow mom and dad. The kids rebelled and fought them at every turn, and many simply left when they were old enough to leave. Even with a spiritual leader like Samuel, his sons were no good to the nation. In fact, one of the reasons given to Samuel for the nation to get a king was that his sons were not like him. Look at 1 Samuel 8. 

Paul, of course, was a Pharisee before he was saved. He would have lived by the letter of the law; and in his own words, he was blameless. Not sinless. But blameless, meaning he made the appropriate sacrifices at the right time for his sins. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would offer a sacrifice on behalf of the whole nation to cover the sins of the people. Paul was blameless, not sinless. There are some ‘pastors and spiritual leaders’ that present themselves as sinless in this present time. This means that they are telling you they do not commit sin daily. Of course, the Lord dealt with this in 1 John 1:8-9, telling us that any who would say they have no sin, referring to saved persons, are liars. Rather, we need to confess our sins, and God will graciously forgive us and cleanse us.

2. The Sinfulness of the Man in the Mirror, Romans 7: 7-25 

For those of us who are saved at a young age, as I was at 14, we have not yet tapped the depth of our depravity. There are many who are saved even younger than I, and they, once again, have no real concept as to the depths of their depravity as sinners. I can say personally that I am astonished each day as to how sinful I am. I am confronted with my thoughts, my conversations in my head, and my desires, the things that no one sees but me and God; and I am ashamed to say that I am a sinful, very sinful man.

I don’t think that I really began to understand the depth of my depravity until I was out of my teens and maybe even into my later twenties. I was a ‘good kid,’ good grades, seldom in any real trouble, off to seminary at a young age and then into the ministry. I knew I was a sinner and had to deal with the external things that most men deal with. But as I got older, I began to see that there was a real battle in my mind. A battle between what I wanted to do and what I actually did. In my mind I want to serve the Lord wholeheartedly, but the power to submit my body was hard to do. Then a sad but true revelation came to my understanding from something Jesus said in Matthew 15:11. We see this:

“Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”

Yes, we need to be careful about what we watch and what we read. For our health, we need to be careful about what we eat and drink. But what Jesus tells us here is, it’s what comes out of a man’s mouth; and, later, he references that a man’s mouth speaks the things in his heart, his core. We can do the right things and even say the right things; but, for many of us, it is a mask for what we really want to say and do.

For me, this was a harsh enlightening. I was not one to use swear words, not one to hit on a woman, I regularly attended church and did all the religious things, but I was just a rotten sinner at my core. I was saved, I was redeemed by the blood of Jesus. But, the more I got to know the Word of God, the more time I spent in prayer and in confession, the more sinful I became. The battle waged on and on in my mind and soul, it waged in my members; and there were times when I thought it was easier to just give in, walk away and forget trying to be good, do good, and simply just be.

It would seem that Paul, in the power of the Holy Spirit, came to this sad but eye-opening revelation. A Pharisee would have had a very different view of his own righteousness. We are reminded of this when Jesus observed two men going to the Temple to pray. One, the Pharisee, reminded God how wonderful he was; and the other, a tax collector, reminded God how evil he was. Paul, at one time, would have been the former. But now, he is coming to the realization of his own sinfulness. He is seeing the battle, and he writes about it, almost lamenting the reality of what he has discovered. In verse 18, he makes the statement that in his flesh ‘dwells no good thing.’

There is not even a shred of righteousness in any of us. Not one iota apart from the righteousness we have from Jesus that we are saved. Then in verse 21, Paul comes to the conclusions and statement of the human condition – ‘evil is present with me, the one who wants to do good.’

This is our condition until death or until Jesus comes to get us. In our deepest depths, we desire to do good, do what is right, think, say and do the right things. But at the very moment that we determine to do what is right as revealed in the Word of God, evil, our flesh, our carnal minds, our sinful self is right there, and we become our greatest enemies. It can be depressing, and at times it can be disheartening. But there is a silver lining on these dark clouds; only saved people have this dilemma. Only saved people have this fight; we have even the desire to do what is good. And only we can truly understand the depth of our own depravity; and, in so doing, grow in our wonder at the salvation we have in Jesus.

The more I get to know me, the more wonderful Jesus is. The more I see how sinful I am, the more I understand why the Lord, in His compassion and love, came to save me. I certainly could not save myself. The more I see the sinfulness in my little 7-year old, and the love I have for her, the more I appreciate God’s love for me. The worse I see myself, the more amazing Jesus is. Oh, what a wonderful Savior! And, oh, what amazing grace we have in Him!

Has Jesus saved you? He loves you and gave himself for you. He loves you as the rotten sinner you are. And Romans 5:8 tells us that God showed his love for us in that, while we were sinners, Jesus died for us. He died for your sins and mine. Oh, wretched man that I am, wretched woman that you are, wretched person that you are, who can deliver us from this body of sin? The answer is Jesus. He is the only answer.

Romans 5:8 “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Mississionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca