transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:06] You get in an accident, or you get told by the doctor, you got something really wrong, your first thought is, what I do wrong? Why are you against me? And to be told with the authority of the living Christ, he is not against you in this. That changes everything about the cancer or the arthritis.

Speaker 2:
[00:30] There's a particular kind of fear that comes when life unravels. And it's not just fear of the circumstance, but fear that maybe God is settling accounts, that this is some form of payback. And John Piper says that cannot be true for those in Christ. I'm your host, Dan Cruver. In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper presses Romans 8 into our deepest anxieties and declares that God is decisively for us. This message was originally delivered at the Cove in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 9th, 2003.

Speaker 1:
[01:19] I'd like to pray just one more time before we begin. It's so true, Father. It's been mercy all the way, and it will be mercy all the way home. And then when we get there, it will be mercy forever. We will never be able to present you with a lifetime of perfection. For from the beginning, we have been imperfect, and when we are finally perfected, we will be still that part perfect and the former part imperfect. And ever dependent on your perfection in mercy. And so we praise you for mercy. I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice. So Lord, surely mercy is a great way to summarize the first 11 chapters of the Book of Romans. Make us feel mercied. Forbid that anyone would feel deserving in this room. Let no wife feel deserving. And let no husband feel deserving. Let no single person feel deserving. No old person or young person feel deserving. Rather, may we feel like desperate beneficiaries of undeserved mercy. Transform our lives by this, I pray, and our marriages and our churches, our business places, our communities by humbling us to realize and feel the sweetness of being undeserving beneficiaries of mercy. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. I can imagine someone saying, well, that's nice not to have God mad at me, but frankly if it doesn't make me well or get me a job or fix my marriage, I'm just not interested. What's the relevance now of being told that there's no condemnation hanging over my head? That's an objection that's very hard for me to fathom, but given the way we are, I think it's one that we need to address. And I have three or four responses to it just briefly. One, even if your life for 85 or 103 years were perfectly miserable, in every way on earth that you can imagine, followed by 85,000 ages of joy, it would be a good deal. It would be a really good deal. So I am not very moved by the demand for immediate relevance in terms of comfort. I'm just not very moved. It wouldn't matter to me much if God gave me exquisite joy of every kind for 85 years and then misery for the rest of eternity. That would not be a good deal. But if he were to allow me, for his sovereign purposes, to have many sufferings, and then awaken me from the grave, as it says in verse 11, he will, forever to be with him in infinite joy, I would say, okay, that's a good deal. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared. So my first response is, if you demand from me now some immediate payoff in terms of some practical comforts or change in your life about relationships, I say, it may or it may not come, but I still say, no condemnation is wonderful, beyond imagination. My second response to that is, this truth changes everything now. I mean, the list would be very long. Let me mention a few. Pain, some of you bring to this room physical pain. You're living probably on drugs to help you manage it, or you will before your life is over. Physical pain is a massive reality. Now I ask you, is it not sweet beyond measure to be told by the living God, that this pain is not owing to the fact that I am mad at you? Because that's our first reaction when we hurt. You get in an accident, or you get told by the doctor, you got something really wrong, your first thought is, what I do wrong? Why are you against me? And to be told with the authority of the living Christ, he is not against you in this. That changes everything about the cancer or the arthritis. Third, I've got several examples under number two here about how it helps you now. Marriage, if a husband and a wife believe that they are and feel that they are sinners, not condemned, it'll change everything. If you wake up in the morning and feel as a husband, I'm a sinner, I deserve wrath, and I'm not condemned, how will you be demanding of her? How will you insist upon so much or reverse the roles? If you know yourself living, hanging on mercy and that God could squash you at any moment, like you feel like squashing her or him, and he would be just, and he doesn't do it. He makes the sun come out in the morning, puts you in the cove in a glorious place like this when you deserve pain, how then could you turn from that? No condemnation to condemn her. It changes everything. Another example is parenting. I've raised now with Noelle four sons up through age 30 down to 20. And now we're starting over kind of with Talitha at seven. And my question is, when I look at the sins of my children, I ask, have I done it as good as I could do it? And you know what the answer to that is? No. And I don't know if any parent could ever do it as good as it could be done, and therefore, if any of your children go astray, or if any of their marriages break down, how you can live with yourself, knowing you could have done it better? There's only one answer. There's no condemnation. It's the only answer to survive as a parent, I think. There's no condemnation in Christ Jesus. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter how you parent. We'll get to sanctification very quickly, but to be told, parent, trust me, in Christ, no condemnation. That enables you at age 57 to keep on parenting. You know, when I came to Bethlehem, my church, I was 34, and I had, I think, three little kids. I can't remember how many I had. Yeah, Abraham had just been born, December. So I had three little boys. And I had this dream that I'd have three or four kids, and I'd raise them to age 18, and that'd be over. Then I could get down to business with the church. And then I met Rollin Erickson, and he's the patriarch of the church. He's probably in his seventies, and he's the sweetest, most Christ-centered man. He's with Jesus now. And he had grown children, and I watched him weep over his grown children. I thought, ooh, this is not going to end when they turn 18. You do shed more tears over your grown children than over your little children. Little children are a piece of cake. You just spank them if they do wrong. And then they do right, at least on the outside. You don't spank an 18-year-old and have it fixed. So we are failures all, and that's okay in Christ, because there's no condemnation. So it's relevant. A third relevance is that it does mean that God is for you and therefore will work out everything for your good. He will work everything together for your good. So all the pain that does come and all the miseries that do come, He's going to turn for good. We have a little saying in our church. When I preached on Romans 8.28, which I hope we get to, but I'll stir it in now just in case. I try to say things that the kids will be able to remember. And we had a little rhyme. If things don't go the way they should, God always makes them turn for good. If things don't go the way they should, God always makes them turn for good. And hundreds of our kids memorized that. And over the years, because I gave that years and years ago. That wasn't in 2001 when I preached on Romans 8. But earlier, it would come back to me year after year. Our kids would come up, our parents would come up and say, we're driving to Florida and we had a flat tire, and mommy and dad were all mad. And little Billy said, when things don't go the way they should, God always makes them turn for good. I said, yes, they're getting it, they're getting it. So Romans 8.28 is true because of Romans 8.1. And finally, point of relevance of this doctrine of no condemnation. I'd like to write a book some day called God is the Gospel. Because I have a burden that us preachers, we preachers preach the gospel with these big nice words, salvation, reconciliation, forgiveness, justification, propitiation, redemption, ransom. We just say, isn't that great, isn't that great? And most saints who have the Holy Spirit know they're great and they join in. That's great. And we don't push through the words to what really makes them all good news. So if you just take all those and ask, why are they good news? Why is no condemnation good news? Now there's an answer to that. Which would give God no honor at all. Like, well hell is hot and I don't want to go there. God gets no honor from that answer. Where would you like to go? Golfing? There's a lot of people that handle the gospel that way. It is an escape hatch from what they don't like, but has very little to do with an affection for God. I ask my people just to test them sometimes. Now, if you could go to heaven when you die, forever, and have every desire that you ever had on earth satisfied, every sex desire, every food desire, every people approval desire, and God just wouldn't be there. That be okay? It's a devastating question because there are a lot of people in the church, I think, who would be really satisfied to go to heaven minus God. If they could just get rid of their pain, they could just have everything they've ever wanted to have on earth, it's just paradise, you know? Now, if that's true, we're not saved. God is the gospel. The reason no condemnation is good news is because it removes the obstacles that keep me from seeing him, delighting in him, treasuring him, embracing him, experiencing his manifold perfections as the satisfaction of my soul. The task of a pastor is very difficult, it's impossible. The task of a small group leader is impossible. The task of a parent is impossible because our task is to awaken the affections of people to treasure God above all his gifts, including forgiveness, psychological relief and peace, nice family, nice cove, nice health, nice job. We must awaken in people affections for God, which are superior to those affections. We must have him to become our treasure. So my fourth statement of relevance is that this no condemnation is precious not only or mainly because it escapes us from final judgment and hell, but because it removes God's wrath so that we can now embrace his flaming holiness as our treasure without being consumed. Now, let's move on. What is the relationship between verse two and verse one? This is a very crucial question because I think you'll see that verse two is about sanctification and not justification. Verse two says, four, that's really important to see that. We'll ask what that means. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free, in Christ Jesus, from the law of sin and death. Now, I think that is a freedom that is experienced now in the transformation of victory over sin. So, we need to ask why that is so by asking, what is the law of sin and death? And I'm going to back you up. You can look in your own Bibles to chapter 7, verses 22 to 23. Now, you know, don't you, that in the original writings, there are no verse divisions and there are no chapter divisions. Those were added about 1700 years after the Bible was written. So, you should really try to ignore them as much as possible in tracing the flow of an argument. So, you come to the end of Romans 7, I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members, that means my hands and tongue and legs and sexual organs, I see in my members another law, waging war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin. Now, that, I think, is the same as this right here, the law of sin, and death is added because that's what it leads to. So, the crucial thing to see here in 723 is the law of sin that dwells in my members. That means he's talking about a principle or an impulse or a rule in my body that inclines me to sin. This is practical, nitty-gritty impulse to sin. That's why I think Romans 8.2 is about real practical godliness and holiness, not about justification. Oh, that we might get clear now. This is so important that we have justification being a declaration at a point in time through faith at the beginning of your Christian life where God says, no condemnation, not guilty, acquitted, righteous in my sight, and then begins a life becoming like that. Christians are becoming what they are in Christ, what they're reckoned to be. We're becoming, little by little we're being shaped into Christ's image and we're being victorious in measure over that law of sin and death. How? The law of the spirit of life in Christ has set you free from the law of sin and death. So verse 2 is describing what verses 1 to 14 are going to unpack, how the Spirit of God sets you free from the impulse to sin. So justification is in verse 1, no condemnation. Sanctification is in verse 2. You are getting victory over the law of sin and death by the power of the Holy Spirit. We're not talking about perfectionism here. There's plenty of evidence in the New Testament that this is a process rather than a perfected work.

Speaker 2:
[20:41] I want to thank you for listening to this episode of Light and Truth where we are committed to providing God-centered preaching to help you see Christ clearly and treasure him truly. I'm your host, Dan Cruver. On our next episode, John Piper continues our 11-part series, Free to Fight, Free to Suffer, with a message titled, Justified First, Then Made Holy. I hope you'll join us. For more resources, visit desiringgod.org.