Simultaneously Justified and Sinner

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Welcome. It's good to have you here today. We are in our eighth week of this series called Justified, how God mends broken lives, broken people, and a broken world. And I'm excited to be here with you today as we continue this series. We're probably at one of the hardest chapters in the entire book of Romans today, and some people would probably have rather Paul just skipped it, you know, just moved from Romans 6 to Romans 8, move on and not deal with some of the realities that we find in Romans 7. But I'm glad he didn't, because my life does reflect a bit of what's going on in this chapter, and I think yours will, too. It's a terrifying little story by the author Robert Louis Stevenson. He's written a number of books, but one of them is entitled Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Never heard of it. What? Bugs Bunny even did something on it, didn't he? Do you remember that? That's why I know it, sort of. I've never read it myself, but let me tell you. The story is that Dr. Jekyll is kind of this wonderfully nice, poised doctor who has this good side, but he has a darker side underneath, impulses, and he has discovered a way through a potion of some type to transform himself periodically to get rid of those bad impulses and let that Mr. Hyde kind of reign free. But the problem in that book is that after a while the experiment goes south and Mr. Hyde keeps coming out even when he hasn't taken the potion, and Mr. Hyde takes over and becomes who he is at the end of the story. But in it, Robert Louis Stevenson confesses this. He says, With every day and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I've been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck that man is not truly one but truly two. Hmm. Okay. Now why I bring this science fiction story up is because actually Robert Louis Stevenson was a Christian. He was raised in, I believe, a strict Presbyterian home. And there is some truth in this that Paul himself would even admit, that man, humanity, is not merely one but two. And we've got both going on at the same time. We're both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Now, I think I had a discussion with Hugo one time about physics. Is light a particle or a wave? Have you ever heard that? And the answer, actually, in physics is, yes. Okay, both, right? In theology, in the Christian world of theology, are we sinners or are we saints? And the answer is yes. Are we defeated or are we victorious? Again, the answer is yes. Are we in bondage to sin or are we freed from sin? And the answer, paradoxically, is yes. Now, Robert Louis Stevenson only talks about half the truth in this book because he ends the book with Mr. Hyde taking over, that that became Dr. Jekyll's true identity. The good news we have this morning is that in Romans 7, in the midst of conflict, Paul doesn't end us with the feeling like, oh, my goodness, well, it's up for grabs, which one of these two human beings you're going to become? We're not quite sure. They're both equally as powerful or they're both conflicted and who knows how you... Paul ends with the victory that we have in Jesus Christ. So he will contrast in the book of Romans this inner conflict we have and then also the eventual victory one day that we have in Jesus Christ, that we are truly saved by grace, and that is still true no matter the conflict that you have in your life. So we're going to read two different sections of Romans 7, and I know it's a very subtle difference in the English, but I want you to recognize in the first section, it's all in the past tense. And in the second section that we're going to read, it's all in the present tense. And I think that's what we're going to look at, the two different conflicts that we have faced, the one in the past that we could not win and the one in the present that we cannot lose because of Jesus Christ. So let's look at Romans 7, verses 7 to 12 to start with. What then shall we say, that the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin, for I would never have known what it is to covet, if the law had not said you shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law. Notice past tense. When the commandment came, sin came alive and I died, past tense. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me, past tense. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. And then Romans 7, 21 to 25. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, present tense, in ...