Tuesday, June 9, 2009

What does this mean?

There is there now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. -- Romans 8:1

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 nautre, 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.

Portions of Romans 8, The Message, by Eugene Peterson

What does this mean for/to you?

2 comments:

angela said...

My hope is to embrace the whole thing and work as the Spirit leads...
continually gets set upon. Sometimes by my own guilt and inadequacy, sometimes by someone or something else.

Choralgrrl said...

Wow, that's a thinker for sure. That last paragraph seems a pretty accurate description of Jesus to me.

Pondering...