GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

Resurrection

It was Easter Sunday morning. A tall soldier, with black hair and dark eyes, had just entered the enclosure surrounding the Garden Tomb in East Jerusalem, just north of the Damascus Gate. The soldier walked toward the tomb, paused a moment to look at that blackened hole in the limestone wall, then plunged in. He sat there, alone in the darkness.

Who was this soldier? He was a friend of mine. He was a very angry man. He had been born into a happy home, treated well as a small boy, until the terrible day when his father abandoned the family. Living for a while with his mother and other relatives, he finally landed in an orphanage on a farm in Pennsylvania. There he learned to fight his way into the position of power, dominating others by force of strength and personality. His life was a hard one: he was raped three times by homosexual men; he was shone a rigid brand of Catholicism that crushed his spirit under towering loads of guilt; he fostered a festering hatred for his father who threw him to the wolves. He learned the laws of the street: you are the only one you can trust, and a fist keeps you safer than a handshake. He entered the Air Force as a means of escape. After basic training, he was deployed to a base in Morocco.

In Morocco, the one true God began to pierce his gloom. On a trip to Jerusalem to see the holy sites, he found himself on Easter Sunday morning, sitting all alone in the darkness of the Garden Tomb. He was a spiritually dead man, sitting where another dead Man might have been entombed.

But sitting in that tomb, the words carved on a simple wooden sign began to work into his heart: HE IS NOT HERE ... FOR HE HAS RISEN. Jesus Christ was not there in the tomb. He is alive. Sitting in that tomb, the soldier opened his heart to Jesus Christ, offering his own heart and body to be Jesus' living home. Then, the dead man who had entered that tomb walked out with the resurrected Christ living and walking in him, by the Holy Spirit. It was a moment of truest baptism: having been buried with Christ, he rose again to new life in Christ. His life began that day: a life of resurrection by the indwelling Spirit of our risen Christ.

Bringing the Resurrection Home

That story is a parable to me. It is a parable because it shows in our time how the resurrection life of Jesus Christ lives on and on inside the people who are Christians indeed. In our last study, we discovered God's definition of the Christian in Rom. 8:9: "However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him." The indwelling Spirit makes Christ belong to us, and through the Spirit we belong to Christ. Our hearts become Christ's home. And what does the Spirit bring home to our hearts? The resurrection life of Jesus Himself.

The passage we study today describes this resurrection life of Christ within us, in Rom. 8:10, 11: "And if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you."

This is what it practically means to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit. First, my human spirit is made alive in eternal union with Christ's Spirit indwelling me. Spiritually, I am right now married to Christ my bridegroom, made one with Him as a direct answer to His High Priestly Prayer in John 17. Second, my physical, mortal body is made alive to God, enabled to carry me into and through the good works God has planned for me to walk into. His resurrection life in me is my life now, both spiritually and physically.

Now we have heard this truth explained before, but it is so easy to miss it. Familiarity with it may not breed contempt, but it does breed complacency. And when we are complacent about the resurrection life of Christ within us, we miss out on the riches of that life, all too often replacing it with our own religious activity.

Leo Tolstoy described his own religious journey, where he missed the reality of Christ's resurrection life in him, in his final novel. Its title is Resurrection. The plot is based on a story Tolstoy read in a newspaper, chronicling how a Russian nobleman was sitting on a jury hearing the case of a prostitute accused of murder, when he suddenly realized he himself had seduced the woman years before, setting her on the path of prostitution and degradation. Tolstoy's Prince Nekhludov discovers the same thing in the book, then embarks on a spiritual journey paralleling Tolstoy's own. He admits he is a sinner and goes to God for forgiveness, but then he tries to atone for his wrongs against this woman by trying to make her prison life better and offering to marry her. In the end, she rejects his proposal of marriage, and he realizes his self-atonement and self-justification is morally vacuous. At the end of the book, during a fevered night of studying Matthew's Gospel, he develops a new religious code of Five Commands out of the last half of Matthew chapter five. He then embarks on a new quest. The book ends with these lines: "That night a new life began for Nekhludov, not because the conditions of his life were altered, but because everything that happened to him from that time held an entirely new and different meaning for him. Only the future will show how this new chapter of his life will end."

Tolstoy labored over a better ending of the book, but he never found one. In the introduction to the copy I read, a biographer summarized Tolstoy's life in this way: "... the path that Prince Nekhludov's life takes after his spiritual regeneration is left to the reader's imagination. It could not be otherwise, since Tolstoy himself was never able to work out a satisfactory way of life for the Resurrected and Regenerate man." He never "worked out a satisfactory way of life for the Resurrected and Regenerate man" because only Christ could work that out, through the man Christ indwelled by the Spirit. Tolstoy abandoned the Ten Commandments of Russian orthodoxy for the Five Commands of his own revised version of the gospel. But Christianity has never been about commandments and rules so much as it has been about THE LIFE: the resurrected life of Christ infused into the believer by the Spirit so that the believer can indeed live a Christ-like Christian life. Tolstoy couldn't write about true resurrection because he had not Christ's resurrection life within him. What a heartache: one of the greatest minds and largest hearts in history came so close, but missed the resurrection life in the end.

But against the sad example of Leo Tolstoy, I think about the man in the dust, scraping the sores all over his body with a potsherd, having lost all his children in a day of terrible tragedy. I think of Job, sitting there under circumstances far darker than any of us will ever face, and he found hope in one thing: His God is a resurrecting God. Job cried into the blackness of his circumstances one of the greatest statements of faith ever, in Job 19:23-26: "'Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron stylus and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! And as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God.'" What a statement of hope in a resurrecting God!

Even more with us, if we are indwelled by the Spirit of Christ, we have resurrection life right now, resident in us! What we have is what Job hoped for, and Tolstoy unfortunately missed. Oh that we may understand the riches within us!! The indwelling Spirit makes our spirit alive in Christ, and our body alive to God. First let's consider how our spirit is resurrected by the indwelling Spirit of Christ.

My Spirit Resurrected by God's Indwelling Spirit: Eternal Union with Christ

What Paul describes in Rom. 8:10 is the oneness of our human spirit with the Spirit of Christ now indwelling us: "And if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness." This oneness in Spirit with Jesus Christ is the answer to Jesus' deepest heartfelt prayer in the gospels: the High Priestly prayer of John 17.

In that prayer, the last one prayed before the Passion began, Jesus concluded His prayer with this loyally loving request, from John 17:20-26: "I do not ask in behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me. And the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given to them; they they may be one, just as We are one; I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and didst love them, even as Thou didst love Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am, in order that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me; for Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, although the world has not known Thee, yet I have known Thee; and these have known that Thou didst send Me; and I have made Thy name known to them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith Thou didst love Me may be in them, and I in them." That prayer, prayed by Jesus for the original disciples and for us, is answered by the indwelling Spirit, who makes us one with Christ.

When the Holy Spirit comes to live inside us, an internal resurrection occurs. Our bodies, dead because of sin, are tombs of flesh, each one a mausoleum housing a dead spirit. Our inheritance from Adam is a body given over to death, and a dead spirit unresponsive to God. Paul describes our dead spirit in Eph. 2:1, "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins." Now the people Paul describes there were physically alive when they received the letter, and they were physically alive during their pre-Christian era Paul is describing to them. But their spirit was dead in trespasses and sins. They were each as dead spiritually as Lazarus was physically. Only rather than being buried in a tomb in the hillside, they were buried within a tomb of flesh, their body dead because of sin.

Yet into that body was invited the reinvigorating Spirit of Christ. Our inheritance in Adam was spiritual and physical death because of sin; but our inheritance from Christ is eternal spiritual life infused into us because of Christ's righteousness displayed on the cross. The indwelling Spirit making our spirit alive in Christ is the ultimate triumph of the cross of Christ.

When a man or woman, boy or girl, opens themselves, inviting Christ to become resident within them, their own spirit is immediately made alive with Christ. That dead, coccooned spirit, asleep in spiritual death, is made alive with Christ. From that moment forward, our resurrected spirit is joined into eternal oneness with our living Christ. We are married to Him, united with Him, identified with Him forever. Spiritually speaking, we are now what we will forever be: one with Christ by the eternal union with of our Spirit with His Spirit. Right now, your spirit is ready for heaven and the next age. We wait only for the death of this physical body for our resurrected spirits to be housed in a resurrection body in our finally consummated oneness with Christ. I am now all I ever will be spiritually. I am a heavenly man united with Christ, bound within an earthly body.

This is the agony and ecstasy of the Christian life: the now and the not yet, the inner realities of eternal life and the impending reality of physical death, the unquenchable hope facing the final hurdle. But what does it actually mean to have Christ's Spirit united with our human spirit so that we are raised to new life?

Here is a story describing what this means. It is the story of a woman named Frederica, as told in the March 7, 1994 issue of Christianity Today. Frederica was a militant feminist flower child of the early 70s. She said of herself at that time, "I would have been proud of having an abortion. I didn't happen to get pregnant, but if I had, I would have had an abortion in a minute. I would have seen it as a revolutionary act in which I declared my independence." She chose Hinduism as her religion, and she was pro-gay rights, pro-women's rights, pro-abortion rights. She was a child of the 60s.

But one day Frederica's boyfriend Gary was required to read one of the four Gospels for a philosophy of religion class. Gary chose to read Mark, the shortest gospel. Gary was struck with the Christ Mark portrayed. "There's something about Jesus ... He speaks with authority."

In May 1974, Frederica and Gary were married, solemnizing their marriage with a Hindu prayer. They had planned a backpacking honeymoon through Europe. In Dublin, they toured a famous cathedral. In that cathedral stands a statue of Christ, with this caption beneath it: "Behold the heart that so loved mankind."

Suddenly, Frederica fell to her knees on the cold, stone floor, weeping before Christ. Not before a dead stone statue, but before a living Christ, whose Spirit had at that moment come to live inside her. As she knelt and prayed, for the first time she heard a different and quiet voice speaking within her. She sensed Jesus Christ saying to her, "I am your life. You think your life is in your personality, your intellect, in your breath itself. But these are not your life. I am your life." Then "I stood up, and I was a Christian," Frederica recalled.

That is it: she kneeled before the living Christ, invited Him to live within her, and He came in and quietly assured her that He inside her was now her life. There was a new voice, a quiet voice, and a new life, an eternal life, within her. And that life raised her up to stand on her feet before God as a Christian indeed. Her Spirit was made alive by the indwelling Spirit of Christ, and her body was then raised up to be alive to God as a Christian.

And now Frederica Mathewes-Green is the director of Real Choices, a research project of the National Women's Coalition for Life. Her resurrected spirit is united with Christ's Spirit inside her, doing the good work of educating American women about the right to life and the value of life. She has changed courses radically: from the death-dealing of militant feminism to the life of resurrection within her. It was the Spirit who brought home the resurrection life of Christ, the Christ who is her life. And now she celebrates life, rather than looking for death.

I love that story because her spirit was resurrected unto life, and her body was raised up to stand before God, alive to God for the work He wanted to do through her. That is what Paul speaks of next in Rom. 8:11.

My Body Given Life: The Miracle of Incarnation in Mortal Me

Rom. 8:11 is one of the more quizzical verses in the Scripture, and its meaning is often misunderstood. Paul tells us "And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you."

Most commentators believe that this verse refers to the resurrection of our bodies at Christ's Second Coming. But Paul clearly says that Christ will give life "to your MORTAL bodies through His Spirit who indwells you." If Paul is referring to the resurrected body of the believer, how could he call that body mortal? By definition, that body will be immortal, imperishable, existing forever beyond death. Paul is not here speaking about the resurrection of our bodies; he will address that down in Rom. 8:17-23. Paul is speaking about how, even now, in this mortal body by definition doomed to die, the Spirit of Christ in us gives life to that body to prepare it for the good works God has planned for us to walk into.

This is the ultimate miracle of Christ's incarnation. Christ comes to live inside us, housing Himself once again in bodies bound for the grave. The imperishable chooses to indwell the perishable, for the sake of the perishing. And His life in us by the Spirit is so great that our mortal bodies will be given life exactly as long as God wills to use them as a vehicle for His divine life. Just as Jesus' body, doomed to go to the cross, was useful until "the hour had come," so our bodies will be given new life as long as God has His good deeds to work through us on this earth.

Lest anyone doubt the truth of this verse, I want us to consider Thelma. Thelma's body has been continually made alive, against all odds, for these seven or so years that she has had cancer. Her back is technically broken, yet she lives. Her breathing is labored, yet she lives. Her circulation is getting weaker, yet she lives. And yet it is not Thelma that lives, but Christ lives in Thelma, and the life she now lives against all the odds in a dying body, she lives by faith in the Son of God. And I don't doubt for a minute that God has kept Thelma's physical body alive against the odds because He wanted to shine the glory of His life in her through her all the more beautifully as her physical housing decays. Truly do the words of II Cor. 4:7, 11, 12 become alive when we think of Thelma: "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves. ... For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you." His life is at work in Thelma, even keeping her frail body alive, so that her delayed death reveals more and more of His life to us, that we too may live out our days with gratitude and praise!

This is God's crowning achievement of incarnation: this mystery whereby His life will not be denied, even though housed in the decaying body of the believer. God is sovereign, and this human body will be alive exactly as long as God wants to shine the life of Christ through my dying humanity, making His life shine all the brighter by contrast. God is the supreme artist: placing the glowing brilliance of His glorious life within a dark and dying frame, that His life might stand out all the more.

I recall how this very resurrection life quickened my mortal body for the work God had prepared for me to do at one rather desperate point in my life. I was a pastoral intern at the time, and I and another pastoral intern had been commissioned by the elders to travel to the island of Timor in eastern Indonesia, to teach a pastor's conference. The two of us found out about the trip on Tuesday morning, we both made the decision to take the trip on Wednesday, I had a business trip to St. Paul, Minnesota on Thursday and Friday, and we flew to Indonesia on Sunday. We had no time to take any shots to prepare us for the journey. Flying over the vast Pacific ocean, my companion warned me about one thing: that if he got sick, I would have to be careful, since he typically fainted whenever he threw up. He warned me of this in passing, and I didn't think much of it.

Until Tuesday afternoon late. That day for lunch, we had been served a wicked black dish called Chimi Chimi, which is squid cooked in its own ink. And it was the whole squid too: not just the cylindrical tail, but the head and tentacles as well. My friend was starving at that lunch, and he quickly consumed four or five whole squids, each about the length of your longest finger. I had the tail of one or two, the tail being the only body part I recognized, then cast it aside. By 5:00 PM that afternoon my friend was feeling sick. That night I had to teach, and I taught under a cloud of impending doom. I went home at 10:00 PM to find my friend writhing in pain. That night lives in my memory like a recurring nightmare. I was starting to feel queasy myself, but all night I had to stay up with my friend, who was deathly afraid of fainting and choking to death. I can still hear his haunting voice, "Dooorm ... Dooooorm." I sat up with him most of the night, maybe catching an hour or two of restless sleep.

The following morning I was slotted to teach from 9:00 - 11:00. I was set to explain Genesis chapter two, through an interpreter, for two straight hours of teaching. I went to the meeting bleary eyed, queasy, and literally shaking with fatigue. When I stood up to speak, I started with a few opening remarks. It was all I could do to get out a sentence, and I would gather my strength while the sentence was being translated. That went on for about ten minutes, until the room started to spin on me and I had to grab hold of the table to keep from falling down in a faint.

At that shakiest moment, I prayed during one of the pauses for translation. I said, "Lord, You are going to have to literally quicken my body here, You are going to have to give Me your strength and power so that You can speak through me, because I am losing it." It wasn't a nicely worded request, or a flowery prayer for provision: it was a simple statement of the earthly facts. I remember praying that prayer, and almost instantly feeling the strength of God begin to course through me. With every sentence I grew stronger, and the message grew clearer. Within ten minutes I felt so good that I became unaware of how I was feeling. Suddenly that morning, in that gleaming white church high on the hillside overlooking the ocean, Genesis chapter two became alive before our eyes. I remember my Christ teaching the ancient truths of that passage through me in such a way that we all were enraptured: we chuckled together at Adam naming the animals and craning his neck to see if there was a mate suitable for him at the end of the long line; we marveled at the wisdom of God teaching the man his need before the giving of the great treasure; we delighted in the fact that the first recorded words of man were words of poetry. When those two hours were up, the entire room spontaneously burst into applause. I applauded too: we were all applauding Jesus Christ who had shown His glory among us, through a fainting human vessel. He gives life to our mortal bodies, in order to shine the glory of His life through us.

There are several prayers which reflect this glorious truth of the treasure of Christ hidden within the empty and dying body of our death. Martin Luther entitled this prayer The Empty Vessel:

Behold, Lord, an empty vessel that needs to be filled. My Lord, fill it.
I am weak in the faith; strengthen me. I am cold in love; warm me
and make me fervent, that my love may go out to my neighbour.
I do not have a strong and firm faith; at times I doubt and am unable
to trust you altogether. O Lord, help me. Strengthen my faith and
trust in you. In you I have sealed the treasure of all I have. I am poor;
you are rich and came to be merciful to the poor. I am a sinner; you are
upright. With me, there is an abundance of sin; in you is the fulness
of righteousness. Therefore I will remain with you, of whom I can
receive, but to whom I may not give.

A sweet Chinese woman who had converted to Christianity, learning to read in the process, prayed this prayer upon returning to her village:

We are going home to many who cannot read.
So, Lord, make us to be Bibles
so that those who cannot read the Book
can read it in us.

The fact of the matter is that we have been given life itself, life as God meant it to be. That life is Christ, and Christ is our life now by the Spirit. Our world is filled with those who are looking for life and love in all the wrong places. When looking at us, even in these decaying bodies, may they see the life of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion: Messengers of Resurrection Hope in the Twilight of an Age

Let me expand on that thought a bit. We live in a great historic moment. We live in a day when humanity is being stirred by momentous revelations and the looming end of the current millenium. The news has been full the past few weeks of dark revelations. Humanity has now successfully cloned an animal, a sheep. Dr. Frankenstein of horror-myth now wears a lab coat in a Scottish lab. The President quickly placed a moratorium on all federally funded research projects endeavoring to clone humans. That was nice: but it is not the federally funded programs that ought to cause us to pause. We also read about an unprecedented level of money-grubbing corruption within the very walls of the White House, and yet Americans stupidly give the President a 60% overall approval rating, one of the highest of his tenure. Pro-abortion forces have admitted blatantly lying to the American public in national television interviews. We may muster the moral gumption to outlaw infanticide by partial birth abortion, but we may not. To anyone aware of the signs of the times, one thing is clear: we are living in the twilight of an age.

What do you do in the twilight of an age, when you are a child of God, indwelled by the Spirit of resurrection? You open your mouth to bear witness that death and gathering darkness are not all there is. You fix your hope on the coming morning, the dawning of the Messianic age, when all will be made right by our Christ who does all things well. We alone bear the flaming torch of hope in the gathering gloom. May we hold it aloft with joyous proclamation about our living Christ, who lives inside us. Let us praise Him and learn of Him in the quiet places, not letting the darkness of this world darken our spirits. Let us hope anew in a God of resurrection, our Christ of the Easter sunrise, who is our life. Let us praise Him while we have breath in these mortal bodies.

This is exactly what Bill and Gloria Gaither chose to do in the beginning of the twilight of our age. It was in the late 1960s, in the midst of the drug culture, when the "God is Dead" theory was all the rage, at the height of the Vietnam War, and during a dry spell in their songwriting careers. Gloria was pregnant with their third child, and they were thinking about what a terrible time it was to bring a child into the world. But shortly after their little son was born, they penned this song, that they might sing words of praise and confidence into the gathering gloom:

God sent His Son -- they called Him Jesus;
He came to love, heal and forgive;
He lived and died to buy my pardon;
An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives.

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,
Because He lives, all fear is gone;
Because I know He holds the future,
and life is worth the living --
Just because He lives.

How sweet to hold a new-born baby
And feel the pride and joy he gives;
But greater still the calm assurance:
This child can face uncertain days
Because Christ lives.

Because He lives in me, because His Spirit has made my spirit forever alive, because He gives life to my mortal body to accomplish His works through me, I have a hope that shines forever, no matter what.

Each of us in this church is going through a day of testing. We have a choice to give into the gloom threatening to envelope us, or to continue to hope in the resurrection life pulsating in us. I know there are some here in our body whose physical bodies are suffering, seeming to hold us back from the life we think God intended for us. But the reality is that His resurrection life is keeping even our frail bodies alive exactly as long as He ordains, that His life might shine through our earthen vessels. Many of us are facing discouragement more terrible than we have ever faced: it feels like God cannot break through the bottle-necks in our lives, that the phrase "Oh well ..." is our only answer. But against this resigned "Oh well ..." may we say instead, "Thank You Lord for your resurrection life in me, in this very day of discouragement." We must never count Him out! The day of darkness over the face of our deep, the day when discouragement envelopes us, marks the beginning of God's work of resurrection in us, not the end to which He has driven us. When Job said, "... yet in my flesh shall I see God" ... he hoped beyond hope. And his hope was justified. In the most important verse in the book, Job's hope became visible reality, in Job 42:5: "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee." Job's hope in resurrection was well-founded! So ours will be, if we hope amid the discouragement, if we hold onto Christ no matter what else is happening! The day of testing and discouragement is the day requiring quiet hope in the resurrection life in us.

This is a day not for gloom or despair or the wringing of hands, but a day for hopeful praise and proclamation!! Christ lives within us: He is our life and our song. May He live His life through us, the imperishable in the perishable, for the sake of the perishing. May we be beacons of hope blazing in the darkness!

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