Producing The Right Fruit
Sermon Notes
Good morning everyone, I’m really excited to open up God’s Word with you this morning. We’ll take a moment now to dismiss our kids to children’s ministry in the back. If you haven’t already done so and would like to, you can still register your child into the class with one of our volunteers back there.
We’re in the middle of our series through the book of Romans. Where we are digging deep into how the Christian faith works, so that we can be Deeply Rooted in our faith. Last week, Louis started us on a 3 week look into the process known as Sanctification. When we talk about sanctification, we’re talking about how we live a Christian life. If we have been saved from the penalty of our sin by having faith in the grace of God, how then are we supposed to live the rest of our lives, even though we still clearly sin? We do this through sanctification, growing closer and closer to the character of Jesus Christ. A common way that the Bible illustrates this is the process of bearing fruit. In today’s passage, Paul is going to show us both a proper and improper way of bearing fruit as Christians.
It’s good for us to distinguish the proper use of our salvation in Christ, because we can be pretty good at using things in our lives sub-optimally or not for their intended purposes. Think about it, I’m certain that we all have things in our homes or cars that are functioning because of some “creative” engineering. There’s a shed door being held closed by a screwdriver or a sink that you know not to turn past a certain mark or else it starts doing weird stuff. Throughout college and my single life, the headboard for my bed was not a headboard at all, it was actually a footboard with some newly drilled holes and bolts to hold it into place. And we all have something that operates more because of duct tape than by its original factory design. That’s all fine and good for little things around the house, but we don’t want our Christian life to be operating that way. We want to know how to follow God in the right way to avoid the confusion and frustration that comes when we feel like we are spinning our wheels or even going backward in our faith.
If you are a skeptic or non-Christian listening today, this is still a great message for you to pay attention to. You can see what being a Christian is actually supposed to look like and be motivated by. You can see what God would truly call you to if you began to follow him.
We’ll be in Romans 7 today. The Title of the Message is “Producing the Right Fruit in the Right Way.” And the Big Idea is this: “Sanctification comes from a loving union with Jesus not a frustrating cycle of obedience and disobedience.”
Clearly, Romans 7 would follow right after Romans 6. This is where it is important to remember that this is a letter and not a modern chapter book. The chapter and verses numbers are added to make finding specific teachings easier. But Paul is not starting some new topic in chapter 7. He’s giving an explanation on a topic that he introduces late in chapter 6. He does this with an interesting question in 6:21
21 So what fruit was produced then from the things you are now ashamed of?
Paul is calling us to look back and see where trying to be our own gods or live life under our own power and ask what did it produce, what was the result? Now this question makes us think of our life before Christ and after Christ, but it also applies to how we live our lives for Christ as Christians. Paul ends this question with the famous verse 6:23 saying that the wages of sin (what sin earns) is death. When we sin, which is saying that we can live without the need for God or that we can do better than him, it leads to death. We want to make sure then that as we follow Jesus we are producing fruit in a way that leads to joy and life and not trying to go back to the way we used to do it that only produced death. Paul gives an analogy that is really helpful here.
7 Since I am speaking to those who know the law, brothers and sisters, don’t you know that the law rules over someone as long as he lives? 2 For example, a married woman is legally bound to her husband while he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law regarding the husband. 3 So then, if she is married to another man while her husband is living, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law. Then, if she is married to another man, she is not an adulteress.
Paul starts here with a pretty straightforward example. This is the “til death do us part” line from traditional wedding vows. It’s not a controversial statement to say that if you face the tragedy of losing your spouse, you are then allowed to marry someone else. It’s not that you have two husbands now or that you are committing adultery. Now in your marriage there may be the threat of your current spouse haunting you in your new marriage, (Jk) but we know that legally and spiritually remarriage after that the death of a spouse is allowable and normal. Now let’s see how Paul continues this illustration.
4 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in relation to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another. You belong to him who was raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.
This is another call back to chapter 6 that Louis preached on last week. Paul tells us that we died with Christ as our sacrifice to sin. Just as a spouse is free to marry someone else when their spouse dies, our death to sin through the death of Jesus frees us to change from being under the law to under the grace of God. We get a better marriage. (don’t be looking at your spouse thinking this is some kind of promise about marrying a better one after death, this is an analogy using marriage, not a promise for marriage)
Because of this change we relate to God and following his Law completely differently than how we used to. A marriage changes everything about your life you home, your time, what you eat, what you do. We now enjoy a union with Jesus meaning we do not have to live this out on our own. We can now follow the law of Jesus with joy because it brings us into deeper relationship with him, and not out of fear that we may never have relationship with him.
5 For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions aroused through the law were working in us to bear fruit for death.
Paul will explain this more below. But this shows us the extent of our need for the grace of God. Not only does the law not save us from our sin, we know that it reveals our sin. But it can actually lead to more sin. You see the difference of what kind of fruit we are bearing based on the “marriage” that we are in. To Christ, bearing fruit for God. To the law, fruit for death.
6 But now we have been released from the law, since we have died to what held us, so that we may serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the old letter of the law.
Paul says that we are released from the obligation of individual perfection required by the law in order to now serve in our Union with Christ through the Spirit. It’s interesting that he uses the word released here. You don’t say that you are released from good situations. Paul is saying that being under the law is something that we have to be released from.
This leads Paul to another question that’s really important for us to understand.
7a What should we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! But I would not have known sin if it were not for the law.
If it is good that we are released from the Law, Paul goes on to ask if the law itself is sin. It’s not and he proceeds to show us the true function of the law. He shows us that the law is still important even if it doesn’t lead us to salvation.
Here we see that the law is a mirror or tutor. The Bible uses both of these terms and it is really helpful. The law serves as a diagnostic not as the cure itself. You look at a mirror to see what is going on with your hair or face then make the needed corrections. A tutor points out what you are missing or don’t understand about a certain subject then leads you to the correct information. It makes known to us our issue and that we are in need of salvation from God. And whether you are already a believer or still a skeptic this is an important role for the Law. Before we know Christ, the law shows that we are sinners in need of trusting in God for salvation. Once we know Christ, the law reminds of that sacrifice that we are trusting in and encourages us to grow closer to Jesus out of that joy and relief.
This point speaks to the sense of sin as “missing the mark.” The root word in Greek that we translate as sin is borrowed from archery. So when we go through our lives, God’s laws and rules are there to show us that even when we are trying to follow him, we often miss by a little. Now ideally as we follow Christ we’ll find that the misses become smaller and smaller. But it is the law that shows us what that gap is. Paul gives a specific example in the rest of verse 7.
For example, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, Do not covet.
Now a quick recap on the Law when it comes to the Bible. All of the Old Testament Law can be traced back or is an extension off of the Ten Commandments. They are the boiled down version of God’s character and desire for his people. These extensions of the law could be characterized as ceremonial laws (worship, sacrifices, festivals), civil laws (how Israel ran itself as a nation), and moral laws (ethics and morality regardless of if you are Jewish or not). We believe that Jesus fulfilled all the ceremonial laws as they were supposed to be signposts pointing to Him as the ultimate sacrifice for sin and celebration of who God is. And we believe that we are bound by the civil laws of the nations that we live in and not of ancient Israel (Jesus taught this with his ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’ teaching). So what we are talking about when we talk about following the Law is the moral law. It hasn’t changed, because God’s character hasn’t and never changes.
Do not covet is an interesting law for Paul to highlight, because it is the most internal of the laws in the Ten Commandments. Before Paul converted to Christianity he was a Jewish religious leader called a Pharisee. Pharisees and other religious Jews viewed the law as external guidelines to follow and as a ladder of sorts for Israel to get to God. They thought they had ethnic superiority over the rest of the world because God had given them the law first. Paul fights against this belief in Romans 1-2. Paul and other Pharisees legitimately thought that they kept the law of God perfectly. They even set up these elaborate laws around the laws to show how pious they were.
Coveting, however, is not an external sin. It’s internal, it’s a sin of the mind and will. Coveting internally is what leads to all the other sins externally. You covet other people’s things, so you steal. You covet sexual experience so you lust and commit adultery. You covet power and position so much that you may even be tempted to bear false witness (lie about them) to hurt them or even murder them. This is why Jesus expanded the scope of the law in the Sermon on the Mount by saying that hating someone or looking at someone with lust is sinful even though you haven’t actually murdered or committed adultery with them. Our sin problem is not just external, it is internal. The law isn’t just a mirror, it’s also like an MRI for our internal sin.
Paul finishes by expanding on something he said earlier. These verses reveal the depth of our sin problem and the incredible gift that is God’s grace to help us overcome it as we walk with Him.
8 And sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind. For apart from the law sin is dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again 10 and I died. The commandment that was meant for life resulted in death for me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. 12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. 13 Therefore, did what is good become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, in order to be recognized as sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment, sin might become sinful beyond measure.
The law isn’t simply a mirror or an MRI that shows our occasional sin, it can actually serve as a Motivation for our deeper problem with sin. Look at all the active verbs that Paul uses about our sin. We don’t just miss the mark passively as we were just bad at archery, we in our sin actively seek to rebel against God’s design for the world described in the Law. It’s not aiming at the right thing and missing because of shaky hands, it’s knowing what the right target is then deciding to turn and shoot an arrow at the people beside us. A lot of times we desire to sin because we know there is a rule against it, just like we are tempted to sneak into a door that says Do Not Enter. That’s not the Law’s fault, that’s why Paul still upholds it, it just reveals the sin nature that we all have.
This is what the Bible refers to as lawlessness or transgression. And it is spoken of in a worse way than the normal “missing the mark” sin. Parents, you’ll understand this easily. If you find out that your child got in a little fight at recess because they were arguing back in forth with another kid, you’re certainly disappointed and know that you will have to lay down some consequences. But you are way more upset if you see your kids about to fight and you specifically tell them to separate for a while to cool off only to see one of them sneak back around to get another shot in at their sibling. Why? They’re both fights. The second one is worse because your kid willfully disobeyed something that you had just told them. It wasn’t a heat of the moment miss, it was a deliberate act of disobedience and rebellion. Tim Keller explains this desire in us so well.
“We have a deep desire to be in charge of the world and of our lives. We want to be sovereign. Every law that God lays down is an infringement on our absolute sovereignty. It reminds us that we are not God, and prevents us from being sovereign to live as we wish. In its essence, sin is a force that hates any such infringement. It desires to be God.” Tim Keller
You can see this inclination in us all the way back to the Fall of Adam and Eve. The two of them didn’t eat the fruit because of a momentary slip up or curiosity about how it would taste. They were tempted by the serpent with the prospect that they could be like God. They were convinced that God was holding out on them and there was more power to be gained, that they could be like God.
Paul does a brilliant job here of showing us again that the “good person” idea of getting right with God is never going to work for us. Our sin problem is too large, the desire is too strong. The law of God both reveals this to us and acts to incite the rebelliousness that we all struggle with. That’s why our only hope is in the Cross of Christ. He is the only one that could look at the law and live it out, see nothing to rebel against, and see nothing wrong when the scan came back or he saw his life reflected in it. If you’re not a Christian, that’s where you start. You recognize that what we’ve said about our sinfulness is true about you (not just you btw, all of us are here because it’s true of us too). Once you recognize that, you can look to Jesus as the solution to that problem.
For the believers in the room. You already know that these sin problems are still a part of your life even as you walk through Sanctification. Louis is going to preach on that even more next week. The question for us then is “How do we produce fruit in Sanctification despite the fact that we are sinful?”
The answer comes from the illustration Paul opened the chapter with. Before we knew Jesus, we were united to the law in a way that only pointed to our death. We rebelled against it which only went to show how much we lacked in light of it. With every sin we piled more and more weight on our shoulders that we could never carry. That union showed us to be farther and farther from God with each passing day. But now, through the Grace of God and our faith in that Grace we are united to Jesus directly. The law which used to prove our sin and bring despair at how sinful we are now reveals how gracious our God is and the power that he has to cleanse and forgive.
That’s why the Big Idea today is “Sanctification comes from a loving union with Jesus not a frustrating cycle of obedience and disobedience.”
Before Christ, any good fruit we produced was constantly being covered up by the sin that we lived in. Trying to overcome that imbalance was impossible for us. Now those heaping piles of sin have been cleared and we can actually see the fruit that we produce. We can serve others not out of obligation but because we can actually see that God is using us to bless them. We can go deeper into study of Scripture and prayer not because we feel like we have to or God will be disappointed or mad, but because we can actually experience the joy of better understanding and relationship to God. Of course, we will still sin. But the more we lean into our union with Jesus the more those sins will feel foreign to us like an old toxic relationship. You may get still angry on occasion, but you’ll be able to remember back to when anything and everything used to make you angry. There’s no need to hide anything or get defensive with Jesus. He knows us fully, nothing is going to come up now that proves to be a dealbreaker. Let’s walk in that freedom and impact our world knowing that we are now free to produce lasting and meaningful fruit in Christ.