Grace – Not the Law – Is An Ever-flowing River

I was strolling down the Facebook neighborhood listening to various conversations between friends. I overheard one of my FB friends conversing with one of his about the struggles of humanity, trying to serve God’s law in their minds while their flesh wrestled with the law of sin (Romans 7:15-24).

As I pondered this, I thought to myself: the operative word here, "law." We absolutely cannot serve the law of God, and because we are marked by Christ's blood, we can't adequately serve sin with success or pleasure either.

The verses in Romans 7 about the dark struggle are followed by:

"O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin." (vv 24, 25)

But read on to the next verses (Rom 8:1-5) "The Message" is rich with good news:

"With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. 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 nature, 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.

"Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God!"

Our blessed Lord replaced law with grace. He has fulfilled the law for us. By that, He made provision for us to step away from the fight and let grace take over. We can rest in His grace.

As we serve the Lord in sincerity and love, He will not take our sins into account (Romans 4:4-8; Psalms 32:1,2). This is because, when He forgave us, it was for ALL our sins, past, present and future. He saw all of them in the eternal realm where there is no time (timelessness, i.e. “The I Am”). So when grace was released from the atonement provision for us, we got all our obedience to the law taken care of for us, by our precious, risen Lord.

Therefore, Grace says: "Leave it at the foot of the cross and continue on. I've got your back!"

Grace is an ever-flowing river that never stops! Wow!