NO greater words than these have ever been written. They stand out even in a great chapter like this as an expression of truth which is quite unique. It is one of the most magnificent statements that is found anywhere in the whole realm and range of the Scriptures, and yet there is nothing more important about a statement like this than that we should realize exactly why it was the Apostle ever made it. The danger with some of these resounding phrases is that we tend to content ourselves with the words, or with some general impression which they make upon us; we enjoy them so much that we do not realize their significance, and therefore we do not truly appropriate to ourselves the teaching which they are meant to convey.
Take this great statement. Why did Paul ever make it, what was the object, what was his reason for doing so? The answer is given in the fifteenth verse: ‘For’ says the Apostle, ‘ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear’. In other words the statement is linked up with something that has gone before, and the Apostle has a very definite object in view in writing these words, and it is that he is anxious to save these Roman Christians from a spirit of discouragement—from a spirit of despondency or depression. They may have been actually suffering from that, but even if they were not at the moment, he is concerned that they never should suffer from it, and his one object is to provide them with an antidote against this depression, this spirit of bondage, this spirit of defeat, this spirit of discouragement that, as we have seen, is always threatening us in the Christian life. The Apostle does not throw out a magnificent statement like this without any context, it is not simply some wonderful truth that is suddenly uttered. It comes—as such statements almost invariably come in the writings of this great Apostle—as he is dealing with some very practical problem. These Epistles which we have in the New Testament are full of doctrine and of theology and yet it would be very wrong to say that the collection of New Testament Epistles is a text book of theology. It is not. The astounding thing is this, and it is important to bear in mind, that these pronouncements and doctrines are always introduced with some practical object in view, with the pastoral element right in the very forefront. These letters are pastoral letters written primarily because the Apostle was concerned to help people to an actual enjoyment and out-living of the Christian faith which they had believed and accepted.
It is very important, therefore, to notice exactly how he came to make this particular statement. What is the cause of the discouragement in this case? It is nothing less than the problem of living the Christian life, the problem, if you like, of dealing with sin. Paul has been dealing with that problem from the beginning of the sixth chapter of this mighty Epistle, and he is still dealing with it here. These people to whom he is writing have been converted and have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, but now they are up against the problem of living this new life which they have received, in a world that is antagonistic and utterly opposed to them. They have to live it also in the face of certain things that they find within their own nature. It is a fight, it is a battle; there is sin without and within, and here are people who are now concerned about following the Lord Jesus Christ and living their lives as He lived His life in this world. Now it is very often face to face with that particular question and problem that discouragement and depression tend to come in. We have already considered many examples of the various means which the devil in his subtlety uses to discourage us. This again is a very common one, and particularly so with the conscientious type of person, who takes the Christian faith very seriously, the type of person who says, not, ‘Now I am converted, all is well’, but rather, ‘This is a great and glorious life, and I must live it’. We are considering here the peculiar temptation that comes to such people.
What is the essence of this problem? It is that there is a failure on their part to realize certain truths concerning the Christian life, a failure to realize what is possible for us as Christians. It is, ultimately, a failure to understand doctrine, or, if you prefer it, it is, ultimately, another failure in the realm of faith. We have seen a number of things concerning faith; we have seen, for example, that it is to be an activity. Many people forget that and get into trouble, because they fail to realize that they have to apply their faith. Then we have seen that others get into trouble because they do not see that they have to continue and persist with the application of faith, that it is not enough to start well, but that we have to go on and that we cannot relax for a moment. But here the difficulty seems to be that of failing to realize that faith must be appropriated. Here is the Truth set down before us, but if we do not appropriate it, it will not help us. Failure to grasp that is one of the most remarkable things about man as the result of sin. We must all have noticed it. Have you not found yourself reading a passage of Scripture which you have read many times before, and which you thought you knew, and suddenly finding that it becomes alive to you and speaks in a way in which it has never done before? We must all have had this kind of experience many times. How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the Truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!
I believe that that is the very essence of this particular problem which we are considering now, for it always tends to produce what the Apostle calls ‘a spirit of bondage’—‘you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear’. What does he mean by this ‘spirit of bondage’? He means the danger of having a ‘servant spirit,’ a serf-like spirit and attitude. The slave attitude generally arises from the tendency to turn the Christian life and the living of the Christian life into a new law, into a higher law. I am thinking of people who are quite clear about their relationship to the law—the Ten Commandments, or the moral law—as a way of salvation. They have seen clearly that Christ has delivered them from that, and that He alone could do so; they know that their own efforts will never enable them to fulfil the law. They see that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law; they are quite clear about their justification. However, they now begin to look positively at the Christian life, and in a very subtle way—quite unconsciously to themselves—they turn it into a new kind of law, with the result that they get into a spirit of bondage and of serfdom. They think of the Christian life as great task which they have to take up and to which now they are to apply themselves. They have read the Sermon on the Mount and realize that it is a portrayal of the Christian life, the life they desire to live. They turn to other teachings of our Lord recorded in the Gospels and they find it there. They then go through the Epistles and see there those detailed injunctions that are given by the apostles and they say: ‘That is the Christian life’. And having thus found it they regard it as something which they have to take up and put into practice in their daily life and living. In other words, holiness becomes a great task to them, and they begin to plan and organize their lives and introduce certain disciplines in order to enable them to carry it out. This attitude is seen in a classic manner in the Roman Catholic Church and her teaching, in the whole idea of monasticism, which is nothing but a great exhibition of this very thing. There you have men and women who, having been confronted by the Christian truth, say: ‘Obviously, the Christian life is a high and exalted life and if anybody is to live that life successfully it must become a whole time matter’. Going even further they say: ‘You cannot do that and continue in business or in some profession or indeed in the world at all. You must segregate yourself from the world, you must go out of it’. And they do. Now that is the extreme form of this idea that holiness, and the cultivation of holiness and the spiritual life, is a whole-time occupation, and that you must devote yourself exclusively to it and have your rules, etc., to enable you to live it.
That, according to the Apostle Paul, is nothing but a spirit of bondage. But I need scarcely say that this is not confined to the Roman Catholics, nor to others who call themselves ‘Catholics’—it can be quite common, and is quite common, among evangelical Christians. We can easily impose upon ourselves a new law. Of course we do not call it a law, and if we realized that we were putting ourselves under a law we would not do it; but still there is a tendency to do so. I can prove that by the frequent references which are made to this in the various New Testament Epistles. Take Paul’s argument in writing to the Colossians where he has a specific passage dealing with this matter. Listen to him putting it like this at the end of chapter two: ‘Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy-day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days; Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God. Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances. (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using); after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh’. Now that gives us an insight into what was happening in the early Church. A kind of monasticism was coming in, in a most insidious manner. It is no longer present among us in that particular form, but the tendency, the temptation, is still there. Again, Paul writing to Timothy has to warn him against exactly the same thing. Listen to him in the First Epistle to Timothy, fourth chapter: ‘Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth’. That is something, surely, which is quite common still. I remember very well the case of a thoroughly evangelical Christian lady who had ceased to eat meat. She believed that she could demonstrate quite clearly that a Christian should not eat meat for the reason that the animal had first of all to be killed, and that was a violation of the spirit of love. Now, there was a lady who imposed upon herself a law. What was her object? It was, as she thought, to live the Christian life truly. She took Christianity very seriously, she was an evangelical Christian, she was quite clear about justification by faith, but unconsciously she was turning Christian life and living into a new law which she had imposed upon herself. That passage which I have just quoted about seducing spirits that forbid to marry and forbid to eat meats should suffice to show what the Apostle means by this ‘spirit of bondage again to fear’.
Let us try to interpret this in terms of certain things which are to be seen in the country at the present time, this tendency to impose new laws on Christian people. Later in this series I hope to come back to deal with this more in detail, but here it is in principle. This ‘spirit of bondage’ always brings with it and in its train, a spirit of fear. ‘God hath not given us a spirit of bondage,’ says Paul, in writing to the Galatians, but here he puts it: ‘Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear’.
Well, in what sense does this produce a spirit of fear? In the first place, it tends to produce a wrong fear of God. There is a right fear of God, and we neglect and ignore that at our peril; but there is also a wrong fear of God and that is a craven fear, ‘a fear that hath torment’. These people, I suggest, tend to develop this kind of wrong fear. They regard God as a taskmaster, they regard Him as Someone who is constantly watching to discover faults and blemishes in them, and to punish them accordingly. Others think of God only as a stern Law-giver far away in the distance. This is very obviously true of that Catholic tendency to which I have already referred, but it is equally true in every manifestation of this particular trouble—God as Someone far away in the distance and as the great Law-giver only.
But it is not only a fear of God, it is also a fear of the greatness of the task. Having outlined the task to themselves, they now begin to fear it. That is why they think it can only be lived if one segregates oneself from the world, and that a man cannot possibly be in business, or engaged in any profession and live the Christian life. Thus it becomes a kind of dread and terror; they are afraid of it. That is their attitude towards the Christian life. They have no joy in it because the gigantic nature of the task is something that fills them with a spirit of fear, and they are in trouble about themselves and the possibility of ever really living this life as it should be lived.
Then another way in which this spirit of fear manifests itself is that they tend to be afraid in a wrong way of the power of the devil. Now I have to qualify every one of these statements. There is a right fear of the devil. You will find that mentioned in the Epistle of Jude, you will find it also in the Second Epistle of Peter. There are flippant, spiritually ignorant people, who make jokes about the devil simply because they are utterly ignorant of him and of his power. But, on the other hand, we must not be subject to a craven fear of the devil. These people are, because they are aware of his power. They are spiritually-minded people—this is a peculiar temptation to some of the best people—and they see this mighty power, the power of the devil set against them, and they are afraid.
Then they are equally afraid of the sin which is within themselves. They spend their time in denouncing themselves and in talking about the blackness and darkness of their own hearts. Again we must keep the balance. The Christian who does not know his own sinfulness and the blackness of his own heart is the merest child in the Christian faith, indeed, unless he has some knowledge of it, I query whether he is in the Christian faith at all. Clearly, according to the Scriptures, people who are not aware of indwelling sin, are either the merest tyros or else are unregenerate. But that is very different from having this spirit of fear, from being in this condition in which they simply live a life of ‘scorning delights and living laborious days’. Now this is not so common today. I am tempted to say, alas, that modern Christians are much too healthy. Our peculiar problem is that we are much too healthy and lighthearted. If you go back to the last century, and if you go back to the century before and to the century before that, you will find this other tendency, this tendency to be mourning, and always mourning and never rejoicing at all. Indeed, some of them almost went so far as to say that if you did rejoice there was something wrong with you. Now that again is to be guilty of the spirit of fear because of an acute awareness of the power of indwelling sin.
In other words I can sum it up like this, the spirit of fear which results from the spirit of bondage in this type of Christian is ultimately a fear of themselves and a fear of failure. They say: ‘I have come into this Christian life, yes, but the question is, can I live it? It is so marvellous and so wonderful and so exalted. How am I to live such a life, how can I rise to such heights?’ And with this consciousness of their own weakness, of the greatness of the task and of the power of the devil, they enter into this spirit of bondage and are held down and troubled, worried and full of fears.
It is to people in that condition that the Apostle turns and says: ‘Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear’, as if to say, ‘You were in this spirit of bondage and fear but you have been brought out of it—why go back to it?’ What is the antidote to this condition? The Apostle gives an outline in this magnificent statement. What is the answer? It is that we must realize the truth concerning the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Christian.
That is the message, and that, according to the Apostle, works out in two ways. The first is that as I confront this mighty, glorious task of denying myself and taking up the cross and following the Lord Jesus Christ I realize that I am to walk through this world as He walked. As I realize that I have been born again and fashioned by God according to the image of His dear Son, and as I begin to ask: ‘Who am I ever to live so? How can I ever hope to do that?’—here is the answer, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the truth that the Holy Spirit dwells within us. What does it teach? It first of all reminds me of the power of the Holy Spirit that is within me. The Apostle has already said that in verse 13 where he deals with the question of how to stop living after the flesh—‘If ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live’. Here he comes back to that same teaching. ‘For God hath not given us the spirit of fear’. ‘You must realize that you are not living by yourselves—he says in effect to these Romans—‘You have been thinking of this task of yours as if you alone, by yourself, had to live the great Christian life. You realize that you are forgiven, and you can thank God that your sins are blotted out and washed away, but you seem to think that that is all and that you are left to live the Christian life on your own. If you think like that,’ says Paul, ‘it is not surprising that you are in a spirit of fear and bondage, for the whole thing is entirely hopeless. It means that you just have a new law which is infinitely more difficult than the old law. But that is not the position, for the Holy Spirit dwells within you’.
In reality he has been dealing with that right through this eighth chapter. Take what he says in the third verse for instance: ‘For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh’. What does he mean by ‘what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh’? He means that the law could not save anybody, the law could not enable anybody to live the Christian life, for the reason that the law is weak, because of the weakness of my flesh. ‘What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh.’ There is no flesh in the law, you obviously cannot talk about the weakness of the flesh of the law. What it means is, that the law was given, but that man in and of himself is asked to keep it. The weakness of the flesh is in the man, not in the law. The law is not weak, it is the man who has to carry it out who is weak. I heard an old preacher put that very well. He gave us a picture of a man digging a garden with a spade and as he kept on digging, the handle of the spade kept on breaking. He pointed out that there was nothing wrong with the spade as such, it was all right, but the handle was too weak. The actual spade itself was strong and made of iron, the failure was in the handle which was made of wood and therefore weak. That is the picture and is it not equally true that if we impose upon ourselves in this Christian life a new law which you and I have to keep in our own strength, we are doomed to failure? But we must not do that, because the Spirit now dwells in us. ‘Ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit.’
Observe how that is worked out from verse 5 to verse 14. The essential difference between the natural man and the Christian is that the latter has the Spirit of Christ in him. Whatever experiences a man has had if he has not the Spirit of Christ he is not a Christian—‘But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His’.
Here he comes back to that same argument. He says: ‘You need not be in that spirit of bondage’. Why not? Because the Holy Spirit is in you and He will empower you and strengthen you. Paul is always repeating that message. Listen to him again in Philippians 2 verse 13: ‘It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure’. ‘Work out your own salvation’. How? ‘With fear and trembling.’ Today we are much too healthy. ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’ People do not fear at the point of conversion and they do not fear afterwards; they do not know the meaning of trembling—‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure’. That is the Spirit again. This is the way to get rid of the spirit of bondage and that false spirit of fear. We are to realize that the Spirit of God is in us. We must look to Him, we must seek His aid, we must rely upon Him. That does not mean that we are to be passive. It means we believe, that as we are wrestling, He is empowering us. We would not even have bothered to exert ourselves unless He had prompted us to do so. He works in us and we work it out, and as we realize this, the task is not impossible. Paul in the parallel passage in the fourth chapter of Galatians says: ‘God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts’—the Spirit of His own Son. Do we realize that as Christians we have within us the self-same Holy Spirit that was in the Son of God when He was here on earth? The Father gives the Spirit and it is the same Spirit that was in the Son that is given to us. The Spirit that enabled Him will enable us. That is his argument.
Let me hurry to the second principle—the presence of the Holy Spirit in us reminds us of our relationship to God. This is a wonderful thing. ‘Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.’ The presence of the Holy Spirit within us reminds us of our sonship, yes, our adult sonship. We are not infants, the very term means that we are grown sons and have reached full age. We are sons in the fullest sense and in the possession of all our faculties. The clear realization of this gets rid of the spirit of bondage again to fear. It does not do away with ‘reverence and godly fear’, but it does away with the fear that the spirit of bondage brings.
How does it do so? Well, it enables us to see that our object in living the Christian life is not simply to attain a certain standard, but is rather to please God because He is our Father—‘the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father’. The slave was not allowed to say ‘Abba’ and that slave spirit does not regard God as Father. He has not realized that He is Father, he regards Him still as a Judge who condemns. But that is wrong. As Christian people we must learn to appropriate by faith the fact that God is our Father. Christ taught us to pray ‘Our Father’. This eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, everything tends to change. He is our Father and He is always caring for us, He loves us with an everlasting love, He so loved us that He sent His only begotten Son into this world and to the Cross to die for our sins. That is our relationship to God and the moment we realize it, it transforms everything. Henceforth my desire is not to keep the law but to please my Father. We know something about that by nature, Filial love, filial reverence, filial fear is so different from that old servile fear. It is based upon the desire to please our father, and the moment we grasp that we lose the spirit of bondage. Our Christian living is not a matter of rules and regulations any longer, but rather our desire to show Him our gratitude for all He has ever done for us.
That, however, does not exhaust the matter. ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.’ You see the argument, the inevitable logic. If we are children of God, we must be related to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is ‘the first born of many brethren’ and we are related to God as children and heirs. Have you ever noticed the amazing thing which John says in chapter 17, verse 23?—Listen to our Lord as He prays to the Father—‘I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou hast loved Me’. Our Lord says there that God the Father loves us as He loved Him, the only begotten Son. So we begin to realize this, that we are now sons of God, children of God. We have this new dignity, this new standing, this new status, this glorious position in which we find ourselves. Go back again to that High Priestly prayer and notice how our Lord says that we are to glorify Him in this world exactly as He glorified His Father. Have you realized that? That is the Christian life, that is the reason for living the Christian life; it is to realize that I belong to God and that I must glorify Him. That is how I am to look at it. What a wonderful position. And the Spirit is in me and is enabling me to do it. He transforms my outlook and I lose the spirit of bondage again to fear.
Again I realize it in this way, I realize that the Holy Spirit is dwelling within me. That is Paul’s argument in the sixth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?’ That is the way to overcome the sins of the flesh. Constantly I find myself having to ask people this question—they come to me about some problem or difficulty and they say: ‘I have been praying about this’, and I say: ‘My friend, do you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?’ That is the answer. I say it again at the risk of being misunderstood, but such friends in a way need to pray less and to think more. They must remind themselves that their bodies are ‘the temples of the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us’. Prayer is always essential, but thought is essential, too, because prayer can be just an escape mechanism, almost at times a cry in the dark by people who are desperate and defeated. Prayer must be intelligent, and it is only to those who realize that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost that the answer will be given and the power will come.
Then, finally, of course, the Holy Spirit within us reminds us of our destiny. ‘If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.’ That is the way to look at the Christian life. Paul constantly uses this argument and frequently ends up by saying what he says so gloriously in the last two verses of Romans 8. The Christian is absolutely certain of his destiny, he is persuaded beyond any doubt that ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor death, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ It is not a question of keeping to a standard, it is not a question of vainly striving to do something; it is a question of getting ready for the place to which you are going. The way to get rid of the spirit of bondage and fear, is to know that if you are a child of God, you are destined for heaven and for glory, and that all the things you see inside yourself and outside yourself cannot prevent that plan from being carried out. So the Christian life is a matter of preparing for that. ‘This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.’ Faith in what? Faith in my ultimate destiny. Or take it as John puts it in his First Epistle and third chapter, verse 2: ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is’. What does that lead to? It leads to what we read in the next verse: ‘Every man that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as He is pure’. There is nothing that is so calculated to promote holiness as the realization that we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, that our destiny is certain and secure, that nothing can prevent it. Realizing that, we purify ourselves even as He is pure, and we feel that there is no time to waste. That is the Apostle’s argument in these three verses and it is all practical. That is the way to live the Christian life! Do not turn it into a law, but realize that you have received the Holy Spirit. Then work out this theme. Your Father is watching over you. He is looking after you—yes, let me use scriptural language—He is jealous concerning you because you belong to Him. You belong to Christ, you are His brother. The Holy Spirit is dwelling in your very body and you are destined for glory. Well, then, what of it? As you contemplate such a destiny say:
‘Take my soul thy full salvation,
Rise o’er sin and fear and care,
Joy to find in every station,
Something still to do or bear.
Think what Spirit dwells within thee,
What a Father’s smile is thine,
What a Saviour died to win thee,
Child of Heaven, should’st thou repine?’
How wrong it is to be in a spirit of bondage and of fear. ‘Child of Heaven, should’st thou repine?’ Never! ‘Think what Spirit dwells within thee, what a Father’s smile is thine, what a Saviour died to win thee, Child of Heaven, should’st thou repine?’ That verse of that hymn is a good exposition of these three verses. Lay hold of it, appropriate it, practise it. Do not worry about what you feel. The truth about you is glorious’ If you are in Christ, rise to it ‘o’er sin and fear and care’. Take your full salvation and triumph and prevail.