The Power of Justice

 

Text: Romans 8:6-11

Focus: Justice (Righteousness)

Function: To help people see that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we do good works.

⁶To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. ⁷For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, ⁸and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

⁹But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. ¹¹If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

There are a lot of promises in this passage. I used to use the last verse a lot when I was praying over someone for healing. The verse says that if the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, then it will give life to our mortal bodies through the Spirit that dwells in us.

I think that applying that verse merely to physical healing takes it out of context and lessens the incredible promise that this verse gives us.

The Spirit of God inside of us gives us a new life and a new way of living.

In Romans chapter 7, brother Paul wrestles with the problem of failure to meet the standards that God has provided for us. He speaks of the futility of trying to please God by abstaining from sin. It is a sin focused understanding of the faith. Jesus forgave our sins, past, present and future, so we don’t have to worry about “Not Sinning.”

Instead we get to focus on the doing of the good. You know the phrase, not biblical, but probably true: “The idle mind is the playground of the devil.” In other words, keep ones self busy, and for the believer who is saved by grace, keep ones self busy doing good.

And that is what chapter 8 is about. It is about more than just doing good, it tells us that the good that we are doing we are doing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The introduction to the book of Romans indicates that the Spirit of God rests in every single person in the form of a conscience. People have a tendency, before they encounter Christ, to harden their hearts toward their conscience.

When we place our trust in Christ for His restoration in our lives to God and others, the bible promises that God will take away the hard heart of stone and make it a soft heart of flesh.

I believe that this is what it meant to be born from above. Although, I have been sorely disappointed by the way people who profess Christ can still harden their hearts and not forgive, embrace racist ideals, be greedy and selfish.

Jesus said that we will be known by the way we love others.

So, what does all that have to do with the title of the sermon: The Power of Justice?”

Verse 9 tells us that we who profess Christ are living “In the Spirit.” He speaks mysteriously here and describes it like this: The Body is dead, but the Spirit is alive.”

What he is talking about is the tendency that we had before we trusted in Christ to allow ourselves to be selfish, greedy, racist, unforgiving and etc is something that we have died to. We have decided to live lives that reflect the love of Jesus as a testimony to our trust in Jesus to heal and restore us.

We, when we were baptized, symbolically died to our selves and came out of the water as new people who have decided to follow the example of Christ.

This is the work of the Holy Spirit inside of us.

And that leads us to the rest of the verse. The body is dead… ...the Spirit is alive because of righteousness.

And here is where the title of the sermon comes in to play. You have heard me mention this before, the word translated righteousness is best translated as justice.* A righteous person is a person who does the right thing.

We cheapened the meaning of being righteous when we said that it meant simply something that happened to us, by God, when we “got saved” whereby we were now righteous despite our actions.

The problem is the idea “despite our actions.”

That is not what he is saying here. He is saying that our actions determine our right standing with God. When we allow the Spirit of Christ to move inside of our hearts and move us away from a selfish response to a loving response from Christ, then we are being righteous.

And it is the work of the Holy Spirit inside of us that moves us.

I want to harp in this a bit. Christianity changed in the 3^rd Century. The Roman Emperor, Constantine, converted to Christianity. However, history says that when he was baptized by immersion, he refused to let his right hand go under the water because it was his sword hand.

He then claimed to have a vision of a cross above his nation’s banner and a voice that told him to go out and conquer under this sign.

Jesus, on the other hand, said that He could call 10,000 angels to defend Himself if needed, but instead surrendered His life to the Empire as a sign against the power of the Empire.

The Kingdom of God that we serve is not from this world. It is not an human empire.

In the third century, the Church became the “State Church” and was designed to empower the Roman empire. That is where the Roman/Greek concept of hell first came into the Church’s mythology.

They changed the meaning from “people who did the right thing, the Just” to “people who believed the right thing, the righteous.” And then they forgave the transgressions of those who denied Jesus with their actions.

All of that is the sad and embarrassing history of the Church. And yet, throughout its history there has always been a remanent. There has always been people who rejected the concept of empire, as Jesus did and was killed for it.

One of the guys on our Kairos team is a Franciscan monk. St. Francis of Assisi, Mother Theresa and many other Saints rejected imperialism and materialism and remained faithful within the State Church. And then there were groups like us, the Anabaptists. The Brethren, Mennonites, and Amish come from the “re-baptizing” position. People were baptized into the faith of the Count of the County during the days of the Church Territorial Concept. And the Anabaptists believed that baptism should be the choice of the adult, not the child, into the faith of their choosing, instead of their birth and began re-baptizing people. It was considered an act of political rebellion and they were persecuted for it and fled to the US where we were free to practice our faith as we saw fit.

And the whole idea was the rejection of Empire, just as Jesus did.

Empire gave excuses for people to not love their enemies. It gives Christians the excuse to call refugees “Illegals.” And that is not the term Jesus has for them. Jesus commands us to consider them as neighbors.

You hear me speak of the refugees on our borders as “neighbors” because that is the only name Jesus gives us for it. Jesus Himself was a refugee whose parents drug Him across the border to seek political asylum. And if we call the refugees on our borders the name “Illegal,” we are calling Jesus an illegal.

Calling them illegal dehumanizes them and gives us the excuse to harden our hearts. And It happens when we place our allegiance to the nation/state above our call to love our neighbors as ourselves. We can be patriotic and still love our enemies as our neighbors.

Jesus died rejecting empire. We follow His example and say this: “All people, everywhere are our neighbors and we love them as we love ourselves.”

Now, I refuse to get political. We need secure borders, especially to prevent the Fentanyl that is flooding our Southern border and killing the weakest members of our Society.

So, pray for the politicians to find a just solution so that we can enjoy God’s blessing in our land for treating the least of these as we treat Jesus.

One of the things that has dismayed me about the Political rhetoric is how Christians have lowered themselves to unloving, bitter and non helpful responses. We are supposed to be known for the way we love others, not how clever we can retort to make the other side look weak.

And that is the problem with mixing empire, politics, with our faith. I want this to be a neutral place where we look at what the Bible says about justice, not empire. I promise to bring you the teaching of Jesus on this matter.

However, today we are looking at the teaching of the Apostle Paul.

He tells us that when we do the right thing, the Spirit of God is leading us. Oftentimes through self-sacrifice, I might add. The sacrifice component being that we are following Jesus who sacrificed Himself for us. We believe Jesus when He said that our reward is in heaven, not on earth.

And When we do the right thing, we are righteous, and that is the power of Justice, or righteousness.

And the conclusion? Let the Spirit of God fill you.

*For more on this see: https://revnerd.blogspot.com/2011/06/dikaios-right-word-translated-wrong-way.html