A Right Relationship with God
In chapters one through five of Romans the Apostle Paul sets forth the foundation of a right relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. The apostle's first conclusion in Romans 3:9 shows the human need for a right relationship with God. He concluded that (we) are all under sin.

In other words, human nature has become ensnared by the force called sin. It does harm to human life. It contradicts our good intentions. It can mushroom into demonic, global proportions. We all have first hand experience of it in large and small ways. This dominion of sin is just as true of religious people as it is true of irreligious people, and no one can shake off this power just by trying.

This brought Paul to the crucial conclusion in Romans 3:19 that the whole world may be held accountable to God. Not only can we not shake off the power of sin, but God also holds us responsible for it. That conclusion defines the human dilemma.

Inasmuch as humanity is answerable to God for repeated and willful sin, how can we have grounds for hope on the day of God's wrath? Does God demonstrate to us clearly now that He will treat us with mercy then? All right thinking about the human dilemma starts with that question.

The apostle frames Christianity's answer this way. But now (now that Christ has come) a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known (3:22). When the Bible talks about the righteousness of God, it means not only that He demands what is right; He also acts to make right what has gone wrong in the human family.

His decisive act is called justification. All who believe in Jesus Christ are justified freely by his grace (3:24). "As a gift, without payment," (Dunn, I, 168), by "sheer generosity," (ibid. 179), God absolves us of guilt for our sins.

The death of Christ makes that possible. His death at first looked like a particularly cruel and unjust way to die. But when God raised Jesus from death, people took another look at His death and found a new and powerful meaning. Guided by the Jewish Scriptures, the apostles came to view the death of Christ as the permanent and material sign of God's merciful intentions toward humanity.

We can have hope on the day of God's wrath, because the death of Christ atoned for the sins that separated us from God. We know that God loves us, because the death of Christ embodies that love for all to see.

These benefits of Christ's death come to bear on human life through faith in Jesus Christ. Our faith in Christ releases the power of His atoning death into our experience, and God's merciful offer of forgiveness becomes personal for us. I hope it has become personal for everyone of us.

The end of Romans five states the magnificent conclusion of those first five chapters. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more. Whenever the evil power that mars human life reaches new depths in its degradation, the sheer generosity of God reaches new heights to counteract the degradation and replace it with holiness. That's the lesson about God the apostle learned from Jesus Christ.

Nowhere did the force called sin show its true colors more clearly than in the killing of Jesus Christ. Nowhere did the purpose of God seem so weak and foolish as on the cross. Nowhere did the love of God for frail and fallen humanity shine as on the cross. Nowhere did the power of God show its true colors so clearly than at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul saw all that and said, "That is what God is like. That is how God will win the battle with evil. His grace will always absorb the worst that sin can do and then reassert its supremacy until some day evil is finished." Verses 20-21 put his idea this way.

But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. That is the magnificent conclusion of Romans 1-5.

The New Life and the New Way of the Spirit
Beginning with chapter six, a new question arises. How are those who now have a right relationship with God through Jesus Christ to live? Paul first says that those who have this new relationship with God are alive to God.What God wants now matters to us as never before. We are learning to say to God, "Not my will but Yours be done." Everything increasingly passes through the grid of asking, "How can I please God in this situation?" We begin to notice behavior that displeases God. Old habits begin to change. We become like a tree in spring, when the sap rises and new buds begin to push last year's dead leaves off the tree.

When Paul talks about this break with evil that faith in Christ causes, he often refers to it as a death. In Romans six he said, We died to sin. Our old self was crucified with (Christ). We died with Christ. Count yourselves dead to sin. It is extreme language. It reminds us rerlentlessly that Christ came into the world to destroy the works of the devil, and we are to be part of the demolition by renouncing sin and offering ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness.

However, we will not succeed in doing that without a lifelong spiritual battle. The cause of that battle is on one hand the disorder that coils in the will of everyone of us that has a hankering for the old ways of our sins. On the other hand, the cause is the presence of the Holy Spirit within us that is prompting us to please God.

Contrary to what we might think, we will win this battle by serving in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. If all we have at our disposal to fight that battle is a list of rules telling us what not to do, the battle will be brief and bad for us. We do have something else at our disposal. In Romans eight the apostle will call it being led by the Spirit. In Galatians he uses another phrase, which I will use: keeping in step with the Spirit.

We follow the neww way of the Spirit by keeping in step with the Spirit. The new way of the Spirit is the way of love. Not romance only or primarily, but the deepest, most uncompromising preferences of the heart. Jesus said, Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matt. 6:21).

Tell me what you love, and I will tell you where your treasure is. The new way of the Spirit is what the Scottish preacher, Chalmers Alexander, called "the explusive power of a new affection." When that love for God captures a person's heart, it gives the world of the Spirit a fighting chance in the world of the flesh.

More deeply, the new way of the Spirit teaches us that when we know the death of Christ means that God loves us, that He gives Himself to us "without restraint, in a way unparalleled by any human love," (ibid.), then we will know in the marrow of our bones that the old war between heaven and earth is over, God and man are reconciled, and we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.