“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus,who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” (Rom. 8:1, NKJV)
In the previous teaching we used Rom. 8:2 to explain that there is a particular spiritual law at work within all people who have lost the Image of God, “the law of sin and death”. This pressing law in each person must be replaced by the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”, the only law that can truly free you from sin and death, and fill you with grace and truth, and thus with glory, so that you can learn to truly love yourself.
To explore this topic, and understand the law of death within you (Rom. 7:13) we need to delve into the Scripture of Rom. 8:1-2. Take note that both verses speak of Christ Jesus and not Jesus Christ. When Paul uses this expression the emphasis is on Christ (it is used a total of 71 times, from Acts to Revelation), within the context of its wider meaning as was extensively explained in the teaching of Day 848. For those in Christ Jesus there is no condemnation, not even when we condemn ourselves, or are condemned by our hearts (1 John 3:20).
Two of the greatest battles of faith that believers need to fight is firstly that we fail to accept ourselves, and thus by implication love ourselves, and secondly to forgive ourselves for what we are, what we’ve done, or perhaps what we haven’t done.
Your identity in Christ is thus a precondition for achieving spiritual unity, and, based on that, spiritual maturity and authority. Remember the apt description John Eldridge offers in Waking the Dead: “Sin is a mistaken identity.” The identity in Christ is the centre of the new man from which you are now starting to learn how to live – “the life of Jesus … manifested in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10).
But how do you get rid of the pressing feelings of guilt, insecurity, shame, or even a more serious pathological self-hatred? Richard Lovelace, in his book Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal, places this crisis experienced by believers within a larger context: “It is often said today … that we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others. This is certainly the release which we must seek to give our people. But no realistic human beings find it easy to love or to forgive themselves, and hence their self-acceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ. There is a sense in which the strongest self-love that we can have, in the sense of agape, is merely the mirror image of the lively conviction we have that God loves us. There is endless talk about this in the church, but little apparent belief in it among Christians, although they may have a conscious complacency which conceals the subconscious despair which Kierkegaard calls ‘the sickness unto death’.”
We can only call out, as Paul does in Rom. 7:24 – “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
- Selah: Do you struggle with feelings of guilt, insecurity, shame, or even self-hatred?
- Read: 1 Chr. 26-29; Ps. 127.
- Memorise: 127.
- For a more in-depth understanding: Read any of the books mentioned in the text.
