Deliverance from Sin        Romans 7:17-25   

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason  -- Memorial Day Weekend, 2005

It is gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket. Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life.

Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark...ten feet long. But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them. And a miracle occurred.

In Captain Eddie's own words, "Cherry," that was the B- 17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off."

Now this is still Captian Rickenbacker talking..."Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food...if I could catch it."
And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know that Captain Eddie made it.
And now you also know...that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast...you could see an old man walking...white-haired, bushy-eye browed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls...to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle...like manna in the wilderness. 

Here was a man who by the sacrifice of a sea gull was delivered from certain death and because of that expressed his gratitude in this way for the rest of his life.

In our text for this morning we find the Apostle Paul’s expression of deliverance from sin.

We want to work backwards from Romans 8:1-2 where Paul tells us that “There is therefore  now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of Life has set me free from the law of sin and death.”

There is in this word “Therefore” a three fold hinge which fastens all that follows in this epistle to the framework which has gone before. There are three flanges that jut back into chapters 3, 6, and 7. Because of the truth of justification (chapter 3), because of our union with Christ (chapter 6) and because of our complete identification with Him (chapter 7), there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

There could be no condemnation for those who are justified…those who are before God as those who had never sinned…whom God sees as just as if they had never sinned. That has been Paul’s perspective all through this part of his letter to the Romans. That is God’s perspective. The truth is that we who have trusted Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord of our lives have been delivered…we have been set free from the law of sin and death. Because of that fact we will never be condemned by God.

While this fact is true and real what is Paul’s personal experience? What does he tell us about walking with Christ without sin in his life?

Well, we have to go back into the last part of Chapter 7 to see this from Paul’s perspective: 

      14The law is good, then. The trouble is not with the law but with me, because I am sold into slavery, with sin as my master. 15I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate. 16I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience shows that I agree that the law is good. 17But I can’t help myself, because it is sin inside me that makes me do these evil things.
      18I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn, I can’t make myself do right. I want to, but I can’t. 19When I want to do good, I don’t. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. 20But if I am doing what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it.
21It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. 22I love God’s law with all my heart. 23But there is another law at work within me that is at war with my mind. This law wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. 24Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin?? 25Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.

Paul says, I do not understand what I am doing.

He says I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

I have the desire to do what is good, but I don’t find the strength within me to accomplish what is good. I do not do the good I wish and the evil I do not wish is what I do. If I do what I do not wish, it no longer I who do it, but sin which dwells within me.

I have discovered a law: that when I want to do good, evil is present.

Notice if you will what we can see about Paul’s attitude in all of this:
       To desire good is present with me (vs. 18),
the good I desire (v 19);
I delight in the law of God (v 22)

Paul has written to us in the first three chapters of his letter that no unregenerate man “desires good”.
desires righteousness or delights in the law of God. The conscience of the unregenerate man can distinguish between right and wrong, but it cannot compel him to choose the right over the wrong.

When we are born again, new desires are planted within us along with the divine nature. However, within us there still exists a principle that is contrary to the will of God. And this principle of evil opposes every claim of God, hinders and impairs our every effort to please God.

The good that Paul has in mind is the absolute, unmixed good that has been found only once on earth since the fall of Adam and Eve…in Jesus Christ alone. This passage tells us that this kind of absolute good is beyond us.

If we think back to the essential nature of sin…we are reminded that it is independence. And the first result of sin is evil desire, which cannot be separated from sin any more than heat can be separated from fire.  This evil desire precedes the deliberate choices of the soul, and all outward acts of sin arise from these inward choices. The human heart is the source of these evil desires…and we know that the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. And this is the reason that the good we desire, we do not.

This is Paul’s delimma: the good I want to do, I don’t do and the evil that I don’t want to do is exactly what I find myself doing. “O wretched man that I am!” he says, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

It has been reported that near Tarsus, where Paul was born, a tribe of people lived who inflicted a most terrible penalty on a murderer. They took the body of the victim and tied it to him arm to arm, leg to leg and so on. They tied the body of the deceased to him so tightly that he could not free himself from this awful burden. And then they took him out into the wilderness and let him loose. He had only one prospect and that was that the death in the victim’s body would be communicated to and affect his own body. A gangrenous death awaited him.

Perhaps that image is in Paul’s mind when he asks, “who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
The old nature is still within us contaminating everything.

Paul then answers his own question and tells us that deliverance is to be found in Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Thanks be to God there is deliverance!

Believers have the power in Christ to overcome the outbreaks of our old nature, but we must recognize with Paul that its presence constantly contaminates our lives here on earth.

He makes this estimate of the situation confronting us:  It was not I that did it, but sin that lives within me.”

The deliverance we receive is includes:

1. It is deliverance from the penalty of sin.  The substitutionary death of Christ on the cross has delivered us completely from the penalty of sin…which is death. We were dead in trespasses and sins and deserved only condemnation. But by His grace every demand of God’s holiness has been met in the death of Jesus for us. All our sins were placed on Him and then this deliverance put righteousness on our account.
2. The second thing this deliverance did for us is it joined us to the Risen Lord Jesus Christ so that His resurrection life might be ours. The Holy Spirit has been sent to dwell within us to make possible triumphant, victorious living.

Paul’s perspective:  is one of appreciation and thanksgiving to God. (verse 25) “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Deliverance that is promised to us by God is real.

Because of Jesus Christ we who believe in Him will never be condemned for our sinfulness.

For us Memorial Day is a day of remembering…remembering those who have died, making the ultimate sacrifice for us so that we might live in freedom.

As Captain Eddie Rickenbacker remembered the sea gulls, let us remember Jesus who sacrificed himself for us so that we might live…so that we might have our sins forgiven…so that we might be delivered from death.

Let  us remember, that though we do not always do the things we should, nor do we avoid the things we shouldn’t do…As with Paul that is our normal experience. We find the same to be true in our own lives, but let us remember that there is now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus.

How grateful and thankful we should be…the He died so that we might live.

-Dennis Gleason