Romans 8:1-11. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
“There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We hear these words from the Apostle Paul, but do we really believe them? No condemnation. Not now. Not ever. God loves us so much, God yearns for us so dearly, God longs so eagerly, like a loving parent, to restore us to God’s own tender embrace. That is why, According to Paul, that God has given us Godself in Jesus, in the power of the Incarnation. Not to suffer in our place. Not to show us how to earn god’s love or live so that we might somehow “deserve” God’s love, and certainly not to satisfy a strange notion of justice that says it is only possible for God to love us if blood has been spilled. No. In the cross we see how much God already loves us. On the cross, Jesus opens his arms wide and takes into himself all the evil and sin in the world. That is what God does for us. Now. Not later. Now. And then, in the power of the Resurrection, all that evil and sin is redeemed. Love is more powerful than anything including death. Love is more powerful than our own foolishness. Love is more powerful than our own confusion. Love is more powerful than the condemnation that we, not God, but we, want to heap on our own heads.
Paul invites us to experience and to know, in this very moment, the freedom from the law of sin and death, when we know ourselves to walk according to the spirit. Not as prisoners who have been condemned, but as free people, walking upright into the light. Love is more powerful than death.
— Lex Breckinridge
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