The Spirit-Empowered Life

Coffee With God: 2/28/23 | Romans 10:4

"For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

Is God’s law good or bad? The unequivocal, definitive answer your Bible gives is the former. “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). Why all this talk about the law being powerless? Ineffective? Futile? (See Romans 8:3, for example). The short answer: the problem was never with the law. It was with the people who were trying to live by it.

Any honest look into the Old Testament law will reveal a magnificent display of justice. Sin is punished. Love is exalted. The oppressed are cared for. The powerful have a responsibility to care for the powerless. The law is a spectacular display of God’s righteousness. But the question remains: if the law is holy, just, and good, why is it powerless to save sinners?

Answer: because we have zero ability to keep it. The law reveals God's righteousness. And people corrupted by sin do not measure up.

That is why our new life in Christ is lived by faith, not by works of the law (Romans 10:4; Galatians 2:20). It is by faith that we receive Jesus as our Lord, allowing his shed blood to wash us of sin and create in us new hearts that are right with God. By faith, we receive his Holy Spirit, who empowers us to be led each moment by the God who is with us. It really is a whole new way of doing things.

Before, we were like people submerged and drowning, trying with every ounce of energy to reach the surface and stay afloat. Now, we’re like people on water skis; the Holy Spirit empowers us to glide gleefully upon the water's surface, uplifted by a force much stronger than ourselves.