A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians
Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay
Press, a Friends publishing house
Lesson 6
Romans 7:1-8, 21-25
Paul is honest about the distance that can exist between the
eternal truth that we are free from slavery to sin and the daily experience of
choosing good over evil in our actions. The habitual forces of selfishness,
self-preservation, and self-promotion, all at others’ expense, are hard to
resist on a daily basis.
I know good folks who believe in holiness and freedom from
slavery to sin who cannot admit that they make mistakes in human relationships.
The result tends to be that they place the fault for the mistakes in the other
person.
Paul’s honesty helps us here. We know Paul is set apart,
purified, cleaned up (i.e., sanctified), and yet he describes difficulties in
making his freedom from sin operational. Note that Paul split up from Barnabas
because of “irreconcilable differences” over John Mark’s fitness for ministry
(Acts 15:37-40).
We often respond almost reflexively, and when we kick out,
we hit someone else. Yet there is a better way to live, modeled by Jesus, who
did what he saw our Father doing and what our Father told him to do. The only
way I know to change my behavior is to slow myself down so I can see the
opportunity to choose differently from my habits. Paul thanks God for Jesus
Christ the rescuer, who pulls us along with him and into him. Despite the
difficulty we have learning to live free from sin, our inclusion in Jesus’s
death and resurrection sets us free from condemnation.
Lesson 7
Romans 8:1-11
This passage comes directly after Romans 7, in which Paul attributes
to Jesus the victory over sin and the death that ensues from sin; he asserts
that we are no longer under judgment at all. This sets us free to live under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the source of the abundant life Jesus came to
give us. Because Jesus and we are identified in his death and resurrection, we
live outside the law.
Paul has spent a lot of time explaining that we are saved
through faith in the promise God made that we can live at peace with God
through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We aren’t saved through
doing but through trusting. So this isn’t a sudden shift to another legalistic
way of earning salvation, this reference to the law of the Spirit. Instead,
what Jesus does for us is move us from a moral universe of “have to” into one
of “want to.” We are no longer afraid of
God because Jesus has “oned” us to God. Jesus sets us right, and therefore we
can take the risk of listening to the Spirit and doing what we hear to do on a
daily basis.
It’s like the difference between fulfilling an assignment in
school to write a paper on space travel and falling in love with exploring “the
final frontier” and doing what you can to become an astronaut. Or the
difference between being a tourist and deciding to emigrate. Or the difference
between babysitting and having a baby. Jesus makes it attractive for us to turn
to God and run in God’s direction rather than running away.
Walking according to the Spirit is just the same thing as
putting the Kingdom of God first. Don’t unite yourself to the concerns of this
world’s systems; instead, unite yourself to the concerns of God that the Spirit
of God will make clear to you each day. As Jesus said, no one can serve two
masters.
Lesson 8
Romans 8:28-39
In between Lesson 7 and this one is Paul’s teaching that
reminds us of Romans 7. We are set free from sin and death, free to do the
right thing that God tells us to do; and yet we find ourselves fighting against
old habits of selfishness, etc. Who will deliver us? Jesus. Paul refers to our having the early
signs or “first fruits” of the Spirit, but groaning inwardly for the redemption
of our bodies. Like Abraham, we are saved in hope, which by definition we do
not see, and we wait for its fulfillment with patience.
I love the thought that the Spirit translates our prayers
and entreats God for us because of our weakness. We can therefore pray for and
about anything, knowing that God will answer the prayers in the right way to
advance the Kingdom. We can sit in silence before God, knowing that the Spirit
is groaning for and with us.
When we love God, which Jesus makes possible, nothing can
hurt us. In fact, God makes all things work to our good. God, who sees us
coming from a long way off and runs to meet us, has purposed to shape us into
the kind of child Jesus is so that everyone can see the family resemblance. He
plans to put us right and make us what we ought to be and then brag on us.
Loving God is easy when we realize how God loves us. God
wants to give us everything, God sets us right side up, God makes Jesus our
judge, Jesus who prays for us all the time. Whatever hardship we face does not
come because God has quit loving us. No power can separate us from God’s love.
I am so hopeful that this trust in the work of Jesus will
free you and me to go boldly wherever God calls us to go without fearing that
we will get it wrong. Of course we will often miss the bull’s eye or fail at
perfect obedience, but Jesus is our redeemer, our guarantee, our intercessor
and our judge. We could not be in kinder or more precisely healing hands.
