Set FREE! by Andrew Murray

 

The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death…If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
—Romans 8:2, 13

But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
—Romans 7:6

In the sixth chapter of Romans, Paul spoke of our having been “made free from sin” in Christ Jesus (verses 18 and 22). We were made free from sin as a power, as a master. When we accepted Christ in faith, we became servants to righteousness and to God.

In the seventh chapter (verses 1–6) Paul spoke of our being made free from the law. “The strength of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56). Deliverance from sin and the law go together. Being made free from the law, we were united to the living Christ so that, in union with Him, we might now serve in newness of the Spirit (Romans 7:4–6). In these two passages (Romans 6 and 7:1–6), Paul presented being made free from sin and the law as a life to be accepted and maintained by faith.

In the account of the Christian life in the epistle of Romans, there is a distinct advance from step to step. The eighth chapter teaches us that when the Spirit empowers our life and walk, we can fully possess and enjoy the riches of grace that are ours in Christ.

The second verse of the eighth chapter is the key verse. It reveals the wonderful secret of how our freedom from sin and the law may become a living and abiding experience. A believer may know that he is free and yet have to mourn that his experience is that of a wretched captive. The freedom is entirely in Christ Jesus, and the maintenance of the living union with Him is distinctly and entirely a work of divine power.

The believer who wants to live fully in this freedom of the life in Christ Jesus will easily understand the path in which he must learn to walk. The eighth chapter of Romans is the goal to which the sixth and seventh chapters lead. In faith the believer will first have to study and accept all that is taught in these two earlier chapters of his being in Christ Jesus—dead to sin and alive to God, free from sin and the law, and married to Christ.