High Standards

Re:Verse passage – Romans 8:1-4 (day four)

As a young teenager, I competed in the High Jump.  Never with any degree of success because there was a problem…the standard was raised with each jump until I could no longer clear the bar.  The standard was not at fault, it was my inability to jump high enough to clear it.

In our passage this week, we see the intersection of the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ vs. the law of sin and death.  The deficiency is not with the Law (God’s Law), it is with man’s inability to overcome the high standard on our own.  God’s Law has set a high and perfectly obedient standard and we cannot attain it…only in Christ can we achieve the standard!

If my short-lived track and field career could have had a spring board like Christ is to my spiritual life, I could have been an Olympic jumper.  Christ, through the Holy Spirit, enables us to achieve the high standard of the Law…it is only by His grace!

Wind

Re:Verse passage – Romans 8:1-4 (day three)

“…that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us…

The Pharisees’ use of the law as a tool for building a society was – well, just stop right there. The law is not a tool for anything. It is not something one uses. It is itself the mind of God in written form. The human person will be transformed by it, and when that occurs, no one will ever have to worry that such a person will become like the Pharisees. Such a person – and only such a person – will never die. That is what the law’s “requirement” is all about. Transformation is required for a person to live forever. The Holy Spirit came a-howling gale across the society that the Pharisees built. It leveled everything – except that which was transformed by the One who fulfilled the law.