Daily Manna · Day 309 · November 5
Free from Sin
“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”
When a plane lifts off at the end of a runway, it does not cancel gravity. Gravity pulls on every ounce of it just as hard as before, all the way up. A stronger force is lifting it.
You may know the loop by now: the same failure, the same shame afterward, and the same promise that this time you will try harder, a promise gone by Thursday. Underneath it all sits the question of whether you are someone who ever really changes.
Paul's answer is easy to miss, because the verse uses the word "law" twice. Here "law" means a force at work, the way we speak of the law of gravity. One force is "the law of sin and death," and Paul has just spent the whole of Romans 7 describing it from the inside. The other is "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," and it is stronger. Paul is careful to explain why the first force wins so often: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son." The commandment was never the problem. The trouble was the human material it had to work with. That is why willpower keeps failing: it works at the same level as the pull it is fighting.
So when you fall, stop asking, "Can I keep this up?" That is a question about your own engine. Ask the better question, and keep asking it: "Who owns me now?" The answer is Christ, and His Spirit of life is the stronger force. He has already "made me free from the law of sin and death," and He is still lifting.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 309 is In a Strange Land (Psalm 137:4).