temptation.  We are in Him, and He in us, on condition, and by means, of our humble faith; and because my faith thus knits me to Him it is ‘the victory that overcomes the world’ and breaks the chains of many sins.  So this communion with Jesus Christ is the way by which we shall increase that triumphant spiritual life, which is the only victorious antagonist of the else inevitable consequence which declares that the ‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ and die even in sinning.

III.  The process of the deliverance.

Following the R.V. we read ‘made me free,’ not ‘hath made me.’  The reference is obviously, as the Greek more clearly shows, to a single historical event, which some would take to be the Apostle’s baptism, but which is more properly supposed to be his conversion.  His strong bold language here does not mean that he claims to be sinless.  The emancipation is effected, although it is but begun.  He holds that at that moment when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, and he yielded to Him as Lord, his deliverance was real, though not complete.  He was conscious of a real change of position in reference to that law of sin and of death.  Paul distinguishes between the true self and the accumulation of selfish and sensual habits which make up so much of ourselves.  The deeper and purer self may be vitalised in will and heart, and set free even while the emancipation is not worked out in the life.  The parable of the leaven applies in the individual renewal; and there is no fanaticism, and no harm, in Paul’s point of view, if only it be remembered that sins by which passion and externals overbear my better self are mine in responsibility and in consequences.  Thus guarded, we may be wholly right in thinking of all the evils which still cleave to the renewed Christian soul as not being part of it, but destined to drop away.

And this bold declaration is to be vindicated as a prophetic confidence in the supremacy and ultimate dominion of the new power which works even through much antagonism in an imperfect Christian.  Paul, too, calls ‘things that are not as though they were.’  If my spirit of life is the ‘Spirit of life in Christ,’ it will go on to perfection.  It is Spirit, therefore it is informing and conquering the material; it is a divine Spirit, therefore it is omnipotent; it is the Spirit of life, leading in and imparting life like itself, which is kindred with it and is its source; it is the Spirit of life in Christ, therefore leading to life like His, bringing us to conformity with Him because the same causes produce the same effects; it is a life in Christ having a law and regular orderly course of development.  So, just as if we have the germ we may hope for fruit, and can see the infantile oak in the tightly-shut acorn, or in the egg the creature which shall afterwards grow there, we have in this gift of the Spirit, the victory.  If we have the cause, we have the effects implicitly folded in it; and we have but to wait further development.