Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The speaker is continuing their discussion of the book of Romans, specifically focusing on chapters 6 and 7. In chapter 6, the speaker explains that after being saved, believers are dead to sin and alive in Christ. In chapter 7, the speaker discusses the idea of a civil war within the heart of believers, where they still struggle with sin even though they are saved. The speaker emphasizes that believers have a choice to not let sin dominate their lives and to instead offer themselves to God. The speaker also mentions that believers have the Holy Spirit living in them to guide them. The speaker concludes by stating that believers are justified in Christ and have the power to resist the flesh. They encourage believers to live the resurrection life in Christ and to focus on the eternal rather than the temporary. So anyway, we're going to start where we left off last week and finish up the 6th chapter, and then we're going to try to get to the end of the 7th, middle of the 7th chapter. Now, I said to you last week that these two chapters are probably the heart of the book of Romans. Chapter 6, very simple outline. Paul presents us as dead in sin. We get saved. We become dead to sin, and then when we become dead to sin, it's because we're alive in Christ. And so that's kind of the beginning. Oh, by the way, Gordon Meek back here, I married him and his wife back in 1989. That's been a long, long time. And Ken White and I have known each other for quite a while, but I went to Baylor with his brother, Jim, not Keith, but Jim. And so we've been praying again for you guys. We'll miss Keith, but thank you so much. Now, we're getting into stuff that we're going to need to look at that is very controversial. Alive under God, alive in Christ, and then we get in the 7th chapter, particularly the last portion of the 7th chapter, this whole idea of the civil war in the heart of every believer. Now, when I was here, the big theological debate across the country among people who cared to debate theology was, do we have one nature or two? Now the truth is, whatever the Bible says is what we are, and the Bible continually talks about once we're saved, we still struggle with sin. For instance, we were in the, I came to the end last week of 1 John 1, the verses toward the end of 1 John 1 says, now if we confess our sins, he's faithful, just forgive us our sins, cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And so we know he's writing to believers, so he's doing more than telling them what happened when they got saved, because the first verse of the 2nd chapter says, my little children, now that's a very, very tender term, he's writing to believers, my little children, I'm writing these things so that you may not sin, pause, is it possible for a Christian to reach sinless perfection? No, but he says, I write this to those of you who are saved, that you may not sin. So we know that that is God's desire for us, but at the same time, we know that none of us can do that. And so the very next verse in that same verse, he says, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one, he himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, not only for ours, but also for the whole world. So we know that God would not have told us that we're not supposed to sin and then said, but if you do, and he wouldn't have said if you do, if it wasn't possible for us to do. So I don't know, you can explain it any way you want to, but when you become a believer, you not only get a new Savior, you get a new enemy. You didn't recognize him before you got saved because you agreed with him and he led you along and promised you the world, kind of like our politicians, and delivered nothing. And Satan, you were going his way, he didn't bother you. Once you get saved, you have an adversary. And when we come to the last half of the seventh chapter, I'm just simply calling that portion of the scripture, the adversary within, a civil war within the heart of believers. Now those are hard things for us to kind of wrap our minds around, but this is what we're dealing with and it's here in the seventh chapter, but we're going to finish this first chapter and then get into hopefully about the first 13 verses or so of the seventh chapter. Looking at verse 11 of Romans 6, Paul says, So you too consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you may obey its desires. By the way, he said, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. He wouldn't have said, don't let it, if you couldn't stop it. So I mean, again, we're getting into some concepts that are very complicated and there's not going to be a lot of disagreement with others as we go through these things. But he says, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. Oh, by the way, it's interesting that he mentioned the mortal bodies. I think there's an ulterior motive in that for him, because the body is mortal. It is not permanent. So what he's saying is this body, which is temporary, is going to mess you up if you don't practice what you preach. The body that's temporary is going to soon be gone. But Christ, you're alive unto God in Jesus Christ, and that's your hope, not your body. You can treat your body any way you want to, but it's temporary. I told Ken a minute ago, you know, we're all terminal. We just don't know when. God hasn't left that up to us. So I'll say it many times, and I'll say it again, I may die in an accident, but I will never die accidentally, because our lives are in God's hands. God is guiding us. He's going to allow what needs to come into our lives. And everything that we desire and hope for and reason and conclude is temporary. But we're alive unto God, and the Holy Spirit is in us, as Brother John talked about this morning. If you read my book that I gave you, it's not rocket science. The Holy Spirit lives in us. Stay close to Him. He is God, by the way. Holy Spirit's in you. God's in you. Jesus is in you. Jesus is in you. God and the Holy Spirit are in you. If God's in you, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are in you. One God, three Persons. He put Himself in us and wants us to pay attention and be obedient. It's not rocket science. We make life too complicated. It's very simple. Stay in a relationship with God, listen to Him, and be obedient. And we get in trouble when we do something else. So he says, don't let sin reign in your mortal body. We have something to say about this. You know, Flip Wilson is not correct when he said, the devil made me do it. Devil can't make you do anything. You may let him lead you to do things, but don't blame the devil for your choices. So don't let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, and don't even offer any parts of it to sin as weapons for unrighteousness, but as those who are alive from the dead, offer yourselves to God and all the parts of yourself to God as weapons of righteousness, for sin will not rule over you because you're not under the law. You're under grace. So chapter 6 emphasizes that we're alive in Christ. Chapter 7 now is telling us we're not under the law. We're under grace. And so what happens when we get saved, we change masters. Once we were enslaved by sin, now we're enslaved by Christ. Sin has evil desires for us. He leads us nowhere worth going. Jesus knows us, has a perfect plan for our lives, and wants us to stay close to him. Now let me just give you a heads up of what we'll run into later. In chapter 7, we're going to begin dealing with, and he kind of sneaks into it, we're going to be dealing with this idea of can a Christian sin? If we get saved by grace, why not just sin a lot so there'd be a lot of grace? That's certainly not God's way. But we're dealing with the fact that we are dead to sin and alive to God, and that we have choices to make. And so we have a choice over what we do. And as a believer, we have a new resource. We have the Holy Spirit living in us, and the Holy Spirit will guide us. And God has declared us justified, and what he asked us to do is make the same declaration. Announce every day that you belong to Christ, you're alive in Christ. When you do slip into sin, or do some things that you know you shouldn't do, what you need to do is come back to verse 13 here, and submit yourselves again unto God. Come back and yield yourself as his instruments all over again. This is to be a daily affair for us. So God has declared us justified, and he asked us to make the same declaration. We've been justified, freed from sin, and this exhortation would not have been necessary unless sin was still alive and active and present in our lives. Every believer will discover that there is a struggle between his new nature and his old nature. Sin is still present in our bodies. The flesh will always be the flesh. It will always be there. There will always be a conflict between the spiritual and the flesh. Sin is ever present in the flesh, so Paul warns us in verse 12, Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey his desires. That's a choice we make. It's kind of like our physical lives. All of us are going to get older. It's not an option. We're all going to get older, but we don't have to get old while we're getting older. That's a choice. So I just plan not to get old. My body tells me I'm kidding myself, but I just, you know, we are justified in Christ and we need to realize that we have his power within us. Just as we are identified in his death, we're also identified in his resurrection. So death isn't the end of it. Now he's resurrected and our part as being alive under God is to live the resurrection life and it's what Major Ian Thomas, as Brother Jack said the other day in his book on the saving life of Christ, that's my old age creeping in, but the saving life of Christ. He died to save us, but he lives so he can live in us and that's what we're talking about here in these chapters. Now the flesh will always be the flesh and only in Christ will we have the power to resist the flesh. And really what we're talking about, before we were saved, we were controlled by our flesh. After we're saved, flesh is still there, but we're not to be controlled by the flesh. We're controlled by the spirit and we want to live in the spirit and as we come into the seventh chapter, we'll see a little more clearly about that. But sin's lordship over us has ended. It's over. So it's foolish for us to let sin dominate our lives just because our mortal bodies will soon be passing away. The expressions of our sins primarily attacks our mortal bodies because that is what is temporary and Paul is reminding us we can't live for the temporary. We live for the eternal and life in Christ brings eternal joy. Now Paul is not suggesting that the body causes us to sin. That may have been true when we were mastered by sin, but not when we were mastered by Christ. But sin, the instrument sin uses to reveal itself is our bodies, through our bodies. Don't fulfill the evil desires of your flesh, your bodies. We've died to sin, but our bodies are not dead. So we have to live with that. Instead of using our bodies for instruments of evil and sin, he says in verse 13, offer yourselves to God and all parts of yourself to God as weapons of righteousness. Since our bodies belong to him, then they ought to be used for God's purposes. That's what he's trying to tell us. The law does not redeem us from sin. It reveals our sinfulness. The law has no power to transform us, to save us, to forgive us, to redeem us. The law can't do that. Only Jesus Christ can do that. The purposes of law and grace are very clear. They don't belong together. Grace and the law don't mix. Paul has shown that it is unthinkable that a believer would continue to practice sin. The law reveals our sinfulness, but it is grace that brings justification to us. And again, we're talking about the sin nature that dominated us, and we were habitually bound to the sin nature. A believer can't live like that. If 2 Corinthians 5, 17 is a lie, if that's not true, if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation. Now, either he is or he's not. And so we want to conjure up a lot of excuses about how we live, but we really have no excuse because the living power of Christ is in us. And so don't blame Satan or somebody else. It's our bad choices. And don't be enslaved to sin again. When you were under sin, you had no choice. When you're under grace, you have a choice. And you need to choose to be instruments of righteousness for God, give honor and glory to him. I think Galatians 6, 1 kind of gives us a little hint. It talks about redeeming someone who has sinned. It refers to if anyone be overtaken by sin. In other words, if something just happened, it's kind of like a spur of the moment. My favorite illustration is a guy that jumped through a plate glass window, and he got up and dusted himself off and nursed his wounds. Someone said, why'd you do that? And he said, I don't know. It just seemed to be the thing to do at the time. If that happens to you, it just happens to be you just stumble onto something, then God understands that. So he's given us an advocate. It doesn't mean we're less saved, but the advocate is the one who's going to make sure that our sin, God has the fact and the testimony of Christ that our sin has been forgiven and we belong to him. But to habitually practice sin, to do the same thing over and over again that you did before you got saved, Paul's saying you don't need to do that. In fact, you can't do that. Now it's not for us to determine. People want to ask me, do you think so-and-so is really saved? I don't know who's saved. I know this, that if we're alive unto God, this passage tells us that we will bear fruit unto holiness. We can watch, we can be fruit tree inspectors, we can kind of observe, but I don't know who's saved and who's not saved. I do know this, if you are a believer, you have the power of Christ in you and you have been raised with this resurrection power and that power lives in you and you are responsible to God for how you treat the one who lives within you. I used to ask teenagers, would it make any difference how you act on your date if I was in the backseat of the car? And they would give me a little bit of, you know, well, truthfully, God's always in the backseat of the car. If you wouldn't live your life differently, if I was in the backseat of the car, why would you do it differently if God's there? And that's what he said, if we're alive unto God, we're in partnership with God, we belong to God, our lives are to reflect what we are. And so he's given us two alternatives in this passage. We're slave to sin, which equals death, or we're slave to God, which equals righteousness. So it's, and Paul makes this very clear in 1 Corinthians 6, also in 1 Corinthians 3, but 1 Corinthians 6, 19 and 20 says, don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You're not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God with your body. That's hard to misunderstand. We belong to God. And so we ought to act like it. Verses 17 and 18, he's not praising them for what they've done, but he's thanking God for what God has done through them. And that's the way it ought to be. You know, we'll say it many times, the Christian life's not difficult, it's impossible. You can't do it. That's why he put the Holy Spirit in us. What we could never do, the Holy Spirit does through us. Oh, now don't be so surprised at that, because we couldn't save ourselves either. Nothing we could do to save ourselves, so God had to take care of that. That's what Jesus did on the cross. And we don't have enough common sense, courage, or anything else to do everything God wants us to do when we're saved. So what's going to happen? What are we going to do? Well, the Holy Spirit's put in us. And we can have the same relationship with the Holy Spirit that we had with evil before we got saved, and then we can be obedient to the Holy Spirit. Our sin alienates us from God. And Paul in these verses is rejoicing that the alienation has now passed, because he says you have obeyed God from your hearts. That means they really meant business. They were really, really sincere about what they did. Their obedience, that obeyed there, is in the Aorist tense. You've heard Brother Jack and me over the years talk about the Aorist tense. We have no English equivalent, as close as probably to the past perfect sense. It means something happened at an instant in time, pow, like the sound of a rifle when it's fired. It happened, and it stands having happened, and it's going to keep on standing having happened. And so you have obeyed from your heart. You did what God told you to do. Now, he says they had a sincere heart, a pure heart. Then we ought to keep living the way God wants us to live. So don't try to blame someone else. He's just saying that these Roman Christians had a deep and complete experience with God that was both voluntary and genuine, and that the believer is now free to sin. Now, let me illustrate that. Go with me to the airport, and let's get on an airplane, and we're going to parachute. We're going to drive up into the sky at about 10,000 feet. We're going to parachute. Two of us are going to parachute. So we both leap out of the plane. We're both free to fall, but only one has a parachute. He's not only free to fall, he's free not to fall, but the one with no parachute is not free not to fall. He's just free to fall. Well, in Christ, we have the parachute. We don't have to leap without having some way to get safely to the ground. The Holy Spirit in us performs that for us, and we need to live in the power of a resurrected Christ who now lives within us. Freedom in Christ is not freedom and liberty to disobey God. We are owned by God's righteousness, so we no longer live in aimlessness and without purpose. We've been freed from sin in order to be absorbed in the righteousness of Christ. We're no longer wandering aimlessly in a moral vacuum. We are now directed and dominated by the Holy Spirit, by the righteousness of God. And Paul, in verse 19 here in the 6th chapter, he says, I'm using a human analogy. It's kind of interesting. He's just using common expressions to explain this to Roman believers. You know, there's not a whole lot of common sense left in the world. Have you noticed that? I mean, it's just not a lot of common sense. Well, that's kind of what he's saying. Let me just tell it to you in plain language. It's a common thing. Now you obeyed sin completely, now obey God completely. That's his illustration. They gave up slavery to evil, and now they need to accept and to abide in slavery to righteousness, which he's now beginning to talk about sanctification. This means becoming holy as a slave to God. They gave up slavery to evil. They now must accept slavery to God. And they have eternal life. They've been transformed. They're new creations. There's no middle ground. We're either sons of God or we're sons of the devil. There's not a place in between. We're either one or the other. We're either controlled by our new nature in Christ, or we're controlled by the old nature which brings death. Thus we're conquerors and victorious over the world, the flesh, and the devil, as 1 John 4 talks about it, because we're not ruled any longer by fear or by sin. We're not ruled by sin because we fear the law. We refuse to sin because the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us is there. The motive of love is much higher than the motive of fear. So we're not fearing God because of the law, but we are doing what we do for God because he has saved us and we are redeemed. Verses 21, 22 talks about the fruit, and it makes a very simple statement that the fruit of our old lives resulted in death, the fruit of our new life is sanctification. In Christ we're completely new creations, and it ought to be just as natural for us to crave righteousness and holiness as we crave sinfulness in the old life. The problem is we now have another nature, and sin is still hanging on. The flesh is still the flesh. We still have the same fleshly desires, but we have a new nature now that has set us free from sin, and we need to produce fruit that leads us to becoming holy. And so he comes down to verse 23 there in the sixth chapter and says the wages of sin is death. Probably one of the most familiar verses in the scripture. The wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the reason why Jesus died. Mankind stands condemned by sin, and the result is death. Jesus bore our sins so we wouldn't have to suffer the reality of eternal separation from him, eternal death. Salvation in Jesus cannot be separated. He is the way, the truth, and the life. You can't take Jesus out of salvation. All other roads lead to death. He's the door. The only door to justification. All other doors lead to death. He is the center and the soul of redemption. The gospel finds man dead in sin because all have sinned. They've all come short of the glory of God, of God's demands. The gospel brings the wonderful message that Christ raises the dead to life in Jesus Christ. Now that's what happens when we're saved. So to speak of salvation apart from Christ is an act of ignorance and deceit. He's the centerpiece of salvation, and it's interesting that at this point, Paul changes his focus from a slave owner to someone who's employed. Slaves don't get wages. Wages of sin. You're employed by sin. Sin gives death. In sin, the sinner gets what he deserves. Death is not an arbitrary sentence. It is the inevitable consequence of sin. Over against this truth, here at the end of the sixth chapter now, he says, but the gift of God. Isn't that great? The gift of God is eternal life, and eternal life is not the reward for service rendered. We don't have eternal life because we did something to please God, and so he reimbursed us by saying that we would have eternal life. There is no element of pay or wages in salvation, and Paul's distinctive is that the sinners do nothing to earn eternal life, and that gives us the free gift of God. Eternal life is anchored in, based upon, and provided by the person and work of Jesus Christ. I was preaching to a church in Germany a number of years ago, when Carol and I were still here, and I don't know why I did this. I've got a translator, but I pulled out an equivalent of a $10 bill, German mark. Like I say, it's one of those things, when you do something, you say, who did that? Who said that? And I held up that German bill, and I said, how many of you would like to have this German mark? Ten mark, whatever. I mean, you know, it wasn't a dollar bill or pennies, it was a $10 equivalent. A man lost a hand, so I said, well, come get it. Well finally, one gal on the front came up and got it. I stopped her when I gave her the $10 bill, I said, now, you were the only one who came up here and got it. Now, they all could have gotten it. It was offered to everybody, but you're the only one that came. And she said, as you started to give it back, I said, oh no, no, it's yours. I gave it to you, and it's yours now. You keep it. But, you know, this is the difference between slavery to sin and slavery to God. God gives us eternal life, sin gives us death. That is not a good deal. And so, we finish up this chapter with this, one of the favorite verses for all of us in witnessing is that Romans 6, 23. Now, as we come into the seventh chapter, Paul has already explained that victory for believers rests upon a different principle than that of the law, according to the 15th verse of that sixth chapter. The law emphasizes human effort. Paul now underlines the fact that there is no system of human effort that can contain victorious Christian living. This is the key to experience freedom from dominion to sin. Paul is not dealing with pardon of sins in this chapter. He's dealing with the deliverance of our sin nature from believers. You don't have to live under the power of sin any longer. He's not talking about you stole something, you said something is wrong, you did this, you did that. No, he's talking about the whole issue of the sin nature. Jesus is taking care of that. And there's a real struggle for the sincere believer who desires to live a holy life. I don't think any of you would say, if you do see me afterwards, I'd like to talk to you, that it's easy being a Christian and living like God wants us to live. It's just not easy. It's a hard thing. And the real struggle goes on with Satan through the flesh. And the normal Christian life should not include defeated by sin. Shouldn't include that. If we would simply believe the truth that we died with Christ and we're united with him through his resurrection, we would immediately enter that blessed state of deliverance where we're no longer under the law. The law of grace is now the rule for believer's life, not the law of, not the Adamic laws written into the human nature, not the laws of the Ten Commandments or the laws that God gave to the Jews. Under grace, we know that there's nothing in the law, the law tells us a lot about ourselves except how to get out of it. How to get away from the condition we're in. The law is like a mirror. You look in a mirror and you say, oh me, who is this person looking at me? It tells you what you are. That's what the law is. It is a mirror to say to all of us, all of sin comes short of the glory of God. But we're no longer under the Adamic nature. We're no longer under the law and its power. And that fact is made real by faith. I said to you, we're not saved by understanding. I mean, we could sit down here and discuss almost anything about the Christian faith and we'd disagree at some point. We're not saved because we all have figured something out and have the right answers to everything. We're saved by faith. The difference is, liberalism says faith is a leaf in the dark. Christian faith says faith is a leaf in the light. We have faith in God. Faith is not, you don't have faith in faith. There's some folks that seem to have faith in faith. You have enough faith, you can be healed. Well, God never said that. In fact, several people were healed that didn't even know that they were being healed. Didn't ask for it. Someone asked for it in their behalf. Anyway, it's faith that allows us to live the way God intended for us to live. We have changed masters in our lives. No longer slaves to sin, now we're slaves to God and we bring forth fruit unto righteousness. Paul describes the individual, he describes mankind in three terms. He says there's the natural man and there's the carnal man and there's the spiritual man. The natural man or the unsaved. The carnal man is saved, but in some way is still under the power of the flesh and that's going to be true of us. We all still have the flesh, so we've got to deal with it. So somehow we're still struggling with the flesh, but the spiritual man is the believer whose life is controlled by the Holy Spirit. These are the three men that are viewed here in Romans chapter 7. Now again, everything God expects of us is beyond our human ability to do. That's why Christ died for us and that's why the Holy Spirit was planted within us. And so the spiritual man, these first verses of chapter 7, is delivered from the law. Death releases us from the law. The law is only good until death. The law says I can't drive but 45 miles an hour down Davis Boulevard, but when I'm dead that law doesn't apply to me anymore. I'm free from the law, but the law is important. Now he uses an illustration here and you need to be careful how you look at it. He uses the illustration of what the law said about marriage. The law said that a woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. When he died and she died as a wife and was now free from the law and now she was free to marry another. Now don't try to translate that into your life or anybody else's life because the application that he's making and the illustration he is using is that we have died to sin and therefore we are free from the law which bound us to the old man and now we are united with Christ and we are new creations. That's what he's talking about. That's the illustration. He's not talking about whether a divorced woman can marry her previous husband still alive. We don't get into that. That's not what he's talking about. He's not trying to give you a definition of legal remarriage. He's just trying to point out the fact that according to the law, a woman is bound to her wife until he's dead. When he's dead, she's free. That's the illustration he's making and it's the illustration of how we have died to an old way of life and been raised to a new law. This new law is the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus and we're to bring forth good fruit and good works of holiness and we died to self. We died with Christ but we also lived in his resurrection and we are redeemed. We have exchanged masters. We're being slaves to sins. We're slaves to Christ and righteousness and we bear fruit under God and that's the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Dead to the law, verse 4 says, since we have died to what held us, verse 6 says. The new law is the law of the Spirit of God and that law operates in us through faith in Jesus Christ. Walking in the Spirit has taken the place of walking in external commandments. We're walking in the Spirit of Christ. There's often a difference between the letter of the law and the Spirit of the law. The Holy Spirit is the renewing power in us that produces the kind of lives that we ought to live. The incredible power of grace from the Spirit is shown in Romans chapter 8 and I don't know how Jack did this but he finagled where he'd get to do chapter 8, which he'll start in two weeks. The old relationship to the law never gives life. The new law is the presence of the Holy Spirit and that's grace and what a glorious day it will be when we realize that we're no more in bondage to the flesh but we're in Christ dead, buried, and resurrected and now bringing forth fruit unto life, holiness. Our relationship to sin, to the law, and to world ended at the cross. We died with Christ. We're no longer trying to have victory any more than we were trying to get saved. We couldn't do anything about either one of those. We're in Christ. The Holy Spirit pointed us to Christ for our redemption and now we live in the closest intimacy with him. You know, the thing that impressed me as I studied to write It's Not Rocket Science is the inevitable description of the presence of the Holy Spirit throughout history. Think of all the times that there were awakenings or revivals in history. Sometimes there were no preachers. Sometimes it was just an overwhelming sense God was here and he's in control. I think something like that kind of happened at Auburn University last week. Did you hear about what happened down there? Spontaneously, in the commons, the gospel was presented and 200 Auburn students got baptized and they threatened to fire the football coach over it. Nobody but God just showed up. When God shows up, you can't explain it. You can't explain it. I've seen it a few times. We had a touch of revival in 1983 here when in one two-week period we saw over 500 people saved. We had a revival that was going Sunday to Saturday and we had about 300 people saved before that. I preached on Sunday and we had 35 more saved, so I said, come back tomorrow night. Everybody showed up again on Monday night. We did that through Friday night. Nobody ever wanted to go home. Everybody wanted the fellowship and people wanted to get saved. It was an amazing time. It was just a touch that somehow God was in it. Now, that's distressing. It's disturbing. It robs us of sleep and rest. It's hectic. We don't know what's going to happen, who's going to be next. God is mysterious in how he acts, but he is sovereign in how he acts. It's up to him. When he shows up, we need to pay attention. It was exciting to me over the two years that I wrestled with the idea just to read through history, secular history books, talking about the inner energy or the inner dynamic of the Christians, which they often refer to as the Spirit or the Holy Spirit. That runs throughout the whole history of Christianity. That's really what Paul is describing here. He's not saying you're going to get the place where you don't need me anymore. You're not going to get the place where you don't sin anymore. You're going to still struggle with sin, but I'm there with you and you've got an advocate, Jesus Christ. When you do sin, he's going to make sure everything comes out okay because you belong to him now. Those are things that are hard for us to understand. That's what he's saying in these verses. The new life is one of service, not to sin, one of righteousness, not to evil. We've exchanged masters and now we're bringing forth fruit to holiness. Instead of seeking outward conformity to the letter of the law or to the commandments of the law, the believer fulfills the spirit of the law through Jesus Christ. The Christian life is more than just a meeting regulations and rules that someone has deduced. Hebrews 10, 16 and 17, this is what God said about our relationship with the Holy Spirit. This is the covenant I will make with them after those days. The Lord says I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. I will never again remember their sins and their lawless acts. That's what happens when we come to Jesus Christ and he meets us as someone dead in sin and in these verses, he first talks about it, we're doomed by the law. It's almost like Paul is going back and thinking before he got saved because the verbs here are in the past tense, but then verses 14 to 25 are all in the present tense. That refers certainly to Paul's life after conversion. The parallel is clear. As a believer, he must come to an end to his own efforts. He can never do enough to please God. That's not because God is unreasonable, it's because that's who God is. You remember several weeks ago I talked about the judgment that was a response just to who God is. I bounced a ball. Now I throw a ball down, what is it going to do? It's going to come up. Well, when sin approaches the Holy God, it's like throwing a ball on the floor. It's going to come right back up and it's going to be active and God's love and God's grace is active and his judgment is the natural reaction to the very nature of God. God cannot tolerate sin, any sin. Too many times we make several mistakes as believers. One is that we make our plans and then ask God to bless them. Lord, I'm going to do this, this, this and this and please bless me. That's getting it in reverse. We ought to go to God and say, now what plan should I be making? And let him help you make the plans and know that he's going to be with you. The natural man is doomed because he is a sinner. The natural man is a sinner by nature and we try to cover our sins and excuse our sins and camouflage it with respectable names. We don't call sin, sin anymore. It's some natural inclination or something. We've got a nicer name than that. We always try to hide it and before we had the law, there was no accusing conscience, false peace. The law was the straight edge that reveals the crookedness of human nature and forges into open the latent rebellion of the human heart. That's what the law is good for. It did us no good except to tell us what we were like. It revealed us to be sinners. We need the law. Jesus didn't destroy the law, he fulfilled it, he said. Didn't do away with it, but the sacrifice of Christ was the ultimate fulfillment for the desire of God to bring salvation to us. So sin is revealed and then sin is described. This is how serious sin is. The law punished sin, but it did not have the power to remove sin. The law does not reward us for keeping the law. It only punishes us for breaking the law. You realize the Old Testament at one time or another shows that the death penalty is applied for everyone who breaks the Ten Commandments. You probably never thought of that, but the reason I mention that is that tells you how serious sin is. Death penalty for coveting seems like a strong reaction. That's the natural reaction of a holy God. The law presented us with the reality of our sin and that sin is very, very serious. That's how serious sin is in God's sight. The holy standard, the high standard that God leaves the sinner exposed and defenseless, the law has no remedy. It cannot save, only grace can do that. Now when we go, starting next week, we're going to deal with this civil war inside every one of us. Now there are those who believe you can reach sinless perfection. The Nazarenes, who by the way are wonderful people, when we lived in Kansas City, the international headquarters of the Church of Nazarenes in Kansas City, and I'm not sure how they found me, I passed a little church out south of Kansas City, but they asked me to come and greet their triennial convention on behalf of the city of Kansas City. They didn't have a convention every year, they had one every three years. And they had about 10,000, 12,000 people there and I came to welcome them to Kansas City and you know, you've seen the welcomes before. Well, they believe that you can reach sinless perfection. I don't believe that that's accurate. The Mormons believe that if you adhere to all that they teach, you will become God yourself. The average Mormon doesn't even know that because it's not taught very much, but in the heart of Mormon theology, you will be just like God if you do certain things. And it's the attempt to achieve something by natural means. You just can't do that. We don't stand on our merit. I don't want justice. I want mercy, because I am guilty as hell itself and I don't want to be punished for what I deserve. And that's when God intervenes. Do you think for a minute that if there was some other way that we could be redeemed and our sins saved and we be justified other than the death of Christ, He wouldn't have done it? I mean, there is no other way. And it's amazing to think that God loved us that much. You just think about your child. Would you be willing to give the life of your child for people who didn't want it? For people who wouldn't accept that as any meaningful in their life? I mean, Jesus died for us knowing that most people in the world are not going to accept it. That's a love that is beyond our ability to comprehend it. Think about it. He died for people He knew were going to reject Him. He still died for them. It's amazing. The grace of God is beyond our imagination. It is more than we could ever achieve, more than we should ever expect, and only God could have done what He did. That's what all the six, seven chapters are about. Next Sunday we'll get a little more into the enemy within us and the civil war that takes place, because when we get saved, it's still possible that we might not sin, but then it's possible we will. And God says, I'm writing this to you so that you don't sin. But if you do, you have an advocate, Jesus Christ. What a deal. He died for us. He lives in us even when we rebel against Him. And who of us has not done that, even as believers? He loves us anyway. It's a grace so amazing. And we possess it. And when Christ is within what we could never achieve or never earn, never deserve, He goes through us. Wow. Father, just thank you for the love that is beyond our possibility of even understanding. Lord, you loved us so much. You died for those who hated you, even those who crucified you. You died for us all. And Father, we thank you for that. Thank you for the grace that brought salvation to us. Thanks for the power, the resurrection power of Christ who dwells within each of us as believers. May we never let sin have any reign in our lives. Thank you, Father, that when that might happen, when it does happen, we have an advocate. You don't forsake us. You don't throw us out. You just keep on loving us. Amazing. Thank you. In Jesus' name, amen.
