SPEAKER_00: This podcast is the Ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information in our church, please visit grandparkway.org.
SPEAKER_00: If you've got a Bible, I invite you to take it and open up to Romans chapter 7.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're our guest today, let me just tell you what we're doing.
SPEAKER_00: We are preaching through the book of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: We just go verse by verse.
SPEAKER_00: We believe the way you nourish a congregation as a pastor and as a staff, all the pastors on staff here, we believe that the way we nourish you is just to teach you the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to treat you like little kids.
SPEAKER_00: We want to treat you like men and women of appetite, whether you're 14 or 84.
SPEAKER_00: And we just want to put the truth out there and let your mind and your heart and your hands grapple with it.
SPEAKER_00: And so we come to this part of Romans chapter 7, and I want to talk to you this morning about the beauty of God's law.
SPEAKER_00: The beauty of God's law.
SPEAKER_00: Or if I had to title this sermon differently, I would call it Why My Dad Is Right.
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, well, we never met your dad.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: You will before we get to the end, but let's stick with the beauty of God's law.
SPEAKER_00: Romans chapter 7.
SPEAKER_00: I'll start reading actually in verse 7.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what the Bible says.
SPEAKER_00: He says, What then shall we say?
SPEAKER_00: That the law is sin?
SPEAKER_00: By no means.
SPEAKER_00: Yet if I had if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.
SPEAKER_00: I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet.
SPEAKER_00: But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.
SPEAKER_00: Apart from the law, sin lies dead.
SPEAKER_00: I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died.
SPEAKER_00: The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me, for sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.
SPEAKER_00: So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
SPEAKER_00: Did that which is good then bring death to me?
SPEAKER_00: By no means.
SPEAKER_00: It was sin producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.
SPEAKER_00: We'll just stop right there.
SPEAKER_00: If you would, just keep your Bibles open because we'll come back to that passage now.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just say up front, if you're our guest today, just relax.
SPEAKER_00: This is not a this is not like a class for engineers or or scientists or chemists or whatever, or whatever your hardest subject in class in school was.
SPEAKER_00: This is not a class like that.
SPEAKER_00: God wants his word to be understandable to you.
SPEAKER_00: And so he kind of breaks it down in bite-sized pieces so you can get your head and your arms around it.
SPEAKER_00: And I say the beauty of God's law, and what I mean is that there's a beauty, God intends his word, the things that he says, the things that he ordains to be seen for what they really are.
SPEAKER_00: And last week when he talked about, Paul talked about the law, and in chapter six, he talks about the law.
SPEAKER_00: And he basically, if you're not careful, you start thinking, last week we talked about why the rules don't work.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're not careful, you can look and go, oh, the rules are bad.
SPEAKER_00: Those are trying to keep me down.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: There's a beauty to God's word.
SPEAKER_00: There's a beauty to God's law.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when Paul talks about the law, he's not talking about like what we read in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: That's God's ordinance, that's God's law as well.
SPEAKER_00: But all they had was mainly what they had was the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: Have you read the book of Numbers lately?
SPEAKER_00: It's that kind of thing that Paul would read, and he was kind of like, man, I uh uh.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a beauty to it if you can see it.
SPEAKER_00: And there's three things I want you to say.
SPEAKER_00: What do you mean, the beauty?
SPEAKER_00: Three reasons why, uh what what what I mean when I say the beauty of God's law.
SPEAKER_00: The first one is what makes it beautiful is it defines sin.
SPEAKER_00: It defines sin.
SPEAKER_00: Look in verse 7, if you would.
SPEAKER_00: He says, What then shall we say?
SPEAKER_00: That the law is sin?
SPEAKER_00: By no means.
SPEAKER_00: Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.
SPEAKER_00: I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had said, You shall not covet.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what Paul says is, hey, the law defined sin for me, and the sin that he struggled with was covetousness.
SPEAKER_00: Did you know that's one of the Ten Commandments?
SPEAKER_00: I think it's number 10.
SPEAKER_00: Thou shalt not covet.
SPEAKER_00: And you say, no, what do you mean?
SPEAKER_00: Today, if you turn on your TV to watch the fourth round of the Masters, uh, you're gonna see a few commercials on that.
SPEAKER_00: But if you watch something else, like at my house, we watched Chopped 24-7.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that show came on that many times in a day, but there's commercials on there, and they appeal to you.
SPEAKER_00: They make you like I love my house until I go to my friend's house and have a bigger, nicer house, and then I come home and I hate my house.
SPEAKER_00: You say, What is that?
SPEAKER_00: That's covetousness in me, in your pasture.
SPEAKER_00: I have to deal with that.
SPEAKER_00: I love things until I go and somebody's go, oh, you got that.
SPEAKER_00: I love my golf clubs until I play with someone who's got a newer set, and then I go, Oh, I hate my golf clubs, and I think I'd be a better golfer if I had those.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, if they invented golf clubs on the space shuttle, okay, that were like super technologically advanced, it wouldn't help my game one bit, okay?
SPEAKER_00: I would still be the same golf hack that I am.
SPEAKER_00: But that's what Paul says.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't have had words for this feeling inside of me unless I'd read God's law and it says, do not covet.
SPEAKER_00: And then I was like, oh, that's what that is inside of me.
SPEAKER_00: The law defines sin.
SPEAKER_00: And that sounds simple and cut and dry, but yet there's three problems in our culture that we've got to be aware of.
SPEAKER_00: The first one is this left to ourselves, left to themselves, people cannot define sin.
SPEAKER_00: Let me say it again.
SPEAKER_00: Left to themselves, people cannot define sin.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says that sin is hamartia, is a Greek word.
SPEAKER_00: It means missing the mark.
SPEAKER_00: Sin means to miss the mark, which suggests that there's a mark out there.
SPEAKER_00: This objective standard by which we do life, by which God has established right and wrong.
SPEAKER_00: But left to ourselves, we cannot define sin.
SPEAKER_00: Don't turn there, but sometimes if you ever read through the book of Proverbs, if you're bored on a rainy, Tuesday afternoon, you read through the book of Proverbs, which is a collection of the sayings of the wise.
SPEAKER_00: It's like you pulled your car up to a Hebrew nursing home and walked into all the 80 and 90 year olds with about six teeth in their mouth and said, Hey, what's the three best lessons you've learned in life?
SPEAKER_00: That's what Proverbs is.
SPEAKER_00: It's this collection of wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: All through the book of Proverbs, if you read, you would see this phrase, do not move the ancient boundary stone.
SPEAKER_00: Do not move the ancient boundary stone.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of why they like there's a show on TV.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know this until my kids informed me.
SPEAKER_00: And the show is called, I think it's on the History Channel.
SPEAKER_00: It's called How the States Got Their Shape.
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen that?
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever noticed up on the, like if you go up to the Northeast, everything's all squiggly and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_00: Because people would say, My property's this river, or it's this tree to that tree, to down around that river.
SPEAKER_00: And then, but when they got surveying equipment, if you move to the central Texas and out west, everything is very clean and linear because they got surveying equipment.
SPEAKER_00: They got stuff they could do that with.
SPEAKER_00: Well, in the biblical days, they would take, they would mark property with what's called a boundary stone.
SPEAKER_00: They would take a rock and they'd put it right there and they would say, This marks the boundary between my property and your property.
SPEAKER_00: And the Bible says, do not move the ancient boundary stone because people would come along in the middle of the night.
SPEAKER_00: Your neighbor's yard would get bigger and yours would shrink.
SPEAKER_00: And you'd be thinking, I thought we had four acres.
SPEAKER_00: Now we got three.
SPEAKER_00: And then a year later you got one, and you're like, what's going on here?
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says the same thing happened.
SPEAKER_00: The reason we need the law to define sin, and it's beautiful, is because left to ourselves, we cannot define sin.
SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, everything is a sin until your kids do it.
SPEAKER_00: And then it's a mistake.
SPEAKER_00: Or it's a poor choice.
SPEAKER_00: Or she lacked discretion.
SPEAKER_00: She knows better.
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you something.
SPEAKER_00: I said this before, and my wife hates this, okay?
SPEAKER_00: But my dad used to look at us and say things like, Hey, that's wrong, okay?
SPEAKER_00: What you did is a sin.
SPEAKER_00: And then my dad would go the extra mile and say, Shame on you.
SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons that we don't have shame anymore, and I'm not saying tell your kids shame on you.
SPEAKER_00: My wife's like, please don't ever say that to our children.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I don't say it to my children.
SPEAKER_00: I just beat them until they obey.
SPEAKER_00: It's just a joke.
SPEAKER_00: If you're visiting today.
SPEAKER_00: My kids took after their mom, okay?
SPEAKER_00: My my my wife's parents could look at her and go, Marcy, we're so disappointed, and she would cry.
SPEAKER_00: If my dad ever said that to me, I'm like, that stinks for you, loser.
SPEAKER_00: So my dad never said that.
SPEAKER_00: My dad said, What'd I tell you to do?
SPEAKER_00: What'd you do?
SPEAKER_00: Like dirty Harry showed up talking through his teeth.
SPEAKER_00: What'd you do?
SPEAKER_00: You had to tell my dad what he told you and what you did, and then he said, Bend over.
SPEAKER_00: And if you didn't bend over, he just started whipping whatever he could get his hands on.
SPEAKER_00: I walked around most of my childhood like this.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just just go ahead and whip me.
SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I deserve it.
SPEAKER_00: Because left to ourselves, we cannot define sin.
SPEAKER_00: Because we say, hey, well, this is just kind of who I am.
SPEAKER_00: It's just me doing what I prefer to do.
SPEAKER_00: Or we come along and we say, well, you know, it's it's kind of here's the second problem.
SPEAKER_00: People never naturally think of themselves as sinners.
SPEAKER_00: No one believes this apart from the supernatural revelation from the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: God's got to reveal to you that, hey, now wait a minute.
SPEAKER_00: Not only is there sin in the world, there's many, but but but but but I'm by nature not only a sinful person, but I'm a sinner.
SPEAKER_00: Now see, this doesn't happen because we define sin in terms of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: That's why, in whatever situation you find yourself in, when people find themselves uh uh in a situation that the Bible would define as sinful, they say they go to the relationship to establish the rightness or wrongness of it.
SPEAKER_00: Like right now, I'm so sick of hearing about gay marriage.
SPEAKER_00: It is everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: It's on the Supreme Court, it's on the news, it's on the media, it's blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: That used to be a sin issue a long time ago.
SPEAKER_00: And because they sat in a room and kind of figured out this political action committees, now it's a civil rights issue.
SPEAKER_00: See how what happens when you move the ancient boundary stone?
SPEAKER_00: And it used to become, hey, this is right or wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Now, by the way, if you're visiting today, we're not hateful towards the gay community.
SPEAKER_00: I have friends of mine that live the alternate lifestyle.
SPEAKER_00: And every once in a while, when they want to walk on the wild side, they'll call their preacher friend Neil and say, hey, can you meet me for lunch?
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not embarrassed to be your friend.
SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
SPEAKER_00: I I we're we're gonna fundamentally disagree.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I just want to check in and see if you've changed your mind.
SPEAKER_00: Has the Bible changed its mind?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_00: Why have I changed my mind?
SPEAKER_00: I'm not, I don't have the right to say of the Bible, I see what the Bible says, but I disagree and then call myself a person that is a Christ follower.
SPEAKER_00: Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_00: Did you feel that?
SPEAKER_00: Some of you pulled back a little bit, like, easy, easy.
SPEAKER_00: See, see, this is how you know Jesus says, hey, by this all men will know you're my disciples.
SPEAKER_00: That you have loved for one another?
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: I tell my friends during that lifestyle all the time, you know I love you, right?
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know.
SPEAKER_00: Come on, let's hug.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not comfortable with that.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, dude, you got a boyfriend, okay?
SPEAKER_00: I should be uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: See, but what happens is here's what we do.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, it's not just that.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in this room right now and you're having an affair, or if you're living together, here's what you say: you say, we love each other, we're monogamous, we're committed, we're all these things.
SPEAKER_00: And what happens is sin has eroded in America to only that which we can get people to agree about.
SPEAKER_00: And if we can't agree about it, then it can't be wrong.
SPEAKER_00: It's just a difference of opinion.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because people never naturally think of themselves as sinners, which is why we need the law.
SPEAKER_00: It defines sin.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, uh the third problem we run into in defining sin is that we prefer these impersonal generalities.
SPEAKER_00: We talk about bad things I've done, uh, but this misses the point.
SPEAKER_00: See, this makes sin sin, define sin in relation to you and its effects upon you.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I've done some bad things in my life, but nobody's perfect.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: But see, these impersonal generalities, when you talk about bad things and not specific sins, then you never know what you're being forgiven for.
SPEAKER_00: You never get the vast wonder of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: You never understand.
SPEAKER_00: Man, I by nature was a screw up.
SPEAKER_00: I used to belong to an accountability group, and we would begin every meeting, every Tuesday, by talking about the sin, specific sin we struggled with that week.
SPEAKER_00: And one time, uh uh a guy that's on staff at a church, uh, it's a good church, but very slick and smooth and kind of like a kind of like a corporation.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I want to come to y'all's community group, but I mean you're you're your accountability group.
SPEAKER_00: I said, No, you don't.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Why?
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Because it's it's bloody and it's great and it's transformational, but you got to be honest.
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Oh, I'm great, all right.
SPEAKER_00: Well, we we talked about it, prayed about it.
SPEAKER_00: Come on, join.
SPEAKER_00: He comes first time.
SPEAKER_00: The guy's just leading it, sipping his coffee, just looking at it as he said, All right, man, let's confess our sins one to another.
SPEAKER_00: Who go first?
SPEAKER_00: One guy raised his hand and said, Man, I lost my temper with my wife this week, and I spoke dishonorably to my wife, and that is sin.
SPEAKER_00: And I need to confess that.
SPEAKER_00: I need y'all to pray for me over that.
SPEAKER_00: Because the way I treat my wife sometimes, I'm great at the office, and I come home and act like a jerk.
SPEAKER_00: One of the other guys says, I overeat this week.
SPEAKER_00: Because just like an alcoholic that drinks too much, I eat too much, I medicate with food.
SPEAKER_00: I looked over and this cat that was new, his eyes were this big.
SPEAKER_00: It got to him and my buddy is leading and said, What about you?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, I got some struggles and I got some unspoken prayer requests.
SPEAKER_00: So if y'all could pray for me.
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, ding ding, somebody rang the bell.
SPEAKER_00: That cat looked at him and said, Hey, bro, we're not here.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't get up early, okay, and come over here to hear about some unspoken prayer requests.
SPEAKER_00: If you can't be honest with five people, how can you be honest with the 2,000 people in your church?
SPEAKER_00: Either be honest or get up and leave.
SPEAKER_00: And y'all are like, whoo, I'm glad I'm not in that group.
SPEAKER_00: No, what it was was he could not think of a specific sin that he had struggled with.
SPEAKER_00: And I just suggested, hey, let's crucify him.
SPEAKER_00: Clearly, he's perfect.
SPEAKER_00: Because I like to help things when they get bogged down like that.
SPEAKER_00: And here's my point.
SPEAKER_00: He had been in church, and finally, through tears, he looked at us and he said, I've been in church my whole life, and no one's ever asked me what specific sins do you need to confess?
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Do you know how to do this?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Not at all.
SPEAKER_00: And we turned to James 5.
SPEAKER_00: I said, You know, the Bible says, hey, confess your sins one to another and pray for one another so you may be healed.
SPEAKER_00: Have you had like secret sin?
SPEAKER_00: I bet you've had the same besetting sin most of your life.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Yes! How'd you know?
SPEAKER_00: Because the Lord's giving me a word of knowledge right now.
SPEAKER_00: Pull out some paper.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the wing lottery numbers.
SPEAKER_00: I said, No, because secrecy is the power of badness.
SPEAKER_00: How do you break the power of canceled sin if you don't practice a discipline of confession?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I just never thought of myself in these terms.
SPEAKER_00: Because we prefer these impersonal generalities.
SPEAKER_00: You say, Why are you telling us this?
SPEAKER_00: Here's why.
SPEAKER_00: Because in America, you've heard this phrase, we've lost our moral compass.
SPEAKER_00: That sounds so much more politically correct than saying we've kind of lost, forsaken God's law.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't, see, we didn't just move the ancient boundary stone, we forgot where we hid it.
SPEAKER_00: And now we can't go back and get it.
SPEAKER_00: It's never too late to go back and do the right thing.
SPEAKER_00: No matter how far you are down the road of disobedience, hear me say this morning, grace is greater than your sin.
SPEAKER_00: Grace, this God of grace, beckons you back, and he's not saying, See, I told you so.
SPEAKER_00: You better come back here, you scum sucking dog.
SPEAKER_00: You ought to feel bad about yourself.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: Grace says, Oh, it doesn't, grace doesn't dismiss the law.
SPEAKER_00: Grace magnifies the beauty of God's law, and you come back and you reorient yourself around that and go, This is the way I was created to live.
SPEAKER_00: The beauty of God's law is number one, is it defines sin.
SPEAKER_00: Number two, it provokes sin.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul says.
SPEAKER_00: Look if you would in verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: You still with me?
SPEAKER_00: He says, But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetedness.
SPEAKER_00: Apart from the law, sin lies dead.
SPEAKER_00: But look at it sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment.
SPEAKER_00: See, the law, that's the commandment that says, do not covet.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says in him, hey, this produced in me all kinds of covetedness.
SPEAKER_00: So what do you mean?
SPEAKER_00: That it just kind of no, it exposes it.
SPEAKER_00: The law just kind of pushed it out, it kind of made it obvious because Paul realized, hey, maybe I covet a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00: And then, once kind of provoked about covetousness, all of a sudden it becomes, wow.
SPEAKER_00: It's like when your kids went off to college.
SPEAKER_00: Remember they went off to college and they took like freshman psychology and they come back and all of a sudden they're a psychologist and they want to psychoanalyze everybody in the family, and you're just sitting there cutting your meat thinking, listen, you keep talking to your mom like that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna slap the taste out of your mouth, boy.
SPEAKER_00: It just becomes this prevailing world.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul says.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, this meant provoke.
SPEAKER_00: I thought I was doing okay, and then I understood what it meant when the law said, do not covet, and then all of a sudden, ooh, all I wanted to do was covet.
SPEAKER_00: Let me paint this picture for you.
SPEAKER_00: I have a friend, Bob Hendricks.
SPEAKER_00: Bob Hendricks is Bob has kind of a lead foot, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Bob's an executive, he's now retired, he was vice president of a large, large company.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and he's driving down the road and he was notorious for his lead foot.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Uh, I'm not gonna get a radar detector.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna lie, I just like to drive fast.
SPEAKER_00: And so he's driving through Arkansas, going to see his parents.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if you've been in Arkansas, not a lot of four-lane, you know, divided highways there.
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of just two-lane over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house.
SPEAKER_00: He said, We were stuck in a parade.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I just couldn't take it.
SPEAKER_00: It was going 55 miles an hour.
SPEAKER_00: I said, What's wrong with that?
SPEAKER_00: I like to drive 70.
SPEAKER_00: What was the speed of it?
SPEAKER_00: 55.
SPEAKER_00: And he began to count the cars between him and over the hill.
SPEAKER_00: There's like nine, nine or ten cars.
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, I gotta get up here to the front of the line and see what's going on.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a farmer with a tractor slowing everything down.
SPEAKER_00: So he won by gun, he began to pick them off.
SPEAKER_00: And he got up there and he saw that in the very front of the line was a cop car.
SPEAKER_00: And the cop was doing 55, and pretty soon he's right on the bumper of the cop.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Now I don't know what happened, but I mean, I was just the I was so agitated, he's just doing this to make a point.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, he's not making a point.
SPEAKER_00: That's the law.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I uh his wife said, Let me tell the rest of the story.
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't take being told how fast to drive, so my husband put his blinker on, pulls out, and floorboards it and passes the cop and takes off 70 miles an hour.
SPEAKER_00: And the cop just turned on the sirens, pulled him over and said, Excuse me, you didn't see me back there?
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Yeah, handed him his license and said, I saw you.
SPEAKER_00: I just couldn't take it anymore.
SPEAKER_00: And the cop said, Excuse me.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I just thought I'd take one for the team.
SPEAKER_00: And all those cars just went by, eh, the Bible says that's what the law is like.
SPEAKER_00: It provokes you.
SPEAKER_00: You're just like, I can't take it anymore.
SPEAKER_00: Third beauty of the law, and I'm gonna drill down on this one, is it brings us to the end of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Romans chapter 7.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 9.
SPEAKER_00: It brings us to the end of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Look what he says in the first part of verse 9.
SPEAKER_00: I was once alive apart from the law.
SPEAKER_00: Just stop right there.
SPEAKER_00: I was once alive.
SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
SPEAKER_00: There was a time when I felt good about myself.
SPEAKER_00: I felt so good, I felt like I was alive.
SPEAKER_00: And then after this, I felt so bad, it was like being dead.
SPEAKER_00: What's he talking about?
SPEAKER_00: If you've got a Bible, turn to the right to Philippians chapter 3, or it'll come up on the screen.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I once was alive.
SPEAKER_00: There was a time when Paul was religious, but he didn't have a relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: He describes what he was like during this time in the book of Philippians chapter 3.
SPEAKER_00: I'll start reading in verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: He says, For we are the real circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, he said, if you want to compare notes about confidence in your flesh and what you can do, I let me give you my resume.
SPEAKER_00: He says, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more.
SPEAKER_00: Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee.
SPEAKER_00: As to zeal, a persecutor of the church.
SPEAKER_00: As to righteousness, under the law, blameless.
SPEAKER_00: Now stop there for a minute and think about that.
SPEAKER_00: As to righteousness, as to what it means to be rightly related to God, according to the law, Paul says, I was blameless.
SPEAKER_00: I kept all the rules.
SPEAKER_00: I was the most zealous, religious person there.
SPEAKER_00: As I told my friends of the prison on Tuesday night, you know that you can know the Bible and love the Bible and never know God.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says in John 5, don't turn it.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says in John 5 about verse 39 and 40, you search those scriptures because they testify of me, but yet you refuse to come to me and have life.
SPEAKER_00: That's how you know a person knows God is that there's there's something supernatural about their life.
SPEAKER_00: There's something different.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean crazy stuff happens every day, but it means that they kind of oriented their life differently.
SPEAKER_00: It's what you saw in Norm.
SPEAKER_00: I went and saw him yesterday.
SPEAKER_00: And my confession to you is I don't go see him to comfort him.
SPEAKER_00: I go see him so he can convict me.
SPEAKER_00: He's laying there on his back porch in his porch swing and the wind's blowing.
SPEAKER_00: He can't keep his eyes open.
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, I'm gonna pay, yeah, I'm in agony.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, okay.
SPEAKER_00: This is a good front-end alignment.
SPEAKER_00: Because left to myself, I love this world too much.
SPEAKER_00: It's good for me to be around somebody who's just how long do you think you got?
SPEAKER_00: Two weeks, four weeks?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: Crazy old man?
SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, hey, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta ask yourself, what must that feel like?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he tells us in Romans chapter 7, starting in verse 14.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just read it to you, but before I read it to you, let me just remind you just tell you about this little thing called the historical.
SPEAKER_00: Present.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's you see it in literature, you see it in the in in in the biblical times.
SPEAKER_00: You say, What do you mean historical present?
SPEAKER_00: It's the use of the present tense when narrating a past event, and the purpose is to make these past events more vivid.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's the preacher and me talking.
SPEAKER_00: Uh let me put it down here where you live.
SPEAKER_00: You ever get around your buddies from high school and you start retelling a story about something y'all did in high school?
SPEAKER_00: Hello?
SPEAKER_00: Like one time, me and my friends, this is before I was a Christian, we kind of had uh too much to eat and drink.
SPEAKER_00: And we went out to the lake, and the lake wasn't quite filled up yet.
SPEAKER_00: It was still kind of filling up, and a friend of mine had a jeep, a big old jacked-up jeep.
SPEAKER_00: We used to go mudding, and we sunk that thing all the way down to the axles in the middle of the lake, and then got out, and we started walking, and the mud was about up to our thighs.
SPEAKER_00: You ever walked a half mile in mud, and every step you take is and you got to kind of crawl up and then I could go back to my small East Texas town I grew up in and start talking to one of my buddies, and we would talk about that like it happened yesterday.
SPEAKER_00: Because one of them was like, I can't make it.
SPEAKER_00: Just kick mud on me and bury me, just put a marker, remind my parents.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the guys just walked back and grabbed him by the foot and started just dragging him through the mud.
SPEAKER_00: Drugged that cat for a quarter of a mile.
SPEAKER_00: Come loose on me! Come loose on me! Shut up, you're drunk.
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
SPEAKER_00: We laugh about that because we all showed up in town, covered head to toe.
SPEAKER_00: We had mud on every nook and crevice and cranny all over our body.
SPEAKER_00: And here's how you know you live in a small town.
SPEAKER_00: The sheriff pulled up at the little convenience store we were standing in, telling everybody, it was awesome! We got that.
SPEAKER_00: The sheriff pulled up and said, You boys look like you need a shower or to spend the night in jail.
SPEAKER_00: Which one do you want?
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll go with option A, the shower.
SPEAKER_00: All right, you boys, you've been stupid long enough.
SPEAKER_00: Go home and shower up.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to see this nonsense out in public anymore.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Graves.
SPEAKER_00: We would talk about that like in the historical present.
SPEAKER_00: We would talk about it like, yeah, I remember that time then Greg said, but it happened in 1981.
SPEAKER_00: So you weren't even born, Haley, were you?
SPEAKER_00: You're kind of like, who cares about it?
SPEAKER_00: We would talk about it like, oh man, that's what Paul's doing.
SPEAKER_00: He's using the historical present in verse 14.
SPEAKER_00: He's describing what it felt like to be a very religious person, but he didn't know God.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what he says in verse 14 of Romans 7.
SPEAKER_00: He says, For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.
SPEAKER_00: I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good.
SPEAKER_00: So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
SPEAKER_00: For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.
SPEAKER_00: For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
SPEAKER_00: That is not the confession of a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: This is Paul, who's under the law, who's keeping all the rules, and he's miserable.
SPEAKER_00: He's up at night, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring into the dark abyss and saying, Is this all there is?
SPEAKER_00: Verse 19, for I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
SPEAKER_00: So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.
SPEAKER_00: For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my body, in my members.
SPEAKER_00: Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?
SPEAKER_00: And it's like he has a pause and he says, Oh, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
SPEAKER_00: What Paul is saying is, hey, when I was a Pharisee, he's remembering in the present something in his past so vividly, he uses present tense verbs to describe it.
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people go, Well, that's what Christianity is like.
SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: See, you have the capacity to do the right thing.
SPEAKER_00: When Paul says down here in about verse uh uh 18, for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
SPEAKER_00: You have the ability to carry it out.
SPEAKER_00: I have the ability, you say, What do you mean?
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Holy Spirit that comes to live inside of you when you become a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: You say, now, I want to draw your attention to one other thing and we'll be done this morning.
SPEAKER_00: You still with me?
SPEAKER_00: Now, he he reads all this stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to notice in Romans 7, I want you to look at verse 12.
SPEAKER_00: He says this of the law.
SPEAKER_00: He says, So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
SPEAKER_00: Here's my question for you and I this morning.
SPEAKER_00: How can something that kills you be considered holy and righteous and good?
SPEAKER_00: The Puritans used to say that a preacher's task is to slay men by the law so they may be raised up by the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean come to church and get beat up by the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: It means just to tell people the truth about themselves and about God.
SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
SPEAKER_00: Why did Paul say, hey, this thing, this law killed me?
SPEAKER_00: And it was a good thing.
SPEAKER_00: Because we'll pick back up in Philippians chapter 3 where we left off.
SPEAKER_00: I'll start reading verse 7.
SPEAKER_00: He says, But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is the guy that says, Hey, under the law, I was blameless.
SPEAKER_00: But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
SPEAKER_00: For his sake, I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own.
SPEAKER_00: Hello?
SPEAKER_00: This is the guy that just said, hey, as to as to righteousness, I'm I'm I'm blameless.
SPEAKER_00: I got that down.
SPEAKER_00: And now, as a believer, he's looking back on that and saying, now I don't have a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness that is from God, that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, Hey, listen, there was a time when I was alive, I thought I was doing really good.
SPEAKER_00: But then I begin to read the Bible, I begin to read the Pentateuch, the law of God, and I realize, man, the more I read of the Bible, the less I like of myself.
SPEAKER_00: I'm this conflicted ball of self-hate and self-determination.
SPEAKER_00: I'm religious, but I don't have a relationship.
SPEAKER_00: Then he comes to Christ and all of a sudden everything changes.
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, he's writing in Philippians 3 to combat these religious people that used to, that were still like he used to be, saying, Oh, you got to keep that rule and you got to do that and you got to do that.
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of keeping the rules, I told you last week my dad called me for the third time in my life.
SPEAKER_00: I'm 48.
SPEAKER_00: So my dad wanted this certain Bible.
SPEAKER_00: I was like, my dad, you're not gonna be able to understand that.
SPEAKER_00: It's real complicated.
SPEAKER_00: And I told him, hey dad, I'm gonna send you a copy of the message as well.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's a translation of the Bible, it's in very contemporary language, easier for you to understand.
SPEAKER_00: Now I know some of you are kind of like, I'm telling you what, the ESV is the only.
SPEAKER_00: My dad hadn't read a whole lot of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: My dad needs to get a Bible he understands.
SPEAKER_00: So I get on Amazon, send him this Bible he wanted, and then the Bible I want him to have, the message.
SPEAKER_00: Called my dad on Thursday.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, Dad, did you get the package?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I did.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I keep telling him, Dad, don't start in Genesis and just read it.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like a library book.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can do that, but it's gonna be confusing.
SPEAKER_00: My dad doesn't listen.
SPEAKER_00: He's 78 years old.
SPEAKER_00: He is set in his ways.
SPEAKER_00: He starts page one.
SPEAKER_00: Got it on Wednesday, starting on page one.
SPEAKER_00: I called him on Thursday.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Dad, how you get?
SPEAKER_00: He said, I didn't understand that companion Bible too well.
SPEAKER_00: But boy, that messenger thing.
SPEAKER_00: That messenger is awesome.
SPEAKER_00: It's the message, Dad.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the messenger, like I said.
SPEAKER_00: My dad will call that the messenger to the day he dies.
SPEAKER_00: That messenger, I'm telling you, I start in Genesis, I'm up to Deuteronomy chapter 32.
SPEAKER_00: In my mind, I'm crunching the numbers.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: Dad, you got it yesterday.
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't say that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just thinking, you crazy old fool, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_00: And then my dad says, This is my dad hardworking, worked in a steel mill, just a man's man, the whole thing, quit your crying, I'll give you something to cry about.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, Dad, he goes, I'll tell you what, I mean, this thing is changing my life.
SPEAKER_00: I just want to live the word.
SPEAKER_00: This is all I want to do.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Whoa, wait for it.
SPEAKER_00: And my said, well, Dad, are you enjoying it?
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Yeah, but I got a question.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Okay.
SPEAKER_00: My dad's like yelling in the phone.
SPEAKER_00: My dad never raises his voice anymore.
SPEAKER_00: He did all that when we were kids.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't have a voice.
SPEAKER_00: He's so laid back he can barely see over his hips now.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, hey.
SPEAKER_00: My dad's all passionate.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Hey, I got a question.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's more than 10 rules in here.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Yeah, Dad?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he goes, I mean, in like in Numbers and Deuteronomy, every time you turn around, God's giving him a new rule.
SPEAKER_00: Here's my question: Who can keep all these rules?
SPEAKER_00: I started checking to see if I had any cigarette.
SPEAKER_00: We just had us a good meal.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even smoke, by the way, if you're visiting.
SPEAKER_00: I said, uh, it's funny you should say that, Dad, because this Sunday I'm in Romans 7 and I'm gonna tell my people none of them can keep the rule.
SPEAKER_00: I said, nobody can keep the rules.
SPEAKER_00: I said, the Old Testament, you know, all these laws that God is calling his people to distinguish themselves, calling them out from among the nations, and by keeping all these rules, they're distinguishing themselves.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what they're gonna realize we can distinguish ourselves from everybody else with our effort, but we can't keep the rules.
SPEAKER_00: And I said, the entire New Old Testament points to the fact that Jesus has to come because if you could keep the rules, Dad, Jesus doesn't have to come, but Jesus gladly comes and he dies on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: It's payment for my sins and your sins and everyone else's sins.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's good news there.
SPEAKER_00: I said, Dad, keep reading the Old Testament, but understand something.
SPEAKER_00: God is setting it up where the only way people can have a relationship, go to heaven, be forgiven, all that stuff, is by believing and accepting what Christ does on the cross on your behalf.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I believe that.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I and my dad's been married four times.
SPEAKER_00: He lives with a woman's nice wife.
SPEAKER_00: He told her, he said, boy, she told him, she said, you should have started reading that book a long time ago.
SPEAKER_00: And my dad said back to her, if I would have, I would have never met you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Dad, you probably should have left that part out.
SPEAKER_00: Now turn in your messenger to Ephesians chapter 5, because it talks about husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm in the Old Testament now.
SPEAKER_00: We'll get to that later.
SPEAKER_00: See, my dad's already figured out the parts to avoid.
SPEAKER_00: You say, why you tell us that?
SPEAKER_00: Here's why I tell you that.
SPEAKER_00: Because the law, the law, the beauty, the highest expression and the manifestation of the beauty of the law is that it drives you to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It leaves you without any excuse.
SPEAKER_00: It brings you to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: If you were at the women's retreat, you heard part of this this weekend from your speaker.
SPEAKER_00: That a long time ago, your relationship to the law, the law was over you.
SPEAKER_00: Remember this?
SPEAKER_00: That the law was over you.
SPEAKER_00: And then now the law becomes this under you.
SPEAKER_00: It becomes this path that leads you to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And once you come to Christ, the law, to finish it, the law is within you.
SPEAKER_00: It's written on the tablets of your heart, is what the Bible says.
SPEAKER_00: You just kind of find yourself wanting to do the right thing and doing the right thing.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because you have the power, the capacity to do the right thing.
SPEAKER_00: Because God doesn't just say, watch you from a distance.
SPEAKER_00: He comes to live inside of you and he empowers you to live what he demands of you.
SPEAKER_00: That's what moves you from law to relationship.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's beautiful about God's law.
SPEAKER_00: Stand to your feet.
SPEAKER_00: Hold your hands out.
SPEAKER_00: I want to speak a blessing over you.
SPEAKER_00: Your God does not rejoice when you fail.
SPEAKER_00: He rejoices when you succeed.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he summed up the law with these words.
SPEAKER_00: Love the Lord your God.
SPEAKER_00: With all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.
SPEAKER_00: Depart now and do what you're capable of.
SPEAKER_00: In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Bless you.
SPEAKER_00: You just miss.