You want to turn your Bibles
to Romans if you're not already there. Romans chapter 6. This is a second part really
to last week's sermon. I would like to be able to preach
out of the first eight chapters of Romans today. It's necessary,
I think, that we get the whole context here of Romans 6, verse
14. But this verse is like going
to the end of the book and finding the answer there, and then going
back and reading the book and seeing how it develops. Romans
6, verse 14, let's read this together. For sin shall not have dominion
over you, For you are not under the law, but under grace. It's worth reading that twice,
isn't it? Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are
not under the law, but under grace. Now it's interesting,
that song, that hymn we just sang, it was a song sung by a
believing sinner declaring to God in tender affections and
trust that they would come just as they are. Just as I am, I
come to thee. Myself I cannot better make.
And it's interesting that at the end of the song it said,
oh hear me, bless me, save me Lord. Now this is the expression
of prayer from a sinner in need of God's saving grace. Where
did that prayer come from? Who initiated it? Who gave the
word, the truth that prayer is founded on, the warrant for coming?
Wasn't it God? Didn't He give? Wasn't it His
initiative, His design of salvation? Wasn't it His accomplishment?
And wasn't it His gospel that was declared to us? In fact,
wasn't it all of God? And what was the result of His
work there? It was that the poor sinner comes
to God asking Him to hear, to bless, and to save. But that
was God's heart all along. And so we find a resonance here.
If you know what resonance is, it's a property of something
physical, sometimes electrical, that when you have a frequency
that stimulates it at that particular a resonant frequency, it vibrates
or it oscillates. And you've seen that. You take
a jump rope and you tie it to a doorknob and you do this to
it. And if you do it at the right rate, then you get these nice
repeating patterns. Or like on a swing set when you're
going back and forth, you do that at the right rate and you
go faster and faster and faster. Well, in the gospel, there's
a resonance between God's purpose and grace and the response of
a sinner when we cry out to Him. In Psalm 119 and verse 133, you
wanna look at that? Psalm 119, this is the longest chapter in the
Bible, has 176 verses in it. But in the 133rd verse, it says
this. It says, order my steps in thy word. and let not any iniquity have
dominion over me." You see that? The cry of the one praying to
God in supplications is, oh, do not let any iniquity have
dominion over me. So in that prayer, he's saying
really that iniquity will have dominion over me unless God delivers
me from that dominion. So we are by admission, our own
admission by God's revelation really, and then we admit it,
we're enslaved to sin. We cannot help but sin. But God
says, by the promise there in Psalm 119, 133, that he has the
power to deliver us from the dominion of sin. And here in
Romans chapter six and verse 14, he says, sin shall not have
dominion over you, It won't have the mastery over you, for you
are not under the law, but under grace. What is the law? Well, we know that the law is
the Ten Commandments are God's law, but what is law in general? Well, let me put it this way.
It's as simple as I can think of it. The law is everything
God requires from you. The law is everything you need
to do to meet a condition. What is that? Well, you need
to do what's right, whatever God has revealed to be right.
You need to stop doing what's wrong. All those things are things
you have to do. And what is the result of putting
upon you requirements? What happens when you put requirements
on somebody? Well, they try to do them, but
they never quite do them the way you want. Even people can't
follow the instructions of another person perfectly, let alone God's
requirements. And when we fall short of meeting
the requirements, we feel a sense of failure, don't we? We haven't
measured up, and we expect the person who has told us these
things to be disappointed in us, so we try more. Or we give
up. Or we think, they're too hard.
You've required more from me than I can give. And we begin
to think ill thoughts about the person who's asked us to do these
things. Well, the law requires us to do, in fact, in God's word,
everything God requires of us is something that we are supposed
to do. But if we see that all of God's requirements are our
obligation to do or not do, that's a good explanation of what the
law is. You're not under that. That's the way sin's gonna have
no dominion over me, is that we're not under requirements,
we're not under obligations, not for your salvation, not for
the power over sin, because he says in the next thing here,
you're not under the law, but under grace. Who are these that
over which sin has no dominion? He says, for sin shall not have
dominion over you. Who are the you? Well, it's those who have fled
to Jesus for refuge. It's those God has given grace
to. Notice he says here, the reason why we're not under the
dominion of sin is because we're under grace. What is grace? If the law is everything God
requires from me, then what is grace? It's everything God requires
of me laid upon Christ and fulfilled by Christ. That is grace. God has done in Christ what he
required of me to do. And God says that's the way it
is for the believer. When we come to God in faith,
we come looking only to Christ. Like Abraham, he did not consider
his own body. It was dead. Why would he consider
it? He couldn't contribute anything in his own body. But he considered
God. who promised, and he considered
his ability to fulfill his promise. He made the promise, he had to
fulfill it. And that's what Abraham believed.
He believed God who calls things which are not as though they
were, as though they are, and he quickens, he makes alive the
dead. He believed God could do whatever
he couldn't do. And so that's grace. God doing
for us what he requires of us, only doing it not in us, but
in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's grace. That's the best
definition I know of grace. Everything in our salvation is
by grace, from first to last. Did you know that God says that
we were chosen out of grace? Look at Romans chapter 9. God
chose to save us because of his grace. In fact, that's the reason
he chose it that way, is so that it would be by grace. In Romans
chapter nine, he says about Jacob and Esau in verse 11, Romans
9, 11, for the children, Jacob and Esau, be not yet born. So they weren't even born yet.
neither having done any good or evil. They hadn't done good
in order to attract God's choice to themselves. There was no qualities
in them God saw. And they hadn't done any evil,
so there was nothing they had done to prohibit God's favor
towards them, to keep him from being favorable. But while the
children being not yet born, neither having done any good
or evil, that the purpose of God God always acts out of his
own purpose. He does all things according
to the counsel of his own will. That's what determines what God
does. What did his will say? The counsel
of his own mind, his thoughts. That's what he does, according
to God's purpose. to according to election, that
was his purpose, election, his own purpose according to election
might stand not of works, but of him that calleth. So salvation
is not of our works. Does that make you feel like,
well, I don't have a chance? Does that make you feel like,
well, God's unfair? See, that's the natural response we have.
We feel like it's been taken away from us all of our ability
to influence the outcome. We can't influence the outcome,
therefore we feel out of, well, we just feel at loss. We don't
know what to do. Guess what? It's worse than just not being
able to influence it. We've done everything to disinfluence,
if that's even a word, to persuade God against saving us, yet his
grace didn't depend upon us. He chose to save us by saving
us by His grace alone. He chose us to save us individually
by His own will. That's grace. And if we have
a problem with that, it's because we don't really understand what
grace is and we don't really understand our condition. If
we understood our condition that we're sinners against God, we
have nothing to do with God. In our minds, we don't like to
retain God. If we understood that, then we
would see that it had to be God entirely on his part saving us. And that's why it's called grace.
Grace starts with God. It began with God before we were
ever created, before we were ever born, and it ends with God. Not only is our election by grace,
but notice this. Look at Romans 3 and verse 24.
He says in Romans 3, 24, being justified freely by His grace. There it is again. God did it.
He did it all, all that He required from us and demanded from us,
demanded our punishment for our sin, required our obedience for
our righteousness and our life. All that God required, He provided,
and He did it Himself without our contribution, and He did
it in Christ. And so he says here, being justified
freely, without cause found in us. That's what the word freely
means. He didn't look for cause and he wouldn't have found one
had he looked. Being justified freely by his grace through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus. That's the sum. That's
the conclusion of it all. We're justified by grace without
consideration of us because God considered the redeeming work
of Christ, our Redeemer. So we're chosen by grace, we're
justified by grace, and guess what? We're also called by grace.
Look at 2 Timothy, chapter 1, 2 Timothy, in chapter 1, in verse 9, he says, who hath saved
us, this is God, who hath saved us and called us, there's the
word called, according with a holy calling, not according to our
works, but according to His own purpose and grace. So, why are
we saved? Not for anything we did, but
for God's purpose, for reasons found in God, and according to
His grace. Out of motives He found in Himself
to be good, because God is good. So he says, reading it all together
now, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according
to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which
was given us in Christ Jesus. There it is. Where is God's grace?
In Christ Jesus. Before the world began. How much
more can you take it out of our hands than that? So we're chosen
by grace, we're justified by grace, we're called by grace. And look at Titus chapter three,
another text of scripture. Not only were we called, but
we were called to life. We were born to God as children
of God by grace. Look at Titus three, verse three.
For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving divers lusts, different kinds of lusts and pleasures,
living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. This
describes us all. But after that, after that the
kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not
by works of righteousness which we have done. There's no one
out there in the world who can claim they're saved because of
what they did. Because if you go that route,
you have to do all that God requires yourself. There's no middle ground.
Either Christ does it all or you do it all. And those who
end up in hell try to do it all and fail. Not by works of righteousness
which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us by
the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost. which
He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. That being justified by His grace,
we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Because God has justified us in Christ, He has given His Spirit
to us to birth us, to regenerate us, to give us life from the
dead. And then He continues that, He renews us all the time by
His Spirit. All that is God's work of grace,
because of His grace towards us, having justified us by Christ,
and He shed this grace upon us abundantly by Jesus Christ. Okay? So, look, and one more verse,
not only were we chosen by grace, justified by grace, called and
regenerated, made sons of God by grace, but look at this in
1 Peter 1. In 1 Peter 1, verse 5, he says
this, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation,
ready to be revealed in the last time. How are we kept? How are
we preserved? Well, we're preserved in Christ
Jesus, and that's by the power of God, not by our own power. We're kept by the power of God
through faith. And one more verse, Galatians
chapter five. Look at Galatians chapter five.
How do we live? How do we live? Well, this is
how. Galatians chapter five and verse five. We, through the spirit,
not through our own flesh, but we through the spirit of God,
wait, like a dog, wait. We wait for the hope of salvation,
a hope of righteousness, how? By faith. How do we wait? Through the Spirit. What are
we doing? What does wait mean? It means
we're just patiently enduring all of the difficulties of life,
taking God's Word as the way things are, trusting Him, and
expecting, that's what hope is, expecting God to do His Word,
like Abraham. He was fully persuaded that God,
who promised, was faithful and able to do what He promised.
That's what we do, by the Spirit. It's not by our own abilities,
but by the Spirit of God. Okay, so we see that all of our
salvation is by grace, right? And so in Romans chapter 6 and
verse 5, he says, sin shall not have dominion over you, for you
are not under the law, but under grace. Now, I fear, there's two
things I want to say here. I fear that in telling you these
things, I actually get in the way of God's grace. That I somehow
give some kind of a condition or barrier to you that prevents
you from fully trusting that your salvation is all of God's
grace. I don't want to do that. I don't
want to even hint at the fact that there's something you have
to do in order to make this work. I want you to understand from
God's word that your salvation is entirely God working, out
of motives found in himself to his glory alone. And that you,
seeing that, would stand still and see the salvation of the
Lord and see your salvation in him. Now, I would say that, first
of all, that I'm afraid that I would get in the way and make
somehow this grace less than it truly is, because it's beyond
our comprehension in the freeness of it and in the sufficiency
of it. It's all capable to do all that
we need to save us from our sins. The second thing is I want you
to understand here that when you are truly loved and you know
it, it has an effect upon you. And if you think about this as
grownups, I want you to consider this as grownups, that when a
husband and wife are joined together, there's a fruit that's produced
by that union of love, isn't there? It's called children.
The wife, because of the love her husband has to her, yields
herself to her husband in love. And the result of that union
is children. You see that? You know that,
don't you? You know something about that as an adult. But this is exactly what happens
in our salvation, only in an infinitely greater sense. Because
when God reveals to us the love of God in Christ, And we see
that the Son of God has loved me and gave himself for me and
giving himself for me has given all that is his to me with himself. That there is a yielding of submission
in love that is an irresistible wooing of God's Spirit in our
hearts by faith. He convinces us, he persuades
us of God's grace to us in Christ, and there's nothing else in this
world that we need, nothing more that we want. We want to submit
to the Lord Jesus Christ out of love. It's not a burden. It's
not a weight. Jesus said, come unto me, all
you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take
my yoke upon you and learn of me. I am meek and lowly of heart.
How hard is it to submit to someone who is humble? It's very easy,
especially when that humble person is able to do everything and
has done everything and will not stop until it's all done
in your own experience. They can be trusted, never lies.
You don't have to pretend anymore. You don't have to hide your sin.
You don't have to act like you're better than you are. All of your
virtue and righteousness and the covering for your sin is
found in the one who loved you and gave himself for you. And
there's no power in you to overcome your sin. And what do you do? And it's all by his grace. What
do you want to do? You want to live under that grace,
don't you? That's what he's saying here
in Romans chapter 6. Listen to verse 12. Let not sin
therefore reign in your mortal body that you should obey it
in the lust thereof. Your body is mortal. It's dying.
Your body is going to die. You don't owe it anything. Your
body has had the mastery over you in all of the lust of your
own flesh, seeking your own desires, the pride of your heart in order
to establish some place relative to other people in this world
and the ambition of your life, thinking, I have to grasp for
things I don't have because I want them. All those things are part
of your mortal body. Don't let sin have reign over,
sorry, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body that
you should obey it in the lust thereof. That describes our body. It's just a body of lust and
pride. He says, neither yield your members
as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but yield yourselves
to God as those that are alive from the dead and your members
as instruments of righteousness under God. We submit ourselves
as the Church of God, as the people saved by Christ, to our
Redeemer. the one who bought and paid our
debt when we had nothing to pay, who forgave us all of our sins,
not at the end after we performed something, but at the beginning,
fully and completely. You are forgiven all of your
sins for his sake alone. He didn't find anything in you
or from, didn't require anything from you, but he found it and
provided it in his son. And he has forgiven you all of
your sins. You have no guilt. And he has
provided all of your obedience in the obedience of Christ as
righteousness. And he looks upon his son. And
that's where he sees you. And he looks for you. And he
finds his son. And he receives you as his son.
And he gives you all that he gave his son because he gave
his son for you. And there's no barrier to this.
There's no impediment. God has removed everything. And
he says here, now yield yourself to him. The one who so loved
and gave out of grace in holy righteousness and fulfilled his
own truth and righteousness in order to have you for himself. Yield yourself to him in a submission
that bears fruit. Because he goes on, he says in,
let's see, In verse 20, for when you were
the servants of sin, you were free from righteousness. You
couldn't do any righteousness. What fruit had you then in those
things whereof you're now ashamed? For the end of those things is
what? Death. But now being made free from
sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness
and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Fruit comes from who? The Spirit of God. And the faith
given to us to see our salvation in Christ also comes from Him.
God gives it. He gives it to His Son to give
to us, who gives it to us by His own Spirit. And that faith
looks to Christ and sees in Christ everything and comes to God by
Him and submits. in love, in happy, glad trust,
in leaning upon a staff, this is all my life, embracing, I
want this, I want him. And this happens when we see
Christ is all in our salvation. And this is the way God promises.
Now notice in Romans 6, 14, sin shall not have dominion over
you. That is a truth, that is a promise. That is not something
that is accomplished by our fulfilling some condition. This is God's
doing. This was by grace. Can we believe that? Remember,
the cry of our heart is that God would do for us what was
in His heart before because He put that cry there. He put it
in our heart to ask him to save us. He put it in the heart of
the woman. He says, if you knew the gift of God and who it is
that says to you, give me to drink, you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water. So God puts it in our
heart. Who is asking us? The Lord Jesus
Christ. Who should we ask then? The Lord
Jesus Christ. Remember what Jesus said to the
woman taking an adultery? Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you? No
man, Lord. And then Jesus said, neither
do I condemn thee. I justify you. Therefore, go and sin no more. What was she going to do then?
Okay, I've got a big burden now. I've got to go out and fulfill
this huge task. What's the definition of insanity? I heard this a long time ago.
It's doing the same thing and expecting different results.
That's the colloquial definition of it. But isn't that natural
to us? We think, let's see, I got myself
into my indebtedness to God by my sin. I got to get myself out
of my indebtedness by paying it back by not sinning, by making
up for it, by resolving to do better and setting a pattern
in my life to fix the problems that I created by my sin. That's
the definition of insanity. That's what the first part of
Romans is proving. First, that God's wrath is against
us because of our unrighteousness. Second, that we love to have
it this way. God showed himself to us in truth
and we suppressed it. We turned it off. We did not
like to retain God in our knowledge, but we set up idols that we could
manipulate because we didn't like God as he was made known
to us. And so God gave us over to what?
Our own heart's lust. So that we did everything that
was in our heart, which was corrupt. So we were guilty before God.
We attracted His wrath towards us by our sin, and we were corrupt
in nature. And then God gave his law, a
written law, with his own hand. And those to whom it was given
used that law, not to highlight their sin and drive them to Christ,
but as a weapon against others. Aha, now I've got this hugely
powerful weapon that condemns sinners, and I can see sinners
all over the place, and I'm going to fire it at them and put them
to death. And so we naturally are like
those legalists who take God's requirements on us, And we identify
the failure of others, and we try to elevate ourselves by comparing
ourselves to them in light of God's law. And we say, well,
I'm surely not as bad as that guy over there. And the Lord
uses our own words to condemn us. He says, you that teach others,
don't you teach yourself? You that preach a man should
not steal, do you steal? You that say, do not commit adultery,
do you commit adultery? and so on. And so God proves
that we naturally are so corrupt that even given his holy law,
we use it not in order to show us our sin, but to hide our sins,
to inflate our righteousness as if we had any, and to condemn
others because we're merciless, cruel and merciless. So God's
law actually discovers and makes evident our corruptions. So we're
guilty, we're corrupt, God's law excites all of that, it inflames
our pride and our lust, and we sin more. When God closes the
law in the Ten Commandments, he says, thou shalt not covet.
And the Apostle Paul in Romans 7 says, as soon as the law said
that, I found all kinds of covetousness. I wanted everything. I had ambition. I had pride. I had pleasure,
lust for pleasure. I had everything going rampant
in my life. And when God said, it's on the
inside that I'm concerned about covetousness, just try to stop
envying. Try to stop trying to put yourself
on a comparison with other people to see if you can measure up
or get better than them. Try it. You won't be able to
do it for a moment. Your motives, your thoughts,
all of your drive and energy is covetousness. And so that's
the point here. Insanity means taking what God's
law proves us to be and trying to fulfill now on the other side
what we could never do under the law to fulfill it in our
sanctification. It won't work. And when a preacher
gets up and preaches against a particular sin, this is what
you can be certain of, that he's guilty of that sin. The very
thing that we decry from the pulpit is the very thing that
we ourselves are most familiar with in our own commission of
it. You see? And that's what he says in Romans
chapter 2. You that judge others, you judge yourselves because
you're guilty of the same thing. And I'll read it to you the way
it's written there. He says in Romans chapter 2 in
verse 1, he says, therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever
thou art, that judgest. For wherein thou judgest another,
thou condemnest thyself, for thou that judgest doest the same
things. This is true in religion. It's
true in politics. You want to know what someone
is guilty of, what they're thinking of doing? Just listen to them.
What are they accusing others of doing? That is the very thing
they're planning and conniving and doing in secret. And that's
the way the law is. But we, in our insanity, we take
the guilt God's law proves us to be, the guiltiness we are,
the corruptions of our nature, our idolatrous ways and thoughts,
and our judgmental, legalistic attitude And he proves there's
no good, none righteous, not one, and we're no better than
those who have the law and break it, we're no better than they
are. But now, into the darkness, a light piercing that darkness
of human vile corruptions and sin, which is what we all are
in the eyes of God in ourselves, into that darkness shines the
bright light of what? The righteousness of God. God
has found a way to, in truth and in holiness and in consistency
with his own nature, to save a sinful people, to justify the
ungodly, because Christ died for the ungodly. He died for
sinners, and when we were God's enemies, he reconciled us by
the death of his Son. The whole weight of God's requirements
on us was laid, come to weight on the Lord Jesus Christ. And
he fulfilled it, he shouldered it, he bore it up out of love
and grace that was in his heart for his people. And now he says
in promise here, sin shall not have dominion over you. Don't
think in your natural insanity of going back and fulfilling
the gospel, producing the fruit of the gospel
by living as under the law. Don't think you're going to produce
children to Christ by living under the law. You know how you
live? By the Spirit. We walk in newness
of spirit. And what does that mean? It means
that God has revealed to us what Christ has done. It means he
has made known to us in our heart. He's written it upon our heart.
I am absolutely guilty and corrupt and weak and have no strength
before God. God has to save me all by his
grace. And he has done so in Christ.
That's the way I come. And since I come by Christ alone,
then I can come boldly. And I can come even into the
very presence of God in all of His holiness where Christ offered
His blood and I was accepted because of the blood. That's
what God says in Hebrews 10, 19. Having therefore, brethren,
boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus. That's
the only reason and because it's the only reason we can come boldly. Okay? Now, this is God's promise. What are we going to do? What
would the woman do? Go and sin no more. Would she
not turn again to the one who just delivered her from this
debt she had nothing to pay, but paid it all for her, who
hid her sin under the cloak of his righteousness in love? What
would she do? Would she not go to him who gave
her that grace that she might live to God in submission of
love? Look at Romans chapter 5 and
verse 10. We read this a minute ago. For if, when we were enemies,
we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more,
being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. This is how,
by grace, by the life of Christ. Look at Romans 8 and verse 1.
He says, there is therefore now no condemnation, exactly what
Jesus told the woman in John 8, 11. There is therefore now
no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk
not after the flesh, but after the spirit. We do not take any
confidence in our flesh. We don't try to puff it up, or
smooth it out, or beat it down, or whatever we say. We don't
take confidence in ourselves, in our flesh. But we walk after
the Spirit. The Spirit of God has drawn us
and brought us to Christ, has given us faith in Him. And how
do you know you have saving faith? I ask this question. How do you
know that you have saving faith, that you are His? Well, just
a minute. Rip open your chest and look
inside and see. Aha! There it is. No? Saving faith is identified in
one way only. The object of our faith. Who do you believe? That's the
question. Not how much or how purely, but
who. And who do we believe? We believe
the one who identifies himself to us by his name and by his
relations to us and by his work, don't we? The name is the son
of God, his person, the son of man, the Lord Jesus Christ. And his relations to us, he's
our shepherd, our redeemer, the propitiation for our sins. He's
our righteousness. You see, we can go down this
list here. Everything that Christ is, He is. in Himself for His
people and He accomplished by His work. So that when we say
we trust Christ, we trust Him in these things. The Son of God
who loved me and gave Himself for me, we preach Jesus Christ
and Him crucified. Our Redeemer, our Shepherd, the
One who provides Himself and in providing Himself provides
all that He requires for us. The one we find our all in. The
one who stands up against our enemies as our banner, Jehovanisi. The one who heals us. He was
beaten, we are healed. He died, we live. We died with
him. Our husband, the one who does
everything, took our obligations and everything that he did, we
were credited with. Because as the first Adam, everything
he did in that one transgression, we did in him. So in the second
Adam, all of our sins, our many sins, were put on him, and all
of his righteousness is counted as ours. So all of the names
of Jesus Christ in his person, in his relations, and in his
saving work, that's the one we trust. And how do we know these
things? From God's word in the gospel. And so when God speaks
to us here, for you are not under the law but under grace, He's
speaking about those who have been given this grace to see
Christ is everything. They don't bring a value on their
own, they're sinners, they're ungodly. Their sin and their
ungodliness qualifies them for the promise. Not that we go out
to sin in order to become qualified, we just are that way. Our hearts
are already corrupt and our actions are already sinful. We can look
back on our life and see it just lines so well with Romans chapter
1, 2, and 3. We fit that description perfectly.
So totally wicked and helpless in our wickedness. We're so foul
and vile that God should destroy us. But God says, no, when we
were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.
And now, much more being reconciled, we'll be saved by his life. We
don't walk after the flesh. We walk after the spirit. The
spirit has shined a light on Christ, and we live looking to
Jesus. He goes on in Romans 8 too, for
the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free
from the law of sin and death. The spirit of Christ in me has
revealed Christ for me. I trust in him in all things
coming to God by him. And that's the spirit of life
in Christ Jesus. The gospel, the gospel in Christ
living in me. It's written on our heart. The
life of God living in me in Christ Jesus. For what the law could
not do, and that it was weak through my flesh, or the flesh,
God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and
for sin condemned sin in the flesh, when it condemned my sin
in his flesh. That the righteousness of the
law might be fulfilled in us. What is the righteousness of
the law? Perfection. And what is the fulfillment?
When you do all the law, what do you get? Life. Everlasting
life is fulfilled in us. Christ lives in us by His Spirit.
So one more look at Romans 6, 14. Sin shall not have dominion
over you. What are you going to do? Lord,
do not let any iniquity have dominion over me. You are not
under the law but under grace. Does this make us say, whew,
man, that is such good news. I've always wanted to commit
that sin and now I'm under grace, I can go do it freely, don't
have any restraints. Is that the way it works? Well,
think about it. If Denise told me that she loved
me and that she would never stop loving me and she loved me no
matter what, no matter what I do, if I truly believed that she
loved me, What would I do? Would I just go live contrary
to her love? Absolutely not. That would prove
the very opposite, that I did not believe her love. But it
says in 1 John 4, we have known and believed the love God has
for us. So we don't act like that. And
I don't require my wife to give me a list of things. Now, you
be sure and do this or my love will change. No, I know that
she loves me unconditionally and faithfully. So I love her
too. That's the way it works. And
if it works that way on a human scale, how much more on a divine
scale? Grace keeps sin from reigning
over us. Look at Romans 5.21. As sin has
reigned unto death, can you stop death? I haven't met anyone yet
who could. Of course you can't. You have
no more power over death. Well, you have no more power
over death than you do have power over death. You have no power
over it. But that's how much power you have over your own
sin. As sin has reigned unto death, even so might grace reign.
Christ reigns. His grace reigns through His
righteousness unto eternal life. It's all by Jesus Christ, our
Lord. Okay? So how are we going to, how is
sin not going to have dominion over us? The Lord Jesus Christ,
by his grace, will not let it have dominion over us. So we
come to him, Lord, don't let any iniquity have dominion over
me. This is your promise. It's your work. It's all because
of your grace. Therefore, I'm looking to you
to do what only you can do, what you promised to do, what I know
you will do. I'm expecting it. Isn't it wonderful? All of the stress is taken away. I mean, there is a stress, there
is a warfare. Romans 7 describes that warfare.
But who's gonna win? The Lord Jesus Christ. Remember,
that's the answer to every question. I thank God through Jesus Christ,
our Lord. That's what he says at the end. Let's pray. Father,
thank you for your goodness towards us. It's immeasurable, it's incomprehensible,
it's infinite, and we will never exhaust it. Your loving kindness
will be made known to us fully in the ages to come, but now
by faith we see these things from your word, and we, like
Abraham, are persuaded of them. We're persuaded that you who
promised are able to do all that you promised and that you did
accomplish our salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have
told us, even commanded us now to reckon it to be so and to
come to God at all times by Him. And so we rest our case, we rest
our all in the Lord Jesus Christ and we find that in Him we have
an all-sufficient supply. because You have given us everything
in Him. Help us never to go back to the law, to think that we
can somehow undo what we have done, or change what we are.
We cannot. Only the Lord Jesus Christ can
give us His Spirit, and by His Spirit living in us, we live
to God. And only by Your grace will sin not have dominion over
us. So we pray, Lord, coming to you with an empty hand and
a needy heart. Save us for your name's sake.
Hear us, bless us, save us, Lord. We come to you, looking to Christ,
expecting you to do what you've said. In Jesus' name we pray,
amen.