Let's turn this morning to the
book of Romans chapter 7. Romans chapter 7. It simply is not possible. for any man or woman by nature,
for us to see our sin and therefore ourselves as God sees us by nature. We wouldn't survive if God showed
us what we really are in our sin. The only man in the flesh
who ever really saw that was the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember,
he went into the garden and prayed, and he had a vision of what would
happen to him when he was made sin at the cross. It made his blood run backwards. And I don't know what that means,
but I know he would have died had not angels come intended
to him. Can you imagine what would happen
to us? if we really saw sin as God sees it. Having said that,
whenever God saves a sinner, you can be certain that he is
going to give that sinner a glimpse of their sin. No one can stand a full revelation,
but nevertheless, God never saves any sinner without some revelation
of who and what we are by nature in God's view of sin. That revelation
most often comes by the reading or the preaching of the Word
of God. And most older believers here will testify that the longer
we live, you know what happens? The more we see of just how vile
we are by nature. And what these recurring, ever-worsening
revelations accomplish, you say, why is it that the longer a believer
lives, The more awful he really comes to realize he is. Why is
that? For the same reason God chose
the sinner when he first saves him, who and what he is. So we'll
flee to the Lord Jesus Christ. A sick person, I mean, the only
person who goes to a doctor is what? I already gave it away,
didn't I? It's a sick person. That's the only one who's going
to go to the doctor is somebody who's sick. If we ever see our sin, we'll
want to run faster to the Lord Jesus Christ. The more we see
of our sin, we'll follow him more diligently. Did you ever
notice us old-timers? Not too many Wednesday
nights or Sunday nights at Sun School lessons. We're not there. You know why? I'm figuring out
every day I need the Lord Jesus Christ more than I did when I
was young. I see how bad I am, how wicked
I am. And some weeks ago, I got a fresh
revelation of my sin. It's never pleasant, but it's
been percolating in my mind ever since. And you say, what do you
mean by that? Well, did you ever eat something, tasted fine when
you ate it, but then a little while later, you kind of get
this gurgling going on in your stomach? And you know, you think it's
going to be OK, it's going to be all right. And then it gurgles a little more
and maybe you burp. And then maybe you start to get
this heartburn thing or your little acid reflux and you go,
I've got a problem and I better deal with this. Ever happened
to you? Well, I, you know, I've read
this portion of Scripture before, heard it preached from lots of
things, but something happened, I saw it. And boy, it got to
percolating, and I said, I'm going to have to look into this.
And the portion of Scripture I'm talking about is Romans 7,
verse 24, where the Apostle Paul said, O wretched man that I am. Do you know what that word wretched
means? Miserable. Paul said, oh, miserable man
that I am. And I didn't really like the
picture I was getting and what was percolating, but you know,
I began to see something of what Paul was talking about here.
And miserable and wretched in this context has a different
connotation, a subtle thing that means bearing the experience
or the reality of misery. It's one thing to sing that song,
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like
me. It's one thing to sing that.
And it's another thing to say the words, I'm wretched. It's something else to be wretched. To be wretched. It's an altogether
different thing to be miserable. And I suppose that there's a
number of things that can occur that would make us think we're
miserable. Kids are great at it. You just
don't let them have their way and they think they're miserable.
And we have a little disappointment or some sad experience or frustration. But let me give you an example
of true human misery, which I suspect every one of us here has as a
common experience. This is not going to be pleasant,
but you've got to bear with me to get to the point of all this,
OK? I learned a word recently. I called a schoolteacher, actually,
to find out this word, because I didn't know what it was. I
said, what's the term for two words that sound alike, but they
have different meanings? Like, there's seven days in the
week, W-E-E-K. But if you're not strong, then
you're weak, W-E-A-K. They sound just alike, but they
mean two different things, don't they? You know, there's another
word for wretch, w-r-e-t-c-h, for miserable. It's r-e-t-c-h. They're pronounced just the same.
You know what it means? R-e-t-c-h means to vomit. Now, I'm sorry, that's called
a homophone. Two words sound just alike, but
they mean different things. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry if you've
experienced that, but I think most of us have. And you say,
is that really miserable? Well, my experience is that it
is. And the point I want to make
is there's a little window of time when that happens. And you
know what happens? You have no control over your
body or your mind. Megan Davis is just grinning
at me. She has had that she's expecting, and she's had a few
miserable months of this. But am I telling the truth? There's
this little window, and if you've never experienced this, I'm sorry,
you're just going to take the word from the rest of us, OK? There's
this little window of time. You have no control of your mind
or your body. You can tell yourself I won't.
I won't. But you do it anyway. You try
to stop, but you can't. You don't want
to. You don't want to do it, but
you do it anyway. The Apostle Paul had that kind
of problem. It's why he called himself a
wretch. Have you got Romans 7, verse 15? For that which I do, I allow
not. For what I would, that's not
what I do. But the very thing I hate, that's
what I do. Have you got verse 19? He says,
For the good that I would, I do not. But the evil which I would
not, that's what I do. It sounds to me like Paul is
saying, I don't seem to have much control over this. Sound
familiar? What's the problem? Look at verse
20. He said, Now if I do that what I would not, it's no more
I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. Paul's got a problem here
which he can't control. It's his sin. He's got a sin
sickness. So do you and I. I do. Now does that expose the awful
lie about free will? Will you just try this? The next
time you think that you're actually going to throw up, just exercise
your free will and see how that works out. Let me ask you this. Religion
is the only thing in the world that modern day preachers treat
this way, would dare to make this application. You know, they
say, well, You know, Jesus has done all he can do, and now it's
up to you. You've got to let him into your
heart and let him save you. Let me ask this. If you found
out you had cancer, would you go home and sit down and cross
your legs and your arms and say, well, you know, if if a cancer
specialist calls me and begs me to let him come over, I might
just let him see if he can help me. Is that the attitude you're
going to exercise your free will that way? Do we see how absurd
this whole application is? If we ever find out that we're
sick, really sick, if we ever find out what sin sick is, we'll
be the path to the door of the Great Physician, begging the
Lord Jesus Christ to help us. We'll race after Him, pleading
for mercy to do for us what we can't do for ourselves. Because
our sin is out of control. Paul said, O wretched man that
I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? The question ought to be, why
don't all men come to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Great Physician?
Why don't we just come? There's an awful answer to that.
Turn to Revelation 3. Why don't we all Run to the Lord Jesus Christ,
the Great Physician. The answer to that in the first
place is that we don't, by nature, really think we're sick. We really
don't. Have you ever kid yourself about
that? That's what it's all about. Before,
you get that gurgling and you go, there's nothing wrong with
me. I'm going to be okay. I'll just take a little antacid. I'm
alright. We delude ourselves consistently that there's not
anything really wrong. Here's an example of it in Revelation
3, verse 16. God says, So then because you're
lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, he said, I'll spew thee
out of my mouth. And that word spew is just what
you think it is. I'll spew you out of my mouth
because you say I'm rich and increased with goods and have
need of nothing and know as not that you're wretched and miserable
and poor and blind and naked. You see, by nature, we all are
blind to the reality of our sin sickness. We think we're happy,
but we're wretched. We think with all the stuff we've
got, we're rich, when in fact, we're poor. We think we're clothed,
when in fact, we're naked in sin. We think we see, but are
blind. If the light we have is darkness,
how great is the darkness? We delude ourselves and say,
isn't there something wrong with me? I'm OK. It's going to be
all right. Let's turn to Proverbs 26. And here's the second reason that
all men don't come to the Lord Jesus Christ, the great physician. In the first place, we don't
by nature, because we think we don't really think we're sick,
but the second thing. And this is tough. Do you know what? We like our sin. We love it. You say, no. Yeah, we do. And here's the Scripture used
to prove that. And again, I apologize that it's
graphic, but it doesn't change it. Let me ask you this. Who would like that? It smells awful. It looks disgusting. It sounds terrible. It's vile.
And anyone here who's ever owned a dog knows the truth of this
proverb. Have you got it? Proverb 2611.
As a dog returns to its vomit, and they do, so a fool returns to his folly,
and that word is sin. You say, this is really disgusting,
Bob. I'm sorry, but we are in God's
sight by nature. It's a dog's nature to do what
he does, and it's a natural man's nature, it's a sinner's nature
to return to sin rather than seek the physician who can put
away the sin. By nature, we're worse than the
dog. All the dog does is eat his own
spew. We're sin eaters. We drink iniquity
like water. We sin and regurgitate it all
over everyone else and ourselves only to start it again and do
it over and over endlessly all the days of our lives. That is
sin sick. That is sick. Are you convinced yet? The Apostle
Paul was. Back in Romans 7, he said, Oh,
wretched man that I am. I am. We don't have a lot of
trouble looking at one another and going, John, it's me. Look in the mirror, it's me.
I'm the one who's wretched and miserable. Paul asks the question, Who shall
deliver me from this body of death? You know, we just think that
this mess we're talking about, hurling and stuff and what comes
out, we just think that's vile. You know, if you're a parent,
you smell that before with your kids, and it's not nice. Let
me tell you what really smells. I've smelled this smell two times,
years apart. One time, I was at Lake Cumberland. And it was June, good and hot,
but the previous winter, a man fell out of a boat and drowned
and sank in 300 feet of water. They couldn't find him. They
tried for days and couldn't find him. I'm managing the dock and
this boat roars up and says, there's something out here in
the lake, in the cove. And I don't know why, I thought,
hmm. And I got a dark hand, and we
headed out there, and here this guy was. How many months after
being down there in decay and coming up, the smell of death
you will never forget. Not when it's not all prettied
up at the funeral home and covered up with chemicals. You smell
that, and I mean, you talk about Hurl. I'd like to never got a
rope around that enough to where the medics could come and take
care of it. But you know, I smell that one
of the time. You know where it was? Years later, we're in Mexico. And Walter and Betty Groover
take us to the to the pyramids of Chichen Itza. And on the top
of that pyramid, they had a room. And you know what they did in
that room? They had human sacrifice. And I walked in that room and
looked around and went, I've got to get out of here. It took
me right back to the lake. It was the same smell and it
had been a thousand years since anybody died in that room. That's what sin smells like to
God except worse. I didn't come here to disgust
you, but we're disgusting. Our sin is vile. It's miserable
and wretched. Who can deliver a sin-sick sinner? The answer, Paul, he didn't wait
long to give it to us. In verse 25, he says, in our
text, verse 25, he says, I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Who shall deliver me from this
body of death? I thank God for the Lord Jesus Christ. He is
able to deliver us. Here's the next question. How
can he do that? How can Jesus Christ deliver
this thing we are, this sin, from our sin sickness? Well,
I've got to go back to the illustration. You moms, when one of your children
upchecks, what do you do? Well, you comfort the child and
you try to determine the cause and do we need to go to the doctor
and this sort of thing. But then I know what you do.
You clean it up. You have to clean it up. You
mop and you wipe and you disinfect, and the goal is to remove any
indication that the vile stuff ever existed. It's a disgusting,
nasty, miserable job, but you do it for two reasons. Number
one is nobody else is going to. And if they tried it, they couldn't
do it to suit you. But secondly, you do it because
you love that child and you want every evidence of that child's
misery gone. The Lord Jesus Christ went to
Calvary to clean up the mess his children made and the mess
they are. You know why? Nobody else would
and nobody else could. He could pay with his death the
price of the sin of all his children, only he could do that to God's
satisfaction. And he did. Secondly, he did
it willingly because he loves his children, even unto death. The only thing that can clean
up this mess, this sin sickness, is the blood of Jesus Christ.
And folks, he's done it. He's done it. Our works, our
so-called good deeds, giving, tithing, prayers, witnessing,
nothing we do can disinfect the violence of our sin. Only the
blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. It's done. Aren't you glad we don't smell
like the guy in the lake? Not anymore. sweet fragrance
in the nostrils of God. Why? He doesn't smell us. He
smells the Lord Jesus Christ. One more thing is needful. We
do need to be cleaned up in order to go into God's presence. We
cannot be sin sick, but we also must be perfectly healthy. That
is to be completely righteous. How is that done? Well, imagine
it's the Lord Jesus Christ again. He's done that also. And Paul
went right into that. In Romans 8, he says, There is
therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus,
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the
law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free
from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do,
in that it was weeped through the flesh, God sending his own
Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned
sin in the flesh." He's put away our sin. But now look, that's
not all. "...that the righteousness of the law was fulfilled in us
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." How did
we fulfill the law? In the Lord Jesus Christ. That's
how we did it. He did it for us. Our Lord not
only cleaned up the mess. If we go into God's presence
having never been sick, but we're also holy and righteous in Christ,
we're perfect. Now, there may be somebody here
this morning who doesn't think it's really quite as bad as I'm
making this all out to be, this sin thing. Well, hear this warning. There's no way to dress up this
mess. I've got another big word for
you. I had to look this one up, too. I thought I knew what it
meant, but boy, when I read the definition of it, that's really
it. You've probably heard the word euphemism. Euphemism. Well, when I looked it up, this
is what it said. Euphemism is the substitution of an agreeable
expression for one that is offensive or unpleasant. You want to hear
that again? A euphemism is to use an agreeable
term for one that's really offensive or unpleasant. Now, you may have
noticed I've used a number of euphemisms for wretch or vomit
this morning. There was blue lunch, upchuck,
spew, barf, puke, hurl. I didn't use heave, spit up,
expel, and get this one, toss your cookies. How did we get
from cookies to vomit? Huh? How crazy is that? They
have nothing in common. Nothing. Somebody tell me how
modern day preachers got from the terms they use for sin, the
euphemisms they use for sin, to what God says sin is. Just
listen to them. They say, There's indiscretions,
there's vices and taboos and foibles and shortcomings. And
how about character flaws? You know, nobody lies anymore.
They just misspeak. If it weren't so heartbreaking,
it would be humorous. Nobody steals. They misappropriate. Nobody cheats. They avail themselves
of business opportunities. I'm telling you, preachers aren't
telling the truth about sin because they're not telling the truth
about Jesus Christ. They don't dare tell us how bad
it is because they don't have a Savior who can save. We do. I'm not afraid to come in here
this morning and make these comparisons. I didn't come to make you sick,
but I'm telling you, our sin makes God sick. We need somebody
who can save us from our sin sickness, not some helpless person
who stands down front or walks across the banister of heaven
wringing his hands saying, Oh, you know, you better let Jesus
in. I wish he'd let me into their
hearts. No, no. Jesus Christ has chosen a people
knowing what we are by nature, and he saved us knowing he was
able to do it. We didn't slap some man in the
face. We didn't just pluck out some
facial hair. We didn't just expectorate. That's
a euphemism for spit. We didn't just expectorate in
the face of some man. At Calvary, we crucified an innocent
man. And it wasn't just any man. It
was the only Son of God, Jesus Christ. Are we so deluded that
we suppose that God is going to euphemize what we did and
call it self-defense or justifiable homicide or even manslaughter? No, we murdered God's Son. And
He rightly sees it for what it is. And He sees us rightly for
what we are. We are accountable for what we
did. Yes, we are. And this defense of, well, I
wasn't there. Well, we were in Adam, and if
you don't want any part of that, you can't have any part of being
in Christ. If we had been there, we would
have been angry because we didn't get to take the hammer and hold
the spice. We did what we did because of
what we are. We are sin-sick sinners. You
can dress this up any way you want to. It is still sin, and
the Word of God still says, The soul that sinneth shall surely
die. Indeed, when Paul says, Who is
going to deliver me from this body of death? If you don't have
Jesus Christ, you don't have a deliverer. You don't have anybody
to deliver you. Turn to 1 John. We're just about
done. Turn to 1 John. I'm going to
conclude with this Scripture, but let me give you one more
illustration. Y'all probably get tired of hearing
me talk about being a little boy, but I was once, I promise. I was maybe four, something like
that, a little bitty guy. And in our family, we sat down
to dinner at night, and after we ate, Even as little kids,
we'd pick up and carry our dishes to the kitchen for my mom, and
then she would bring in dessert, and we'd have dessert. And this
particular night, my mother had ice cream with some chocolate
sauce, and then we had a big jar of those red cherries, maraschino
cherries, the ones, bright red ones with little stems. And I
tell you, you got a cherry on top. And if you ate all your
dinner, you got two. And I could never get enough,
and I wanted a third, and no, no, two is all you get. So we
finish and take our dishes into the kitchen, and I put the cherries
back in the refrigerator. And way in the wee hours of the
morning, I went in and woke up my mom and said, I'm sick, I'm
going to be sick. And she rushes me into the bathroom
over the commode, and here it comes. And it's all red, and
she thinks she's bleeding to death. And she calls the, it
was, call this way back then. She calls the doctor. And back
then in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, the family doctor had
his office in a house downstairs and lived above it. So he's right
there and he says, well, bring him in, bring him in. She gets
me there and sits me on the table and, you know, he takes my temperature
and I don't have any. He pokes around in my stomach
and can't find anything. He does everything, nothing there.
And he says, well, what did he eat? And she told him everything.
And he goes, well, I don't see any problem there. And he looked
at me and he said, did he eat anything else? And I'm going, I don't want to look at him.
And finally he says, Robert, did you eat anything else? And he said, what did you eat?
And I said, I didn't eat any cherries. I didn't. I didn't.
But I drank all the juice. I stood in the corner behind
the door of that refrigerator and took off the lid and drank
every bit of it and put it back down. If my mother hadn't been
so glad I wasn't bleeding to death, she'd have killed me. Listen to the application of
that. We can pretend we never ate the
cherries, we just drank the juice. We can pretend that we're not
sick, even though we are. We can even pretend we're sick,
but it's not our fault. None of that works. The truth
is always going to be revealed by the great physician. He knows
every transgression ever committed and the question to ask to bring
us to the place of saying, I did it. I did it. Everyone here like me has drunk
the cherry juice and for a time I got away with it. But in the
end, we'll be found out as the cherry juice drinkers, as the
sinners we are. The only hope we have is to flee
to the great position and say, I did it. Oh, wretched man that
I am. Look here at 1 John 1, verse
7. Read these three verses and we'll
conclude. If we walk in the light as he
is in the light, We have fellowship one with another, and the blood
of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. Now, if we say
that we have no sin, we are just deceiving ourselves and the truth
is not in us. If we confess our sin, he is
faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness. We have one hope, the Great Physician. Come to Christ. Come on, come
on. A great and kind and wise and
wonderful physician. He'll make you well. The only
one who can. And I didn't come here to make
everybody sick. I hope you know I didn't mean
to be offensive, and I hope I didn't offend you with that. But I hope
somebody, for the first time, got sin sick this morning and
will flee to the Lord Jesus Christ, the great physician. If that
happens, we'll all leave here rejoicing. Oh, you got a closing hymn pick?