Turn with me to Romans chapter
3. Romans 3, and the verse I want
to look at this morning with you is the last verse of the
chapter, verse 31. Let's read that. Do we then make void
the law through faith? God forbid. Yea, we establish
the law. Now how do we establish the law
by faith? Because that's what Paul is talking
about. We're now born of the grace of
God. We are believers. Our faith looks
to Christ. So how do we now establish the
law by faith? Have you ever wondered that?
What does Paul mean when he says that we establish the law by
faith? I've wondered it. I've admittedly
wondered, is Paul somehow implying here that after that grace has
come, and I've been given the spirit of God, and that my hope
is now fixed in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is Paul saying that now
I can go back to the law? and take another crack at the
law, and now I can keep the law by the works of my flesh and
what I do in religion. Is that what Paul is saying? I want to know that because just
thinking about that troubles me. Just thinking that now I'm
supposed to go back to the law with some expectation that I
can keep it, I feel the yoke of the burden of the law begin
to weigh me down at that very thought. So, what does Paul mean
that we establish the law by faith? Well, first of all, when
we speak of faith, we cannot be talking about the flesh. Paul tells us in Galatians 3.12
that the law is not of faith. It's not of faith, but the man
that do with them, if you're going to do the law, that's how
you're going to live. If you're going to go to God
in the law, you better be perfect, because that's going to be your
life. Otherwise, any infraction of that law, any breaking of
that law, You're dead. You've come under the curses
of the law. So no, Paul is not now turning
believers back to the law. He opposed that very thing when
speaking to the Galatians. He opposed that very thing. He
said, if you go back to the law now, you're falling from grace. If you go and get circumcised
now that you're believing in Christ, thinking that this is
somehow going to, that this is necessary or somehow going to
improve your standing before God, you've fallen from grace. That's not the gospel. That's
not what the Lord is teaching us. So after we've been born
again by the Spirit of God, After that, he's come to us and given
us hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We're not now able to keep the
law by the works of this flesh. Because that's how you do the
laws. It's in the flesh. It's doing the works of the law
by the flesh. In fact, let's look at some scriptures
that speak of believers after that faith is come. Turn over
to Romans chapter 7. We'll look at a few verses here
in this chapter. Romans 7. Now, I want to first
establish that Paul is, right now, he's describing himself
as a believer. Look at verse 24 and 25. He's a believer right now when
he's saying these things. Oh wretched man that I am. present tense, right now, this
is what I am. I'm a wretched man. And then he asks a question for
our benefit. He knows what we're thinking.
And he asks a question for our benefit and understanding by
showing what a child of God is brought to seek. God for, when
God pricks us in the heart, when God shows us that we are wretched,
vile sinners, what do we seek? Well, Paul says it, who shall
deliver me from the body of this death? When the Lord shows me
my sin, when I get a glimpse of it, you don't even have to
see it all, just when I get a glimpse of my sin, who shall save me
from the body of this death? We cry out because now all hope
in this flesh vanishes. It all disappears. I'm not the
guy I thought I was. I'm worse. I'm a sinner. I'm
a wicked, vile sinner without a righteousness before holy God. And what does the Lord of Glory
do when he's pricked us in our heart? Well, he reveals salvation
to his people in the face of Jesus Christ. That's his Savior. That's our Savior, his salvation
for us. I thank God through Jesus Christ
our Lord, so then with the mind I myself serve the law of God,
but with the flesh the law of sin. So he's saying, I now serve
the law of God, establishing the law by faith. That's what
he's saying. I'm establishing the law by faith
in Jesus Christ. But in my flesh, the law of sin. That's still working in my members,
this law of sin. And we'll look at that, what
that means a little bit later. So second, the law which Paul
speaks of earlier in this chapter 7, that law that he's speaking
of is a reference to the whole law of Moses. When he's talking
about the law, it's a reference to the whole law of Moses. Now, men today, going back at
least a few hundred years, they came up with a clever idea to
start breaking the law down into the moral law, and the ceremonial
law, and the civil law. And they started saying, well,
this part doesn't apply to us anymore, but this part still
applies to believers. And they started breaking it
up in that way, but We ought not to change it like that, because
Paul never speaks of the law in separate components like that.
It maybe helps us to sort of group things together, but there's
a danger in just dismissing the parts that we think don't apply
to us anymore in the law. And the sad part is, the risk
there is that you're actually missing what the Lord is teaching
you by the law. When he gave the law and we read
these scriptures, he's teaching us something about us through
the law, the whole law, the civil, the ceremonial, and the moral,
because it's showing us our sin. It's showing us our need of a
savior. It's showing us the penalty of
sin. It's showing us the wickedness of our sin. just how evil and
corrupting and vile and wretched our sin is. And so when we start
breaking it, we're dismissing a lot of what the Lord is showing
his people. So Paul was speaking of the law
of Moses when he said in Romans 7 verse 4, wherefore my brethren,
ye also are become dead to the law. That's how he refers to
it most of the time here. You're dead to the law by the
body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, even to
him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit
unto God. So being dead to the law in Christ
now by faith, in one sense it means we're delivered from the
curse of the law. The curse has no more bearing
on you in Christ. You're not in that body of Adam
anymore. You've been taken from that body
of death. and brought into the body of
Christ. You are members of Christ's body,
and that curse has nothing more to say to you and me who believe
in Christ. It's silenced. The accuser is
silenced against the children of God. The law has nothing more
to say to you. The law doesn't tell you and
direct you and tell you what to do any more than a dead husband
can tell his wife what to do. Whatever he wanted and demanded,
it's done. It's silence. He's got nothing more to say
to her. She doesn't listen to him anymore, and she's free to
be married to another. Which, for the church, is Christ. He's our husband, and we listen
to him. And so we're delivered from the curse of the law. We're delivered from that penalty
that the curse demands, which is our death. And we don't divide
it and split it up and say, well, this isn't talking about this
part of the law anymore. We don't follow that, but we
follow this part. Well, James said, whosoever shall
keep the whole law and yet offend in one part, Just one infraction,
one sin, you've broken, you're guilty of breaking the whole
law, the whole law, James 2.10. So Christ delivers his people
from the law's curse, which demands our death. And we're delivered
then also from the fear and the bondage that comes from the law. If we believe, if we think, that
we've now got to go back to the law and keep the law for a righteousness,
and that the law is going to somehow improve my standing with
God or improve my walk in some way. That recalls and brings
down all the threats and the fears and the curses of the law
upon me. It brings me back under the weight
of the law, hanging over my head. And with fears, that's what the
devil uses to manipulate and strike fear in the people, because
all their lifetime, they're laboring, they're working, they're sacrificing
to cleanse their guilty hands, and they can't ever get free
of it. Looking to the law, you just can't ever get free of that
doubt and that worry and the fear that I've not done enough,
because you never will do enough. We can't do enough. We can't
cry about it enough. We can't do enough works to put
it off. We can never do enough to satisfy
the righteous requirements of the law. And so we're always
going to come up short, drive ourselves nuts and mad trying
to be perfect under the law. And there's a lot of people who
call themselves Christians that are fearful and afraid and terrified
because they think that they've done what they needed to do to
make themselves Christians. That's part of the problem is
that they've made themselves Christians. And then they're
told to go back to the law for righteousness. And they're all
torn up and afraid and fearful and doubting and worried constantly. But our God, our Lord tells us
that every one of us has sinned and come short of the glory of
God. We're all sinners. And we're not going to fix that
by the law. Now, Paul, in this passage of
Romans 7, uses one of the 10 commandments. He actually uses
an actual commandment. And this is what he's saying
we're delivered from. And he calls, he recites back to us one of
the 10 commandments, the 10th commandment to be exact. And I think that serves to illustrate
this point of why we don't go back to the law. So verse 7,
Romans 7 verse 7. What shall we say then? Is the
law sin? God forbid. You say no, the problem
isn't with the law. The problem is with you and me.
It's with our flesh in Adam. It's our inherited sin nature
in Adam. No, I had not known sin but by
the law, for I had not known lust except the law had said,
thou shalt not covet. And so what he's saying there
is, I didn't realize the sinful lusts that were in me until the
law said, thou shalt not covet. And then, when I saw that law,
then I said, oh, I'm transgressing the law of God. And then the
fears And the worries begin to pile up. And those doubts and
worries, and we begin to see that I'm a sinner. And not just
here, but I'm a sinner here, and here, and there, and everywhere. We start seeing the filth and
blood in our hands. And that's the 10th commandment
of God. Now let's flip over briefly to Exodus 20. Go to Exodus chapter
20. this is where God gives Moses
the Ten Commandments. And we're going to pick up in
verse 17, just look at a few verses down through 20, but verse
17 is the Tenth Commandment. He says thou shalt not covet. That's what Paul said. The law
said thou shalt not covet. And then it gives examples. Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his
ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's. Today
it might be their pickup truck or their nice car or their tractor
or that they have a lot of kids or that they have these animals
or whatever they have, a lot of acreage, whatever it is that
man looks at and becomes jealous of and thinks, why does he have
that good job? I should have that job. Why did
he get promoted? That should have been me. Why does he get
recognized or all this? That's what we do. And we think
that I should get that. How come I'm being overlooked
and passed over for these things? What's going on here, right?
And then we start lusting for the things that another has rather
than being content in what our God has given to us. Now here's
why I think this is good. Verse 18, and all the people,
so after the 10th commandment was given, all the people saw
the thunderings and the lightnings and the noise of the trumpet
and the mountain smoking. And when the people saw it, they
removed, they drew back and stood afar off and said to Moses, you
talk to us. You get here from God, and you
come and talk to us, and we'll listen to what you say. But don't
let us talk to God, because we're going to die. We're going to
die. And so they saw these fearful things, these terrifying things
in the law. It's a picture to show us that
under the law, if you don't keep the law perfectly, you come under
the curses, the thunderings, the lightnings, the sound of
the trumpet declaring your imminent judgment. It's declaring judgment. And so, they're right to be terrified. Because in Adam, we've inherited
Adam's sin nature. for fallen sinners who cannot
keep the law for righteousness. And just as Adam's fig leaves
were no covering for his nakedness, so our works in religion are
no covering for our nakedness and sin, for our sin and nakedness.
And so this brings us to the third point. Which is why, then,
was the law of commandment, why was the whole law of Moses given
if we can't keep it? Because there have been people
in history that have said, God would never have given the law
to you if you were not able to keep it. And that's a lie. He
gave the law to reveal that we're sinners, to show us our need
of salvation, that we don't come to God by our own works. Because you can look out in the
world and there's all kinds of wacky ideas out there. People
got crazy things. I mean, they'll come to God thinking
that they are accepted of God because they burn incense, or
wear the right robe, or the right material, or walk the right way,
or do this, or do that. And there's people that really
believe this is how you come to God. They'll meditate for
hours, and they'll climb up mountains and stay there for months like
a monk shut away. There's all kinds of ways. People
come to church thinking that this is their righteousness.
And they have a form of prayer and a form of Bible reading.
And they do certain things thinking that this is how God receives
them. And a lot of people who call
themselves Christians think, I keep the Ten Commandments,
and that that's their righteousness. That's how they're saved. And
that's not what the Lord is showing us. And so Paul even describes
what happens under the law. Look back in Romans 7. verse 8 through 11. He says, But sin, taking occasion
by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence,
For without the law, sin was dead. In other words, when the
law came, when I heard the law, it provoked sin in me. It provoked
that which was in me and revealed the deaths of sin in me. It showed
me what a sinner I am. For I was alive without the law
once. I was comfortable. I was OK.
I felt good about life and things once. But when the commandment
came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment which was
ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking
occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me."
And so the law wasn't given because we can now keep it. It wasn't
given for that reason. The law was given to make known
to us what sin is, what the punishment for sin is, and just how wicked
sin is, how pervasive and all-encompassing it is in this flesh. This is
why Isaiah, the prophet, Isaiah 64, 6 said, our righteousnesses
are filthy rags. Not our sins, our righteousnesses
are filthy rags. That's what the prophet tells
us, what our Lord tells us. And so what Paul means is, what
he's saying about the law is, look over in Romans 3. The law
makes sin known to us. Romans 3, 19 and 20. Now we know that what things
soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law,
that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become
guilty before God. Believers aren't under the law
anymore. Paul said to Timothy, the law was not made for a righteous
man, but for sinners. That's what the law was made
for. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh
be justified in his sight, for by the law, and here it is, by
the law is the knowledge of sin. So the law, and all of it, the
moral law as we call it, the civil law which requires that
you be put to death for breaking the law, and the ceremonial law
that shows the sacrifices and the blood, and the death, it
revealed how holy God is, how perfect His law is, and how imperfect,
how unholy, what sinners we are before holy God and before His
law. Then in Galatians 3.22, But the
scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by
faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. And
so, having a right understanding of the law, and being born of
the grace of God, by his spirit, by the blood of Christ, we now,
when we look at the scriptures, and you're honest, you see everybody
in here is a sinner. Every one of them, even the best
of the best, are sinners. There's the recording of Abraham's
seed, the father of the faithful. I mean, of Abraham's sin, there's
a lot of sins of Abraham recorded. And Isaac's sin, he did the same
sin as his father. And Jacob, he's quite the sinner. And then you look at the judges
and how the Lord used the judges to deliver Israel, and yet, They
bring out all kinds of faults of these guys and you see all
kinds of sin. And then you look at David, a
man after God's own heart, and that man did one of the most
heinous sins ever recorded in scripture. He took another man's
wife, Uriah's wife, and committed adultery with her and then slew
Uriah to cover his sin. He slew that man's blood when
it should have been his own blood that was shed for that sin. And
yet God forgave him. God put that sin away by the
death of Christ. And he's a man after God's own
heart. And so we see that all are sinners. All are sinners.
You even see the folly of the disciples of Christ. And so that's
what the scriptures have concluded. We're all sinners. We need Christ. That's what the Lord's bringing
us to see. That the promise by faith of
Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. Now, this
brings us to how believers establish the law by faith. I wanted you
to see what the law says and why the law was given. So how
do we establish the law by faith? Well, one thing, understand that
the coming of Christ makes known to us what true righteousness
is, the Lord Jesus Christ, and His coming makes known to us
that we need a Savior, that God has concluded What he's showing
us that all are under sin and now he's provided the savior,
salvation of his people. And so if it was just somebody,
if we just needed somebody to, to get us on the right path and
to save ourselves, you know, by doing a better job under in
religion, then he wouldn't have needed to send his son to die. On the cross he would have just
raised up a prophet or he would have sent an angel or something.
But instead he had to send his son because there's no man righteous. And we can't work a righteousness
by that law. And so the coming of Christ exposes
and strips down what we are trusting in by nature. Because he came
and the Pharisees, you could see they were very confident
in their keeping of the law. They were very confident in their
baptisms and their ceremonies and their tithings and their
sacrifices. They trusted in those things
and Christ's coming stripped us all down to see that that's
just dead letter religion that cannot save and cannot make you
righteous because when Christ came they didn't receive him
they rejected him and our Lord said that if you loved my father
you would love me also but now you're revealing that you're
of your father the devil and not of my heavenly father because
you reject me and you want to murder me you want to put me
to death he was saying and so Christ shows us the inability of this flesh to
keep the law, make a righteousness for ourselves by the keeping
and practice of the law. And so, by God's grace in Christ,
he turns us, he gives us repentance from trusting that one. Christ's
salvation turns us. Godly repentance is not just
putting away a sin and never doing that sin anymore. True
godly repentance takes the veil off the heart, thinking that
these works are my righteousness, and turns us from trusting those
things, and turns us to Christ in faith, believing that He's
all my righteousness and acceptance with God, that God has provided
my salvation. That's godly repentance. being
turned from dead works to the living God, to the living Savior,
the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Paul, again, in Christ,
what grace taught us, we see Paul speaks of seeing now the
law of sin in his members. clarifying what's going on here.
Why do I still see sin in my members? And Paul was taught
and showed that it's the law of sin in your members. Look
at Romans 7. This is the sin nature we've
inherited from Adam and why we can't keep the law for righteousness.
Romans 7 verse 21 through 23. I find, then, a law that when
I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the
law of God after the inward man. It's good. It's right. I don't
have a problem with the holiness of God. But I see another law
in my members, my physical body, warring against the law of my
mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in
my members. And so the law of sin is saying
to us right now that we're not going to be rid of the effects
of sin in our bodies that we think that we should be rid of.
We're still going to see and feel the effects of the lust
of this flesh in us. attacking and troubling us and
going after to trouble the new man. That old man is going to
rise up, he gets angry at times unjustly and he handles situations
wrongly and turns to the works of the flesh to work through
problems with people and he starts getting into evil workings and
trying to get back at them and all kinds of things that we do
in the flesh. That's not the fruit of the spirit,
that's the flesh. that we turn to. Listen to what
Paul said in Romans 8.10. He said, if Christ be in you,
the body is dead because of sin. It is. Right now it's dead because
of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. And
so our fleshly bodies are withering and dying, because they are dead.
They're spiritually dead. And they're going to die and
be laid in a grave of dust. And this body is going to return
back to dust from whence it came. And there it'll lay until Christ
returns and raises us anew with a new body that is not full of
sin, not full of the effects and inheritance in nature. Romans
5, 12 speaks of this law. He says, wherefore, as by one
man, sin entered into the world, and death by sin. And so death
passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. And so these
bodies are dead, and this is why believers yet see presently
in their members sin. and are yet troubled by their
sin. They see it in their words, they
see it in their own actions, they see it in their thoughts,
and it troubles them. It troubles them, because we
still see it. I'm not rid of this law of sin in my members,
in this body. But in Jesus Christ now, our
hope is one of true righteousness, that He, Jesus Christ, is my
righteousness and acceptance with God. I don't look at this
body anymore and what this body is doing. Not that I feed it.
I don't want to feed it or encourage sin in any way. But this isn't
my hope. Our hope of righteousness looks
to the Lord Jesus Christ alone. Only Him. He's our acceptance
with holy God. He came and fulfilled the law
of Moses perfectly. Perfectly as of a lamb without
blemish and without spot. and we're given by his grace,
by his spirit, through his redemption, his gifts which he obtained for
us when he rose from the dead and gives to his church, gives
to his people, we have a hope firmly fixed in Christ. It's called the hope of salvation. It's the helmet of salvation.
It's a hope in Christ that by his blood, all the debts that
I've racked up, All that I did, all the foolishness in my sin,
all the foolishness in my religion, all that debt is now settled. Settled by the blood of Christ.
And the justice of God is satisfied. The price has been paid by the
Lord Jesus Christ. and we in Him when He for us
came and made His soul an offering for sin on the cross as the Lamb
of God to take away the sin of His people. And He's established
now that covenant of grace for us by His own blood so that God
deals with us in grace and in mercy and gives us His Spirit
to keep us in Him. And so in that covenant, he's
revealing through the preaching of the gospel more and more what
Christ has done, the fullness of Christ, what Christ has accomplished
for us, how he is our Savior in all points, in every way. And he keeps showing us and showing
us. He just takes the diamond of Christ and just turns it little
by little and shows us new glimmerings and glints of the light and beauty
of our Savior, Jesus Christ. And we love him, and we love
him more and more, because we see how full and free he is. And so now that believers live
by faith, and we establish the law by faith, this verse here
that we're looking at, do we then make void the law through
faith? God forbid, yea, we establish
the law. He's saying we establish the
law by faith. Let me just give you two things
in which we establish the law by faith. First, what we see
now and everything we saw this morning about the law, the first
thing that we establish is, Lord, you are righteous, you're just,
I am a sinner. I see now what you've shown me
by your grace and power. By faith, looking to Christ,
I see now what a sinner I am, how perfect, how holy your law
is, how short I come of your glory and keeping that. We take
sides with God against ourselves by faith. We're trusted. We're
saying, Lord, your law is perfect, and I'm not. That's the first
thing that is established there. When the Apostle John wrote in
1 John 1 verse 8, he said, if we say that we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. We're not going
to stand here and lie and say, I don't see sin in my members
and I'm good now. I knew one religious fellow,
he said, oh, no, no, no, no, I don't sin. I don't sin no more.
I just make mistakes. Well, no, you're sinning. I'm
a sinner, you're a sinner. We don't just now change the
word and change the definition to excuse our sin. No, we're
sinners. We're sinners. If we confess
our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned,
we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. So a man who claims
that God's pleased with him because of Jesus and his best efforts
now under the law, he deceives himself and makes God a liar. Righteousness isn't about us,
how we play our religious games and the definitions and words
we use to fudge the data and cloud the fact that we're sinners
in this flesh. No, we're confessing, in my flesh,
I'm a sinner. And I don't make myself righteous.
Christ is all my righteousness. And the second thing that faith
does is, that's where we stay looking. To Jesus Christ for
all my righteousness. Faith agrees that I'm a sinner,
and faith now rejoices in what God has revealed to us in His
Son. Believing, you've sent the Savior,
you've provided salvation. I don't save myself, you save
me, and you save all my brethren, and you've delivered us from
death. For therein is the righteousness
of God revealed from faith to faith, as it's written, the just
shall live by faith. So even when we see sin in these
members, we're walking by faith, trusting. We confess our sin.
It's not about allowing ourselves to do sin. That's not what this
is about. It's trusting. that all my sin is put away by
Christ, and that I'm just looking to Him, trusting Him, and He
feeds us and nourishes us and strengthens us with the gospel,
because that's how we are kept looking to Christ and trusting
Him. We're walking by faith. So even
when we see sin in the members, we don't now run back to the
law to fix that. We run to Christ and confess
it and ask Him for grace. and help in time of need. So
that's how we establish the law. I'm a sinner and Christ is all
salvation. That's really it in a nutshell.
That he's the righteousness, my righteousness. Amen.