Good evening. All right, we're
going to be in Isaiah chapter 3. Isaiah chapter 3 in verse
13. Lord willing, we're going to
make it all the way to the end of the chapter, verse 26. So
Isaiah 3 verse 13. And what we find here is that
our Lord continues his judgment upon the house of Jacob. the house of Jacob. And what
I want us to recognize is that for the child of God, there is
a blessing. And the Lord dealing with the
wicked in his rebuke to the wicked, there's a blessing for the child
of God because we who have been given ears to hear and eyes to
see and been given a new heart, we hear that rebuke. We hear
it in the old man and how it puts down the works of the flesh. So we hear it by the Spirit And
it teaches us. And the man of flesh hears it
and it just angers him. He doesn't believe it. He puts
it aside and thinks, no, that'll never happen to me. But to the
child of God, it teaches the Lord's remnant, lest we should
be swallowed up with the wrath that's coming upon the wicked.
So there's a blessing here, and I believe that's what we'll see
tonight. Our title is The Lord Contends,
and we'll just have two divisions. The first one will be the longest,
and the second one pretty short. The first one is The Lord Stands
to Plead, and then we'll see what we are delivered from. All
right, so let's look at the first three verses here in Isaiah,
well, the first three verses of our text, Isaiah 3, verses
13 through 15. Isaiah 3, 13. The Lord standeth up to plead
and standeth to judge the people. The Lord will enter into judgment
with the ancients of his people and the princes thereof. For
ye have eaten up my vineyard, or eaten up the vineyard. The
spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye
beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor,
saith the Lord God of hosts? So the Lord here rises up to
judge the people because they're not doing what is right. And
what they're doing is they're turning the people to the works
of the flesh. They're turning them to the law,
and they're having confidence and trust in those works of the
flesh. And what they're really doing
is to the poor, to those who are taught and know that they're
sinners, they're beating them with the law, and they're mistreating
them, and they're misusing them, and they're robbing the Lord
of His glory. It says in Psalm 12 verse 5, For the oppression
of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise,
saith the Lord. I will set him in safety from
him that puffeth at him. So the word here says that the
Lord standeth up to plead. And what that word means is that
he's going to contend with them. He's gonna contend with them
or he's gonna strive against them. It even can mean to conduct
a case. So he's bringing a case against
this people. He's gonna show them that what
they're doing is wrong. And the Lord is laying out the
fault of the people before them. But notice in verse 14, in Isaiah
3, 14, he calls who he's speaking to. It says, Isaiah 314, the
Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people
and the princes thereof. And at first I looked at that
and thought, why is he going to the ancients? What is it about
the ancients that the Lord is standing up to contend with them
about? And then I looked up that word
and what it means is the old man. The old man. The ancients
is the old man. man and you know what the old
man is because every one of us has the old man so that we see
here the Lord is contending with the old man of flesh the old
man of flesh which cannot hear the truth and will not bow before
holy God so the ancients there is the Lord is standing up to
contend with the old man, the ancients. So we who have spiritual
eyes to see and ears to hear, we see and understand that the
Lord is judging the flesh. He's not pleased with the works
of the flesh, and he's standing up to contend there with that
flesh. It's said in Genesis 6, 12, God looked upon the earth,
and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way
upon the earth. Now a natural man doesn't see
it that way, right? He thinks that what he does is
right. And certainly the house of Jacob
there in that day, they looked around them under Uzziah, who
was reigning at the time, who was the king. They looked around
and they said, well wait a minute, I seem to be prospering. Everything
I'm doing the Lord must be pleased with because all the walls are
being built up, all the towers are going up, the bulwarks are
going up, people are trading with us, there's a lot of wealth,
and it's good times here. So the Lord must be pleased with
what we're doing. So The flesh doesn't hear what
God is saying because he's looking around at all the outward things
and thinking that surely everything must be well with me. But he was misusing the word
of God. He was looking to the law for
his own righteousness and he was getting haughty and proud
and confident in his understanding of the law and what it meant,
but he was misusing it, convincing himself that he was righteous
and that his works were pleasing to the Father. So the Lord has
to show him, and it says there in verse 14, the Lord will enter
into judgment with the ancients of his people. So that he's going
to judge the old man, because we need to hear it. We need to
understand that God isn't pleased with our works. He's not pleased
with the flesh. Because until he reveals that
to us and brings it home to our heart, until he shows us that
he's not pleased with our works, we continue to trust in those
things. Right? Every one of us here was in dead
letter religion, incarnate religion, thinking that we had made ourselves
righteous by the things that we had done, to some degree,
more or less, we had some confidence in what we were doing, and not
doing, and putting aside. So, we got to hear it. Now turn
to Romans 8. Romans 8, verse 5. And we'll
look at a few passages in Romans. So don't be too quick to flip
out of it. Romans 8, 5. We read there that they that
are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh. They that are after the spirit,
the things of the spirit. For to be carnally minded is
death. And every one of us is carnally
minded by nature. When we come forth naturally
of Adam's seed, all of us are of a carnal mind and our mind
is dead. But to be spiritually minded
is life and peace. And we know that that is the
work of Christ. If Christ doesn't do it in us,
we're not going to be spiritual. If he doesn't give us the new
birth, There's no spirit there to hear what God is doing. There's
no spirit there to receive the teaching of God. And so we won't
hear it and we'll keep interpreting it as though, oh, I gotta go
back to the law and try harder. I gotta try harder. and harder
and harder and so we keep going back to the flesh and to the
law until the Lord gives us His Spirit and destroys the works
of darkness in us, destroys the power of sin and shows us that
He alone is our righteousness, that He must be our righteousness
and He reveals that He is our righteousness so that we look
to Him and we grow in Him and stop looking back to these works
of the flesh. Verse seven, because the carnal
mind, which is that old man, is enmity against God. For it
is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. Which confirms to us that this
flesh can't be reformed. Many of us have come up through
Reformed theology and Reformed teachings, which says that we
look to the law to sanctify this flesh. They've moved away from
saying that it justifies us. They won't go so far to say that,
but they still teach and have confidence in looking to the
law and looking to the flesh for sanctification. But Christ
said, I think it was in Matthew 5 where he said, do men gather
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? And what he's saying there is,
because we know where the thorns and the thistles came from, right?
When Adam sinned, When he would work the earth, when he would
work the ground, the dust there, it would bring forth thorns and
thistles, which is a picture of what we bring forth in our
flesh, thorns and thistles. And Christ is saying, you don't
go to thorns, you don't go to gather grapes from thorns or
figs from thistles. So he's saying, don't go back
to the flesh. Don't look to the flesh and the
works of the flesh. to gather good fruit unto God,
because it's not going to happen. It's only going to produce thorns
and thistles. It's not going to produce grapes
and figs to the glory of God. Confirms here that we can't be
reformed. This body isn't getting better
and better and improving day by day It won't until Christ
returns again and raises this flesh out of the grave and gives
us a new body Created in the image of Christ our Savior who
raises that body and does that work in us? so then verse 8 Romans
8 8 so then they that are in the flesh are cannot please God,
as those that are trusting in their works in the flesh can't
please God. But we who walk by the Spirit
are pleasing Him. Because we're not coming in our
own works, we're coming trusting in Him. We're coming in the faith
of Christ, trusting in His faithful work. And what He's done, knowing
that even our faith isn't of this flesh, it's a work that
He's produced in us. So it's all to the glory and
praise of Christ our Savior. Whereas all religion, all man-made
religion, looks to their teachings, looks to the religious examples
and fleshly good works as signs that they are good people, as
tokens that surely God is pleased with what I'm doing and He's
happy with me, and so they continue on in those things. And some of them, the Lord shows
them the confusion and breaks them out of it and delivers them
when He finally hear the gospel and are delivered out of that
mess and that nonsense which just left them confused and dazed
and in darkness all that time. Alright, turn over to Romans
2. Romans 2. As we see that, as long as that
man stays in his flesh, he never comes to a knowledge of the truth
of just how dead he is in trespasses and sins. He doesn't understand
that his flesh isn't profiting him anything. Romans 2.17 says,
Behold, now this is Paul talking to the Jew as an example, Behold,
thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest thy boast
of God, and knowest his will, and approvest the things that
are more excellent being instructed out of the law, and art confident
that thou Thyself are the guide of the blind, a light of them
which are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of
babes, which has the form of knowledge and of the truth in
the law. So they have a form, but they
couldn't see the deadness of their flesh and their own self-righteousness,
and that they were trusting in their works, and that all that
they were doing was just covetous idolatry. They were robbing God
of his glory. They were robbing him of his
praise. that He alone is worthy of. And
they were trusting and looking in what they themselves did and
making their boast of that. Verse 21, Romans 221, Thou therefore
which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? Thou that preaches
the man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that says the
man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou
that abhors idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? Thou that makest
thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonorest
thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed
among the Gentiles through you, as it's written. So Paul had
written that letter to the Romans in the beginning of his ministry,
right? And he noted that they have a
form of knowledge and of the truth of the law, and it never
changed with them. It never improved or got any
better with the Jews, so that at the end of his ministry, when
he was writing to Timothy in the second letter of Timothy,
he said, they're ever learning and never able to come to the
knowledge of the truth. So never improved, never changed,
after having that gospel preached to them, Year after year, day
after day, all those decades of hearing the apostles preach
the gospel, they didn't hear it. They heard the Lord himself
declare it, and then they heard his apostles, all being attended
to with the power of the Holy Spirit, but being left in the
flesh, it didn't profit them. And I really think that the Lord
has allowed it to go on as long as it has here under the gospel
being preached. Now, just as long as it was preached
under the law, and you could see that man is completely without
excuse, so that God gave him all these truths and revealed
everything to him, showing him the truth of God, the mystery
of godliness, and man didn't see it, and then he pulled back
the mystery of godliness, and declared to him the plainness
that it's all of Christ and he still didn't see it. So there's
still no excuse. Man has no excuse when he stands
before God because he gave him, he's just demonstrating over
and over and over again throughout all these ages that carnal man,
left to himself, is never going to improve upon his condition. He's never going to hear God.
He's never going to will to believe God. As Christ said, you will
not come unto me that you might have eternal life, because it's
not in the will of man. He doesn't care. He doesn't want
to hear it. He doesn't believe it. He can't hear it. And he
refuses to hear it. So they stumble over that mystery
of godliness. They can't hear it. As Paul said
in Romans 10, verses 2 through 4, he said, I bear them record
that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge,
for they being ignorant of God's righteousness and going about
to establish their own righteousness. have not submitted themselves
unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the
law for righteousness to everyone that believe it." So we have
this gospel, he's preached it, and they still don't believe. Even hearing it plainly declared,
they still don't hear and believe the mystery of godliness is that
Christ is our righteousness and that he's fulfilled all the law
and he's fulfilled righteousness in his people so that we don't
walk after the flesh anymore, we walk after the spirit, not
trusting in our own hearts. Look into him. We don't want
to go on sinning, right? Paul, Peter said, and all the
apostles said, but I like the way Peter said it, abstain from,
dearly beloved, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against
the soul. So we don't want to, we don't
walk in the lusts of the flesh, but we don't do it by looking
back to the law. We do it by looking to Christ.
And so that when we do sin, we look to our advocate. Christ
Jesus, the Savior, the one who was sent of God to put away the
sins of his people, to provide forgiveness for his people, to
be a propitiation for the sins of his people, to be an atonement
and a covering and a forgiveness for his people. So that's how
we walk, trusting that he is sufficient, that he is able to
bring us out of this death and into the light of our Savior.
For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath
shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of
God in the face of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So he's revealing to us the knowledge
and the mystery of godliness. He's making it known to us by
the Spirit. All being a work of the Lord
so that we can't boast and hold it over any other man that we're
something because we're nothing. And he shows us that we're nothing
so that all we glory in is Christ and Christ alone. So don't think
that for a minute that were any better off today, just because
people have the name Jesus on their lips, that were any better
than they were back in this time when Isaiah is preaching the
gospel and where he's declaring and stating the word of the Lord
to the house of Jacob. Just as they were no better when
they were Pharisees and really doing the law to the utmost when
Christ came, and they were worse. They rejected Him and crucified
the Lord of Glory. And now that we see it and know
that it's Christ, we see that the promise of God has been fulfilled
and sending is Christ, and seeing all that, we're still no better.
as humans. We're no better. We're just as
awful and wicked as sinners as ever. So that all we can boast
in, we who have the light and the mystery of godliness revealed,
all we can boast in is Christ and nothing of the flesh. So
thanks be to God for him. But yeah, we're no better. We're
no better today than they were back then in any of those ages. So the Lord teaches us that Christ
is everything. Turn over to Romans 8. We'll
look at the first four verses in Romans 8, Romans 8.1. And Paul said, There is therefore
now no condemnation to them which 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. See, that's all that we, in the
flesh, The law of Moses is just the law of sin and death. It
just declares to us that we are sinners. For what the law could
not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own
Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned
sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled
in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. so that Christ in us forms love
to Christ, love for the brethren, and a desire and a willingness
to walk in a manner that is pleasing to Him. But it's never by looking
back to the law for that instruction. He shows you. He teaches us in
the heart what pleases Him. And what pleases Him is Christ.
And so we keep looking to Christ and hearing what He's done, and
therein He teaches us and shows us that He's our inheritance,
that He's our life, He breaks that power of sin in us. He breaks
that power of sin and death in the flesh so that we see under
His teaching and guidance that this thing, you know, that's
not profitable. I don't want to do that. My Savior
died to put away that sin. But it's all in Him teaching
us. It's not with me beating you over the head with the law
to get you to do something in your flesh. Because then it's
just the work of the flesh. It's to declare what Christ has
done in His gospel for his people and the Lord teaches us and shows
us and brings us along where the love of this world fades
more and more and more until this isn't what we desire and
we desire him and long for him and thirst and hunger for his
righteousness and not what this world says is righteous. What
this world says is good or meaningful or has value in this world. So
the Lord has to do that and that's exactly what he does. As Joseph
Hart wrote in one of his hymns, law and terrors do but harden,
all the while they work alone, but a sense of blood-bought pardon
soon dissolves a heart of stone. So it's not through the preaching
of the law, it's through preaching Christ that we're saved and that
we're delivered from the death of this world, the man-made religion
and all that nonsense that we've heard all our lives. So this
old man, he's got to die. And Isaiah said in Isaiah 3,
14, the Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of
his people and the princes thereof. He's going to enter into judgment
with that old man. He's going to show that old man
is not profiting the Lord's people at all. So God never looked to
the flesh of man for righteousness. Once Adam fell in that garden,
it was over. That was it. We were condemned
in the flesh. Death entered because of sin,
and we couldn't produce a righteousness. So God declared from that moment
that the land slain from the foundation of the world would
be the provision of righteousness for his people. When he said
in Genesis 3.15, the gospel right there, I will put enmity between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. So that's why
the carnal mind The carnal man left to himself is enmity against
God because he comes forth of the seed of Adam, which is corrupt
and dead in trespasses and sins, so he comes forth hating God,
hating one another, being a child of disobedience, being a child
of wrath until the Lord comes, until Christ comes and puts enmity
between the two seeds and delivers us out of that darkness, out
of that enmity and hatred of God into the fellowship of the
Spirit into the kingdom of light where we rejoice in Christ and
we have reconciled to God and have friendship with God and
therefore now that enemy hates us too and we hate him and so
there's no fellowship there. Christ breaks that fellowship
and destroys all his works. And so we don't go back to the
works of the flesh. We don't look back to those works of the
flesh anymore, entrusting in those things. And we hear what
that mystery of godliness, we see it being revealed, like when
Moses spoke to the children of Israel, and he said there in
Deuteronomy 18, 15, the Lord thy God will raise up unto thee
a prophet from the midst of thee of thy brethren, like unto me,
unto him. Ye shall hearken. And that's
exactly what our Lord did. He raised up that prophet, the
Lord Jesus Christ, just as he promised he would do by the mouth
of Moses there, as he promised he would do back in the garden,
he sent the Christ. We now know that Jesus of Nazareth
is the very Christ sent of God into the world to save his people
from their sins. And we see it and we rejoice.
We read how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost
and with power. who went about doing good and
healing all that were oppressed of the devil, for God was with
him. And we know what his people did when he came to his own,
his own received him not. They rejected him. They slew
him and hanged him on a tree. But even so, with all of that,
and God sending his son to do that work for his people, And
then rejecting Him and hanging Him on a tree and slaying Him,
that we see, you know, the foolishness and the weakness of God so much
wiser than man and so much stronger than man because God, through
that work there, laid the sins of His people upon His Son there
so that when He went to the cross, He put away our sin perfectly,
fully, satisfying the wrath of God against us. So that now there's
no more enmity. By his death, he reconciled us
to God and brought us into union with the Father and we have entered,
through Christ, entered into the beloved and the inheritance
of the saints. So that Christ accomplished all
that in their rejection and their slaying of him. So that God wasn't
defeated. Man thought he could throw off
God and destroy the the son and take his inheritance, but that
didn't happen at all. So Paul said, where's the wise
and where's the scribe? Where's the disputer of this
world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? And
then he said, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks,
either one, they're all called the same way, Christ, the power
of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God
is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
All right now, let's look back there in Isaiah 3. Verses 14 and then 15. The middle of verse 14, Isaiah
3, 14. Ye have eaten up the vineyard,
the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye
beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor,
saith the Lord God of hosts? So the Lord speaks of a vineyard
and he speaks of Well, a vineyard should be producing fruit, right?
So the teachers, the ancients, the ones who had the authority
and should have been teaching the people rightly and declaring
to them the coming Christ, they weren't. They were abusing the
people and they were turning them back to the flesh. They
were turning them back to the works of the flesh and to trust
in their own works for righteousness. And because the people were poor
and couldn't do it, They justify themselves in despising the people
and hating them and mistreating them and abusing the poor of
the Lord's people. Turn over to Matthew 21. So Matthew
21, our Lord speaks. of this in verse 33, and when
he says, hear another parable, Matthew 21, 33, hear another
parable. There was a certain householder
which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged
a winepress in it, and built a tower, and led it out to husbandmen,
and went into a far country. And when the time of the fruit
drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen that they might
receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants
and beat one and killed another and stoned another." Right? These
are all the prophets that the Lord had sent over the years,
like Isaiah and like Jeremiah. We see how they misused them
and beat them and killed them because they didn't want to hear
what they had to say. Let's skip to verse 37. But last
of all, he sent unto them his son saying, they will reverence
my son. But when the husbandmen saw the
son, they said among themselves, this is the heir, come, let us
kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. So that they
slew him, and the people even went when he said, what then
will the lord of the vineyard do when he comes? And they even
answered rightly, saying, he'll slay them, and he'll take that
vineyard from them, and give the vineyard to a nation that
will render the fruits unto God in their seasons. And so they
said the right thing. And that's exactly what the Lord
did. So that the Pharisees were just
like, in the Lord's day, they were just like that house of
Jacob. They had improved not one bit. And they just imagined
vainly that they could seize the inheritance of the Lord.
So they just misused the people and they treated them horribly.
And as Christ said, the Pharisees followed the law even to excess,
so that they laid on requirements of the people, things that were
in excess of even what the law required, so that they were just
abusing them, and that which is of the poor was in their house.
They just took it from them, and took it from the Lord, and
just kept it for themselves, and gloried in what they were
able to do. rather than glorying in the Lord. And we do well to
heed Peter's words, which was to the council at Jerusalem in
Acts 15, verse 10, when he was speaking of the use of the law
to bind the believers. He said, now, therefore, why
tempt ye God to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which
neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe
that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall be
saved even as they. so that we see in Christ, Jew
and Gentile are all saved by the righteousness that God has
provided in his son, Jesus Christ. He is our righteousness. For
to him give all the prophets witness that through his name,
whosoever believeth on him shall receive remission of sins. That's the word. Not looking
back to the law, not following the law, but believing on the
Lord Jesus Christ, you shall receive the remission sins that's
the promise of God to those who hear it and to believe and believe
on Christ all right now briefly the last the last point what
must we do or rather what we must be delivered from so the
Lord's going to deliver us from these things look at Isaiah 316
and we'll go through it pretty quickly Isaiah 316, Moreover the Lord
saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk
with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing
as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet. So the Lord's
going to show us that We in the old man, naturally speaking,
we're haughty and we're proud just like these daughters here
that we're proud in our self-righteousness. We're proud in the works that
we've done in the flesh. Naturally, we look to what we've
done and if it's well, if it was good and others praise us
for it, we had confidence in those things and we trusted in
them. And we got built up and puffed up in those works. And
then it says, those stretched forth necks, which were then,
they became stiffened against the truth. And as long as we
remained in that deadness, we were hard against the truth and
we resisted the truth that, no, in our flesh, We're totally depraved
in our flesh. We're dead and can't produce
a good work that pleases the Lord. And so we resisted the
truth of Christ that he is our righteousness by whom the sinner
must be saved. And then wantonize, which is
deception. They're just full of deception.
Being deceived and deceiving others. They went about trusting
in their own works. And then that mincing of steps,
which is like a short gait, like a short kind of, almost like
a tripping, in a skipping-type manner, and it looked so elegant.
It was done to exhibit a certain elegance, and so that entrusting
in their own self-righteousness, they had this beautiful, elegant
walk that looked so gorgeous and so pretty to the outward
eye, you know, to carnal man, and yet inward, they're full
of dead men's bones, and there's nothing good, nothing pleasing
to the Lord at all, so that they were just doing What the wicked
do is just line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little,
there a little, just building it up, and there's short little
steps there, that mincing as they went, but it wasn't to any
profit. And then that tinkling around
of the ankles, which sounds so pleasing to the natural ear,
but the spiritual man hears it and knows that's just death.
That's death. That's not profiting anyone in
doing that thing. We are but to tell men and women
that salvation has been provided by the Father through the Son,
Jesus Christ, that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
shall find it in Christ and in Christ alone. And it seems impossible
to the unregenerate man. They hear that and they just
can't understand it. Because if they understood it,
they wouldn't go back to the law to try and work a sanctification
for themselves. And they think it's crazy that
we should just preach the gospel of Christ. Because they don't
understand how can the gospel have any effect to the saving
of the soul. How can the gospel of Christ
profit somebody so that after they've been saved, okay fine,
you get them in through the gospel, but then you've got to slip them
another kind of food, you've got to give them something else
so that they can grow in grace and knowledge. And they don't
understand that we grow in grace and knowledge under the gospel
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And they begin to use
words like, except ye be circumcised. after the law of Moses, or after
the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved. And they won't say
those words, because they know, well wait a minute, now I sound
just like Acts 15 verse 1, I can't say those very words, but that's
exactly what they're saying. Except you start looking back
to the law, after what Moses said, you can't be saved, you're
not going to be sanctified. You're going to fall back into
this world, and go back into wicked ways, and looking, you
know, and doing evil things, because that's all that they
have is the Law of Moses, just the works of the flesh, because
there's no walking by the Spirit of Christ. They're walking by
the carnal flesh, which is enmity against the things of God. Therefore,
Isaiah 317, therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown
of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover
their secret parts. So that the Lord took He takes
his people who are in that and steeped in that and he destroys
that heady head knowledge wherein we trust in our doctrines and
our high-mindedness and our high doctrines. He strikes that and
breaks that and cancels all that work. and he discovers to us
the hidden evils of our heart so that he, you know, the secret
parts and he gives us a new heart in the secret parts so that we
hear his word and he writes his law, the law of liberty, the
law of Christ on our hearts so that we're ever looking back
to Christ and we don't want to offend our Savior and he breaks
that and when we do sin against him he chastens us and he brings
us back to Christ over and over showing us the preciousness of
Christ and destroys all those works that we cease looking to
them and cease trusting in those works and trust more and more
and more in Christ and what he himself has done. All right,
now let's just read Isaiah 318 through 26. In that day, in that
day when the Lord brings the gospel of Christ to his people,
the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about
their feet and their calls and their round tires like the moon,
the chains and the bracelets and the mufflers, the bonnets
and the ornaments of the legs and the headbands and the tablets
and the earrings, the rings and nose jewels, the changeable suits
of apparel and the mantles and the wimples and the crisping
pins, the glasses and the fine linen and the hoods and the bales,
and it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell there
shall be stink, and instead of a girdle, a rent, and instead
of well-set hair, baldness, and instead of a stomacher, a girding
of sackcloth, and burning instead of beauty, so that the Lord will
make all this world's beauties and riches, He'll make them a
stink to us. And He'll make their gospel,
their dead gospel, their dead letter religion, a stink to us.
And then He makes Christ a saver of life unto the believer, when
He gives us life in Christ. And that this religion of the
world becomes a saver of death unto death. But to the old man
left to himself, Christ is the saver of death unto death. So
the Lord has to do this work. And then He says, shall fall
by the sword and die mighty men in the war, so that the Lord
takes up the jawbone of an ass and smites all the Philistines
in the hearts of his people." And he destroys those mighty
men of war. in our hearts. And he knocks
them down through the preaching of the gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And her gates, verse 26, shall
amend and mourn, and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground,
back in the dust from whence she came. So that the wicked,
they will be brought low. They'll go through it. They'll
have these things and be destroyed and wiped out. But to the child
of God, to that old man, he also strikes down that old man so
that we no longer trust in his strength, we no longer look to
his religion and to his ways and how he did things and all
the might of the flesh gets wiped out. The Lord takes it and brings
us down to the dust so that we mourn and weep in the flesh,
but he gives us a spirit so that we hear that gospel and no longer,
you know, he destroys all that work and destroys that fellowship
with the seed of the evil one, and makes us the seed of Christ. And he restores that which was
lost, because we always were the seed of Christ. But he brings
us out of that death into the glorious light of his kingdom.
As it says in Revelation 18, 4, and I heard another voice
from heaven saying, come out of her, my people, that ye be
not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. Because all that religion is
just the whore of Babylon's religion. It's just death and nothing of
profit or help to us. So the Lord, you see how the
Lord will judge the wicked. It'll be woe to the wicked. They're
going down. But to the righteous, though
they be They're judged in Christ, and he destroys the works of
his flesh, but he restores us in Christ, and so it's a blessing.
It may be hard on the flesh, but it's a blessing because now
we have Christ, the righteousness of God revealed to us and made
our righteousness in us so that he's our hope and our glory and
our joy and our rejoicing. I pray the Lord will bless that
to our hearts. Let's pray, and then Brother,
you'll close us in to him. Our gracious Lord, Father, we
just ask that you would take that, Lord, which is precious,
and lay it to the hearts of your people. Lord, that you would
reveal to us your Son, Jesus Christ. Comfort us in him and
in his righteousness. Lord, let us not look to the
works of this flesh that the mighty men of this flesh and
all the beauty that this flesh thinks that it has, but let us
see Jesus. And that this flesh would become
nothing, but that Christ would become everything to us. Lord,
establish us in him, that he be all of our hope. and our comfort and our joy. We pray this, that you would
keep us until he returns again and takes us to himself. We pray
this in Jesus' name, our Lord and Savior. Amen.