Okay. Let's begin with a word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning and for those who
are able to come in this weather. And we pray now that you'd bless
us with the lesson that we'll learn this morning. In Christ's
name we pray, amen. Now, we have had two of our lessons
in the series on the fundamentals of the grace of God. We have
defined what grace is, and then we have, last week we looked
at the aspects of God's nature that are most relevant to a good
understanding of his grace. So having established within
the context of the gospel, grace is the unmerited favor of God. Now, we also mentioned it has
been earned, but it wasn't earned by us, was it? Whatever favor
we get from God came to us by favor that was earned by someone
else. And so we call it unmerited favor
or it's unmerited grace. And rather than having to explain
that for the rest of these lessons, when I talk about grace, I'm
talking about it in that unmerited, unearned sense in which we receive
it. So the question becomes, what
has caused us to be in such a state that whatever favor or grace
God shows to us must be entirely unearned, unmerited by us? Why do we need God's grace in
that sense? Now it goes without saying that
a person cannot have the blessing of God if he doesn't have the
favor of God. Well, what caused the human race
to fall out of favor with God? And furthermore, what did this
fall from God's favor do to us that made it necessary that any
further favor from God must come to us without us doing anything
to deserve it? Now, anyone coming from any of
the various versions of Christianity would say that it is sin that
has caused us to fall out of favor with God. And on that point,
they would be right. God is just in everything he
does. He will always show favor to
the righteous, and he will always show disfavor to the unrighteous. In fact, this principle is found
in all religion, isn't it? I mean, every form of religion
has the understanding that there is a God, that his blessings
are given to the righteous, and therefore, if we are unrighteous,
we'll not receive those blessings. All men know intuitively that
there is a God. And therefore all men understand
the principle in Hebrews chapter nine verse 27, it is appointed
unto man once to die and after this face judgment. And that
is really the foundation of all religion because not only do
people intuitively understand that there is a God and that
we must give an account to him Everybody has the intuitive understanding
that that judgment's not gonna go well, that we are not going
to pass the test. The scriptures describe sin in
the darkest terms imaginable. Yet many in the Christian religion
have the most superficial understanding of sin. And that results in a
superficial understanding of the grace of God. Sin is much more than most people
think it is. The scriptures define sin on
three levels. It's a matter of our actions,
it's a matter of our nature, and it's a matter of our ancestry.
And the gospel answers the sin problem on all three of those
levels. Now first, there's the most obvious
level of sin. Our actions fall short of God's
standards. What we do is sin. In Romans
3, beginning in verse 22, the last part of it, we read this.
There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God. Now this verse defines sin for
us and it also shows us the standard by which our conduct is determined
to be either sinful or righteous. Now most people begin their understanding
of sin with this definition of it. It is to fall short of God's
standard and so we also realize then that we
are sinners because God demands that we be content but we covet. God demands that we be honest
but we lie. God demands love but we slander,
maim, and murder. God demands sexual purity but
we commit all manner of fornication. And so That's the most superficial
understanding of sin, and it's probably everybody's first understanding
of what sin is. It's the first definition of
sin that we learned as children. In our childhood homes, we were
taught that there's proper behavior, and that to violate the commandments
that define that proper behavior brings punishment. And we grew
up understanding that's the way things work in the house. And as we begin to form our religious
beliefs, we take that definition with us. And it's a good definition
as far as it goes. Because we are counted as sinners
because the things we do do not meet God's standards. Now, the problem is that so long
as a man remains just with his natural understanding, he misuses
that definition of sin. Because what he does, instead
of seeking God's grace as a remedy for his transgressions, he thinks,
I need to mend my behavior. Isn't that true? I mean, that's
what, you know, when we were growing up in a house, that's
the way you kept from getting a spanking or some other kind
of punishment. You change your behavior. So when people come
into religion, they take this same attitude with them. Well,
I have done what is wrong in the eyes of God, and so he's
going to punish me for it. I need to start doing what's
right in the sight of God so that he'll bless me for it. Now,
that's natural religion. All the religions of the world,
that is what they believe is the proper way to have a good
eternity. Unfortunately, it also is what
I would say the majority of what is called Christianity believes.
But you see, the Bible does not teach us that we are transgressors
against God's law. in order that we would try to
quit being transgressors against God's law. Yes, we should try
to not transgress God's law, but that's not why the Bible
shows us that we have transgressed. The Bible does not show us this
to put us on a path of trying to obtain the blessings of God
by obedience to his law. Why? Because we can't do it.
The law is not a testimony to us of what we must or what we
need to start doing so that we don't go to hell. It is a testimony
to us that it's absolutely impossible for us to ever be good enough
to earn any of the blessings of God. Now this self-righteousness that
is stirred up by only this superficial knowledge of sin, thinking that
it exists only in the actions that we do, it promotes self-righteousness
because people change their behavior and therefore believe themselves
more worthy of the blessings of God than someone else is. And this self-righteousness, it's interesting that when the
law is used this way, when the standard is used this way to
propel people on a course of trying to do better, what it
actually does is corrupt them even further. It's like putting
a Band-Aid over an untended wound. When people, you know, they say,
okay, I gotta start banning the Ten Commandments or whatever
law it is they think they're supposed to follow. All they're
doing is putting a Band-Aid over an infected and untreated wound. What happens? It just keeps getting
worse. Infection sets in, gangrene sets
in, the infection starts to spread until sepsis takes over and the
person dies. And that's what the law does.
That's what any kind of religion that is based on doing better
in order to obtain God's blessings, it'll always do that. You shove
sin underground and it gets worse. In fact, it got so bad that this
very version of An understanding of sin is simply, you know, breaking
the law. And it prompted the Pharisees
and other religious people of our Lord's day to try to keep
the law in order to establish righteousness. What did it make
them do? It made them express themselves
in the worst kind of wickedness there is. They crucified the
Lord Jesus Christ. That's the greatest sin that's
ever been committed. And it was this superficial understanding
of sin that promoted that in them. Violence is always the
result of thinking that sin is simply that which resides in
our actions and I can overcome sin by changing my behavior. So people make bad use of that simple definition
of sin. However, if they understood what
the standard was, what the real standard of righteousness is,
they would quit trying. They believe that the law written
on tablets of stone is the standard. But Romans 3.23 says, for all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The standard
of righteousness is God himself. We are not called on to do the
best we can. It is not written that we fall
short of the glory of the law, even though it's true that we
do fall short of that. What shows us to be sinners is
that we fall short of God's glorious righteousness. Henry used to
say, God is not required that we do the best we can. He's required
that we do the best he can. Now, if anyone ever understood
that, Even understanding sin on this level should cause them
to give up. Everybody knows you can't be
as good as God. And that's the standard. Now, in order to properly understand
our need of God's grace, we must see our guilt before him in an
even deeper sense than simply the fact we've transgressed his
law. Sin is not just the things we do. Sin is our very nature. Even if we were able to offer
some sacrifice that put away all our former sin, and then
fully mend our ways and live the remainder of our lives without
sinning, it would not change our status with God, for our
sin does not reside only in our actions, it resides in our very
nature. Sin isn't just what we do, sin
is what we are. We are not sinners because we
sin, we sin because we are sinners. In Jeremiah chapter 17 verse
9 it is written, the heart is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked. Who can know it? Now man's inability
to remedy his own sin problem comes from the fact that sin
is in his nature and he can't change his nature. No matter
how outwardly righteous and godly a person may appear, Every imagination
of the thoughts of man's heart is only evil continually. Now that's what, how God, that's
God's verdict on man as he saw man before the flood of Noah. And man hasn't changed. Well
how could it be that every imagination and thought of his heart is evil
continually? Weren't the people back then
or people in our day doing some good things? Outwardly, it appears
that they are. But there is a sinfulness to
everything they think and do. Now, such a concept strips people
of the right to judge their own value by comparing their conduct
with others. Now, that's what people naturally
do. We do it. But we say, well, you
know, yeah, I've done some things wrong, but I'm not like that
guy. I never robbed a bank. And I'm thinking that's not a
very high standard to aspire to. Well, I never robbed a bank.
But that's what we do. I'm better than that person because
he did something worse than what I've done. But when we understand
that sinfulness or sin is our nature, The heart is deceitful above
all things and desperately wicked. Jeremiah says that sin resides
in our heart and it resides in our heart to such a degree that
it is called deceitful above all things. Now why is it called
deceitful because our heart is so desperately wicked and it
keeps telling us we're not that bad. We're not that bad. We know this
to be true, that is that our hearts are deceitful. We know
it to be true whether we'll openly admit it or not. There is not
a person who will not lie if the stakes are sufficiently high. Every one of us presents a false
version of ourselves to the world. We hide what we do not want the
world to see and we exaggerate what we do want the world to
see. And we're quite capable of making an entirely false narrative
about ourselves in order to manipulate the world into approving of us.
Now, I think it's a good idea that we hide our sin from the
world. I don't think it's, we don't go around telling people
everything we've ever done. There's only one person who can
handle the full truth about you, and that's God. In fact, you
can't handle the full truth about you. He only reveals to us enough
of our sin to move us to call upon him for his salvation. And that's the only value in
knowing your sin. is that it causes you to abandon
hope in yourself and flee for refuge to the Lord Jesus Christ. But, so far as our lives among
people are concerned, we don't need to come out of the closet
on those things that we know about our nature and about our
secret conduct. The world doesn't need to be
burdened with that. So I'm not saying that everyone
who hides his sin from man is a self-righteous person. That's
necessary for civilization. But if you begin to promote yourself
as an extra-righteous person because you have hidden the truth
about you, then you have stepped into the realm of self-righteousness,
heart-condemning self-righteousness. And if we turn that into a boast
in the sight of God, it's even worse. Trying to establish a
righteousness in the sight of God is the most deceitful thing
a person has ever done. Because you're standing in the
presence of one who sees into your very heart, he knows you
better than you do, and yet you think that you're gonna be able
to pull the wool over his eyes and say to him, well, you know,
I'm pretty good overall. He sees the deep wickedness of
the soul. It is written that our hearts
are desperately wicked. Now this Hebrew word translated
desperately wicked occurs nine times in the Old Testament. Seven
times it is translated incurable. A few verses later in Jeremiah
17, 16, it's translated as woeful, despairing, or disastrous. So
it seems that it's not so much a word about the moral corruption
of human nature when it says is desperately wicked, The point
it's making is its wickedness is beyond cure. It's beyond remedy. You can't fix man. Now that's how wicked we are.
You know, when I was doing that insulation
From time to time, you know, most houses we went in were in
fairly good shape. You'd see some that had been
allowed to go, you know, and people hadn't maintained it.
But you could go in there with some skill, refurbish the house. We went in a few houses. There
really wasn't anything you could do. It was too far gone. And they proved it because we'd
go by there about a year later and the house was gone. We're
thinking, why'd they send us the insulator if they were going
to tear it down? But most people perceive God's salvation as Him
coming to fix what's wrong with us, just patch up the holes in
the plaster and put in some new windows and straighten up this
wall. No, we are beyond fixing. That's why in the book of Ezekiel,
it says, in describing the covenant of the gospel, I will give you
a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will remove from
you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Now, he's
not using the word flesh the way Paul does, meaning, generally
speaking, our corrupt nature. He's saying, I'll take out your
dead heart and put a living heart in you. You know, a stone can't
hear, can it? You can walk up to a stone and
you can say whatever you want, you won't get any kind of reaction
out of it. You can curse it, it does nothing. You can brag about it, you're
the finest stone I ever saw. Unmoved, it's a stone, it's dead. It doesn't have the capacity.
to hear, and the stony heart of man cannot hear the testimony
of God concerning sin and instead remains in hardened, deceitful
self-righteousness. There are other ways the scriptures
describe our nature of sin. One way in which the ceremonial
and civil laws that God gave to the Jews in the old covenant,
one way it shows our sinful nature is that almost everything that
came out of the body was treated as unclean and it was required
that some act of purification be done. which is a testimony that nothing
that comes out of us is good. In fact, the only thing that
the scriptures ever mention that comes out of us that is any good
whatsoever are tears of genuine repentance. But that's something
that God works. Everything about man is sinful
because it is his nature to sin. But our sin goes one step deeper
and makes us even more desperate than these two previous definitions
of sin. Men might think they can change
their conduct. They might even think they can
change their nature. But the Bible says we are counted
sinners because of our ancestry. And nobody can change his ancestry. Two scriptures bear this out.
We've already seen one in Romans 3, verses 22 and 23. Now most translate that as, for
all have sinned. But this is not exactly the way
that the Greek language puts it. Remember that the New Testament
was originally written in Greek. And they have a tense that we
don't have in English. We don't have any way to express
it in a single word. But what it indicates is a thing
that was done once at a particular point in time. Usually it's the
past, but not always. So it's like, you know, we would
just say for all sin, and that would get kinda close to it but
we could think we could say all sinned and we would be thinking
about repeated acts of sin but the tense in which this is written
in the Greek one action it's talking about one thing at a
particular point in time and everybody sinned at that point
in time well when was that? well in Romans
chapter 5 verse 12 we read this therefore just as sin entered
the world through one man and death through sin. And in this
way, death came to all men, and it uses exactly the same phrase,
because all sinned. And if you skip down just a few
more verses to verse 15, it says, for if many died by the trespass
of the one man. Now what is Paul talking about?
What's this single event at a single point in time that made all of
us to be designated as sinners? The sin of Adam. When he disobeyed
God, what he did was imputed or accounted to all of us as
though all of us did it. Why is that? Because he was set
forward as the representative of all people. Therefore, before I ever was
conceived in my mother's womb, I was already a sinner in the
sight of God, because if I go back far enough in my ancestry,
I'll find Adam. Now, many think that that's unjust.
Why should we be held accountable for what someone else did? Well,
the first answer to that objection is this. No matter what we think
of it, that's the way things are. And we have to deal with
it that way. You know, it doesn't matter how
you want things to be. You must face things as they
actually are. And while such a system may not
appear just to us, we know this, God is just. And if that's the
system he set up, then it is a just system. But the appearance of injustice
is answered in two things. First of all, even though we
were made guilty in Adam, all of us have given our own personal
amen to what Adam did. We can complain, you know, we
can say, well, it's not right that I'd be guilty of Adam's sin.
Well, you're acting just like him. It wouldn't make any difference
if you weren't guilty of Adam's sin. You're still guilty of your
own, and therefore would come under condemnation because of
your own sin. However, I believe the best way
to answer what appears to us to be an unjust system is this.
Yes, God has condemned us by the actions of one man. but he
has also justified us by the actions of one man. The shocking truth of the gospel
of Christ is that neither our fall from God's favor nor our
restoration to his favor is based on anything that we have done
or will do. Both our fall from his favor
and our restoration to his favor are based on historical events
in which we played no part whatsoever. Now, why would we bother to define
sin that way? Other than the fact that's what
the scriptures say, there's this. Man will never go to Christ and
seek his mercy until he has nowhere else to go. He will never hope
in Christ till he has utterly lost hope in himself. And he
may be foolish enough to think he could change his behavior
to be good enough to please God. He may even be a little more
foolish and think he can actually change his nature. But no one
is so foolish as to think he can change his ancestry. I am
a descendant of Adam, and that has marked me as a guilty man
in the sight of God. And if I'm going to understand
the grace of God, I've got to understand how His grace answers
that problem, my ancestry. Of course, the grace of God deals
with all of these things. It deals with our actions, it
deals with our nature, but it also solves the problem of our
ancestry. All right, that's the end of
our lesson. By the way, the title of that, I said these are the
fundamentals of the grace of God, and here's the first fundamental
of the grace of God, and that is our sin, the need of grace. That's why we need it, because
of sin. Okay, you are dismissed.