Let's look at 4. We started out
last week in the question that Paul writes in regard to Abraham. When he says there, look at verse
1, What shall we say then was gained by Abraham, our forefather,
according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified
by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.
For what does Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it
was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his
wages are not counted as a gift, but as due. And to the one who
does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly,
his faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of
the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart
from the works. Blessed are those whose lawless
deeds are forgiven and those whose sins are covered. Blessed
is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this
blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised?
We say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.
How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had
been circumcised? It was not after, but before
he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision
as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he
was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the
father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness
would be counted to them as well. Verse 12, and to make him the
father of the circumcised who were not merely circumcised but
also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham
had before he was circumcised. For the promise to Abraham and
his offspring that it would be heir of the world do not come
through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For
if it is the adherence to the law who are to be heirs, faith
is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but
where there is no law, there is no transgression." I'm going
to stop there. Now, let's ask ourselves a couple of questions.
Ask yourself, what it is that you believe is the gospel of
grace. Ask yourself, is the gospel the
power of God unto salvation, as Paul had said in verses 16
of chapter 1 and 17? Or is salvation accomplished
through the works of humanity? Is the gospel good news because
it's an opportunity that we can invest in, like Bitcoin or the
stock market or a great job offer? Or is the gospel truly the work
of God in all authority and in all power and in all might? for
His glory. But beloved, we all know the
answer to that, and we know that the gospel is all of grace, it's
all of Christ, it's all of God, and every fiber of every instance
of every inch of the gospel has everything to do with God and
His sovereignty. That is why we call the gospel
by name as sovereign grace. It is the sovereign grace of
God. We believe in the fact that God absolutely and sovereignly
rules over election and salvation and redemption and the life and
the fruit thereof of His people. So we come to this week, and
by the way, this is week 24, and I know that going, imagine
how we've been going through this really verse by verse. Imagine
how we've been going through this letter, taking careful steps
to illustrate every nuance of every argument, of every piece
of every sentence. Chapter, I mean, excuse me, in
week 24 where we are tonight, we would probably just now be
getting to the middle of chapter two. So there's a lot of things
that we could cover, but in, the purpose in which we're doing
this on the midweek service, we want to make sure that we
give a good ground of this letter. So as we see verse 13 of chapter
4 here, I want us to ask ourselves what we think that Paul is continually
trying to argue. And I would suggest to you that
he's continually arguing that the law has no bearing in grace
whatsoever. As a matter of fact, Paul in
verse 13 pits the law in opposition to grace. and opposition to faith. He says there are only two things.
The promise to Abraham and his offspring that we would be the
heir of the world did not come through the law. See, the promise
of God has nothing to do with the commands of God. The promise
of God to save his people has nothing to do with the requirements
of God upon humanity. Even though we are condemned
because of the law, we are not We are not going to put our trust
in the promise of God based on the law of God, especially in
the fact that we cannot honor the law of God. And so if we
think about this, and we think about the audience who is hearing
this, both Roman, Greek, non-Jewish and Jewish Roman citizen who
are professing to believe in Christ, there is this grand awakening
that's happening. There's a grand awakening that
needs to happen in the United States. There's a grand awakening
and a reaping that needs to take place in America's churches so
that they quit abusing the gospel of Christ and holding people
subject to the law to such a degree that they are condemning each
and every person who hears their false gospel. Paul would say
to the church of Galatia that those who try to add to the gospel
of sovereign grace are forever, that's eternally, anathema, cut
off, cursed from Christ. That means that we are condemned
if we add to the gospel. We are condemned when we look
within ourselves as evidence of our regeneration. We are condemned
when we come to this letter. And we begin to say, yeah, but
I hear what you're saying, but where are the works? But this
is not the point of Paul's argument. As a matter of fact, it's the
very antithesis to take no one, to have no one be able to take
their mouth and open it up and say, but God, look at this. But God, look at that. As a matter
of fact, the scripture even told us over in chapter two that all
mouths will be closed. All mouths will be closed. because
of the teaching of the gospel of grace, because the word of
God will close the mouths of those who trust in themselves.
This really is what I believe causes so much frustration in
the hearts of so many. Because there are so many people
in our world today. I mean, let's think about what
the census says about the Christianity of America. Just the national
federal census of 2010 would tell us in this area that 90%
of those asked confessed to be Christian. 90%. Now what does that mean
to them? They believe in God. They believe
in Jesus. But get this. We are 12% churched as a state, as a region. We're 12% churched as a population. That means that people who are
confessing in a 90% that they are followers of Christ, that
they are born of God by the gospel of grace, only 12% are actually
in church. Okay, so then out of that, that
means that they go to church at least two times a year. But
it shows, it further goes to show in church attendance that
less than 3% of our population is in church on a regular basis,
which is once a month. So that it leaves us with about
an average of 2% of the population in our state, in our region,
in our culture, in our community, less than 2% of the population
that are actually in church on a regular basis. Now of course
church attendance does not equal justification. Church attendance
does not equal what? Salvation. Church attendance
does not equal those things. But let me ask you this. If indeed
we are the saints of God, and if indeed the Spirit of God resides
in us, and if indeed we believe in the authority of Scripture,
and if indeed we read it, and if indeed we see the words that
says, do not forsake the gathering together as some are accustomed
to doing, in the context of that actual language which shows that
they are not actually born of God if they forsake the assembly. So God has made a judgment to
say that those that forsake the assembly because of their non-desire
to be in the assembly. Now there are some who can't
be here. There are some who have to work. There are some who get
sick. There are some who are dealing with all sorts of things
that prevent them. There's a difference in being
prevented and could care less. I'm just going to show you that
there are a lot of people who confess to be in Christ. And let me tell
you what we find when we go to other organizations that like
to take polls, like the Barna group, who takes a lot of polls.
And what's that other one? The Graham Evangelistic Association
takes a lot of polls. This particular number that I'm
about to give you here has been a common thread for the last
20 years in the United States. That out of every person who
is actively a member and an attender of an evangelical church in the
United States, get this, that less than 3% of them can give
you the answer to their assurance of their salvation. And the reason that is, is because
people trust in their works. When someone asks you, how do
you know that you are born again? How do you know that you are
a recipient of eternal life? The answer that you give them
best be, because God has saved me through the finished work
of Jesus Christ. The answer better be that I believe
only in the promise of God. And God's Word says that Christ
paid for my sins and I trust in Him. That's what saving faith
is. Why can't people believe in that?
See, we like to ask the question, why can't people believe in the
Gospel? Because it's not being preached.
What's being preached is if you pray, you're saved. And then
years later when someone says, well, I'm a little confused,
I just don't feel saved. They say to you, well, you remember
you prayed. And they put your trust in your
prayer, and they put your trust in your flesh, and they put your
trust in your choices. Friends, if our trust is in anything but
the work of God and His promise of salvation, we are condemned. We are condemned. Paul pits the law against faith. And he said, you've got one or
the other. You can't have both. You can't work and say that faith
obtains something from the law in order to justify us. It doesn't.
The law needs nothing to work what its purpose is. The law
condemns. The law brings wrath. The law
brings righteous judgment. The law obtains also then no
evidence of assurance from faith in order to please God. And this
is where the rub comes, because people like certain doctrines. They like to believe in what
they call the sovereignty of God. But yet, in sense, what
was happening here with the Jews in the audience, they believed
in the sovereignty of God, but they believed in themselves more.
They believed in themselves more. And the Romans, the non-Jewish
Christians of this audience, also would be very, very, very
surprised to hear Paul's arguments here. You know, I've talked on
a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago about antinomianism.
How many times have I said on our Wednesday night over the
last six months, don't worry, Romans 6 is coming. Because it's
very easy for us to come and say, man, I just live like I
want to live. Paul knows these people are thinking
this way. And he says in Romans 6, he asks
another question like he does so well. What shall we say then? Should we continue in sin that
grace may abound? He says, by no means, it cannot
be. So of course, nobody's preaching against obedience. Nobody's preaching
a license to sin. Nobody's preaching antinomianism. Nobody's preaching that. That's
heretical. It's stupid. It's an absolute absurdity. And
it's foolish for someone to ever accuse somebody preaching the
gospel of that, except that they are not born of the Spirit of
God. Because it's very difficult. It's very difficult when we hold
so fast to our flesh For Paul to say that Abraham never obeyed,
and even had he obeyed, it would have had no bearing on the promise
of God. Because what do you want to hope in? The promise of God
or the work of God in your life right now? You want to trust in the work
of God working in you, your sanctification? I hope not. Because you know
what? Even our confession says that
sometimes God will let you wallow in sin. to prove something to
you, to show you the necessity of His grace, and to show you
that you are a child indeed through the discipline of restoration. So we don't rest in who we are. We rest in whose we are. And
we rest in the one who has made the promise. See, faith, it says
right there, does not come through the law, but through the righteousness
of faith. The righteousness of faith. I
could preach an entire sermon on this particular phrase right
here. Several sermons if I had the opportunity. But the righteousness
of faith. So here, faith is righteousness. Abraham's righteousness is his
faith. Now let me be careful here. Oh,
oh, oh, so we have faith and we can trust in our faith. No,
we trust in the object of our faith. But it is believing in
the person of Jesus Christ and His righteousness. What does
Paul say? What? Who? He says, Who shall
ever save this wretched sinner? Who's going to save me from this
body of flesh? What does he say? Does He say,
oh man, one day God's going to get it straight. You want to
be perfect? You must die. You must die in
your flesh. You must leave this body in order
to be perfect. But to live is Christ. And to
die is far better. Why? Because not only do we get
to see Christ, but we get to get away from this body which
is corrupt. We stand. in righteousness because
Christ, who is the standard, who is the perfect one, who is
the righteousness of God, is the measure of it. And we cannot
keep it. And that's why Paul has spent
so much time here dealing with this. Because there is a religiosity
that comes through Judaism that condemns. Now if you think and remember
what we're doing in John, if you've read through John ahead,
you know that over in chapter 12, Jesus quotes Isaiah chapter
6. And Jesus quotes Isaiah chapter
6 because the text there says many people believed in Him.
Many of the Pharisees believed in Him. What does that mean?
They knew without a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was Messiah.
That's what it means. They knew. He was Messiah. But they dared not confess it,
for they loved the glory that comes from men rather than the
glory that comes from God. In other words, they loved their
stature and their place in society and the power and the glory that
comes through their religion and their ministry and their
pulpits rather than the Christ who would cause them to lose
their freedom and their livelihood and their life and their family.
You see the difference? That's why it's so easy to fall
prey to placating to a culture that continually pushes us into
the direction of a works-based salvation. Then say, oh no, no,
no, we're not talking about salvation. But we are. We are. And that's what Paul is dealing
with here. He wants these Jews to do what he did. When he says,
I've got something to brag about. You want to talk about the flesh?
Abraham ain't got nothing on me. I never disobeyed like Abraham. That's what Paul said. I am more
righteous in the flesh than Abraham's toe ever wished it could be.
He says, according to the flesh, I am blameless against the law. And I started at the day of eight.
Days old. I was circumcised. I was given
the name of Saul, the king of Israel. I'm of the Pharisees,
the highest order. I pray this way, I tithe this
way, I wear the right clothes and I walk in the right manner
and I speak the right thing. He says that all that was garbage
and that He was condemned. He was condemned. Faith. The righteousness that is of
faith. is that faith brings the righteousness
to us and that we believe in the righteous. One, if we believe
by faith alone, not adherence to the law. Last week we saw
that Abraham was justified long before the law was given. He
never obeyed any precepts of God's righteous requirements,
yet he was justified, and then what? Fourteen, thirteen, fourteen
years later when Ishmael was born, Abraham and Ishmael were
circumcised on the same day. Irony is that Ishmael never followed
in the ways of the Lord. Hebrews chapter 1, one of the
most amazing places that God used to bring me out of my really
bad place in life, and inner depression, and pity, and the
sin of self-consumption. He says, but in these last days
He spoke to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all
things, through whom He also created the world. Now you think
about it for a second. Where do you get that? Verse
13, for the promise of Abraham and his offspring that he would
be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through
the righteousness of faith. So Jesus Christ is the heir of
all things. And then now here, Paul is arguing
that Abraham is going to be the heir of the world, because this
is not the promise that God gives Abraham. You'll be the father
of many nations, and through you, the whole world will be
blessed. Does it give you an explanation
of what the apostles mean when they start talking about the
world in their writing? Jesus Christ is there of all
things. It is through Jesus that we have our hope. It is through
Jesus that we have our security. It is Jesus who inherits eternal
life and His humanity. Listen to this. You realize Jesus took on humanity.
Being subject to the law. Get this. Jesus was not exempt. Had He sinned, the God-man would
have been condemned. But He could not sin. Why? Because
He's holy. And I said, well, he had it easy.
Really? Give yourself the power to turn stone to bread and be
hungry for 40 days and then be told to do it and then not do
it. What would I do? Subway sandwiches. We'd had buns, buns, and more
buns. throw myself off a cliff and
watch the angels come? Oh, you don't believe me? I dare
you. I mean, most of us would take a dare to try to catch a
cracker in our mouth, much less not do something incredibly glorious.
The temptation was there. But the Christ, Jesus, desired
to obey and to honor the Father and to be the representative
of humanity that is perfect. Jesus Christ is the heir in His
humanity to the cosmos. He is the perfect man. It is
the work of Jesus through which we have that inheritance. It
is the person of Jesus through which we have our promise. It
is the person of Jesus through which we have eternal hope. Our
security is in Christ alone. We are never, according to Paul
in this chapter, we are never to look within ourselves for
our evidence and assurance. We test ourselves and what do
we do? We work out our salvation with
fear and trembling, but what does Paul say? Finish the sentence
by trusting in Him who wills and works for His good pleasure.
We trust in Christ who is our righteousness. Yeah, we strive,
but what is the striving? It could be really good today
and it could be really bad tomorrow. The teaching of the gospel has
nothing to do with the work of God and His will and the measure
of the gift of grace and His Spirit and the lives collectively
of the church. You hear that? The gospel is
what God has done to secure salvation for His people and it is effectual.
If I mature in an area of my life spiritually and you don't,
it's not because you are weak and running behind us, it's because
God is working differently in you at that time. Now I'm not
talking about heinousness, I'm not talking about... I mean we
can see the obvious stuff. Don't lie, don't murder, don't
steal, don't covet. Love each other, forgive. I mean,
these are things you get popped quickly for. You get popped.
You get popped by the Holy Spirit and conviction. You get popped
by each other when we graciously and politely and biblically say
to one another, man, you don't have to be in that place. Yeah,
your attitude was really fleshly. And we know it already, don't
we? We already know it. We're not talking about these
things. The greater sin here for the Jews is not the wickedness
that they did, it's the wickedness that they didn't do that they
looked to. It's the things that they didn't do that they looked
to. They didn't act like the Gentiles. They didn't dress like
the Gentiles. They didn't eat like the Gentiles.
They didn't walk like the Gentiles. They did it correctly. This past
Lord's Day when we were looking at the woman of Sychar, imagine,
imagine And we'll see it this Sunday, what these people would think
as they came back, as the disciples came back and saw Jesus talking
with this type of woman. Not just that she was a promiscuous
woman, not that just she was a woman, but that she was a Samaritan
woman. Someone who never got her faith
right. Someone who never walked in the way she should walk. And
Nicodemus denied Christ, and lived in unbelief in His righteousness
and His religion. And here's the Samaritan woman
being saved by Jesus. When we consider ourselves right,
according to what Paul's teaching here, when we consider ourselves
right in our living, we are actually self-condemned because we're
judged by the law. When we come to the edge of saying,
well, we're following the right rules for Jesus. We're following
the right rules, we're living the way God wants us to live,
and that is evidence of our lie. What happens when we do that
is we're actually self-condemned, because we are going to be judged
by the very thing to which we want to be measured. And in our
self-measuring, church, listen to this, we measure wrongly. I mean, let's be honest. How
many of us have ever said, man, I'm so glad I don't sin that
way anymore? You know, praise be to God we can say that about
some things. But do we really have something to brag about?
If our pinky toe is cleaned up, but the rest of our body is full
of garbage, are we really clean? No, but we want to walk around.
Look how clean my pinky toe is. Look at that pinky toe. And there's
poop all over your leg. And everybody's like, look at
that poop. No, no, no, no, no. Look at that pinky toe. That's how I
feel when I'm cleaning the house. I get one countertop done. It's
like, voila. Take a picture of that. Put it
on Facebook. I've cleaned up. Don't turn around. Or the leaves, like us blowing
leaves. I've got the ones I can see out the windows. You feel
better about it. That's what we do. We don't want
to be judged by the standard of righteousness that the law
gives because it's perfection. We want to be judged by the standard
of righteousness that Jesus gave and lived because it is the only
hope we have. The gospel is the power of God
unto salvation. Let's not forget it. Let's hold
fast always to the gospel of grace. As we see this heir, what
does it mean to be the heir with Christ? What does it mean for
Abraham to be the heir? We know the temporal blessing.
We know that the fact that he was 100 years older than not
had a son and his wife was aged as well and barren. I mean, just
genetically, that's that's a mistake to have a baby. but yet God had
promised them a baby. Was Abraham faithful in obeying
God in that promise? No, but Abraham was faithful
in believing God in that promise. You see the difference? Let me
say that again. Abraham wasn't faithful in obeying God in that
promise, he was faithful in believing God in that promise. We gain
our inheritance And that inheritance, if we really could put a finger
on it, you know what it is? It's the restoration of our intimacy
with God. It's the restoration of what
we lost in the garden. It's the restoration of what
Adam and Eve destroyed, that intimacy. And we gain this restoration
through Jesus Christ alone who is the heir of heaven. And there
is no other way and no other means and no other fruit and
no other actions through which we can find this restoration.
It's the promise of God through Jesus Christ who is our hope.
We are joint heirs with Christ. And see, this idea about being
joint heirs is the narrative in total of Scripture. It is
something that's there every turn that we see. Satan, on the
alternative though, has devised a plan of humanistic stature
so that we can look at the evidences, we can begin to look at ourselves,
we can begin to measure ourselves by each other, by our spirituality. And then when we do that, we
decide that this is our judging line. This is the line of trespass.
Man, at least I'm not living like James. At least I don't wear a camouflage
jacket in the pulpit. I mean, you know. At least I'm not like that publican,
stealing. At least I tithe. At least I'm
in church. At least I use the right Bible
version. At least I'm a Calvinist. At least I'm a Baptist. I mean,
you know, the list goes on and on. We could just sit here and
just call them out all the time. We're joining us with Christ. Satan
has devised this thing to say, look at this. Look at what you
could be. Look at who you are. Isn't that
what he told Eve? Look at what you could be. Look
at what you could be, just to eat of the fruit. And Eve already
twisted the Word of God, because Adam added to it. You know, the
woman didn't hear. Adam's responsibility was to
tell her what God had said. Don't touch. I mean, don't eat
of any of the fruit on these two trees. You know what the
difference in the tree to the left of that tree and the tree
to the right of that tree was? Nothing. It wasn't like God had a whole
big orchard and then two special kind of trees there. It was the
same trees, the same fruit. It's like having a line of apple
trees and God saying, OK, don't eat off this one and don't eat
off that one. And she says, no, God didn't say. Did God really
say you couldn't? that you would die? Did God really
say that? Well, He said, you could not eat of it nor touch
it. Don't touch! Don't touch! You see what happened?
Eve created a new law for herself. And the devil used that new law
and said, here's the deal, you don't know why God is telling
you not to do this. But see, God hadn't told her
not to do this. It's good for food, it's good to the eye. He
says, because God knows if you touch that fruit, if you eat
that fruit, you're not gonna die. He was telling the truth.
You weren't gonna die right then. You're not gonna die. There's a promise
that the devil makes that's usually half true. Matter of fact, because God doesn't
want you to touch it, so now there's this withholding. God,
everything he commands is for our good and for our joy and
for our pleasure, but we want to think that God is a killjoy.
Why? Because our flesh loves itself.
We love ourselves. And if we want to follow after
Christ and put trust in ourselves, then we want to follow after
Christ with our rules and our laws. And we want to come up
and say, OK, well, I'm not touching that tree. What would it have
been like if Adam would have said, that's on you, girl. I
mean, what a mess humanity would have been in. Nah, he wanted it just like she
did. Thing is, he was too scared to do anything about it. And
here we are looking at things and making our own laws and thinking
that we're right. And the power that even Adam
wanted was promised to them and it was given to them. They were
like God in this way that now they knew evil. Now they knew
evil and we bear the fruit of that. See? Abraham, as I've already said,
acted in faith, not obedience. Therefore, he was the father
of all who live by faith. Abraham is not the father of
those who follow the precepts of the 613 laws of Moses. Abraham
is the father of those who live by faith. Abraham is the father
of those who trust in the righteousness of God. Abraham is the father
of those who believe the promise of God. Do you believe the promise
of God? I want you to hear this, church. If you don't hear anything
else, I'm going to hit this home again. Do you believe the promise
of God unto salvation? Nothing else is promised us.
We're promised suffering, we're promised death, we're promised
hard times, we're promised to be hated in the world, we're
promised to share in the sufferings of Christ. If Christ had these
sufferings, then why are we surprised when the fiery trial comes upon
us, like Peter would ask? Why are you surprised? We're
given the command to rejoice even when we're not happy. Because
we somewhere in our culture think that joy and happiness go together.
Happiness is what we get when our flesh gets what it wants.
Joy is what we don't deserve because we look to Christ who
took what we deserve and gave us what we don't deserve. See,
God has passed judgment. God has passed judgment on all
humanity. They're guilty before Him because they have fallen
from His grace. They've fallen from His glory, rather. And we
deserve to die. We should not mix up the gospel
and the power of the New Testament and the power of the Lord to
teach the elect who, filled with the Spirit of God, are empowered
to imperfectly walk and strive in a manner worthy of life. Strive
in a manner worthy of life by faith. We trust in the Lord even
when we strive. We'll never put our trust in
those acts of imperfect obedience. And we should not ignore the
fact that what God has called sin is sin. And what Paul is
wanting for us to see here, before we move on into verse 16, we
probably won't get any further than 15 tonight, is that the
law has no place in the economy of grace, except to show us our
need for grace. except to show us that we cannot
do it. God has passed judgment and we
await for that day. We as the saints await for the
day of judgment that we might be freed and restored and fully
be like Christ. We look for that day when all
things will be put under His feet and we will get out of this
body of death. He will judge those who rewrite
His Word according to their preferences. He will judge those who allow
culture to dictate what is and is not right. And if you know
the difference between morality and truth. There are a lot of
people who live in a sense of morality, but morality is defined
by the culture, is defined by the people. What is moral is
not what is righteous all the time. Morality is defined by
the culture. We get to determine what morality
is. It used to be immoral and illegal to spit upon a sidewalk
because it was gross when everybody used to walk everywhere and men
would drop a plop of tobacco this big on the sidewalk for
a lady to step in with her Sunday shoes. It was gross. It was immoral. It used to be immoral and it
still is in some sense to look at a certain way a person or
to use a certain hand to wave. It might be immoral to stick
certain fingers in the air in certain directions at certain
times of the day. But in other cultures, that same gesture may
be something good and wholesome. We define what is moral. But
Jesus Christ came to save us from our morality. Jesus Christ came to save us
from our self-efficiency and our self-sufficiency, to walk
in a manner worthy of God's eyes. Worthy adherence there, see.
Verse 14, if it is the inheritor of the law who are to be the
heirs, then faith is null and the promise is void. There's no purpose
for the promise of God if we're just supposed to follow a line
of morality. But see, the problem is the line
of morality that many of us choose is not the line of morality that
God has claimed. Question, how much makeup should
you wear on your face if you really love Jesus? I don't know.
It depends on how ugly you are. Like one Christian comic said
many years ago, it depends on the face. Should I listen to
music that has a drum in it? I don't know. What if you live
in Africa and all you've got is drums? Should I have instruments
in the church or should I have a guitar? Should you? You think God cares
about the guitar? You think God cares about specific
issues? I have my thoughts, and the elders
have their thoughts, and we sort of rest in those. And there are
things that we don't want to do because of people's conscience.
But it's not necessarily inherently wicked or evil because we choose
or not to choose to do those things, so we don't stand smugly
before God and say, wow, you know what, we don't have the
heavy metal in our church. I've recently found out that
somebody that I know online actually goes to a church that is heavy
metal in everything they do. They go to, they worship in heavy
metal style. And I'm thinking, ugh, my first
response was, that's terrible. And I'm thinking, I hate that
junk. Trey goes, well, everybody there
loves it. As long as they preach the truth
of scripture, I mean, can you sing Come Thou Fount with a squealer? I guess, I don't know. It is
well... I guess. I don't know. What does
it sound like? I don't want to experience that. More power to
the ones who do. It's not evil. So we've got a
problem when we start calling evil that which God has not called
evil. When we start calling sin that which God has not called
sin. And these hearers, these Jews and these Romans, they started
to think really hard about what it was that Paul was teaching
them. They started thinking, wow, you know, all the things
we've been taught to do in order to be right before the Lord,
or even to be pious, Paul is saying they're not to be done.
We're not to walk like Abraham walked. As a matter of fact,
the Jews held Abraham to the wrong picture. They messed up.
They thought he walked. He didn't walk. Isn't that the
way it works? We esteem someone to a place
that they actually aren't. Those who live by their morality
will be judged by their morality. And you know what? They'll be
equally as guilty and judged and condemned by those who live
in immorality. They're equally condemned before
God, guilty of law-breaking, guilty of law-making, and guilty
of grace-forsaking. How to do it. It just comes out
like that. If the inheritors of the law
were to be the heirs, faith is null. What does that mean in
verse 14? It means that God's promise is the point. God's promise
to save is the actual point. He is the key to life. We cannot
separate the gospel from gospel power and gospel living, which
is all by faith alone. See, our culture does a great
job of breaking the Spirit of God, like breaking Him in half
and putting fears in the hearts of God's people. It's real easy. If I want something to happen,
And we used to do this as parents of young children, and if you
all do this, if you have young children now, I'm sorry, I'm
about to rain on your parade. But we used to actually, when
our children wouldn't tell us the truth, we'd just say, okay,
we're going to pray and ask God. And they'd spill the beans. Oh
no, I did it! Here's the marker, I wrote it. Sometimes we do that. We try
to get what we want by manipulating what we say God wants. Sometimes
we try to get what we think is right by making fear the point
of life. But perfect love drives out fear.
We don't have to fear God. We revere Him as a papa, as an
intimate dad who we sit on His knee and He bounces us and He
holds us. And I'm not blaspheming because
that is the language that Paul uses when he talks about intimacy
with God. Papa. not O great Father, which
is where He is and who He is, holy, anointed, grand, majestic,
divine Father. Wow! We shudder. But He reaches
out to us in Christ and we can call Him Papa. He is both and. He's gentle with His sheep. He
loves His sheep. He gave His Son for the sake
of His sheep. He is not going to condemn His sheep. He is not
going to chastise His sheep in a penal way. He is going to restore
them and caress them and bring them into righteousness through
His power, no matter how painful. For if we have a God that is
the antithesis of that, we might as well be Islam and earn it.
We might as well just embrace Islam. But our culture does a
great job of breaking the Spirit of God and putting fears in the
hearts of God's people. And then, because of that, God's
people cower. They cower, thinking that they're
doing what God forbids or what God hates. It is clear what God
hates. The Scripture shows us very clearly
what God hates. Prideful hearts, haughty eyes,
self-righteousness, a lack of love and a lack of compassion
and a lack of forgiveness. He hates sin. He hates the devil. And He hates the children of
the devil. In Galatians 3.18 Paul writes,
For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes
by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by promise. It's to reiterate
what Paul is saying here in verse 14, that the inheritance is something
that we get because God has promised it to us. We don't rely on the
works, even the fruit of faith. If we do, we dismiss the promise
of God entirely. And we put a synergistic appeal
that allows the flesh of humanity to endorse what I call a created
object of worship, namely the works of pride and piety, which
is self-righteousness, which God said in Romans chapter 1,
He gives over to reprobation. Please, let's stop thinking that
the Roman one reprobates are those who live in wicked, evil,
dark things. These are also inclusive of those
who live in self-righteousness without love in their hearts. You see how amazing this is?
How freeing this is? How perfect, how powerful this
is? The gospel then is worthless
if we look at our efforts and if we look at our transformation
and we hope in those things as security. 1 Corinthians 15, 14.
And if Christ has not been raised and our preaching is in vain
and your faith is in vain, who is the power belong to? To Christ. Christ has saved us. But I keep
hearing you say it doesn't matter what we do. Where have I said
that? This is the gospel. We don't
have to get to what we've got to do until after God has saved
us. And then we're going to look
at what God's telling us to do, and then by faith we're going
to follow in. And when we fail, we have an advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who has satisfied the wrath of
God on our behalf. That is what propitiation means. See, emeritus works are a sham.
They're actually impossible. Faith, in contrast, reaches upward
and grasps hold of the promise of God. Because He then would
be the mercy giver, the faith giver, the Savior. Rather than
us meeting God where He is and grasping hold of that hand that
He's so desperately reaching down to try to catch us. God
snatches us out of death. Levi used the illustration earlier
today when I was talking to him about the man that's rotting
dead as a corpse in the bottom of an ocean. No matter how many
life ropes we throw out, he's not going to come and grab it.
God has to reach into the depths of the crevices of the darkest
places and pull the corpses out and shake them and to breathe
into them the breath of life that they may come alive through
the hearing of the gospel. Where's our hope? It better be
in the faithful one. And when we're approached, I've
already said this, when we're approached about our hope, let us put our
hope in Christ squarely. Let our response be yes, but
never let our response to the gospel of grace say, well, I
hear what you're saying, but never say that. Erase it from
your memory. Don't make a contrasting argument
when someone's sharing the gospel with you. under any circumstances. Hold fast to the truth of grace. There's never a condition to
it. You know what a condition is? If you clean your room, we'll
go to Dairy Queen. That's a condition. The condition
is, it never works, we never go, you know, and then you feel
bad and everybody gets to have one lick off the cone. But, you
know, the condition is if you clean your room. It's a conditional
statement, if then. And what happens, the consequence,
the outcome of that is if the condition is met, then the outcome
happens. The result is given. And the
result is we get to go to Dairy Queen. You see, parents that
are really logical, they could be sneaky. We could just drive
over to Dairy Queen and drive away from Dairy Queen. We didn't
say anything about going in. We didn't say anything about
getting treats. And that would be great. We'll try that one
day. So the condition, the condition of if you save your money, you
will be able to have money for a tire if it blows out. If you work hard, you might be
homeless. I mean, that's a good condition.
I know a lot of homeless, hardworking people. But there's no condition
on grace. And there's no condition to grace.
God has accomplished everything. This is where saving faith must
lie. It is the finished work of God alone. And my prayer is
that every one of us who has ears to hear, that we hear and
we hold fast to this. Why? Why does Paul teach it? Verse 15 and then I'm done. Why
does Paul teach it this way? Why is he going so overboard?
Four chapters. Guess what? He's going to go
one more. Five chapters to dismantle the works of the flesh. Because if you don't get it,
if you don't see it, If God doesn't continue to reach in you and
allow you to hear and to hold fast to this truth, you don't
have life in Christ. And beloved, some people are
born of God and then they are boxed in to a legalism, or they're
boxed in to what we talked about, an antinomianism, or they're
boxed in to, which is legalism with your own set of rules. And
you're boxed in to fear, and you're boxed in to pressure,
and you're boxed in to these things Let's get the gospel right
and watch what God will do. What motivates you to hear the
text of the apostles where it says, love your neighbor? Or
the text of Jesus says, love your enemies. How do we love
our enemies? Are we just supposed to work on that? No. When we
get the gospel right, God works that in us. And then we obey
it. We do it in our bodies, in our
flesh, in our mind, in our heart. We actually are the one Responding
to the command by the grace of God through faith. But what gives
us that ability is that we believe in the gospel. We hold fast to
the gospel. We're not working between the
gospel and law. We are holding fast to the grace
of God. Verse 15, For the law brings
wrath. But where there is no law, there
is no transgression. Because he goes, the purpose of the law
is righteous judgment. That's why God gave it. So that
the world could see His righteous judgment. Because no man has
ever kept it. The purpose of the law is wrath.
No one can keep it. And when we feel we're moving
closer to keeping it, we're still just as guilty as not keeping
it. Because mercy and faith and the
mercy of God is the point of it all. Grace is the point of
it all. This is why we use the term gospel. Good news. Gospel. Gospel. Gospel. And it is the
power of God. The good news of Jesus Christ
is the power of God unto salvation. The work and the story and the
proclamation of Jesus Christ is the power of God to salvation.
The things that I have been teaching us for 25 Wednesdays is the power
of God unto salvation. And beloved, we never outgrow
it. I don't know about you, but there's
nothing you came in here with today on your shoulders that
the gospel cannot fix. There's no pain in your soul
that the gospel cannot heal, and there is no heartache and
worry and fear that the gospel will not wipe away. Why? Because that's what God does.
Well, I thought the gospel was for the lost. The gospel is for
the church. First unto their salvation, then
their joy, then their eternity. Remember Paul. He did all He
did because grace to Him was an offense. He was offended by
the grace of God through Jesus Christ. He hated the way. He
hated Christ's followers. Because He hated hearing when
Jesus preached in Luke chapter 2, this is not for you, but for
the Gentiles. And they wanted to kill Him.
His first public sermon, they wanted to kill Him that day.
They wanted to throw Him off the cliff of Jerusalem. But He
escaped. Paul was offended by grace. He
bettered himself according to the standard of God's law and
he was condemned for it. A man that cannot see his works
is worthy of death, is truly dead and possibly judicially
blinded. Paul says in Philippians 3, 4-7, Though I myself have
reason for confidence in the flesh, also, if anyone else thinks
he has a reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised
on the eighth day of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin,
a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to the zeal,
a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law,
blameless. For whatever gain I had, it's
all for nothing. I count it all as loss for the sake of Christ. For you have heard of my former
life in Judaism, he tells the church of Galatia, how I persecuted
the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. You see,
that's what happens when people trust in themselves. They violently
persecute, violently persecute and try to destroy the church.
You ever felt like somebody wanted to destroy you, to destroy your
reputation? You ever wonder what makes somebody
hate me so bad? And if it's because of your faith,
it's because they hate Christ. And they've created their own
Christ. They've created their own Gospel. And that's what the
Jews had done. Created their own Gospel. Created
their own way. What Paul would teach later in
this book, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh,
could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful
flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh. See, there
is no transgression when there is no line to cross. That's what
Paul says right there. Look at verse 15. For the law
brings wrath, but where there is no law, there is no transgression.
A transgression is crossing the line. Here's the rule. You stepped
over it. You crossed the line. Here's
your ticket. Here's your sentence. Here's your consequence. The
Jews looked at Abraham as a worthy patriarch because they viewed
him as an obedient and law-keeping soul. Listen to Sirach 4420,
some of the writings of the of the Jews. He kept the law of
the Most High. This is what they're saying about
Abraham. He entered into a covenant with him. He certified the covenant
in his flesh. That's circumcision. And when
he was tested, he proved to be faithful. Who are they talking
about? It sounds like Jesus. But they
were talking about Abraham. Abraham was none of those things.
God sealed his own promise with Abraham's flesh. God entered
a covenant with Abraham and Abraham didn't believe it half the time.
And he never kept the Law of the Most High because he didn't
follow after anything for 13, 14 years. And even when he was
tested, he proved faithless because he lied and deceived and worked
an in-round to try to get what God had promised. Paul says faith
alone was Abraham's hope. not His faithfulness. The law
shows us where we stand, not how to stand. When it says there
that this law brings wrath and there's no transgression
there, think about it this way. The law, and I'll quote, and
I can't remember where I got this now, excites and exasperates
the evil passions of the heart. The law excites and exasperates
the evil passions. When somebody says, don't you
do that, we call it reverse psychology in our day, don't we? And what
happens? People go, well, I think I'll
do that. The law, when we see it, our flesh goes, hmm, I'm
going to do this. Secondly, our imperfect obedience brings the
law's curse upon us. The law brings wrath. So the
law has its place in the way God brings people salvation.
But that place is not the provision of a means whereby people may
so prove themselves holy and meriting salvation. If we
are judged by the law, we die. If we are judged by faith in
Jesus Christ, we live. And that's why in verse 16, and
we'll stop, that is why it depends on faith. In order that the promise
may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring. Not only
to those who adhere to the law, which is the Jews, but to the
one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.
Let's pray. Father, we are so broken and
unable and unworthy. And Lord, I pray continually for
our brothers and sisters. Not just we who are here tonight.
We definitely pray for each other, but God, those who are not here
tonight, those who are laboring in their soul. Father, those
who are struggling, in ways that we don't know, those who are
struggling in things that they've confessed to us, those who are
being bothered in their spirit or in their heart or in their
mind or conscience, God, about things that they should not be
bothered by. Lord, we also pray for the circumstances
that we find ourselves in as a body. We pray for our brothers
and sisters. We pray that unity and reconciliation
and peace and hope and clarity would all come by your Spirit.
Father, we pray for opportunities to pray and to minister to one
another. Lord, we pray for those who are sick, those who are continuing
to suffer in the flesh, those who are dealing with so many
things that we can't imagine what it's doing to their mind
and to their hope. Lord, help us to rest in the
work of Jesus, in the gospel of grace, and never, ever trust
in ourselves. In Jesus' name we pray.