Romans chapter seven, and we're
going to read from verse one. Romans seven, verse one. Know ye not, brethren, for I
speak to them that know the law, how that the law hath dominion
over a man as long as he liveth? For the woman which hath a husband
is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth. But if
the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. So then, if while her husband
liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress. But if her husband be dead, she
is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though
she be married to another man. Wherefore, my brethren, ye also
are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that ye should
be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead,
that we should bring forth fruit unto God. For when we were in
the flesh, the motions of sins which were by the law did work
in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we
are delivered from the law, that being dead, that being dead wherein
we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit and
not in the oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the
law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known
sin, but by the law. For I had not known lust, except
the law had said, thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion
by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law, sin was
dead. For I was alive without the law
once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was
ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking
occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. Wherefore, the law is holy, and
the commandment holy, and just, and good. Amen. May God bless to us this reading
from his word this evening. We'll curtail it there. I want to take perhaps a week
or two to think about this chapter seven. It's an important chapter
in the book of Romans. It's an important chapter to
the Lord's people. So we'll not be too adventurous
this evening. I wanted to point out at the
beginning of our thoughts this evening that We've spent time
on the first six chapters of Romans already. We're now entering
into the seventh chapter. But in the first six chapters
of the book of Romans, Paul has mentioned the law more than 40
times. In these early chapters of Romans,
he has mentioned the law more than 40 times. And in this seventh
chapter, he will refer to the law further another 23 times. Now, we might wonder why the
apostle who spoke of the gospel in such elevated terms in the
opening chapter of this book of Romans should spend so much
time talking about the law. Now you'll remember, of course,
that these chapter headings are not of the utmost importance,
they're useful tools for us now, but in these first chapters,
in these early chapters, up to the end of chapter seven, there's
something like 65 times the law has been spoken of. Now I suspect
that some of you think when I mention the law, oh no, oh no. What has this law got to do with
me? How does it affect my life? How is it in any way applicable
to my circumstances, to my challenges, to my problems, to my life, to
me, to my troubles? Why don't you just give me good
news? Why don't you just give me the
gospel? That's what I'm here for. I'm
here to hear the gospel. I don't need all of this stuff
about the law. Tell me about the mercy of God.
Tell me about the grace of God and the love of God. Tell me
about peace and reconciliation between God and man. Tell me about the Lord Jesus.
Tell me the gospel. Now I'm sympathetic and I shall get there. But I tell you this, Paul is
doing us a great service by emphasising this matter of the law. And that for one simple reason. Every trouble that you have,
every problem that you face, every challenge in your life,
and I know that all of you here profess to be believers. But
you know, as I know, as a professing Christian, as one who has a testimony,
perhaps over many years, that we have believed these gospel
truths. We've trusted in the Lord as
our saviour. I know that you know that life
is hard. Life is tough. Life is a challenge,
that there are problems that we have to face every day. And
we know that those problems find their strength in the sin in
this world, in our lives, and the weakness of our flesh. Every trouble and problem that
we face, everything that we experience in this life that is short of
that blessed communion with God and the Lord Jesus Christ through
the Holy Spirit, can be traced back to sin, either ours personally
or someone else's. And the sin and this body of
flesh in which we dwell is the source of our trouble in this
world. And it's the law that marks sin. It's the law that marks sin. The law was given, the purpose
of the law was given to expose, to constrain and to condemn sin
in the flesh. It had and has an ongoing purpose
in that respect. But here's the matter that we're
going to be thinking about in the context of Romans chapter
seven particularly over the next week or two as the Lord enables. That the deceitfulness of sin and the wickedness of our own
hearts, even the continuing wickedness of our own hearts as professing
believers, means that the law, good and
holy as it is, has been taken and misused, misapplied
and manipulated by Satan to give us as hard a time as he possibly
can, to beset the church with problems, and to serve his purpose
of enlarging his kingdom in this world. Now let's think for a moment
about the natural man. Just want to, before we get into
thinking about how this law applies to us, I just want to think about
the natural man and the condition that we all were in, perhaps
even still are in, I'm not assuming anything. But the natural man
looks at the law. Be it God's holy law, Right,
let's summarise that by the Ten Commandments, but God's holy
law. He looks at that, the revealed
law of God, or else even if it's his own law, His own flawed law
that he picks up and takes and runs with. We spend a little
bit of time in the early part of Romans thinking about the
fact that even where the Gentiles didn't have the fullness of the
revelation of God's law, they still had a law to themselves.
They still understood that there was a God to whom they were accountable. They still had a moral code that
they lived by. and always succumbed to, always
fell short of, even their own limited, flawed moral code. The
law of God, the Ten Commandments, if we like, that is the fullness
of the holiness of God's revealed will. But man has always got a law,
whether it's God's law or his own law. And when the natural
man looks at that law, He thinks one of two things.
He thinks, I can do this. I can keep this. Or else he thinks, I'm going to do what I want.
It's not going to stop me from doing what I want. I am a man.
I'm free. I can act out whatever I want
to do. And let the law try and stop
me. Let the sheriff come and get
me. I'll do what I want to do. And
that's how the natural man thinks. Now sometimes he's a little bit
more subtle than that. Sometimes he just thinks I'll
give this my best attempt. And sometimes he thinks to himself,
I'll do what I want to do, but I'll do it furtively. I'll do
it secretly so that no one will know what I'm doing. And outwardly,
I'll put on a pretense that I'm sticking by the letter of the
law. But that's the natural man's
reaction to the law. And either way, whatever his
response is, man and the flesh misuses and
corrupts this God-given help of law and conscience. So Paul is warning believers. Paul is warning us also that
while the law was given to mark sin, while the law was given
to reveal sin, because of our flesh, There is still an ongoing
warning to believers that all along the Christian path, all
along our pilgrim journey here in this world, our flesh, which
is still that residual flesh that we had in our natural condition,
Our flesh will continue to endeavour to reassert itself over the new
man and over the spiritual life that has been created in the
experience in the soul of one who trusts in the Lord Jesus
Christ. So I'm talking about you and I'm talking about me
and I'm talking about those who have a profession of faith. We
must never think that we have in some way been able to move
out beyond the weakness of our flesh. In fact, I think it would be
quite appropriate to say that it is only as the natural man
is overthrown and the spiritual man created by God the Holy Spirit,
it is only in the regenerated soul that the full weight and
the full force and the full power of God's holy law is experienced
or appreciated. And I think that's what Paul
is referring to here in chapter 7, where he says that, for example,
in verse 9 of chapter 7, I was alive without the law once. He assumed he was, he thought
he was. He didn't realise the true force of the law. He didn't
realise how comprehensive and how detailed the law's spotlight
was in an individual's life. He thought as long as he pretty
much came within the letter of the law, he was doing fine. He
spoke of himself as being of the Pharisees, righteous. He thought he was doing okay,
measuring his life, measuring his moral code and conduct against
the law of God. But then he says, when the commandment
came, not that it was ever gone, But when it came to him, when
it came to him with spiritual sight, with spiritual understanding,
when it came to him that day on the Damascus Road, when he
stood before the Lord Jesus Christ, when he stood before that one
whom he now realised to be God himself, and realised what he
had done. Paul could say, Saul of Tarsus,
Paul could say that he was the chief of sinners. Such was the
weight and the power of that law upon the apostle's conscience. And it is only the regenerate
sinner who truly appreciates the full weight and power of
the law of God. You speak to somebody that doesn't
know that they're a sinner, doesn't know that they're answerable
to the Holy God, and they might say to you, yes, we know that
you've not to commit adultery, yes, we know that you've not
to do this, you've not to do that, but they've no sense to
which in any way that law comes in and starts to probe and stir
in their heart and their conscience. They just don't have it. That
is a work of the Holy Spirit. That work of grace which begins
the experience of regeneration where God the Holy Spirit stirs
up a sense of terror Fear in the soul of an individual at
the prospect of standing before God in these filthy rags. Now Paul has proved that we are
sinners in these early chapters of Romans. And for the reprobate, The law
marks our sin. Those who have no knowledge of
Christ as saviour, no knowledge of God in his holiness, the law
marks and regulates it. It holds us accountable and accuses
us before God's holiness. And that is true for all people,
all people that are born into this world. But the message of
the gospel, the message of scripture, the revelation of God is that
some of those who are sinners before God have rather than being eternally
condemned under the judgment of that law, have rather been
justified by God, and that unconditionally so, that God has looked upon
them, and for some reason which is good to himself, is good for
his own will and known only to himself, he has chosen to place
his love upon those sinners. Not all sinners, not universally
so, but some, some. Some have been chosen out of
the mass of humankind to be recipients of His love, to be recipients
of His mercy, that He might reveal His character as a gracious God,
patient and long-suffering against sin. to those individuals, particularly
and peculiarly so. And he has chosen them. And in
his sovereign purpose and in his sovereign choice, we call
it election, in that elective purpose, God has justified them,
justified them from all their sins, declared them to be without
sin, declared them to be righteous, to be holy and to be perfect
before him as he has taken their guilt and placed it upon the
account of another. And the Lord Jesus Christ is
that one whom the Apostle Paul preaches, whom the Apostle Paul
knows, whom the Apostle Paul met. So here is some sinners
in this world who rather than being eternally condemned are
justified upon the merits of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord's sacrifice of himself
as a lamb as one who would take their guilt, who would take their
sin and carry it away, has been set forth in the purpose of God. We call it the covenant of peace
or the covenant of grace. In this great covenant purpose
of God, to redeem a people, to buy back a people, to recover
a people that had been lost in sin, the Lord Jesus Christ became
the surety and substitute for his people. He was sacrificed
for them. And those individuals are gathered
in time by the preaching of the gospel and by the revelation
of God's grace in their souls. However, until those individuals
of whom we have spoken leave this world, and enter into the
next, enter into their rest in heaven and in glory. They must
continue to contend with the world, the flesh, and the devil. And these enemies of our soul
fight against us all the time. Now, if we would grow in grace,
if we would prove the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we
would discover something of the faithfulness of God towards us
and the comfort of that indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it must be
through that contending with the flesh. Yes, there are spiritual
blessings that flow to us. Yes, there are comforts which
are ours as the Lord's people. And I am sure, I am certain that
those of us who know something of the Lord would be able to
testify that we see something of these comforts. in our Saviour,
in the preaching of the Gospel, in the lifting up of the Lord
Jesus Christ, in the presentation through preaching of that One
who is our Saviour. But we also know that we have
those blessings within a mix of hardship and trial and suffering. that we feel blessed in our souls
but weary in our bodies, that we feel the grace of God upon
us and yet we feel that weight of sin in this flesh and a weariness
which seems to constantly beset us. And here's the point, that the
law continues to be a tool in the devil's hands. He continues to apply it, to
misapply it, and to manipulate our flesh and try and bring us
back under the demands of that law. Our two great enemies as
the Lord's people, are our carnal self, our fallen flesh, if you like,
what Paul is going to later call this body of death. That's in,
towards the end of chapter seven, we'll touch upon that on another
occasion. What Paul there calls the body of death, the passions,
the emotions, the motions of sin in our members. He's previously
in chapter six, verse six, called it the old man. That's our first
great enemy, the old man. And the second is Satan, the
accuser. And both these enemies employ
the law against the Lord's people. Either to puff up our pride,
or to bring us into condemnation. And Paul's purpose in making
so much reference to the law in these early chapters of Romans
is to show us that neither of those uses in the carnal man
or by the accuser, Satan, the devil. Neither of those two uses
of the law is legitimate or legal. So this is the point that I want
to leave with you tonight. that the Apostle Paul is stressing
that we have to be knowledgeable to know when we are being brought
into condemnation, when we are being brought under law again. Because these enemies, our own
flesh and the devil, are seeking to rob us as believers of the
blessings of our justification in Christ. They are trying to
rob us of those things that the apostle has spoken of at the
beginning of chapter 5. Just turn over the page. Let
me read a couple of verses to you from Romans chapter 5. He says there at the beginning,
therefore remember how we said that just the way that you pronounce
these verses can make all the difference in our understanding.
So Paul has been speaking much in chapter 4 about our justification. And he says, therefore being
justified, By faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ. So we have peace. Believers have
peace. Being justified, being made righteous
with God, being brought into the experience of sins forgiven,
we have peace with God through that faith. By faith we have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Then he goes on,
by whom also we have access. So a believer has peace with
God through Christ and access into the presence of God through
the Lord Jesus Christ. Access by faith into this grace
wherein we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
These are lovely blessings. Joy. Glory. Hope. These words are all words
that encourage us and comfort us and give us a sense of God's
goodness towards us. And Paul goes on in verse 3,
not only so, but we glory in tribulations also. Knowing that
tribulation wortheth patience, patience, experience, and experience
hope, and hope maketh not ashamed. Because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. These are blessings which come
to us by faith. in the completed work of the
Lord Jesus Christ, wherein our justification is assured. And
these are our blessings, these are our inheritance, this is
our birthright. We are a people who are blessed with access into
the very presence of God. In all of this world, We have
access into the presence of God by the Lord Jesus Christ and
we have joy in the Lord and we have hope and we have a hope
of glory and therefore Paul is pointing us as the people of
faith to lay hold, to take a fast and grip onto this gospel truth
of our standing before God in the Lord Jesus Christ and the
blessings that flow to us by faith. We are justified. God sees no sin in us. He has
taken that sin and he has laid it upon his son. He has taken
that sin and he has put it to Christ's account and Christ has
carried it away. And as we've said before, he
has put it into the sea of his forgetfulness, never to be remembered
against us anymore. Never, never. God doesn't see
sin in us, not in the new man. Not in our justified state. Not in Christ. He just does not. We are sanctified. We are set
apart. We are declared to be holy. We
are that people that are protected and preserved by God, the Holy
Spirit. He has been given to us as the
earnest of our inheritance, the first fruits of that which we
are about to enter into. And it's only a little while
away. It's just over the hill, just
over the horizon. We are going to be entering into
the fullness of the reality. of what we can now only anticipate
and look forward to but it is absolutely certain and sure and
God the Holy Spirit granted to us is the earnest or is the down
payment if you like of those promises to us and there is imminent
glory. just a little while and we will
enter into those mansions that have been prepared for us. We
will see those who have gone before us. We will stand shoulder
to shoulder with the great saints of the Old Testament and the
New Testament and the Holy Scriptures and we will see them there and
we will join together with them and we will praise and honour
our God and the Lord Jesus Christ, the risen and ascended Christ.
These are our blessings. These are our possessions. This
is our inheritance. But we are not to be misled by
the misapplied and the misused law to bring us back again into
bondage and to take away from us the enjoyment of the possession
of these blessings. The devil is trying to spoil
your blessing. That's what he's trying to do.
And he uses the tools that are at his disposal. He uses the
world with its temptations. And he uses the flesh with its
weakness. And what has he got in order
to condemn us? But that very thing which we
feel most sensitive about. Our sin. Our sin and our flesh. And he uses the law against us. Because we've learned just how
holy and good and blessed the law is. He knows where the flesh
goes. He knows what the flesh will
run to. and therefore he brings the law
against our flesh. In verses one to three of this
chapter seven, we have a lovely picture there about the marriage
relationship. And I guess it's widely understood. I'm not going to spend any real
time on these few verses because I think it's pretty straightforward.
The apostle is drawing It's like the Lord when he speaks a parable
and he speaks about a sword that goes forth to sow or a shepherd
that has his flock. They're just so obviously beautiful,
simple pictures that they're easy to be grasped and understood.
And that's what the apostle is doing here. He's just showing
us that there is this relationship between life and death and law
and not being under the law. And it's pretty much self-explanatory. The marriage covenant exists,
the obligations, the legal requirements exist as long as the parties
to the covenant, to the relationship, to the promises are alive. But once one of them is dead,
then the other one is freed from those obligations. Bound while
living, freed by death. The spouse is
freed by death, the remaining spouse. And then in verse four,
we see that the apostle takes that picture and he gives it
a spiritual application. And his phrase is that believers
are dead to the law. That's the point that he is making
here. We are, ye also are become dead
to the law by the body of Christ. And that's a statement, that's
pretty emphatic that the apostle is saying there. We've become
dead to the law. That is, we are not bound by
the law because the body of the Lord Jesus Christ has satisfied
all the law's claims. The suffering of the Lord Jesus
Christ, the body of the God-man, the human person of the Lord
Jesus Christ as it was the vehicle which carried the sins of his
people. has satisfied all the condemnation
demands of the law. And the law is spent. It's done
its job. It's dead. It doesn't have any
more vitality. It doesn't have any more energy.
It doesn't have anything else to hit us with. Because of what the Lord has
done. And that divine retribution upon the soul of the Lord Jesus
Christ and upon the body of the Lord Jesus Christ has satisfied
every legitimate accusation. But that doesn't stop the devil
using illegitimate accusations. The Lord Jesus Christ has paid
every debt Matthew 5, verse 26 says, to the uttermost farthing. It's nice, the uttermost farthing. You know what a farthing is? It's the fourth part of a penny. I was in somebody's company the
other day Jill picked up a dime on the
ground. It'd fallen out of somebody's
pocket when they were leaving the car, I think. And she picked
it up and gave it to the lady. She says, you must have dropped
your dime. And the lady looked at it. She said, you know, you
can't even buy a single piece of candy for a dime. Well, am I right in thinking
that a dime is 10 pennies? Okay, a farthing is a fourth
part of a penny. And if you can't buy candy for
a dime, I don't know what you can get for a farthing. Christ
has paid it all to the uttermost farthing. There's nothing that
is outstanding. Now we were married to Christ
in that eternal covenant of grace, of peace. And yet in the fall,
in the fall of Adam, We left Christ. We committed adultery
against Christ. That's what it effectively was. That's what it's tantamount to.
We followed someone else. We went with someone else. We left our first love. We committed
adultery and fornication in Adam's fall. But now we've been returned
to Christ, our first love. because he has borne our sins
in his own body on the tree and he has dealt with that law problem. So in verse 5 we see that men
and women in their unregenerate state they served sin in their
flesh. Their passions, or that's what
the word, their motions, the motions of sins or the passions
of lust. They were driven on. They were enraged by the laws
constraining opposition. The law never reduces sin. Man is going to sin. Man in his
unregenerate state is going to pursue sin because that sin principle
has rule in his life. And all the law can do is move
that around, is push that around because it will find an out somewhere. And the law ultimately exacerbates
that sin principle. and it aggravates it and it worsens
it and men become angry at the law because they think that it's
curtailing what they want to do and the passions burn against
the law. In the natural man. But in the
new man, that sin principle has been taken away. That doesn't
mean we're sinless. But it does mean that we are
no longer driven by Satan's rod as once we were. There's a new
king on the throne. There's a new principle at work
in the new man. The law is done for the believer
because the Lord Jesus Christ has taken all our sin. We are
dead to it. We are free from it and from
its curse, from its bondage. Like the woman whose husband
is dead, we are at liberty. And as the believer's life is
no longer regulated by that law, but rather is regulated by love
and by holiness, by newness of spirit, by a desire to honour
the Lord, the secret man of the heart, as Peter calls him, desires
to honour and worship God. Not in the oldness of the letter,
but in the newness of the spirit. And that law, whether it's Moses'
law or whether it's some corrupted man-made alternative that could only ever aggravate
the ruling sinful impulses of the natural man, the believer
finds it still speaks to his flesh. Grace reigns to displace
sin's dominion because Christ is on the throne, but the flesh
is still here. And the world and the temptations
of the world and Satan, he still roars and he still seeks to devour
the Lord's people. And the believer, never more
sensitive than he is now, knows more about disobedience and sin,
feels worse about disobedience and sin than he ever did when
sin reigned and ruled in principle in his soul. Now I think that I would not
be wrong if I said to you that maybe what I'm about to mention
resonates a little bit with some of you. But is it not the case
that as a new believer, we thought we'd made it? In those first early flushes
of forgiveness and grace, it's like being in those early weeks
of a new marriage. Oh, you could just fly. But then we started to grow older
and a little bit more experienced and we found out that those early
flushes of grace and the feelings of mercy and the sensitivity
to the love of the Lord, they started to diminish. The sharpness, the brightness
went off of them. And as we grew in our Christian
testimony, we actually discovered that there were some latent passions
there that we hadn't noticed at the beginning. There were
some forgotten rooms that we had not realised were there. Some hidden basements. And it was more than we could
do not to peek inside. And so we did. And we discovered
that that early flush of enthusiasm and Christian experience dissipated. And sometimes now, we even wonder
if we're Christians at all. And every now and again, the
question comes to our minds. Is this all a big sham? Is this
all a big con? Am I kidding myself on when I
listen to these gospel messages, this truth? Because that's not
how I feel in my heart. That's not how I feel in my mind. What is the cause of that? The
cause of that is Satan applying or misapplying the law
against our flesh. That's what that is. That's what
robs us of our joy. That's what takes away our comfort. That's what puts the stone in
your boot. The peace gets drawn and what's
left is the open sores because we feel just how inadequate we
really are. We know what goes on in our heads.
We know what goes on in the passions. We know that while that sin principle
has been taken away and while we have come into that experience
of grace, yet why is this battle going on? And it makes us feel quite wretched. And that's what Paul says at
the end of the chapter. Oh, wretched man that I am. Who
shall deliver me from this body of death? Now, we're going to
come back to that later in the chapter, but for now, I just
want to make a couple of points and then we're done. In verse
five, we've been shown that the law is a legitimate power to
bring forth fruit unto death. That's what it does. The law
looks at a man's life, looks at a woman's life, and it brings
forth fruit unto death. It shows, it marks the culpability,
the condemnation of the individual. But verse six tells us things
have now changed. Well, what has changed? There's
a new man here. There's a spiritual man. Sins
are forgiven. That's a change. Our sins are
forgiven. We're dead to the law because
the Lord Jesus Christ has satisfied that law. The law is now dead
to us and therefore we, like that woman in the marriage relationship
whose husband is dead, we've moved out from under the constraints
of that relationship. But we're still in the flesh.
And though we're not now ruled by sin, though we have a new
master, the Lord Jesus Christ, we still feel the weakness of
our flesh, maybe more so than ever we did before. Now we saw
in verse 23 of the last chapter, chapter six, that the wages of
sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal
life. The gift of God is justification. The gift of God is holiness by
the Lord Jesus Christ. And Satan is trying to rob us
of that day by day. And he has tools at his disposal,
the law. And the flesh is receptive to
the accusations and allegations that are made for that law. But as believers, we're free.
We are a spiritual people and we're delivered from the law.
We're dead to the law because we're born in Christ. Our service
now is a spiritual service. We have a new nature, a nature
that is acceptable to God. And that must always be our go-to
place when Satan comes against us with the claims of the law.
And Satan comes against us and pokes us in our flesh. And Satan
comes against us and says, you're not worthy to be called a Christian. Not with the things you do. Not
with the things you think or say. Not with the way you act
to your wife. Not with the way you deal with
your children. Not with the way you have these
criticisms, this warped sense of you being better than everybody
else. That's not Christian. That's not Christ-like. And what
is that? But the law being brought against
us and applied against our flesh. fall back position. I thought
about that in the sense of a battle. If you were in a fight, if you
were in a battle, a war, you put your soldiers out, you
send them out in some sort of advanced guard, you take up your
position. And then you find that the enemy's
attack against you is so ferocious that you have to fall back. You
have to come back. You have to regroup. You've taken
the ground, but now the casualties have been so much that you need
to move back. You fall back to a place, you
go back to a place where you can recover your strength, where
you can reform your lines. Where is that? Where are we going
to go? Well, a good general will have
all that planned out in the battle. But we're not talking about a
battle, are we? Not a real battle. We're talking
about a battle. Well, it's real enough, but we're
talking about a battle in our souls. Where are we going to
regroup to? Where are we going to reform
at? Where are we going to fall back to? It's to this ground
here, this ground which says, we stand upon the promise that
God has justified us in Christ. You bring your allegations, you
bring your condemnation, you bring that law against us, and
we wince, we recoil, we have to recover and recoup. But we
do it upon this ground that the Lord Jesus Christ has paid for
that. The Lord Jesus Christ has dealt with that. That's gone. That's been taken away. And Satan is right. Satan's telling
the truth when he says to us that the wages of sin is death. And he says it to you and he
says it to you and he says it to me. He says, look at the way
you act. Don't you know that the wages
of sin is death? You can quote the Bible too. But here's where he's wrong.
He's wrong when he then says to us that the wages of righteousness
is life. You would think that's what it
should be. If the wages of sin is death, then the wages of righteousness
is life. But he's wrong, because that's
not what it is. The wages of righteousness isn't
life. It's the gift of God that's life. The gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. And Satan will employ the law
against us. And he will tell you both. He
will tell you that the wages of sin is death. And he'll tell
you that the wages of righteousness is life. And you've got to fall
back to this position every time. No, the gift of God is eternal
life through Jesus Christ, his son. Eternal life is God's gift. It's free, it's unconditional,
it's his gift to his people whom he loves. Spiritual life is the
gift of God and acceptable service to him is the gift of God. Our acceptable service is our
worship, our acceptable service is our praise, our acceptable
service is standing fast against all the trials that come against
us in this life. How can I produce anything that
is worthy of God? And yet I can in and through
the Lord Jesus Christ. So here's The message in a sentence. You're free from the law. Tell
the devil that when he comes to you. I'm free from this. This accusation, this allegation,
it has no grounds because Christ has paid the price. His accusations
are empty. Get thee behind me, Satan. We are a forgiven people, a cleansed
people. a justified, purified and acceptable
people. And that's a good place to say
Amen.