In his sermon, 'The Pathway to Holiness,' Jeffrey D. Johnson addresses a singles conference, emphasizing the distinction between achieving holiness through the law versus through grace. He asserts that relying on the law, symbolized by Moses, for sanctification is a dead end because it only highlights sin, increases guilt, and leads to frustration. The law demands perfection but offers no assistance, condemning individuals with its rigorous standards. In contrast, Johnson argues that grace, offered through Jesus Christ, is the true path to holiness. Grace liberates believers from the guilt and power of sin, motivating them to live righteously not out of obligation, but out of gratitude and love for God's mercy. Johnson highlights that understanding and experiencing God's grace encourages believers to love God more deeply, which in turn fosters true obedience. The sermon concludes by urging believers to focus on Jesus Christ and his grace to overcome sins and live a life of holiness.

It's good to be back back with you guys this year I've Did the math? Been here five singles conference in a row and So this year I'm gonna do I've got to help you out you guys out a little bit better. So when all the, no, I'm just joking. If you have your Bible's turned to Romans chapter six, I'm assuming I'm going to build this sermon on the assumption that you're Christians, but if you're not, you could become one today. But I want to build this message on the assumption that you, young men and women, singles, that you wanna be holy, that you wanna know how to become more and more like Jesus Christ.

If you have besetting sins in your life, sins you're struggling with, addictions, if they're major addictions or minor little things that you want to get better at, like control your social media time and screen time, or if there's little things you're struggling with, I'm going to give you a path forward or if there's a major sins in your life that you need to conquer that keeps Coming back. I want to give you some help how to overcome those things and I want you To be holy The Lord wants you to be holy. And in the very thought of like, I want to be holy is somewhat daunting. We become very, thinking this is tough. The pathway to holiness is tough.

But I'm really gonna try and make it easy for you. Show you the easy way to holiness. There's two ways that you could try to be holy and one's a dead end and that is through your flesh and the law and say I'm just gonna be better, I'm stopped gonna do that, not gonna do that anymore, I'm gonna just do what's right, I can do this, I want to do this, I gotta be determined, I have to have resolutions, I'm gonna be resolved And through my grit, determination and hard work, I'm going to overcome sin and live a righteous life. I understand that I'm not saved by works. I understand that.

I'm not saved by the law of Moses. But now that I'm saved by grace, I'm going to use the law in your mind. I'm going to go back to Moses and I'm going to try to be holy through Moses. And there's this idea that you're justified by Christ and sanctified by Moses, but I'm gonna try to explain to you that, no, you're not justified by Moses and you're not sanctified by Moses. That is, you're not sanctified by the works of the law.

According to our verse, verse 14 in Romans chapter 6, gives us the path to holiness, the path to sanctification. It says, for sin will have no dominion over you since you're not under law. You're not under Moses, but under Christ, under grace. And so to be free from sin, the sin that holds you captive, It's like, I don't want to be captive to that. I don't want to be a slave to that anymore.

Then the way of being free from sin is counterintuitive. It's like, if I want to be free from sin, then I need to love the law and be married to the law. No, The way to be free from sin is to get out underneath the law and get under grace. Grace is the only way to overcome sin. And it makes you think, well, if it's all about grace, let's sin that grace may abound.

Let's just live up. If we get a free pass to heaven, and we're gonna live in grace and be saturated with grace, and grace is gonna go before us, around us, behind us, above us, below us, then it doesn't matter what we do, because we're living and abiding and being saturated in grace. That seems counterintuitive. But I'm going to show you that only grace can lead you to holiness. There's one thing that all of us want if you're a sinner, Christian, non-Christian, everybody wants to be free without guilt.

And these things are contradictory for the sinner. I want to have a free conscience. I want to be free. But real freedom is not having my own conscience condemning me. This is the homosexual.

The homosexual wants to be free to be who he or she thinks she wants to be. They wanna be opposite sex, they wanna be free. I don't want anyone to tell me what I wanna do, when I wanna be, how I wanna, I wanna be free. But even with the desire to be free and the push God's law aside and man's opinions aside, they still have their own conscience that condemns them and therefore they're not even free from their own conscience. And so they're constantly trying to get their conscience to shut up.

And this is why I think a lot of people are gravitating towards atheism, because if you want to have a free conscience, you've got to get rid of the law. The only way to get rid of the law is to get rid of God. And The problem is the conscious still condemns you. And so there's really no freedom if the conscious is condemning you. So I'm gonna give us the pathway to sanctification where we can have a free conscience that doesn't condemn us.

We can do what we wanna do and how we wanna do it. And there's only two ways, with the way of the law or the way of grace. And the way of the law cannot free us for two reasons. Why? Moses can't sanctify us.

Why you can't be holy through the flesh obeying the law. Okay? Two reasons why. One, the law only can condemn you. That is, it'll only increase your guilty conscience too, because the law will only empower sin in your life.

Rather than the law liberating you to be obedient, The law is going to bring you into greater and greater bondage to sin. So let's look at these reasons quickly. The first reason the law cannot free you from sin, because it will only increase your guilt. This is true even as a Christian. Anybody here just kind of living in guilt and knowing that, hey, God's not satisfied with me and you're just plagued, that you can't please the Lord and you're just never good enough, you feel like you're coming short and maybe you do feel like, hey, I'm a terrible Christian.

Well, that's what the law does. The law is constantly going to tell you how bad you are, even if you're trying hard, because by the works of the law, the law is looking and examining not just your actions, but the law is examining your heart and your affections and your thoughts and the motivations. And so even though outwardly you can deceive humanity and you can deceive your parents and look like a good church member, the law in your conscience can kind of look in and see the motivation of why you're doing what you're doing. And the law is so demanding and so precise that it's not going to be satisfied until you do it perfectly. Until every aspect of your thinking, your thoughts, your motivations are done for the soul, not just one purpose, but the sole purpose of God's glory.

Now have you ever done anything for the sole purpose of God's glory or is some of your good works done to be seen by others or even to make yourself feel better? I mean think about the motivations of why you live like a good Christian. What is your motivation to do what you do? I mean, most of your motivations, if you really examine them by the strictness and the severity and the rigor of the law, you'll find out that your motivations do not come to the full measure of God's glory. And what is sin?

Sin is anything that falls short of the glory of God. So if you're not absorbed in God's glory and say, I want the light to be on him and I want to please him and it's all for him and not for me, I want to decrease that he may increase, then even your good deeds according to the Bible are as filthy rags. Your good deeds are not good in the eyes of the law. And so the law is not going to help you achieve the end of obedience. The law is going to just show you how sinful you are.

And the law looks at every action you've ever committed, ever done, and say it's a crime. And you can throw away your sins, right? You know, like, I can just get rid of that evil thought and that bad motive and some of the things you're most disgraced about and shameful about. You don't want people to know, well, just pretend you can get rid of those. And you just had what's left over is your good deeds.

I'll just take my good deeds to the Lord and I'll take my best actions, my best motivations. I'll take those to the Lord. And if you took your best works, your best deeds and set them before the Lord, the Lord would take his law and examine them, pin them through the x-ray and see the motivations, the intentions of the heart. And then what the law would find is that you're a thorough sinner from head to toe. That you're so wicked that Every thought, every deed, every motivation, every feeling, every action is tainted with selfishness.

Even the desire to obey the law is to get out of hell. I don't want to go to hell. Well, is that for the glory of God or is that for the preservation of self? And so the more you look at the law and say I'm gonna obey the law, the more the law says guilty, guilty, guilty. You see the law can't save us, it can't sanctify us because it demands way too much from us.

It tells us what to do, but it doesn't help us. It doesn't have any power to aid us. It doesn't assist us. It's like a drill sergeant that stands in front of your face all day, all night, says, do, do, do, do, stop, stop, stop, quit, quit, quit. And then you're like, could you help me?

And it says, no, you do it yourself. And then you're just, the more you look at the law the more you find that the law is not friendly in fact the law by its very nature has no compassion you say well I'm having a bad day you know I was bored with terrible situations. The law says I don't care. I don't have any mercy. I don't have any compassion.

I'm just. I'm not looking for any excuses. Your excuses mean nothing to me. You know you're guilty. You knew better and you've done wrong.

And so the law is so rigorous it just barks its commands, its demands all day, all night, And then after it tells you what to do and it doesn't aid you at all to do it, then it tells you at the end of the day, you're a sinner, you're guilty, you deserve wrath, you deserve justice, You deserve condemnation. And so the more you study the law in your own flesh, the more the law condemns us and shows how much of a sinner we are. This is why Galatians 3, 10 says, for all who rely upon the works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, curse should be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and to do them. And so the law doesn't help you, it just curses you.

It condemns you. The law is not bad though. The law is revealing one side of God. You know, think of law and grace as two lenses of a pair of glasses. You need both pairs.

You need both lenses to see properly. But with just the law, it's not like the law is bad because it's showing us the justice and the holiness, the purity of God. But if that's the only lens that we have, if we only know the justice of God, the severity of God, the righteousness of God, and then we're gonna have a God in there, God is this way, he is just. But if that's all we know of God, then that's not gonna lead us to love God. Why will that not lead us to love God?

It's not because God is not lovable, because he's just, he's holy. It's the fact that we're unholy. Paul put it this way, it's not that the law is bad, I'm the bad one. But the law, it just shows me, exposes my evilness, the sinfulness of my, the corruptions of my heart. And so if that's all we see of God, we see a God who's angry.

We see the wrath of God. We see the fury of God. And if we only have a furious, angry God in our face, we have no reason, no motivation to run to him. Why would we run to a God that's going to smash us, to kill us, to throw us into the lake of fire? There is no reason we would ever run to God.

We would run to the caves and ask for the rocks to fall upon us, to hide us from the great wrath of this almighty judge. And so the law exposes us the justice of God, but in that one perspective of God leaves us sinners. Even as Christians, we have enough sins, if it was just the law, if we have enough sin in our hearts today that we should be thrown into the lake of fire. So the law was given not to save us but to condemn us as Romans chapter 3, so that every mouth may be stopped, that we may become guilty before God. But the law doesn't lead to righteousness not only because it condemns us and increases the guilt in our hearts.

But secondly, it enslaves us into sin all the more. Now that's what seems strange. It's like, if you're a parent and you want your kids to be obedient, you give them more law, and they need more law, but actually the Bible says the more law we have, the more sinful we'll become. You know, Legalism is always a killer to holiness. Don't do this, don't do that, don't do this.

Think of a parent that's never satisfied with their children. They're provoking that child to wrath. If you can never satisfy your parent, eventually you're going to give up and you're going to hate your parent. If they're never pleased with your performance, then there's a point of such discouragement that you give up altogether. But the law, because it can never be satisfied, never does lead to us to obey it.

We end up despising it and hating it, and it pushes us further in sin. Now the law increases our bondage in sin for three reasons. One, the law, Not because it is evil, but because our heart is evil. The Bible says the law brings us into greater temptation. Now I do believe in the first use of the law that the law can restrain evil, but only if the law is enforced with punishment.

If a civil government doesn't have the law, then you're going to have recklessness. But that law has to be enforced. But if the law is not enforced, then it's only going to increase sin all the more. And it does it, according to Romans chapter 7, by enticing us to sin. Now, think about you on a beautiful day, not like this where it's raining, but a beautiful day, you're walking in Black Mountain and you're just enjoying the scenery and the shops and you're walking by this pretty house and you see this beautiful green lawn.

I mean, you never see anything so pretty and flush. And you don't think much about it other than it's just a beautiful. And then you see a little sign next to the sidewalk. It says, please do not step on the grass. Now you weren't even thinking about stepping on the grass prior to the sign, but now all of a sudden you're thinking to yourself, man, my feet hurt and that grass looks comfortable.

It won't hurt if I just put my foot on it. You know, it's like all of a sudden, the law enticed you to break it. It's not that the law is sinful, according to Paul. It's the fact your heart is so sinful when someone says don't do something it pushes you to do the very thing it says not to do. This can be seen in the history of Israel.

Of all the nations of the world Israel was given the Ten Commandments and there is no nation that lived more corruptly and sinfully than that nation. They surpassed all the surrounding nations in evil. You say, well they should have been restrained because they knew the law. No, that law only pushed them into greater and greater sin. But the second reason the law will never lead us to holiness is because it frustrates us.

This is how it frustrates us. The more we try to obey its demands, the more we become discouraged with its demands. It's so severe, so strict. Martin Luther tried to. He was trying to get to heaven.

He's trying to be obedient. And he says, if anybody's gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. He'd come in a monk and he would pray throughout the day. He would go and make confession to the priest all day. And the priest says, go home, go home, leave me alone basically.

And this is what Martin Luther would say, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with a extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love. Yes, I hated the righteousness of God who punishes sinners. The more he tried to live righteously, the more he realized he was a sinner.

You know, sinners don't even know they're sinners until they try to be obedient. Their conscience are so sheared and hardened. It's when you try to obey it you get to the light that you realize, man I am filthy. And the holier, I mean the closer you get to holiness the more ugly you become. It's trying to clean your dirty clothes with dirty hands.

You can't do it. And you become all the more filthy the more you try. And some of you may be in that place right now, you're trying to be holy and you're like, man, I can't do it. And the more you try, the more you realize your motivations are so evil. Have any of you had been in a position where you just don't want to pray because you prayed once and someone complimented you on your prayer and you're like, well, now I'm trying to pray to get compliments and you get tied up in the motivations of your heart and you can't know what to do anymore because you're frustrated, because you don't know if you're doing it for God's glory, your own glory.

Ever feel that way? Or am I the only one that deals with such weird thoughts? Well, I deal with those and I realize I'm not going to have perfect motives until I get to heaven. And if you get stuck in the examination of every motivation of your heart, you're going to realize that you're not holy at all. This is what the law does to us.

It condemns us. And in so condemning us, it leads us to despair, and in leaving us to despair, it leads us to frustration and ultimately pushing us away from God, not towards God. And this is why the law doesn't lead us to holiness. It only produces death and condemnation in us. Romans 7-5 says, for while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.

This is why Hebrews 7.19 says the law makes nothing perfect. Now, it's like this has been my method to be holy. I'm going to try to be more obedient by my own efforts. And you find yourself frustrated. And you end up saying, I'm done.

I can't do it anymore. Have you ever noticed some people that go away from Christianity, that was raised in a strict home, they end up being the worst of the worst. I'm just, that way don't work, I can't do it. I'll just indulge right into the life of sin. Okay, How can we live holy?

I got the pathway, the easy way, the only way, and that's grace. Grace. And grace will do it for a couple reasons. It's free, unmerited, sovereign grace. And it sounds counter-intuitive.

Paul knew it sounded counter-intuitive. This is why he says, should we sin that grace may abound? I'm like, man, if you're just going to say, hey, y'all live in grace, you're giving me license and freedoms to not worry about my motives. You're giving me license and freedoms to not worry about the law. You're giving me license and freedoms to just be carefree and that's gonna lead me to sin.

It doesn't, it seems that way. But how does grace and only grace lead you in the path of righteousness? One, two ways. One, grace frees us from the debt of sin, that is the guilt of sin, which the law could never do. Two, grace and only grace frees us from the power of sin.

There's two reasons people are not saved. They got guilt because of their sin record, two, because they're enslaved to self. They're enslaved to depravity. Well, grace frees you from both. First of all, grace frees you from your guilt.

Now, we have guilt, everything we've done from our birth, we come out of the womb speaking lies, and we've had evil thoughts, imaginations of our thoughts were evil continuously. There was not one good deed we've ever committed, I mean, we ever achieved. That's the thing about us. We're so bad, we had no righteousness, not even one act, not even one good deed. Everything was tainted.

Everything was full of sin. Everything was defiled. We were defiled from our head to our toe. And We have all that guilt. We have a mountain of guilt, of sin and shame.

Could you imagine, I mean, you look like a pretty young lady, decent and respectable. And just by your appearance, I think, man, you're an amazing woman. Just, I don't even know you. All of you look that way. And not to pick on any one of you, but I can randomly pick any of you, put you up here, and if your heart was exposed before us, you would run, you would hide, You would never want to be seen before anyone again, especially us.

Imagine, I want you to think about this. Imagine, imagine, imagine your shame. You know, imagine your worst thoughts. Remember making fun of someone in your head? Remember, you know, the disgraceful things you thought about your mother, your father, or your sibling?

You remember the weird sexual thought you had before? I mean, imagine that, being exposed before the world. Now do you think you have a right to go to heaven? You think you have a right to be guilt free? You have a right to have no shame, to feel free from that?

That shame should plague you the rest of your eternity. How are you going to get rid of that? How are you going to get free from your sins, the guilt of your sin, the shame, the embarrassment of it? You know, you're talking about the embarrassment. It's like the reason grace does it is because, brothers and sisters, is because Jesus Christ endured your mockery.

We've got to understand this thing about the gospel. It's not just that he suffered the wrath of God and died for sins, he did, but he was stripped naked and put on a cross right on the sidewalk, right next to the road, where everybody could see his nakedness and his shame, and they poked fun of him, they made fun of him, they laughed at him. What they were doing, they saw your embarrassment, your shame, your disgrace, and they are throwing what they should be done to you on him. Think about you being exposed, naked, and all your ugliness being revealed before the world. It'd be the most shameful, embarrassing moment of your life.

But you don't have to face that. You don't have to face your sins and the guilt and the shame before God or before man. That can be done away with and hidden and thrown into the seed, never to be recovered, never to be brought back up, never to be relived, never to have to think about it again. It's not in the eyes and the opinions and thoughts of God because it's been covered because Jesus Christ took your shame, your guilt, and He paid for it by enduring it in his own flesh. So that now you don't have to have condemnation.

You don't have to have the guilt. You don't have to have that feeling like, oh, I'm dirty. That's talking about cleansing of your conscience, feeling free from the shame because it's not hypothetically dealt with. It has been actually paid for. Your sins, your disgrace, not just some of it, not just everything, every little micro little shortcoming, every little poor thought, and all of it, past, present, and future, You are now guiltless.

You're without shame. You're without disgrace. You're without any condemnation. You say, it's not fair. I know it's called grace.

It's called grace. I mean, the law has no grace in it, but grace is nothing but pure mercy and compassion through Jesus Christ. Now you don't have any condemnation. In the eyes of God, you're never, ever guilty. Even in any of your motivation, even when you pray, even when you preach like I'm preaching, and maybe right now I'm thinking, oh, they like my preaching.

Even that thought might not even be to the glory of God, but I don't have to be fearful of it. I don't have to live in condemnation of even my mixed motives anymore. I am free. I am totally free. What liberation?

What, what, what, what salvation do we have? And if it wasn't for grace, none of us would stand. None of us could do anything. None of us. You know, if you swept the floor and you miss a spot and your dad says, no, do it again, do it again, do it again, I'm going to spank you if you don't get every spot.

He's like, I quit. But I can preach and know that my preaching is not perfect. I can sweep the floor and know that my sweeping is not perfect. I could live and try to be holy knowing that it's not perfect because it's covered by grace. I don't know why I don't amen.

My goodness. But that's not the only reason grace liberates us. It not only frees us of our guilt too, and this is where we're getting into, that's justification. We all know that. But grace also sanctifies.

It leads to holiness. How does it free us from sin? It's because grace and only grace motivates us to have the right motivations, the right heart. You say would not grace motivate us to sin all the more? Let's sin that grace may abound.

I mean, I am covered by grace. I got a free ticket to heaven. It doesn't matter what I do now. Well, that's the way unbelievers think that don't have the grace of God. You say grace empowers us to live holy because grace in the Bible is depicted in two ways.

One, it's in justification is depicted as unmerited favor, but in sanctification, grace is depicted as unmerited power. So when you read the word grace when it relates to sanctification you've got to understand the term power. It's divine supernatural power. Paul put it this way, I've labored more abundantly or more diligently or harder than all the other apostles, yet it wasn't I, but the grace of God or the power of God working in me. I am what I am, He says, by the power or the grace of God.

So when we think about grace, when it comes to sanctification, it is divine infused power. Now, how does this divine infused power called grace work in us? Well, I think the grace that works in us in sanctification works out of the grace of justification that works outside of us. Now, justification is the grace independent of us. It's not something infused in us, it's something external.

It's the fact that Jesus died on a cross 2,000 years ago. By the grace of God, he took our place. And by that grace, we are justified, not by justification through the infused grace within us. It's the grace of Christ on the cross 2,000 years ago. But as we, by faith, look at what Christ did in our justification, delivering us from our guilt and sin, that is what motivates the grace of God to work within us.

How does that work? Well, the more we study grace, the more we study law, the more we end up hating God because we come short of his glory. We can never satisfy it. It's only condemning. Only increases our guilt.

But the more we study the face of God, I mean study this other side of God through the face of Jesus, we see that God is also compassionate, loving, merciful, and good. You see the two lenses in which you view God is, is the law, the lens of the law and the lens of grace. You need both of them. The lens of grace brings you down to your knees and shows you that you need salvation. The lens of grace shows you that you can come to God through Jesus Christ.

It's not until you see and understand the goodness of God, the compassion of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God that you'll come to repentance. It's not the severity of God that leads to repentance, but it's the goodness of God that leads to repentance. And once you see how compassionate, merciful, loving, tender Jesus Christ is, Even though you're a prostitute who's shamed by the world, you can come and come to Jesus without fear. You can come to the Lord Jesus. You can come to the Father boldly as you are.

This is the thing about grace. You don't have to clean yourself up. You don't have to go through some rituals. You don't have to take a bath. You don't have to do five steps of purifications.

You go to church for 10 weeks and say a couple of Hail Marys and do the rosary beads or do some Protestant rituals. You know, this is not all you have to do. In fact, if you're caught in some form of pornography, young men, if you've got some pornography, it's like, well, I gotta go six weeks before I can pray. I can't pray now and this day, no, you go as you are in your filthiness, in your dirtiness, in your shame. You go as you are.

Why can you go as you are? Because you got a savior who says, come unto me. All you who are heavy laden and burdened, all you have a guilty conscience, all of you who are weak and struggling, all of you who are still stuck in sin, come to me. I'm not going to cast you out. I'm not going to find fault with you.

I'm not going to braid if you. I'm not going to kick you. I'm going to receive you. Come to me. I will forgive you, I will restore you, I will love you.

I will be compassionate upon you. And when you see this goodness of Jesus Christ and see the goodness of God, then that leads you. Not out of pride, not out of self-preservation. It leads you to obedience and love. That's what motivates true love in you.

It's the grace of God in you that says, I can love this God. I want to love this God. And that's when you start doing things for his glory and for his honor. How can you not love the one who died for you? How can you not serve the one who served you?

How can you not go, how do I sin against the one who suffered in my behalf? And it's through this grace that puts the motivation to live holy and righteously. Yeah, I'm not saying do away with the law, you're only gonna obey the law until you love Jesus. And you can't love Jesus until you see how good he is and merciful to you and as you see how beautiful He is. You're happy, you need to say, I decrease that He might increase.

I want this. I want more of Him. I've got to have Him. He becomes your hidden treasure. He becomes your life.

He comes everything to you. He redeemed you from your sins. And he redeemed you from the power of Satan himself. And that's why obedience begins with faith. Sanctification flows out of justification.

You begin by recognizing that you have died to sin. You're no longer under the law. You're no longer under this heavy taskmaster who's barking orders at you saying, do, do, do, do, do. You're under a gracious, loving Father who says, come to me, I've already given you A plus. I've already given you the righteousness of Christ.

My love will never be taken from you. My favor will never be abated. Come to me. I'm pleased with you." Now that is a God you can come to. That is a God you can serve.

That is a God who says, your burden is truly easy. I can live for you without fear, without trepidation, without being scared of being pushed aside. You see, let me give you some closing applications. It is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance and it is obedience that flows out of the gospel that is true obedience. It's not legal obedience that we need.

It's like our obedience starts in grace and flows out of the gospel. And we believe that. David said in Psalm 51, be gracious to me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the abundance of your compassion. Joe 2 says, Ruin your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate.

Slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion. Psalm 86, 5, for you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you. For this is the love of God that we keep as commandments and as commandments are not burdensome. There's not this legal burden of strictness. It's like, no, I love the Lord.

I wanna obey the Lord out of my love for Him. And I love Him because He first loved me. Now, how do you, in practical ways, how do you overcome besetting sins and addictions and things that as Christians usually say, I want to struggle with this. The best way forward is keep your eyes on Jesus Christ. You have to fall in love deeper and deeper with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The more you love Him, the more you'll hate sin, the easier it is to run from sin, the more you are running to the Lord. So if you're just trying to be obedient and there's no drive to come to this merciful, kind, gracious, loving savior, you'll find that you're gonna fail every time. But if you're saturated with the grace of God, if you're living in the grace of God, if you're abiding in that love, in the love of God, in the grace of God, then you'll find it'll be much easier and easier to love him and to obey him with your hearts. Amen.