The sermon by Scott Brown, based on the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, chapter 6:3-5, explores the fall of man and the pervasive impact of sin on humanity, as exemplified by the Brown family and beyond. Brown emphasizes that sin, inherited from Adam, is at the root of all human suffering and misery, affecting not just individuals but families and communities at large. The sermon addresses the issue of original sin, where all humans are born with a sinful nature due to Adam's transgression, and the resultant consequences include spiritual, temporal, and eternal miseries. Brown discusses the theological concept of representation, explaining that while Adam represented mankind in sin, Jesus Christ represents mankind in salvation. Through Christ’s righteousness, believers are offered forgiveness and hope. The sermon highlights the critical need for repentance and turning away from sin to avoid its destructive nature. Brown also expounds on John Owen’s insights into the effects of unaddressed sin, which depletes spiritual strength and comfort, weakens the soul, and hinders communion with God. Ultimately, the sermon calls for a continual struggle against sin, embracing Christ’s salvation, and fostering a repentant heart to achieve true happiness and fulfillment.

Well tonight we're continuing moving through chapter 6 in the confession on the fall of man and sin and this section tells you what is The worst thing about the Brown family, everything that's wrong with the Brown family can be found in this chapter. And everything that's wrong in the Noah family and the Bradrick family and every family is found here. Our church family, the human family, and you know here we find the mercy of God toward man that God tells the truth about man so that he can be healed and every every heartbreak every trouble everything every everything that would that would cause you to become discouraged, everything that would cause you to wonder about the goodness of God is all tied to this matter of sin, inborn sin, passed on from Adam as a result of the fall. And it is a kindness that God would show us what's wrong. What is wrong with me?

What's wrong with my son? What's wrong with my wife? What's wrong with my pastor? What's wrong with anyone? And God is kind to help us to understand the world that we live in.

It's such a blessing that God would put his finger in the wound and teach us what's true about ourselves. Because if you don't know what's really wrong with you, you'll never really know how to be healed. It's like your car. Unless you can figure out what's wrong with it, that car is not going to run. And we're the same way.

And so we're going to talk about what's wrong with the Brown family tonight. And it tells us what's wrong in the world. But I also want us to grasp that it also tells us the secret of all happiness as well. What's here implies for us what is the secret of all happiness. And it tells you why there's so much brokenness in the world.

It tells you why families fall apart. It tells you why people fall apart and how why they hurt each other. It tells you why we have wars. It's all found right here in this section. One of the things that I don't like about this section is it doesn't cast a division of the Lord Jesus Christ because that's in all the other chapters.

The covenant, you know, God's covenant, God's mediatorial role, justification, all these other things are in other chapters but it's not, they're not contained in this chapter. And so it can seem kind of dark, but I don't want us to forget that this really tells us what is the secret of all happiness, and that is to turn away from sin. And so in the first paragraph, we saw how sin entered the world and why it entered in through the subtlety of Satan. And it entered in in order that God would glorify himself. God uses sin to glorify his grace.

And then in the second paragraph we learned about the consequence of sin, death and defilement. And now we find ourselves in the third paragraph. And its focus is on how sin is passed on and the effects on people. And so it speaks of this matter of what has happened as a result of your sin and the miseries that are awaiting you there. And so let's read it.

They, Being the root and by God's appointment standing in the room and stead of all mankind The guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed. To all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free. So he's speaking about what David declared in Psalm 51 verse 5, behold I was brought forth in iniquity and in my sin my mother conceived me. That's one of the classic places that you go to recognize that yes, even babies are sinful. We were talking about this on the car on the way over here, you know, how could it be?

In fact, one of my grandchildren asked, was grandpa was I sinful when I was a baby? And Deborah and I explained to him a couple of different ways that he was sinful when he was a baby. Because, well, of course, the Bible tells us so, but there are ways that you can see. But one of the questions that people ask about this is, isn't this unfair? How is it that we become accountable for someone else's sin?

How fair is that? And that's a really important question. It's a right question to ask. How can God judge people for sins they didn't commit? So why am I condemned?

Because Adam is condemned. And I'm going to give two answers to that question. The first answer is that God and his wisdom designed it that way. God is good, God is love, And because we don't understand the love and the goodness of God, that's why we don't understand why this is a good thing. The second answer is that we are not judged for Adam's sins.

We are, but that sin nature that was passed on. And this is a very important point because Adam is a representative. His sin was a representative sin and he represents the rest of mankind. This is the principle of representation And so we're not guilty of Adam's particular sins, but rather we have the same guilt that he had because his sin nature was imputed upon us. And all of our sins can be traced back to his sin.

But Adam represented mankind in sin and in condemnation. But there's another representative, and that is Jesus Christ. And Christ represented mankind in salvation. And so if you have a representative that passes down sin, then you need a representative to forgive you of your sin. So it's, and that's also unfair, isn't it?

That sounds very unfair. How is it that you're forgiven for sin that you actually committed? It's not fair. It's, and you might say neither is it fair that your sin is imputed, but it is also not fair that God would forgive you of your sin because of Jesus Christ's righteousness. Sins are forgiven because the representative, our representative before God, Jesus Christ was righteous and he he puts on his robes of righteousness upon us and we don't deserve it.

So I think that's that's how you can answer the question about whether it's right, whether God was fair in the matter. So if I say that it's unfair that sin is imputed to all men, it's also unfair that God would justify by faith. Is justification by faith unfair? Yes it is. It's very unfair.

But God sent his son to be a sacrifice for our sin. Now one of the most compelling statements in this paragraph is this, that we are by nature children of wrath and servants of sin, subjects of death, and all other miseries. All other miseries. And All of our miseries are related to our sin and You know I'm grateful. We have you know young children here Every young you're a young person needs to recognize this The greater you let sin run in your life, the greater your miseries will be.

And so you want to turn away from sin Because with sin comes misery. And you know how that works. You sin against your brother or your sister and you start hitting and you get worse and worse and you're speaking evil to each other and life gets bad. You know I don't know how many times Debra and I had to gather our little family around and say, hey, what kind of family do we want to have around here? Do we want to have a mocking, challenging, frustrated family where we talk to each other frustratingly, we grab one another's toys?

Is that the family we want to have? Well, most children, you know, will say, no, we don't want to have a family like that. But with sin, there is always misery. And the earlier you understand that the happier you'll be Because all misery is tied to sin And this is why it's so tragic when we turn towards sin. Sin, there are three things that sin will always do.

Three things, you've heard them before. Sin will take you further than you wanted to go. It'll always take you further than you want. You might say, I'm just going to grab this little toy, but that's not the end of it. It gets worse.

Sin will take you farther than you wanted to go. The second thing sin will do to you, it will keep you there longer than you want it to stay. And thirdly, sin will cost you more than you intended to pay. Sin always does those three things. And so we have, there's so much motivation to turn from it.

And here the authors of the Confessions say that all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus sets them free. Jesus is our only hope. He's our only hope in our sin as it rises up in our hearts, and He's our only hope to justify us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now You can trace every misery in a family to sin. Not dealing with it, not repenting of it, not handling it properly, and all of these things well up within the heart.

Sin is without question the most important problem for your family to address. There's nothing more important than that. Because if your family does not understand sin, your family will never understand happiness. Your family will never be able to understand one another, and you'll be continually plunged into miseries. So it's so critical that we understand sin.

Sin is always crouching at the door of a marriage, and sin is always there to devour. And this just brings up the whole matter of repentance between husband and wife, and between parents and children. I don't know how many times I had to repent before my children. I still find myself having to repent to my children for my sin. But a family without repentance will always be an unhappy family.

It'll be a fake family. And everybody will be walking around fake, unless there's a real heart of repentance. And Those who just let sin run in their family, they do irreparable damage to themselves and to their children. And this paragraph here speaks really of the escalating misery, spiritual, temporal, eternal. Do you see the escalation of it?

Spiritual, it begins in you, and then it seems to spread out further, and then finally it's eternal. So sin must be dealt with. You know, I remember when we were in Isaiah and Isaiah speaks, he says, unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and we would have been made like Gomorrah. That's where we're all going if we don't deal with sin. We're headed to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Every family is going to get there if they don't deal with sin. Isaiah also says, your iniquities have separated you from God. Your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. You know often people wonder why they feel so dead inside. It's always because of sin.

And so there are these consequences, both temporal and eternal. And there are so many effects of sin. And we know that the wages of sin is death that's one effect but John Owen gives six effects of refusing to deal with sin are you ready six things that happen to you when you refuse to deal with sin. I think these are very important here. First, sin deprives us of spiritual strength and comfort.

Every un-mortified sin will do two things. It will weaken the soul and deprive it of its vigor. It will darken the soul and deprive it of its comfort and peace There's no quicker way to have turmoil in your heart than to cultivate sin and and Owen is saying that sin deprives us of spiritual strength and comfort It does Secondly sin weakens the soul and deprives it of its strength. Listen to this language that John Owen uses, an un-mortified lust, in other words lust that's not resisted, an lust that's not resisted will drink up the spirit and all the vigor of the soul and weaken it for all duties. Sin weakens you.

You know, it was several weeks ago we said, you know, sin is stupid and it will make you stupid. It's true. And it will weaken you. And it will make you more unprofitable in everything. Because it weakens you.

And then number three, sin becomes the delight of the heart and it diverts the heart from communion with God. Sin lays hold on the affections, expelling the love of the Father. So if you cultivate sin in your heart, you're expelling, it's not that, When you embrace sin, it's replacing the love of the Father. And then number four, sin becomes the meditation of our minds. And he says when sin goes untouched it becomes the meditation of our heart Taking the place that should be filled with the Lord so what Owen is saying in different ways is that the sin fills you and it It displaces strength, it displaces the love of God, and it displaces the Lord.

That's what's so tragic about sin. Everything you need, Everything that gives you hope, everything that heals you, fills you, satisfies you, gets pushed out by sin. Number five, sin hinders our spiritual walk. Sin steals the time, attention, and affection that we need to maintain our communion with God. And the question that Owen is addressing really is what's filling you up?

What's in you? What's going on in you? What's there? And he's making it very clear that sin is a displacer. It always pushes something out.

The two can't exist together. Number six, sin darkens the soul. Listen to this, it is a cloud, a thick cloud, that spreads itself over the face of the soul and intercepts all the beams of God's love and favor. Do you see that? God's love and favor is like shining down upon you like the sun.

And when you hold up your face to receive the beams of his love and the warmth there, the sin blocks it. It's like this ultraviolet shield that falls down upon you. And the cascading love of God, standing in the grace of God, all that's blocked by sin. So that's how Owen describes this tragic situation that they speak of in the confession. It speaks of this matter of other miseries, spiritual and temporal and eternal.

And I think what Owen's trying to say is sin is going to block everything good out of your life. Everything for your heart that you need gets blocked, gets filtered out. And the solution is to put sin to death. To put it to death. That's what mortification of sin is.

He wrote that book, The Mortification of Sin, the classic line that really comes out of Romans 8, do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Be killing sin or it will be killing you. That's the whole point that they're making here. So that was the third paragraph.

The fourth paragraph answers the question, what has the sin nature left us with? And it reads like this, from this original corruption whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil do proceed all actual transgressions And so this original corruption works itself out in real life. That's the basic idea. It's left us with an inclination toward evil. Our hearts are bent toward evil.

And he says that, or the confession says, we are powerless against the allurements of sin. We are utterly indisposed, disabled. And of course that's without Christ, because Christ does break the power of sin. It doesn't make us perfect but it breaks the power of sin. So it's the unconverted who are utterly indisposed and disabled.

And the second thing is that we're inclined. There's this is our tendency and we are made and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil. Now, this teaches us a number of things about ourselves and about particular doctrines. This argues against the doctrine of sinless perfectionism. The Bible is very clear.

Paul said it in Romans 7 14, I am carnal. In verse 18 he says for in my flesh dwells no good thing. John said it in first John 1 8, if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. And so there is, we're back to this matter of original sin and actual sin and this is the focus here is on the actual sin. The inclination of the heart that leads us to actual sins, plural, as the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit lusts against the flesh and we have it we have a tendency toward lawlessness and and so this is this is the critical matter here that we do have an inclination towards sin.

And so we have two ways of dealing with that. And first of all, it's the shed blood of Jesus Christ that breaks the power of sin and then mortifying the flesh. That's how we deal with it. And then the final paragraph talks about our continual struggle with sin. The corruption of nature during this life does remain in those that are regenerated.

And though, and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin. So this is stating a fact that we are going to struggle with sin in this life and we need to recognize that we are sinners and that we're therefore in need of repentance. You know next year I'm going to do a conference on repentance. And I ran across a really interesting video clip of Donald Trump last year, where the interviewer asked him if he ever repented of his sin. And he said, well, of course not.

I don't sin. I might do some things. But no, I don't repent. That was his answer. But we have to recognize that we're sinners.

And so this paragraph I think is a great safeguard to families and to churches. There are two very harmful attitudes. One is thinking too highly of yourself, that you are so righteous. And the other is thinking that you ought to think well of yourself because you do a particular list of things. And when you fall into that trap, you've really forgotten the depth of your sin.

That one sin is enough to have you thrown into hell. One, just one. And we tend to minimize the seriousness of sin in order to exalt ourselves. And When this happens, you end up by being a proud person. You look down your nose on everybody, and you become a proud church, and you might even become a proud family, and you think about how bad everybody else is.

But the only reason that can happen is if you've lost touch with who you really are and and this paragraph makes it clear that you are a person who is in a continuous struggle with sin. So if you if you have a wrong view of sin, you're going to have a wrong view of yourself. And you're going to have a very messed up family and you're going to have a very messed up church. So it's critical that we have a right understanding of sin. And particularly the righteousness of Jesus Christ, that he kept every law, that He never sinned in anything.

He was tempted in every way that we were tempted, but He did not sin. And that's really our only hope, is to understand that Jesus Christ the righteous has come to save sinners, not because of the deeds that they have done, because the wages of sin is death, and he who knew no sin became sin for us so that we might possess the righteousness of God. That's the only hope for sinners. And that the Lord Jesus Christ has come to forgive. There's only one who can forgive sin, and that is God alone.

Now there's so many ways that you deal with sin in a family. You deal with it with the rod, you deal with it with correction and different things like that. But what we need to understand more than anything else is that sin is the reason for all of our unhappinesses and all of our miseries. And so we ought to turn away from sin every way we can and not let any of it in the door. You know, it only takes one leak to sink a ship.

One leak And it spreads. You know, it only takes one spark to blow up a whole ammunition dump. One spark, that's all it takes. And sin is like that. And So I just want to use this time to encourage us all to turn away from sin and you know the little ones that we have here to examine your own hearts and turn away from sin because when you don't you just bring misery into this world and into your own heart and You can't avoid it You know it's I Think you know for us we need to recognize that what God said is true.

Beware or be sure your sins will find you out. They'll find you out one way or another. They'll either drive you to repentance and freedom, or they'll drive you to further condemnation. And so it's really important that we understand the doctrine of sin. And I don't know how you raise a family or run a company or do anything without really understanding human nature.

And here, this section makes it very, very clear. But remember, sin is the pathway to unhappiness. And turning from it is the pathway to happiness. And that's the way God's wired the world. And you can't overcome that.

And so let's be a people who turn from sin you just might ask yourself what are the particular things that I need to turn away from tonight are the things I need to bring before the Lord and confess them and go in the other direction. The problem with that is that you never quit doing that for the rest of your life. In fact maybe it's possible that the older you get you just see more of your sin that you couldn't see before. So we never outgrow the awareness of sin in our lives. But sin will overcome us if we don't.

Thanks be to God for the Lord Jesus Christ who rescues sinners and he makes them clean and he receives them. Let's pray. Lord we thank you that you You have told us what is true about us You've opened up our hearts and you've shown us who we really are and you have Explained our problems you have exposed the reason for our heartbreak, for the troubles that we have in our lives. And Lord we pray that you would give us such a heart to turn toward you that we would displace sin with holy things, That we would make more room for the sweetest and most beautiful things We know that all of your pleasures Are in your presence and we pray oh Lord that your presence would fill our hearts and even even tonight there would be made more room for you in our hearts, edging out the sin, pushing it out. Amen.