In his sermon 'How Sin Kills and Deceives', Scott Brown explores the intricate relationship between sin, the law, grace, and faith as articulated by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7. He explains that while the law is not sin, it exposes and magnifies sin, revealing the depth of human depravity. The sermon highlights the story of David Brainerd, who struggled with sin and the law from a young age until his conversion at 21, exemplifying the transformation from being 'married to the law' to 'married to Christ'. Brown emphasizes that believers, through Christ's sacrifice, are freed from the condemnation of the law and are empowered to bear fruit to God. He stresses that this new life in the Spirit allows Christians to serve God beyond the constraints of the law, underscoring the superabundance of grace and the constant presence of these themes in every aspect of life.

Let's bow our heads and go to the Lord in prayer as we hear his word. Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for you waking us up today, giving us a new day of life. Lord, we are so thankful that You are a God of second chances. You give us the ability to repent, and we know the blood that Christ shed for us is how we obtain that forgiveness. Oh Lord, as we hear the message today we just pray that our hearts will be penetrated, that your Word would resonate with us, that our ears will be open.

And as the Apostle Paul said, Or do you not know, brethren, for I speak to those who know the law, That the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives. For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband. So then it, while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from the law.

So that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law, through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. What shall we say, then?

Is the law sin? Certainly not. On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law, for I would have not known covetousness unless the law had said, You shall not covet. But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead.

I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment which was to bring life I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. Therefore, the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Has then what is good become death to me?

Certainly not. But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I, incarnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing I do not understand, for what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good, but now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

For I know that in me that is in my flesh nothing good dwells, for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now If I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.

But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am, Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin." And Lord, we just continue to lift up this scripture. Lord, may we read it over and over in all of our days.

May it sink into our minds. May it sink into our hearts. And may we, Lord, understand a little bit more of your will and choose our will to follow you. Please bless Scott today as he comes up and delivers this message. We pray that the Spirit would speak through him and that He would share what's on His heart with this whole congregation this morning.

In Jesus' name, Amen. We have this passage of Scripture in front of us in which we read about the great and remarkable favor that God has done toward us in dealing with our sin. He's put His finger on our worst problem. Our worst problem is sin. We were born into this world with sin as infants.

We were born into a sinful family. We were placed in a community where there was sin in the community. We were and are still today in a particular culture that has been marred by sin. And here in in Romans 7, God is helping us with our greatest problem and he's blessing us to help us understand how to grapple with sin. But what he's saying over and over in this entire section is that God has dealt with our sin.

We could not deal with our sin. It was too enormous. It was too comprehensive. Inside of us, out from around us, all about us, sin is reigning. And so the Apostle here is helping us deal with the greatest problem in my life, the greatest problem in this church, the greatest problem in your family, the greatest problem in your business, the greatest problem everywhere is this issue of sin.

And that's why the Apostle Paul is laboring so long, chapter after chapter, to deal with this really amazing subject. What we find in this whole section from chapter 3 to chapter 8 are the matters of sin and grace and the law and faith. Those four words are everywhere through this whole section. Sin, grace, the law and faith. You can read these words over and over again in this section.

This is what Paul is trying to help us to understand. So it's an extremely practical section of Scripture for us. There's not one single second, there's not one single nanosecond of our lives that we're not somehow dealing with sin and grace and the law and faith. There's not one moment of life that is not impacted by these things that the Apostle Paul is talking about. God has set us in this world to practice rightly regarding all of those particular areas.

And so in these chapters, particularly from chapter one all the way up to chapter eight, you see the enormity of our sin. It's absolutely enormous. You also see the, I'm just going to call it, the super enormity of grace. It is so comprehensive. It's so devastating to the work of the devil that he's rendered inoperable.

And then there's the purpose and the jurisdiction of the law. What do we do with the law? We break it all the time. How do we handle this problem of law breaking in our hearts and in our daily lives? And then there are the practical applications of justification by faith.

Serving in the Spirit, being set free from the bondage of the law. What does all that mean? Well, it means a lot because from the rising of the sun till the time that it goes down, there's not one nanosecond that we're not dealing with grace and law and faith and sin. We're constantly grappling with that. So he's speaking to this issue that pervades every conversation, every business deal, everything that happens.

And he's saying let these things, let yourself know something about all these life situations that you're in. Now, Paul hangs his argument on two sets of five questions, OK? In chapters three and four, Paul asks five questions, and he answers them in chapter five. Now, in chapters six and seven, he asks five more questions, and he answers those questions in chapter eight. I just want you to see where this is all going.

In this section, 6 and 7, let me show you where the questions are. 6.1, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. That's the first question.

It has to do with sin, the law, and grace. All wrapped up in one point. Then in 615 he asks another question. And it's this, what then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace?

Certainly not. So again, he's dealing with another question about law, and grace, and sin, and faith, and how it all works together. And then the third question is in 7.1. Or do you not know, brother, that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? Another question and then he answers the question accordingly.

And then the fourth question in this section comes in 7.7. Verse 7 says, what shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not. And then the last question, the fifth question he asks is in verse 13 of chapter 7, where he says, Has then what is good become death to me?

Certainly not. So these five questions are played out in chapter 6 and 7. Do you see that? And then in chapter 8, he comes back and he pulls all the strings together that he's been working through this entire section. And in 8, 1, he says, there is therefore.

So therefore looks back to all the other questions, brings all the things that he's already said forward, and then he presents it in a concise form. You could live your whole life in Romans 8. And Romans 8 once says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus and who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death." And Paul just goes on and on all the way to the end of that chapter, wrapping up everything that he said regarding the sinfulness of man and the terrible sinfulness of sin, that all of sin falls short of the glory of God, and that there are all these problems that are related to sin and grace and righteousness that we have to face. So that's the logic of this whole thing.

So chapter 8 is the follow-up to this whole section. Now, in any time you're teaching scripture, you know, there are a number of ways that you can communicate a principle. One is just through didactic teaching, just kind of explaining the words and how they all fit together and the paragraphs and the whole arguments. You can be taught that way. But there's Another way also that one can understand these doctrines, and that is by giving an example of a person who exemplifies the doctrine or a practice that becomes a beacon of light for us.

And We're beginning this new year here, which just starts in a couple of days. And we're going to recommend that all of our families read a biography, a missionary biography, the diary of David Brainerd, which is written by Jonathan Edwards. So we're going to recommend that you read this in your households. Well, at the beginning of this diary is David Brainerd's account of his conversion. And this little boy who at age seven or eight, He began to struggle with all these things that we were just talking about.

Sin, grace, the law, justification. In his soul was a massive struggle, even as a little boy. I don't know how many seven or eight year old boys or girls there are here right now, but there are a bunch of them. They're everywhere. Everywhere I look, I see one.

And so think of yourself like David Brainerd as a seven or eight year old boy. And you too. It's not just your parents who struggle with sin and the law and judgment and righteousness and faith and grace. No, no, even David Brainerd, even the seven year old boys and girls of this world can have this same struggle. What Brainerd tells us in his biography is that when he was seven or eight, he began to have a serious consciousness of his sin.

Now, I don't know if you have that serious consciousness of your own sin and your inadequacy before God, but Brainerd did, and he began to struggle with it. He struggled, He struggled with these things until he was 21 years old, until he was finally converted by the Lord Jesus Christ. And in those early years, he says that he was concerned for his soul. He says he was terrified at the thoughts of death. And in his terror, even as a seven or eight year old boy, he desired to be a good boy because he was terrified of thoughts of death.

He says, he says, I was terrified and I was driven to the performance of duties. Because he realized that there was something greater out there than just this life. It was, it caused terror in his soul. And that terror drove him to be a better boy, a better kind of boy. But he was not a saved boy.

He had not received the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. He says, quote, I had a very good outside, and I rested in my duties. He was aware of God. He was reading and praying all throughout this entire period from the time he first had a critical awareness of sin until he was saved at age 21. And he says this hundreds of times, I renounced all pretenses of any worth of my duties, and I confessed to God that I deserved nothing for the very best of them but eternal condemnation, yet still I had a secret hope of recommending myself to God by my religious duties." And there, the whole issue of the law is before this young man as he's growing up.

He's thinking that by keeping the law, by performing his duties as a person in this world, that it would give him favor with God. And he's looking back and he's saying, I was so lost even though my duties desired to rise up to fulfill the weaknesses that I had in my soul. He said as he grew older, He says he struggled against the strictness of divine law. He began to hate the law. He says that faith alone was the condition of salvation, and that he couldn't understand what faith was.

He wanted to have faith, but he couldn't have it. He still wanted to just please God by his own duties, by his own niceness, by his own law keeping, his prayers. And he was reading the Bible through this entire time and yet still lost and dead to God. And he says that he also had, this is really interesting to me, he had a great opposition in his soul to the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. That it was God who elects and God who casts into perdition.

So he was struggling over this time. And over this time, God was helping him to relinquish his self-confidence, to relinquish his poor understanding of law and grace and faith and sin. And then finally, in July 12, 1739, he writes this. I was walking in a thick grove and unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul. I stood still.

I wondered. I admired. I knew that I had never seen anything comparable to it for excellency and beauty. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable to see such a God, such a glorious divine being, and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all forever and ever my soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency to loveliness and greatness and other perfections of God that I was even swallowed up in Him, and then He abandoned any hope in His duties to present Him before God, pleasing to Him. And so through this long struggle, He realized that yes, the law was was beating on him, and he finally realized he could never keep the law.

He could never be a good enough boy. But it was faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and resting in his great salvation. That was enough. And so, at that point, David Brainerd was ready to serve in the newness of the Spirit which is spoken of here in Romans chapter 7. Of course David Brainerd had many ups and downs of feeling.

I will read that as we go through. He was very susceptible to what was called melancholy. Jonathan Edwards says, he never knew such a melancholy soul in all of his life. At the same time, though, he was a saved brother who struggled with particular things. And you know, honestly, one of the reasons we're recommending the reading to this, because you do see the struggle of the soul.

You do see the ups and the downs. And this young man had a number of imperfections. But yet he was saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and it was it was his blood it was his being buried in baptism that caused him to be saved the baptism of the Holy Spirit that was granted to him on his conversion so His story is a story of justification by faith alone. And this story has all the elements that are in Romans 7, every single one of them you can find in David Brainerd's story of his salvation. And it explains how one is not under law but under grace, and how to relate to the law before and after conversion.

OK, so enough of that long introduction. Now, let's dive into the text. Verses 1 through 6, you see the outline before you. We're defining our relationship with the law here and in verses 1 through 6. That's this section.

Why is Paul doing this? Because he's being accused of rejecting the law. Whenever you preach the doctrine of justification by faith alone, people are going to misunderstand. They're going to say, oh, does that mean that we can sin while grace abounds? No, no, no, no, no.

And so Paul is explaining what this relationship to the law is all about. And he says, or do you not know, brethren, that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? The law has dominion? What does that mean? And then he's going to go on to explain it and he's speaking to the relationship of the believer to the law.

And the issue here that he's addressing is the dominion of the law, the jurisdiction of the law. What does the law do, and what does it not do? And that's what he's talking about here in this whole section. It's important that we understand the details of what God says about his law. It's easily misunderstood if you just take this verse and grab onto it and hang your whole body on it and hang all of your thoughts on one verse and then not balance it and qualify it with what all is there.

Paul does that. In one place he sounds like he's an antinomian, in another place he sounds completely the opposite. And why is that? It's because God has placed two things before his people. They must obey the law, but they are also not saved by the law.

And those things sound contradictory, but they're not contradictory at all. They're the greatest blessing that ever came to the human race, particularly as we know that we cannot keep the law. And so the Bible says so many glowing, wonderful things about the law. We could just go from Genesis to Revelation and just read statement after statement of the beauty, the goodness, the perfection of the law. And so we have to understand everything that Paul says in harmony with all these other things that he has already said.

And this jurisdiction of the law is explained through an illustration for marriage. Now this passage is not about marriage. We don't go to this passage to learn about marriage. We go to this chapter, we go to this passage to learn about the law. And there's an illustration of jurisdiction in marriage And what that means in terms of the law, and what he's saying is that the jurisdiction of the law has been broken.

It doesn't mean that you disobey the law wantonly, But it does mean that the jurisdiction of the law to condemn you to hell has been broken. That's what he's talking about here. And so when this jurisdiction is broken, then you're free to serve in the newness of the Spirit of God. And this is an explanation of what has happened to us as a result of our justification by faith. Romans has been teaching, Paul's been teaching us in Romans over and over again, that there was an act of justice that was accomplished.

And it was a final act, it was its penal substitution in which something in the past has happened that has broken the power of sin. That's what he's saying. The power of sin has been broken and a new opening has been made so that you can grow, so that you can deal with your sins, so that you can be sanctified, so that you're not the same person next year as you are this year. The power of sin has been broken and now you're able to move forward. You're not made perfect except in His eyes And he is making us more and more perfect as the days pass.

So this new freedom has been granted to us because we've been baptized into his death. We've been buried with him in baptism. Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the Father, and even so we should walk in newness of life. This thing has happened. This death has happened, death to the old man.

Here he's giving an illustration in marriage that the husband dies and the wife is freed from the jurisdiction of that husband. And so he uses this marriage illustration to explain that. And then the apostle begins to apply this. He says, what does this mean? What does it mean to be out from under this jurisdiction of the law, of the old husband?

And he defines it, And I've got four things here in the application of our relationship with the law. And so Paul is now turning to apply this principle of the jurisdiction of the law. And He explains that there are several things that are affected by the breaking of this jurisdiction and the dominion of the law. And the first is that we have a new relationship and that we are dead to the law and married to another. So in verse 4, he says there's a new relationship.

You're married to another. You're not married to the law anymore. Brainerd was married to the law, and it was terrorizing him day after day. And when he was saved, he didn't reject the law, but he was no longer married to the law. That mean old husband was dead, and he no longer had to listen to that mean old husband in the same way.

And it didn't condemn him in the same way. And and so you're married to Christ and not to the law. That's the idea. We're married, all of us are married to Christ. That's what he's saying here.

And Christ has become our new spouse in that sense. Each one of us individually and also each one of us collectively, We also are the Bride of Christ. It's a very interesting thing. He has made us his spouse individually and he's also made us his spouse corporately together and we all stand under the same graces that he has and and that allows us to serve in the newness of the Spirit. There's something new happening.

You know, when you're saved, there's something new that breaks out. And it's like that for all of us. I know we often so languish for more progress. We say things that we shouldn't say, we do things that we shouldn't do, and we languish under that, and we beat our heads against the wall. But the truth is, honestly, you're different today.

You're different today. If you were truly saved, God has broken that power of sin and now that opportunity has taken. The germination has taken place. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed and it just grows and it's going to continue to grow and and God will perform the work of that growth. It's a wonderful thing to imagine that God would do that for us.

We sinners, and He would actually break the power of sin, and He would give us a new spouse. And that new spouse would be more wonderful than any spouse we've ever had. And we have this spouse forever. And then the second way he applies the law, this new relationship with the law, is that we have a new life. Not only do we have a new relationship, we have a new spouse, we also have a new life.

In verses four and five, To him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law, we are at work in our members to bear fruit to death. So you have this whole life bearing fruit to death. Then you have this new life bearing fruit to God So Christ comes he gives us a whole new purpose in life our purpose in life is to bear fruit You know and so We all know why we were born. You might not know what job you're going to have tomorrow, but here's one thing you do know is that you've been appointed to bear fruit to God.

That is your new life. And that new life can carry through all the ups and downs of anything that you might be doing. You know, where are you today in your life? Well, here's where you are. I know exactly where all of us are.

We are here to bear fruit to God. And you can do that right where you're sitting. You don't have to have a new job to bear fruit to God. You don't even have to find a new church to bear fruit for God. You don't have to find...

If you have to move more than 18 inches to bear fruit for God, then you might not be a believer, honestly. You can bear fruit to God wherever God has planted you. And that's a glorious... What a freedom that is! You're no longer bound by your circumstances anymore.

But you can bear fruit to God right this second. There's nothing holding you back at all. What a freedom that is. We're not constrained by anything. Not by environment, not by culture, not by anything.

This is the blessing of what God has done for our soul. We read this Psalm earlier, Oh, what great things God has done for my soul. Well, that's one thing. He's opened the door for you to bear fruit right this second and any old second that He gives you to live. What a marvelous thing that is, and it enables us to serve in the newness of the Spirit.

He says a lot here in these verses that I just don't know how we can cover them all. He talks about in contrast the things, he mentions four things that were happening before our conversion. We were in the flesh, number one, do you see that? We were in the flesh. Number two, that our sinful passions were aroused.

That's what was happening to us. You have to think of this in terms of the contrast. Sinful passions in the flesh in contrast to bearing fruit to God. What a totally different world that is. Third, sinful passions aroused by the law.

Fourth, unceasing work bearing fruit to death. Just constantly bearing fruit to death. Because the power of sin had not been broken. But what a beautiful thing God has done. He's broken the power of sin over us and He's given us something to do every second of our lives from here out.

And we don't have to move more than 18 inches to get it and that is to bear fruit for God. I just think that's so encouraging. You know, here, this morning can be the most fruitful morning of your life. And when you get in the car on the way home, and then when you go to your job on Monday morning, whatever it is, God has just given us enormous freedom as his sons and his daughters. And whatever Yoki has put us on, we can bear fruit right there.

And there's so there's this bearing fruit to death and bearing fruit to life. And so our our conversion leads to this great life of fruit bearing. This year we read that missionary biography, Missionary Patriarch, the biography of John G. Peyton, who was the missionary to the New Hebrides in the middle of the 19th century, middle and toward the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of that biography, there's an absolutely fantastic story where Peyton is announced that he wants to go to the islands in the New Hebrides.

And missionaries have already been murdered on the beaches there. And there are cannibals. What they do is they kill you on the beach, and then they eat you out of their pots. And So it's a dangerous kind of a place to go. So there's a man that rises up as he's getting ready to go to the islands of the New Hebrides.

And he says, cannibals! You will be eaten by cannibals! And then Peyton says, Mr. Dixon, you are advanced in years, and now your prospect is soon going to be laid in the grave, and there you will be eaten by worms. I confess to you that if I can live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I'm eaten by cannibals or whether I'm eaten by worms.

And in the great day in the resurrection of the body, we will arise, I will arise just as fair as you in the likeness of my Redeemer, whether I have been eaten by cannibals or eaten by worms. And so then began this long fruit-bearing ministry of John G. Payton over three decades as he was out on those islands. And just massive revivals broke out on these islands. But it took several years.

He was threatened every day, cannibals were, you know, on his neck all the time, either walking, you know, walking around behind him with muskets or bearing tomahawks at him all the time. I wish I had counted the number of times he records in the book that somebody's trying to kill him. It's absolutely incredible. And so he began this long life of fruit-bearing. And toward the end of his life, he's back in England.

And I believe he's in his early 60s. And he's going through raising money to send more missionaries to the New Hebrides Islands. And he ends up, of all places, in Charles Spurgeon's house at a garden party where he was invited to come and tell a story about what's been happening in the New Hebrides and to ask for money. And Charles Spurgeon salutes him and he says, King of the cannibals, come and hear the King of the cannibals like that. And just what a beautiful expression of how fruit, how much fruit can be born by a life who's courageous, trusting totally in the sovereignty of God, not fearing his life at all.

And This is the new life that God has given us. We can bear fruit. We can bear fruit whether we are eaten by cannibals or eaten by worms. One of the two may happen. And so God has just opened this wonderful door.

Someday, someday perhaps, we'll come into heaven and our Lord God will say, come, King of the cannibals, come on in, because of all this fruit that's being born. Whatever you did in the flesh to serve God in your generation, God will come and He will receive you into His presence. And He'll say, well done, good and faithful servant. So we have this new life, okay? And it's a fruit bearing life that God has granted.

What a blessing. In the midst of our sinfulness, in the midst of our inadequacies, our wrong thoughts about everything, you know, I woke up this morning, I was just thinking about all the, how flawed everything I've ever done is. That's how I woke up and I said, Deborah says, Scott, how are you doing? I said, oh man, you know, I just, I am an idiot. And, but honestly, what, so what's that all about?

Well, the grace of God is greater than all of our idiocy. The grace of God is greater than all the mistakes we've ever made in all of our lives. The grace of God is greater than all of our sins in the past. The grace of God is greater than all of our sins in the past. The grace of God is greater than all of our sins in the present.

It's greater than the whole sins of all the whole world. That's the grace of God. Why? So that you would go out and bear fruit. He's broken the power of sin for the most amazing thing for us, that he would allow us to serve even in our idiocy.

And it's absolutely a remarkable grace of God that has been laid upon us. Okay, there's also a new freedom. Do you see that in verse 6? But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by. So there's this language, we were being held by something, we were being held by the law, we were being held by sin.

It was holding us back. Here's the tragedy of being unconverted. You're held back. You know, the unconverted say, no, God will hold me back. That is so wrong.

That's exactly the opposite. You are held back when you're unconverted. You're set free when you're converted. That's the difference. The devil wants everybody to believe that if they obey God they'll be held back.

That's a lie of the devil and it's an opposite of what it really is. When there's belief, when there's obedience, You're not held back at all. And he's saying that we were held by the law, but we've been set free from condemnation of the law. And so we had in our pre-conversion days just a remarkable inability to perform. But God has opened up the doors that we could perform something of good.

There are many ways that you can be held back by the law, even today. Here's one. We're getting ready to come to our time of celebrating the Lord's Supper. It happens from time to time that someone will pass on the Lord's table because the weight of the law is upon them. Because they feel so inadequate.

Because they yelled at their wife on the way to church. Or they did something that they know is wrong. And their hearts have repented. They said, Oh Lord, forgive me. I've sinned.

But because of the weight of the law, they won't take communion. They won't celebrate the glory of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. They can't stand up and shout because the weight of the law is on them. And it's the fever, heat of the summer of the law that often just keeps us in this dark, somber mood. And it's not right.

If the law would condemn us, it should condemn us for a short time. And then we should move on and celebrate the glory of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so then number four, in this application of our relationship with the law, There's a new kind of service, verse 6, a new kind of service, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. And this has to do, brothers and sisters, with just a supernatural work in the heart of a believer where God energizes them, gives them thoughts, gives them love for mankind, gives them ability to do things that they never could have done in their pre-conversion life. And we're serving in the newness of the Spirit, so that wherever we go, God is able to minister to us and cause us to do His will through a work of the Holy Spirit.

And we can serve in the newness of that spirit. And then we go to the second half of this section, verses 7 through 13, and we're going to look at the good work of the law in our hearts. What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not.

No. No, the law does have a good work to do. The law is not sin. On the contrary, I would have not known my sin except through the law, for I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, you shall not covet. So he's saying is the law sin?

No. Do you have a bad attitude about the law? Don't have a bad attitude about the law. It's blasphemous to declare that something God wrote to be inadequate or to be sinful. And so we should have a high view of the law.

It should be well qualified by all of what we know in Scripture. The law is not the problem here. It's sin that's the problem. That is the big issue. The law comes and then my sin deceives me as I'm receiving the law.

And I work to justify myself as a result. The law comes and it does a work in our hearts. You know, when when Peyton went, when he took the gospel to the island of the Nithyan, There's a huge conflict there. Why? Because there are a number of cultural practices that the gospel was contradictory toward.

Here is one. Strangling widows. The gospel is contrary to the strangling of widows. The gospel was contrary to wife beating. These men on this island were savages and they were beating their wives.

The gospel massively contradicts wife beating. They were, and they had the jurisdiction of strangling their wives as well. The men were making their wives bear great burdens and Peyton was saying, look, you men are strong and Your wives are weak. Why are they carrying all the heavy loads? No, that's wrong.

That contradicts the gospel. So the gospel comes in, and it convicts every culture. The law and the gospel are here to convict and conform and reform culture, not the other way around. We don't bring the church into the culture and become like the culture. We bring the church into the culture and we transform the culture.

That's what we do. And so when Peyton was on that island in Nithium, all these things were crashing down. You know, this is why, this is why Whitefield and many of the great evangelists, the great awakening, they always started with the law. They always started to convict of sin. There's kind of a modern resurgence of this.

There are guys like Ray Comfort out there, and Paul Washer, and a number of who are saying, hey, wait a minute. Where's the law? No one can be saved unless they know they're sinful. And Ray Comfort has all these humorous scenarios where he's talking to someone. He says, oh, people are saying how good they are and how they believe they'll go to heaven because you know God is kind and everything like that and then he gets them to admit that they've lied that they've cheated that they've lusted so he's oh so you're a you're a liar you're an adulterer you know you're you're you're a coveter right that's that's all you are And he uses the law to help people understand that they're really not good.

And they need the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And they have no hope, even on their best day. And so that's what this is saying here. The law is not sin. It's actually necessary, but it has to be used for its proper purpose.

It's like a fire. A fire is great in the fireplace, but it's really very bad in other places. And the law is designed to do a particular work and it has a particular jurisdiction. So One of these chiefs on the island of Tana, where Peyton was, came to John Peyton and he said, our people are determined to kill you if you do not leave this island. You are changing our customs and destroying our worship.

We hate the Jehovah worship. Why? Because the Jehovah worship has something to do with the law. Jehovah worship has to do with transforming you first, and then all those around you. You, your household and all those after you.

And so you know this this crashing in of the law and culture is common and we must engage it. We must not be fearful. We must be like John G. Paton, who's willing to lose his head over the law. We should be willing to do that.

And John Paton was willing to lose his head over wife beating, over making wives carry heavy burdens, and over the other sinful practices that were at work in the New Hebrides Islands. Two chiefs were saved, and this is what Peyton says. The people changed their dispositions. Only the grace of God could do this. Though still marred by many of the faults of heathenism, they were at the roots of their being, literally new creatures, and they were living for their new master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, that's justification by faith alone. God comes, he breaks the power of sin through the law and through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he rescues. And then they serve in newness and newness of life. You know, The law is a blessing in many ways. The law is not sin.

The law is kind of like a wind that blows off your hat. And everybody now knows that you're totally bald. They didn't know that before. The law exposes. It's like a black light that shows what's really there on the page that's obscured by natural light.

The law smokes out problems. The law, in a lot of ways, is like firing tear gas into a building, and all the criminals scatter because they've been exposed. They can't stay there without seeing the light of day. And that's what the law does. The law comes to us, and it sends that tear gas canister into our souls.

And every wicked thing scatters. It's exposed. Something has to be done in order to fix the problem. And that's what sin does. Now, the law produces evil desire.

Verse 8, that sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire, for apart from the law sin was dead. Okay, so here's another purpose of the law. The law arouses evil desire. It ruins you. It arouses disobedience in you.

It says here that sin taking opportunity in the commandment, sin taking occasion by the commandment. This is a really important wording here. So there are two things. There's sin in your heart and then there's the commandment and it is an explosive mix. They don't mix and they cause an explosion and arousal of desire not only does the law coming into the sinful heart expose but it also causes an explosion because the heart is sinful the problem is not the law though the problem is the sin And the sin takes opportunity where there's the law.

Do you see that? Sin taking opportunity. And This is why Brainerd struggled against the strictness of divine law. It was this disturbance of his soul that was taking place, and it aroused doubt toward God. But It ended up leading to his relinquishing self-confidence.

So sin rises up, and it pushes against the law that you're coming aware of. And it inflames the strength of your sin. It's kind of like weight training. If you know, you get stronger by pushing against the weight. And that's what the sin and the law does.

The sin is there, it's already strong enough. But the law comes in and you resist it even more. And it gets stronger and stronger and stronger unless the power of the law is broken. So is sin against the law. It's just like weight training.

And in the sinful heart, it only gets stronger and stronger as it pushes against the law. But then it's weakened. It's weakened. Sin is weakened when there is repentance. And then the soul is satisfied.

And so the law gives something to react to. The law gives something for sin to react against and then it desires to take over. Okay, so whenever there's a law, here's a principle I think we should really understand and if you don't understand this, There's just a number of problems from it. Whenever you bring the law, you're bringing an argument. The law always brings an argument in the soul, because it causes the soul to rise up.

It takes opportunity. The law comes in, and there's an immediate argument in the soul. You know, if you, like here's just an illustration. If you bring words of scripture to evaluate practices in the culture, You're going to cause an argument. The law always causes an argument in the soul, and it causes it everywhere.

But if you talk about homosexuality or modesty or the use of time or manhood and womanhood, you're going to have an argument. Because those have to do with laws of scripture. If you talk about purity and talk about the use of your mind, you're going to cause an argument because the law comes in and it causes a disturbance because it contradicts what you're doing. It contradicts what we're all about and how we live and the things we've gotten used to doing. And so it causes this argument of the soul.

That's why Romans 8-7 says that the carnal mind is in enmity with God. And the problem is the sinful heart, not the law. And that's what he's saying here. So the law comes. It wages war against man's desire to be autonomous.

The law comes, and it wages war against a man's desire to be self-righteous. The law decimates our reputation. You know, there are two reputations destroying things that God has done. First He's given you the law, and then he's given you the cross and your reputation was destroyed completely at those two places and that's what the law is doing the law comes and it does not praise it kills man that's what it says here the law kills it ruins him and that's the that is why the law is not sin. The problem is the sin rising up against the law.

And you know, so you have this, the law is always raised up against our own authority. We want to be our own authorities. We don't want people to tell us what to do. But God is a God of commands and principles. And he comes to us as an authority, and that arouses the sin within us.

And it fights against the law. So man reacts against the law, and he goes in a sinful direction. I was reading somebody who likened it like an automobile. He likened it to the gas pedal on your car. Sin, sin is in your heart, and the law comes in, and you just press on that gas pedal and just go further and faster in the wrong direction.

That's what the law does. It challenges you to go further away from God or go toward God. And so the law is good in that sense. And the law ends up revealing the strength of sin. The sin was always there, but when the law comes and confronts sin, then it reveals the strength of the rebellion and the lack of godliness that was in the soul.

And that's the goodness of the law. It reveals who we really are. It unmasks us. And it pushes back. And it causes a gigantic explosion and a resistance and a turbulence of the soul.

And that's what it was meant to do. That's why God created the law. It's a disturbance that would lead us to the green pastures of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we can no longer think of ourselves self-righteously again. We can no longer be autonomous but under authority, the authority of God.

And then the last point, the law is holy and it reveals a terrible sin nature. We've been speaking about this in a number of different ways, but the law comes in and it shines the light on everything. And it's designed though to be the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, to lead us to repentance, so that we can see the distinctions, we can see the sinfulness of sin and the badness of the ways of the world and the goodness of God, the beauty of all that he has for us, the fruit bearing that's there for us, the mercy that's there for us. That's what the law is designed to do. And so this is the the conflict of the law and grace and sin in the soul of man.

And we started talking about David Brainerd and how his carnal mind was sold into sin, even though he was a good boy from age seven or eight until 21. And then, in his 21st year, God did turn his heart, and sin and grace and the law were finally reconciled with him. And here's what he says about it. He says, I felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what once was. I wanted always to behold God's glory.

My soul dearly loved all mankind, and longed exceedingly that they should enjoy what I enjoyed." Reading those words, you know, that's what happened to me when I was in my teens. I felt that exact same way when I was converted. And so Brainerd began a life of fruit bearing, and he was freed from the condemnation of the law. And he began his journey as a free man. God only knew that it would be a short journey for he would die of tuberculosis just a few years later.

But his faithfulness, his fruit bearing, would incite a missionary movement that the world had never seen. His autobiography has inspired more missionaries than one can tell. And this short life bore much fruit and is bearing fruit even today, even as we tell a story here this morning. And so here we've seen the enormity of sin, we've seen the super enormity of grace, we've seen the purpose and the jurisdiction of the law, and we've also seen the practical lifestyle implications of justification by faith alone. And so from the rising of the sun until the time that it goes down, there's not one moment that we are not dealing somehow with sin or grace or law or faith.

And in through these chapters here, leading up to chapter 8, which is the culmination, God is speaking to us about the greatness of His work toward us as sinners, and also the great responsibility He's laid upon us to walk by faith and not by sight. And that we would know with all of our hearts that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit, for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of sin and death. Would you pray with me? Now Lord, these are beautiful words you put before us here in Romans 7. And Lord, I pray that you would cause us to bear much fruit in this life as a result of all of our prayers and and desires toward you in Jesus name Amen