In this sermon titled 'The Killer of Pride and Self-righteousness' by Scott Brown, the main theme is the doctrine of justification by faith. The sermon focuses on three transformations that occur through justification by faith, namely the exclusion of boasting, the availability of salvation to everyone, and the upholding of the law of God. The apostle emphasizes the importance of humility, obedience, and the unity of the Christian community.

Please find Romans 3, 27. It's always nice to preach after daylight saving because you get an extra hour to preach. Find Romans 3, 27. This is the inerrant, all-sufficient, sweeter than honey. It's the word of God.

Verse 27 in Romans 3. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works?

No. But by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the Gentiles?

Yes of the Gentiles also. Since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not. On the contrary, we establish the law.

Let's pray. Oh Lord, thank you for giving us words from heaven to guide us, to shape our hearts and its meditations, and to shape the culture of a little local church like ours Lord you've been so kind to teach us your ways and here they are so now Lord Make these things live in our hearts amen Please be seated So this text begins with the words, where is boasting then? It is excluded. And so Paul is summing up a long section that began in 1.18 all the way to chapter 3, verse 20, where the title of that section was condemnation, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Now the apostle Paul is explaining the great need of justification by faith.

And he's trying to tell us why he's not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so the apostle, once we get to verse 21, The apostle is declaring the significance of justification by faith alone. You know, I used to listen to J. Vernon McGee years ago when I lived in California, and I pulled out his commentary, and he says this, Paul is driving the nail into the board and clenching it, you know. He's just pounding, pounding away and now he's turning the board over and clenching it, justification by faith, that sinners are only justified by faith.

It's very interesting though, all the other religions of the world are based on justification by works. Even the religions of the atheists, those who claim that there is no God, they live by justification by works as well. This is what cancel culture is all about. You will get yourself canceled if you're not justified by your works of righteousness before a pagan world. And So Paul is explaining the heart of justification by faith.

And here in this passage there are three things that happen. And they actually happen inside the heart of the believer, and they also happen in the in the culture of a church in the way that a church functions in the way that the people in the church think about each other when they think about one another when they look at one another in the eye when they shake hands, you know, when they fellowship together. So this is a very critical passage of scripture. And this is really a declaration of how justification by faith transforms the human heart. And it also transforms the Christian community and the way that community functions.

And then when we go into chapter four, we'll find that the apostle is going to continue to explain this, but he's going to illustrate it through two personalities. First of all, through Abraham, and then through David. So we're moving ahead along this continuation of the doctrine of justification by faith. This continues on all the way to the end of chapter 6. And then the Apostle Paul moves on to other matters.

But I continue to marvel, and you know this if you've been here for any length of time, I continue to marvel at the beauty of what God has designed for his church and what a wonderful culture he wants to create in a church. But it also begins in the human heart. And so there are three conclusions, or maybe three implications of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and you have them in your outline in front of you. First is boasting is excluded. And then second, salvation is for everyone.

And then thirdly, in verse 31, the law of God is upheld by justification by faith So the apostle is actually putting his finger on one of man's greatest problems. It's actually man's most fundamental sin and it's pride. We often are found, you know, thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. We are often found thinking more poorly of others than we ought. It's the greatest of the sins.

This actually is another distinguishing mark of Christianity from all the other religions that Christianity actually speaks to your pride in a different way. Christianity calls for you to to pour contempt on all your all your pride and you know pride pride is competitive. Pride makes comparisons. Pride wants to make us better than the other person and in this case the other Christian in Rome. And pride was Lucifer's sin.

He exalted his Lucifer's sin, he exalted his own will above the will of God. Pride was Eve's sin. She wanted to be like God. In other words, she wanted to be her God. You know, Adam preferred his own autonomy to God's command over God's command.

And so, You have pride as the fundamental sin. Many theologians have said pride is the root of every sin. We sing that wonderful hymn that really declares one of the most helpful things to the human soul and that is pouring contempt on your pride. When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride." Well that's Christianity and the problem with pride is that it runs so deep. It is so pernicious.

It is so pervasive And Jonathan Edwards said that the problem with pride is that pride blinds you from your pride so that you can't see it. And our hearts really cannot completely or accurately bear witness to the depths of our pride. You know, I remember going into a prayer chapel one time and I caught myself hoping since I was all alone that someone would walk in and find me praying there. And then they would say, oh, he must be such a man of prayer. Let me go tell my friend about it and someone else will know and then you know the word would you know the word would spread you know or have I'm sure this has never happened to you, but.

You know, you give a gift, and so it's a large gift. And somehow it slips out, you know, out of your lips, that you, you know, sort of offhandedly tell your friend, well, you know, I gave, you know, $3,000, you know, to the effort. And then some, then of course he would think well of you. But pride runs so deep, we want people to know how holy, how generous we are. But what's so interesting is that whenever we do that, we are always robbing glory from God.

Justification by faith as a doctrine is a pride killer. And that's why I titled this sermon The Killer of Pride and Self-Righteousness. I think that's one of the great things that the apostle is trying to communicate. And he's saying no, all have sinned, there's no distinction. Of course, if our righteousness is something that we could earn, then it would be legitimate to boast.

He's saying boasting is excluded in justification by faith. You know, if your good works outweigh your bad works, then you would have something to boast about. If you were weighed in the balances and you were found doing more good than bad, this is how people think. They think in terms of, well, my good outweighs my bad. And actually, the Apostle Paul has been completely Exploding that whole idea and if that wasn't enough Trent Moody came back and preached on repentance last week and through another megaton 10 megaton bomb on self-righteousness And that's what the Apostle Paul is doing here.

You know, we've just, you know, gone through this celebration of the Reformation all over the world. R.C. Sproul says this, the doctrine of justification is the most controversial issue in the history of Christendom. And it led to a massive division between the Roman Church and the Protestant churches during the Protestant Reformation. And then of course the Council of Trent condemned the Reformation doctrine of justification.

Luther said that the doctrine of justification was the single article upon which the whole church rests. Calvin called it the hinge point upon which everything else turns, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. But what the Apostle Paul is saying here is that there's no glory for man. There's no reason for boasting in man for God's saving grace because it's all of God. It was God who did it all.

It was God who changed your heart. It was God that gave you affection for the things of Jesus Christ. It was God who made your heart actually be thankful for the Word of God when you read it. It was God who did that. It was God who made you wanna follow him.

This is, the theologians call this the order of salvation. God changes your heart, giving you faith to believe. And then you follow him. So this is the whole doctrine of salvation. And the apostle doesn't wanna let us forget it and over and over again, he's gonna continue to pound away at it.

So in these verses speak of three things, three blessings really upon the church, upon the human heart. And that is boasting is excluded and salvation is for everyone and justification upholds the law of God. So let's take each one of these one by one. First of all, boasting is excluded. Notice that there's a pattern here too.

There's a question and then there's an answer and then there's an explanation in each one of these sections and the first section is verses 27 and 28. Where is boasting then it is excluded by what law of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. And by the way, on that statement, the Protestant Reformation was launched.

Man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. That was the explosion that turned the church back to Jesus Christ alone. And we have to, if we believe that we're justified by faith, then there's something that's excluded and that has, and that is boasting. You know the Apostle Paul also wrote a letter to the Galatian Church and in Galatians 6 14 he says, God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the only boast.

Because man is justified by faith alone. Albert Barnes, a commentator, I like the way he explains it. He says, What is justification? It is the declared purpose of God to regard and treat those sinners who believe in Jesus Christ as if they had not sinned on the merits of the Savior. You know, when you think about that in terms of your relationships in the church, to know that God treats his children as if they had not sinned.

There is a way in which that's appropriate for us in the church. But there's actually more to the story because God actually calls his church to discipline the wayward God calls for preaching to rebuke and reprove and exhort you know with great patience and humility. So it's not that we don't deal with sin but there but there's a way that God looks at his children that's so favorable, it's so astonishingly unfairly and in our minds inappropriately favorable. But he sees us actually through the perfections of Jesus Christ. I don't know if I understand what that means, but I hope it's a comfort.

And I hope it also helps husbands and wives as they deal with one another's sins and parents and children and church members with one another that we're dealing with people who are justified by faith alone not by the works of the law. It's a very important thing. John Murray says that faith is self-renouncing, whereas works are self-congratulatory. You know, and we have this tremendous illustration of this coming out of the Protestant Reformation in the biography of Luther. You know, Luther tried so hard to have favor with God.

You know, he tried sleeping on hard floors. You know, he would fast. For a long time, he would Crawl up a staircase kneeling in prayer. He tried monasteries. He tried disciplines He tried confessions.

He tried masses. He tried absolutions He He tried everything that he could think of, and all of it was fruitless to him. He never could have peace with God. He thought that the righteousness of God meant that he had to have perfect righteousness. And so he hated the word righteousness until he was teaching in the university And he came across this verse, that the righteousness of God is satisfied by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, not by his own works.

And so he tried and tried and tried and tried. He wanted to get something, something that would tell him, you know, that he was righteous enough to be saved. This is so common in so many people, especially who've grown up in the church. They have feel like they have to attain some level of righteousness or passion or some level of desire or some level of faith. The truth is, you never have enough faith to be saved.

Never. Because you're saved on the basis of the righteous sacrifice of Jesus Christ. So, you know, pious feelings cannot make you guiltless. Having warm thoughts toward God cannot atone for your sins. Having enough knowledge of the Bible cannot atone for your sins.

Having enough faith cannot make you guiltless. And you know, I was listening to the sermon from last week from Trent in Acts 2, where Peter says, repent and be baptized, and Trent was elaborating on the doctrine of repentance. And he made it so clear that your repentance, your own personal repentance can never go deep enough to cover your sins because of our lack of awareness of the depth of our fallenness because again you have sins that are committed but then you have sin which is original sin that exists in the heart. And here's what Trent said, I'm going to quote him, lack of sinful actions does not make one guiltless. Conviction does not make, does not equal repentance.

Repentance is more than turning from sin. Even the motive, but the motivation for your repentance is even flawed. So that's what the Apostle Paul is saying here. And he's saying there's no moral superiority that would cause anyone to be saved. And of course that doesn't mean that God doesn't call his people to a biblical morality.

We'll get to that in the last verse of this section, in this chapter, in verse 31, because he makes that clear. Do you remember the parable that Jesus told? This is a remarkable illustration. You know, picture this in your mind. Picture this scene.

It's such a remarkable scene in Luke 18. He spoke a parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others. So picture this, Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this tax collector. I fast twice a week.

I give tithes of all I possess." Well that was the end of his meditation and Jesus tells us that the tax collector standing far off would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast saying God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you this man went down to his house justified rather than the other for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. You know in John chapter 3 John the Baptist said, a man can receive nothing unless it's given him from heaven. In Ephesians 2, 8, the apostle tells that church there in that corrupt city of Ephesus, he says, for by grace you've been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works.

Why? Lest anyone should boast. Lest anyone should boast. Spurgeon said, grace puts his hand on the boasting mouth and shuts it once for all. So we often think more highly of ourselves than we ought, but the truth is is that salvation is a gift of God and there and sanctification is also a gift of God by the way because everyone serves according to the strength that God gives him.

It all comes from God. And that's what the Apostle Paul is driving home. So this first wonderful transformation is that boasting is excluded. And the Christian learns how to progressively stop glorying in himself and trying to get glory for himself even in the prayer chapel or wherever else he might be. So the second transformation and this is another wonderful thing salvation is for everyone verse 29 or is he the God of the Jews only?

Is he not also the God of the Gentiles? This is talking about ethnic divisions. Yes, of the Gentiles also. And since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the circumcised through faith. This makes it very clear that all people can be saved, that there's only one way of salvation, and that there are no distinctions, no cultural distinctions, no distinctions at all, Because Jesus Christ, He abolishes all distinctions between people.

God does not concoct different ways of salvation. It says right here, there is one God. Do you see those words? There is one God who saves one way. And there is only one way to get to God.

Jesus says, no one comes to the Father except through me. But this is a, first of all, it's a declaration of the nature of God. There is one God. And this really, this actually is such a wonderful message for the whole world. We live in such a fragmented world.

We live in such a divided world. But in the kingdom of God, God brings all the diversity together into one body of every kind of diversity. You know what kinds of diversities there are? All of them are brought together and the fragmentation actually falls away under the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ. Because there is one mediator between God and man.

There is one God. And like the apostle Paul told the Galatian church, he said it in Galatians 3.28, it's a very famous verse. For there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female. And I don't think that's the comprehensive list. I think the list goes on and on and on.

And it completely destroys the whole legitimacy of ethnic cleansing and divisions based on anything. But then the apostle finishes in Galatians 3.28, for you are all one in Christ. Now in verse 30, he's talking about this massive cultural divide between the circumcised and the uncircumcised, the Jew and the Greek. The Jews in their ethnic purity, if you wanna call it that, which the Jews were never ethnically pure actually, because the nations were always coming in and being converted, okay? But the truth is, this is a strike against ethnic divisions in the church of Jesus Christ, uncircumcised and circumcised.

You know, this is so different compared to the worldly living isn't it? You know in the church there are no distinctions, there are no class divisions, There are no racial quotas. There's no ethnic segregation. Clicks are something that should always be dying in a church. But who may come?

Everyone. Every kind of person can come. Damaged people, fearful people, proud people, people from all over the world. You know, in our church we have people actually here from all over the world. We have a family traveling in an airplane right now on their way to their country of origin, India.

So, you know, the church is a diverse community. It's a very, it's a beautiful community where all the, where they're high or low social status, they're rich or poor, they all come together and they're one. And you know, James actually chastises those who would make divisions based on the rich and the poor. He says, you know, why are you being so nice to the rich people? And why are you putting the poor people over here?

This was one of the big problems in the early church. We'll get to it in Acts chapter 6 where the the Hellenistic widows weren't being served. They were actually being ignored. It was a real problem in the church. The Jews in the church were reluctant to serve the Hellenistic widows.

And of course the Apostles went after it and they said this has to be dealt with. And so this was the origin of the office of the deacon and the qualifications for deacons to take care of the various needs in a very diverse body and so you know your very best deacons they don't care about your social status they don't care about your ethnicity they they care about you and how you're doing, and they try to take care of the physical needs of the church. So every kind of person, Paul later on in Romans, in Romans 10, verse 13, Paul, I think he summarized it, whoever will call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved. You know, in the church in Corinth, which was so divided, God was teaching this church to finally become a united church and the whole letter in First Corinthians is designed for that. And they actually got very mad at him.

They were divided from Paul, and so he wrote another letter called Second Corinthians to try to address their objections to his preaching and his ministry there. But here's what he said to the Corinthian church, for who makes you differ from one another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now, if you did indeed receive it, If you did receive it, in other words, it came to you from God. If you did receive it, why do you boast?

Why do you boast as if you had not received it? This whole matter of boasting runs through this entire passage of scripture. But the second transformation is that salvation is for everyone and God flattens the culture of a church and we're all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. The old, the young, the rich, the poor, the black, the white, the yellow, the red, whatever else you want to say. We don't care about any of that.

What we care about is the soul. You know Christianity is so different than the rest of the world. You know, I did go to a public high school in the 1960s. My high school wasn't like this at all. The cultural divisions, the cool kids, the uncool kids.

I mean, look, the church is so different. It's different than every other institution. It's the best institution in the world. So the second transformation is that salvation is for everyone That's in 29 and 30 and the third transformation is That justification upholds the law of God in other words. There's a transformation of love for the law of God.

That's what verse 31 says. And of course there's a question in verse 31, do we then avoid the law through faith? And then he answers the question, certainly not, and then he explains the question by saying on the contrary we established the law So What do you do with the law? There's a tendency to make void the law To give yourself a pass to minimize obedience because you've been justified by faith, a Greek dictionary, a Greek dictionary defining this word, make void, it's one word in the original language, make void. It means to render inactive.

In other words, to not care about the law, to make it, it's not active in my life. It's not part of my life. It's to condemn it to inactivity. I'm just quoting from the dictionary. In other words, there could be a tendency that a believer would say, well, I'm justified by faith, which would be to rob the law of God of its power.

And you can see the logic, right? The Apostle goes to great lengths to to condemn all humanity. The religious, the irreligious, the atheist, he doesn't leave anybody untouched And then he says, but we're justified by faith. And like in verse 20, he says, by the deeds of the law, no flesh should be justified. And he's also told us that justification is apart from the works of the law.

Well somebody might conclude after hearing that saying, well it doesn't matter if I sin, God's gonna forgive me, God already forgave me, well I can just do whatever I want. I can take sin lightly. Have you taken sin lightly? You know, people might claim, as the Bible says, Let us do evil that good may come. That Paul was accused of preaching that kind of gospel, that you can live any way you want.

But that's not what the apostle is saying. That's what verse 31 is all about. He said, Paul answers the question. Certainly not. In other words, he uses this word, meganoito, like big time absolutely a billion times no.

You know, like mega no, whatever no is, you know. Gazillion times no. He's reacting, you know, and appropriately, because faith does not nullify the law. It doesn't nullify the proper use of the law. You know, Timothy, Paul said to Timothy, the law is good if one uses it lawfully.

There's an unlawful use of the law that is to use it to boast or to think that you're so wonderful because you obeyed this one certain law. You know. But notice the language. He says no, The law is established through justification. That's really important, is established.

And I wanna give you three ways the law, that justification established the law, not done away with it, okay? First, The first way God established the law was that God honored the law by satisfying all of its requirements. The law was so important, the keeping of the law was so important, that God sacrificed his son for all lawbreakers, his son who never broke a law for those who broke all the laws. God so highly valued the law that he could not let man be justified except by punishing by the curses of the law, the punishing of his son. Jesus Christ did not give lawbreakers a pass.

He punished all violations of the law. He punished every single violation of the law of the mind, of the heart, and of the feet. And he punished his son with the punishment that we deserved You know Isaiah says that that he took our yoke upon him Are the yoke of the burden of the curses of the law? The law was so critical that the keeping of the law, obedience to the law was so important. And man broke it so comprehensively that God took the punishment, the weight, the yoke That we deserve to carry and he put it on his son That's how important the law is So no one should ever diminish The law because God has punished all the violations of the law.

The second way God established the law is that the Lord Jesus Christ obeyed the law perfectly. His perfect Son obeyed the law perfectly. It's so important that you obey the law because Jesus did. And then the third way God established the law is that he gives grace to obey the law. Charles Spurgeon said, there is no one who so much loves the law of God and delights in it after the inward man as the one who has been justified by faith.

It's another way of saying if you love the Lord, you'll love the law of God. If you hate the law of God, you're actually hating the very character of the God that the law represents, because every law of God represents some element of the character of God. If you hate a certain law of God, it means that you hate some element of God. This is sort of a difficulty, because a lot of times the laws don't seem to seem all that loving to us. Whenever we think that a law of God is not loving, we need to understand that it's we that don't know what love is, not God.

We need to learn what love looks like by looking into the law of God. We'll get to statements in Romans where the Apostle Paul makes it very clear that every law of God in the law, in the Old Testament law, is a law of love. Every one of them. And yet people hate the law of God today and It's a manifestation of unbelief in the modern church that hates the law of God. So in verse 31, get this, in one single sentence, Paul refutes both legalism and antinomianism in one sentence.

And He refutes antinomianism. Those who say the law is not necessary, he says no, it's abundantly necessary. Mega, mega, mega, certainly not. It is necessary. And then he refutes legalism.

For anyone who thinks that their obedience would save them or give them some reason to boast or some reason to act like they're so much better than their brother. Jesus said, I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Okay, now I'm going to give you three ways the law of God is good. Three ways the law of God is good. First, the law shows you that the law cannot save.

It is so high it cannot be attained. Secondly, the law shows you that you need to be saved. It is a tutor to lead you to Christ, says the Apostle Paul. Thirdly, the law shows you how to live. The law does not cease to be useful.

The law of God always creates a superior culture. It does. The law of God always creates a superior culture. Hey, look at San Francisco, look at Los Angeles, look at Boston, look at these cities, they're in a state of collapse because they've rejected the law of God. They hate the law of God, they won't prosecute criminals.

And the reason they won't prosecute criminals, If you want, you can go walk into a store today and steal whatever you want and no one will stop you. Do you know why? It started with the hatred of the law of God. And now, you have, you know, hundreds of companies moving out of these cities because they need the law of God to protect them. The law of God has always been a protection.

The law of God will not cease to be useful. You know, Jesus Christ gave, you can go to these places, it will list the 50 commands of Jesus Christ. There are 1,050 commands in the New Testament. Don't say, I'm a New Testament Christian, the law is no longer for me. No.

Go back and read the 1,050 commands in the 50 commands of Jesus Christ. The commands of God always are consistent in both the New and the Old Testament. They're a blessing. In fact, Jesus' final command in Matthew 28 is that the disciples of Jesus Christ should teach one another to obey all the things that he commanded. Like in the church we're supposed to teach people to obey.

We're not suspending obedience. The church calls the church to obey the Lord in everything. And so in justification by faith, we don't dispense with obedience. You know, obedience is a fruit of regeneration. Obedience is a display of God's glory and his goodness.

Obedience is always a protection. You know, Jesus made so many commands. Here are just a few of them. Repent, come to me, believe in me, abide in me, take up your cross and follow me. Rejoice, worship God in spirit and in truth.

Always pray and do not lose heart. Do not be anxious about the things you need. Do not be anxious about the threats of men. Do the will of my Father who's in heaven. So you know Jesus Christ does not suspend obedience and frankly I think we're in a particular pickle in the culture that we live in right now because living by Truth is the most important thing, but we live in a culture of lies and deception.

All around us, we live in a world where truth is actually hard to find, unless you can find it in the word of God. The internet, through social media, through news outlets, the algorithms bring us a constant barrage of, I'm gonna call it misinformation, about God particularly, but about so many other things. And you know, the internet has become the most powerful tool of social engineering that's ever been invented outside the family and outside the public education system. Those are the two greatest indoctrination centers that God has established. Well, he did not establish the public education system.

But the news out, have you ever had this thought, the news outlets are no longer news? You know, it's very interesting, you know, with this war in Iraq or this war in Gaza, I'm going to Al Jazeera and the Jerusalem Post and CNN and the Judge Report. You cannot believe how different they are. The news isn't the news. Who knows what's true?

I don't know. I don't trust the news outlets anymore. I don't know, but here's what I do know. God is true. But we live in the midst of a very powerful ideological apologists and manipulators, but it's actually worse than that because when you open up your phone or you open up your computer the algorithms are Manipulating you okay They're actually Tampering with human behavior.

They make you feel something They send you a story that makes you fear something. They send you something that makes you believe something. They're trying to move your heart in a particular direction. This is the world that we live in. And this is, you know, there are many who are calling this psychological warfare.

You know, several months ago I listened to a book called fifth generation warfare, war of information and perception. And you know, warfare used to be waged with guns and armies coming together. Now, fifth generation warfare is cyber warfare. It's the warfare of the mind. It's social engineering and cyber attacks and misinformation.

You know, hey, and just by the way, whenever countries go to war, They always lie about what they're doing. Do you understand that? All countries lie about, they're all trying to deceive the enemy, okay? And they release news stories to deceive not just the enemy, but you too. So that you'll feel something, so that you'll rise up and do something.

You know, my son-in-law drove out of the hospital in Omaha two days ago and there is this big protest, he sent me a video of it, of these people protesting the Gaza war. Well, what did that? It was an information campaign that did that. And The algorithms are manipulating what you read. The algorithms are making you think a certain way.

You need to understand that. They decide what you read. They decide what you will watch. And they have control over your cognitive input. This is the world that we live in today.

This is the great, you know, there are many blessings of the internet, but there are such dangers at the same time. You know, if you watch something or you, another one just like it pops up, and they'll just continue to make you more and more upset and extreme. This is, this is, this is called cyber warfare. And warfare is actually happening without firing a shot. I mean, you remember all the lies about COVID?

I have a list of about 30 lies in my computer. But everybody walked according to the lies. Sustaining. Except actually the people in this church. We were actually having a love fast every Sunday.

Because we actually had the Word of God to tell us that we have to worship God. We have to come together. But you know, the challenges of artificial intelligence and deep fakes and things like that make it hard to find out what the truth is. Here's what I'm here to say. The law of God is the truth.

The law of God is what you need. Don't dismiss the law of God. Walk in the law God. Well, here's some applications. You know, how should this continue to shape our church?

Humility is always a blessing in a church. Not looking down on one another is always a blessing. Recognizing that your brothers and sisters have been saved by grace, not by any works of the law, is so important. That doesn't mean that we don't call one another to obedience, that doesn't mean that we don't do church discipline, but it means that there's a certain way that we relate to one another. It's through the grace of Jesus Christ.

And there are no distinctions. We're united by Jesus Christ and by Christ alone. Not our social status, not even our opinion about some whatever. Because everybody's getting pushed around by whatever right now. You know, have you forgotten about obedience?

Are you walking with the Lord? You know, do you desire, do you love His commandments? You know, are you obeying the commandments of God? You husbands, are you obeying the commandments of God for husbands? To wash your wife in the water of the word, to live with her in an understanding way.

You know, wives, do you respect your husbands? Are you obeying the Lord? Children, are you obeying your parents in the Lord? Are you walking in obedience? Obedience is a blessing.

Obedience is a protection. And here in verse 31, God sets forth the pivotal nature of obedience, that justification does not eliminate obedience. And we cannot say, well, I can do whatever I want now because I've been justified. That's actually the voice of a non-Christian. And Paul is attacking it in Rome.

And it came up because of the conflicts of the Jews and the Gentiles and people thinking they were so much better than one another because of their practices. Well, I continue to marvel at the culture that God has designed for his church, how he transforms the hearts of the people in the church and They learn to quit boasting and they realize that salvation is for everyone and That Justification instead of nullifying the law It actually upholds the law So may it be true in this church, all these wonderful things. The gospel is so good. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for these wonderful words of life that are so helpful, so shaping.

Lord, I pray that you would, in all of us, that you would humble us, that you would make us a humble church. A church that recognizes the the breath of salvation and justification, and an obedient church where we're teaching one another to obey all the things that you've commanded. Amen.