Landon Coleman
Immanuel Sermon Audio
Not Ashamed: Romans 7:7-13
If you have a copy of the Scriptures, you can open to Romans chapter 7, Romans 7. There's an outline in the bulletin where you can track along this morning. Our text is Romans 7 7 to 13. We left off last week with verse 6, so we're picking up right where we left off. And as you look at this passage, you'll notice that we are not stopping on the normal paragraph break. And we're going to stop at verse 13, and then we're going to pick up next week with verse 14 and make it through the end of Romans chapter 7. And the one thing that I want to point out as we begin and as we read this text together is that really this is all one section and it's obviously a bit artificial to stop in the middle of a paragraph, but we're going to look at the last two questions that Paul raises here in Romans 6 and 7. And the things that we say this week are foundational for what we're going to talk about next week. And the things that we're going to look at next week will be built upon what we say this week in this middle part of Romans chapter 7. So you follow along. I'm going to read Romans 7 7 down to verse 13, and then we'll pray and ask the Lord to bless the reading of His Word. This is the Word of God in Romans 7 beginning in verse 7. Paul says, "What then shall we say, that the law is sin by no means, yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin, for I would not have known what it is to covet, if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive, apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. So the law is holy, the commandment is holy, and righteous and good. Did that which is good then bring death to me? By no means, it was sin, producing death in me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For ever O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. Our prayer this morning is a prayer of thanksgiving. We thank you for giving us your law. We thank you for helping us to know the truth about your character in your word. We're thankful that you help us to see the truth about our sin in the mirror of the law. Father, we're thankful for the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, that point us so clearly to your Son, Jesus the Christ. We ask that you would help us this morning to understand these verses, help us to fix our eyes only on Jesus. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. I want to start this morning with a story about a man who was born roughly 2,000 years ago. He was born in the city of Sennep, and Sennep was located in the Roman province of Pontius, and Pontius was one province in the Roman Empire, and you can see on that map over on the right what we would call Turkey. There's a yellow circle, and that's the region of Pontius there, and Sennep is right there on the coast. This man named Marcian was born in Sennep, in Pontius in the Roman Empire, around 85 AD. Around 140 AD, so when he was a middle-aged man, a little bit older in life, he moved to Rome, and he joined a church in Rome, and they found out pretty quickly that Marcian was a wealthy man. When he joined the church, his initial donation was 200,000 Cisterces, and because you probably didn't pay anybody anything in Cisterces this week, let me just translate that to our money. That's about a hundred years of pay for a working man. So in joining the church, he gave 100 years of a working man's salary as an initial gift to the church. The church found out immediately that he had a lot of money. They also found out that he had some odd ideas about the Bible and about God and about Jesus. Marcian taught something that we look back on and call dossatism. It's the idea that Jesus only seemed to be human. Jesus was a divine figure, Marcian said. He really didn't take on human flesh and a human nature. He had only looked like it. He was only pretending. That didn't really happen. Marcian looked at the story of the virgin birth. He said, "You don't need that story. You don't have to believe that kind of stuff. It's too hard to believe." Marcian looked at the story of the crucifixion, and he said, "You don't need to believe that either. It didn't happen." Jesus was just pretending to be a human. He really wasn't crucified. Something happened there at the end, and Jesus, this divine personage, pretending to be man, he would never have died on across the way the gospels present him as dying. You can see a picture here of Marcian. On the left is the apostle John, and you can see he has a nice apostolic glow about him, and then you can see Marcian over on the right, and he doesn't have the glow, and that's the artist's way of saying to you, "This man was up to no good," and the things that this man taught were things to be avoided. Even more fundamentally problematic for Marcian. He looked at the whole Old Testament and said, "You just need to get rid of it. We don't want the Old Testament. We don't want anything from Genesis up through Malachi. Just chuck it all in the trash." He read the Old Testament, and he said, "The God and the Old Testament is different than the God that I believe in. It's different than the God that I read about in the gospels. He's different than the God I read about in Paul's letters. He was embarrassed by the Old Testament. He said, "We want nothing to do with the Old Testament." And all he believed in as Scripture were portions of the gospel of Luke and portions of ten of Paul's letters, not even all of Paul's letters. So the church found out, here's Marcian, he's really rich, and he is saying things that don't line up with apostolic teaching. So the church in swift order excommunicated him. They kicked him out. And not only did they excommunicate him, but on his way out they said, "You can take your 200,000 Cisterces with you, because we don't want them." And they gave the entirety of it back. They said, "We don't want this money." And Marcian took the money, and he essentially used the money to fund his travels around the Roman Empire where he would teach the things that he believed about God, and he would plant Marcianite churches. And these churches grew, these churches were popular in the earliest years of church history. And some of the early church fathers would talk about the Marcianite churches and call them hornets nests. Just like you would avoid a hornets nest. They said, "You need to avoid these churches." They don't preach the truth of the gospel. They're Tolian and the great lawyer and defender of the faith said, "You've got to watch out for Marcian, Justin, Martyr, and Irenaeus." And many of the church fathers said, "This guy is far outside of what we believe to be true about the Bible, and true about God, and even true about the gospel." Now I would love to tell you that when the early church excommunicated Marcian and moved him to the fringe, that all of his bad doctrine and heretical ideas and unorthodox teaching, that it all just moved to the margins and we haven't had to deal with those things since. But we have, and we do. There are prominent teachers in the United States today, people that you would probably recognize their name, people who have a big platform, large churches, large online presence, who would look you in the eye and say, "You know what? I'm embarrassed by the Old Testament. And I just wish we could get rid of it. We don't need it. We don't need to believe all those fantastic stories and all those things about the God in that book that seems so mean and so grouchy. It's not the ideas about God that we want to believe in. We want to listen to other things, things that maybe Luke says or things that Paul says. And we still have to wrestle with these ideas, confusion about who Jesus Christ is, confusion about do we, should we really believe in the virgin birth as modern scientific people? Should we really believe in these things? Do we really believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice to redeem a people with his blood like Paul says in Romans chapter 3? Do we believe these things or not? The book of Romans is more than adequate to deal with Marcian and his followers. In our text in particular, Romans chapter 7 right here in the middle has something important to say to us about what we do as Christians with the Old Testament. Do we need it? The law and the rules and all of the stuff in the Old Testament. What do we do with those books today? Romans chapter 7 will prove helpful. So let me remind you that Romans 7 is in a section of Romans that runs from Romans 6 1 to Romans 8, 39. And in this section of the book of Romans 6, 7, and 8, the Apostle Paul is talking about sanctification. And when Paul talks about sanctification, what he's saying is we have been saved or freed from sin's power. Okay, we just sang, we're free, we're free, we're free. That's the idea that Paul's hitting in Romans 6, 7, and 8. You have been set free from the power of sin and now you need to learn how to live like free people. Are you going to continue in sin? Absolutely not. You're just going to sin all you want because you're under grace, not under the law, absolutely not. Free people and that should translate into sanctification in your life. So Romans 3, 4, and 5 are about justification. You're saved from sin's penalty. At the end of Romans 8, we're going to talk about glorification. In the end, we will be saved from sin's presence in our lives. But right now we're talking about sanctification and how the Lord has freed us from sin's power. Okay, in Romans 6, 7, there's four questions. Paul brings these questions up and all of these questions reflect Jewish concerns about some of the strong, forceful things that Paul has said about the law. If you are a Jewish reader or a Jewish listener to Romans, you listen to Paul say that the law reveals our sin, the law can't save us, only Jesus can save us. We don't earn righteousness by keeping the law. That's not how it works. And you start to have alarm bells going off. And rather than just pretend that people didn't have concerns or questions about what he was saying, Paul has heard these things in his teaching. He raises the questions in the book of Romans. He raises a question in Romans 6, 1, what shall we say? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? Verse 15. Are we to sin because we're not under law but under grace. Verse 7, what do we say that the law is sin? Verse 13, "Does the law bring death to me?" And in each of these questions, Paul's answer is by no means. He doesn't just say, nah, I don't think so, not really, probably not, but in the strongest way possible. He says, absolutely not. This is a resounding, convictional, no. And the ESV translates it as by no means. So we've looked at two of these questions already. Romans 6, 1, and 2, and Romans 6, 15, we're going to look at the next two questions this morning. Question number three, which is first for us, is in verse 7. Paul says, what shall we then say that the law is sin by no means? He's been talking about how the law reveals our sin. It shows us our sin. And he has heard people say, Paul, it sounds like you're saying that the law is sinful itself inherently and that the law creates sin in us. What should we say, Paul, that the law itself is sinful? And Paul says, absolutely no. The law is not sinful, absolutely no, by no means. Here's what Paul does say in this section. He says, the law does define sin. The law of God defines sin. And look at the issue he brings up in verse 7. It's central to understanding this text. He says, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. Here's the example. I would not have known what it is to covet. If the law had not said, and this is in quotes, you shall not covet. He is literally quoting the 10 commandments. He's quoting commandment 10. You shall not covet. The things that belong to your neighbor. You shall not spend your time and your days wishing that you had all of those things that he or she has, but that you don't have. That is God defining sin. And there's 10 other commandments. It's not all of the law that God gave his people, but the 10 commandments are a summary of God's definition of sin. And Paul says, I wouldn't have even known that this was a problem if I hadn't read it in the law that I'm not supposed to do it. What he's saying is, God gets to define sin. You don't, and I don't, and we don't. God defines sin. You live in a culture, whether you realize it or not, in the United States, that historically has been largely shaped by what we often call Judeo-Christian values. That is to say that the way we tend to think about right and wrong and good and bad and what's moral and what's ethical has been largely shaped by the law of God as summarized in the 10 commandments. It is not coincidental that the Supreme Court of the United States has Moses engraved on it with the 10 commandments. That's the founder saying, we believe that this is formative for how we think about right and wrong. At the same time, you live in a place and a time and a culture where many people have openly, completely, defiantly rejected the Word of God as having any authority in their life. He said, we will not listen to what that ancient document says about right and wrong. We will make our own decisions about right and wrong. How will these people make these decisions? Well, largely, they just make them on whatever they think is right or good or moral or ethical. And they have been set adrift in a sea, a hopeless sea of relativism and pluralism. Many of them with absolutely no tether to anything resembling the truth which is why you often turn on the television or scroll through social media and you find yourself shocked that we are debating and discussing certain issues as right or wrong and that there's so much confusion about things that seem simple to you. It's because you have a tether to the Word of God where God defines sin and many of the people among whom we live have no tether. They live in the book of judges where everyone simply does what's right in their own eyes. And the outcome of that in judges is horrific. And the outcome of that in modern times is equally horrific. So what I'm saying to you is when it comes to defining sin, it's not like we live in the state of California. And this is what I mean by California. In the state of California, any citizen can propose a ballot proposal. Any citizen can do it. And if you get enough signatures on a petition, it goes on the ballot and we vote on it, they vote on it in November and they just decide, the voters decide, what do we think about this thing? And it can be anything. I mean, some of them are preposterous. They just propose things and then they vote them up, down, how do we feel about it? God has not left it to us to define sin in that way. But He's given us His law and His law defines right, wrong, good, evil. What is moral and what is ethical? God's law defines sin. Number two, the law of God reveals our sin. Verse 7, Paul says, "If it hadn't been for the law, I wouldn't have known sin. I wouldn't have even known that sin was a problem in my life if it weren't for the law." The specific issue that he brings up is coveting, which is fascinating. He skips over the first nine commandments and he goes to commandment 10. The one commandment that clearly drives sin home to the level of our hearts. Coveting is not something you do and act that I can watch you doing it. I can't tell if you're coveting, I don't know. It's not something that has to be expressed in words. It's just something that exists in your heart, a desire, an unnatural, disordered, wicked desire in your heart, and no one has to know that it's there. And Paul says, "When I came to commandment number 10, I realized that I'm not as good as I thought I was." I mean, most Americans think they're pretty good people. You ask them, "You're a good person?" "Well, I try." We can always find somebody next to us that we think is worse than us. I try to be a good person. Paul says, "I wouldn't have even known that sin was such a problem if it hadn't been for the law in looking in the law like a mirror and seeing the truth about my heart." Some of you are going to leave here today and you're going to go eat a hamburger. And some of you like mustard on your hamburger. And some of you are going to take a big bite of your hamburger and you're going to get mustard way over here on your cheeks or down on your chin. I've told you before, my granddad used to end up with mustard on his ears. I don't know how. You're going to go to the bathroom. You're going to get in the car. You're going to pull your phone out. You're going to look at yourself in a mirror and you're going to see that mustard. And you're going to know immediately the mirror didn't put the mustard there. It wasn't the mirror that did that. You know what else you're going to know intuitively? You shouldn't use the mirror to clean the mustard off your face. Don't try it. That's not what mirrors are for. What Paul is saying is that when he looked in the law of God, it was like a mirror and he saw himself. It wasn't the law that made him sinful. Is the law sinful? Absolutely not, Paul says. But it did reveal my sin. And I wouldn't have even known how big and how bad and how deep of a problem sin was until I looked in the mirror of God's Word. And you know what a lot of people try to do today is they try to use the law of God to clean themselves up. They see themselves exposed in the mirror of the law and then they try to use that mirror to clean themselves. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way with mustard and it doesn't work that way with sin in the law. The law defines sin. The law reveals sin. Number three, the law inflames sin. This is, I think, the most difficult part of the text to wrap your mind around. It's what Paul gets at in verse 8 to 12, kind of the heart of our text. Notice what he says in verse 8, it's an odd statement at the very end. He says, "Apart from the law, sin lies dead." And then notice what he says in verse 9, he says, "I once was alive, apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died." Okay, you can trace that out in all sorts of crazy directions. That's the kind of thing Marcia would do. He'd pull one verse and ignore the rest of the book and make it say whatever he wanted it to say. Most Bible scholars and commentators are agreed that Paul is speaking experientially here. Paul's saying, "Look, there was a time in my life where I thought I was pretty good. I thought I was alive. I thought I was keeping these rules pretty good. But then, man, I really looked into the law and that 10th commandment drove it home. That sin is a heart issue. It's not just an action issue or a word issue, but it's the condition of my heart. And I looked at the law and it was like I died." He's not saying that he was spiritually alive until the moment he saw himself. He's clearly said in this book, "The law reveals what's already true of us." And he's describing his experience. "Man, I thought I was alive, but sin revealed in the law killed me." Look what he says in verse 8, "Sin, through the commandment, produced all kinds of covetousness." He goes on to say, "That sin promised life to me, but all it delivered was death. It promised life, and it delivered death." What do we mean when we say this? The law inflames our sin. I think what Paul's describing is an experience you've had in your life where someone, a parent, a boss, the government, sets a boundary on your life. Immediately, there's something inside of you that wants to cross that boundary. Something you didn't even realize was there in the first place. I'll give you an example of this. I was reading in one of my commentaries this week by James Boyce, a former pastor of 10th Presbyterian in Philadelphia. He's just kind of a pastor-looking guy, isn't he? He's got his big glasses and his big forehead. He's just kind of a nerdy-looking pastor-guy. He represents us well. You can picture what Mr. Boyce would look like as a child, right? I pictured glasses the same size, head just a little bit smaller, not much, and maybe a little more hair on the top. He tells a story from his childhood thinking about Romans 7, and he says, "Look, I was a middle school student, and one day I showed up for seventh grade, whatever." The principal called all the boys together in the whole school. He got all the boys together, and the principal said, "Boys, I need to talk to you about something that's serious." He said, "We have a problem, and the problem is some of you think it's funny to bring fireworks to school, and it's got to stop. You cannot bring fireworks to school. People are bringing fireworks to school, and they're setting them off, and someone's going to get hurt or start a fire. You just can't bring fireworks to school, and he laid the law down." In seventh grade, James Montgomery Boyce said he walked out of that meeting with the principal, and all he could think in his head was, "Wouldn't it be fun to bring fireworks to school?" He said, "I had never in my life thought about bringing fireworks to school." What in the world? Now the principal makes a law, he hears about the law, and sin, working in him, works through the law to inflame his sin, and you know what he did the next day? Look how nice he looks. He brought fireworks to school, and he set them off in first period, and he got in big trouble, he says. Sin seized an opportunity through the law to inflame sin in his life, the law inflamed his sin. Be honest with you, I read that story this week, and it felt very autobiographical. I've told you this before, when I was a grade school student, my mom was the children's director of our church, and she used to take us to pre-teen camp, and we used to go to seat a canyon, which is right down the road from where we take our pre-teens. In the very first year that we went to pre-teen camp, I went to the meeting, had to, my mom was in charge, she handed us all a piece of paper, and it had a big giant list in big bold print that said, "Do not bring these things to camp." You know what was on the list? Fireworks. I left the meeting, and all I could think is, "I have got to sneak some fireworks into my bag." It would be so cool if I brought fireworks. I never thought about it up to that moment, it's the exact same story as boys. I snuck them in, we went to camp, me and my fourth grade buddies put our brilliant minds together, and we came up with this plan to light a smoke bomb, and throw it in the girl's cabin, and just watch the chaos. And we envisioned like billowing smoke from one smoke bomb, just pouring out of this cabin, and so we went, knocked on the door, lit the thing, threw it in. There wasn't a lot of smoke, but it did fall over sideways and light the carpet on fire in the cabin. And I learned how much it cost to repair a 6x6 square of carpet. And I'm telling you, I read that story, and you may not have a fireworks story with camp, but you have something like that, where a boundary is drawn, and suddenly sin welling up in you, all you can think about is how you have to cross that boundary, Adam and Eve in the garden. You can eat from all of the trees, just don't eat from this one. And the serpent shows up, and he only wants to talk about that one tree. You can't eat from that tree. There's a boundary, there's a limit, oh it's ridiculous. You know how happy you'd be if you ate from that tree? And the law inflames our sin. Sin seizes an opportunity through the law to make us transgressors and to bring us under condemnation. That's question one. What shall we say is the law sin by no means? By no means. Question number two, did that which is good then bring death to me? And Paul's answer is a resounding no, by no means. His clear and his direct and his unequivocal statement is that sin produces death in us. It's not the law that kills us, it's sin that leads to death. What did we see in Romans 6, 23? The wages of sin is death. What do we see last week in Romans 7, 5? Sin leads us to bear fruit to death, not to life. Look what Paul says in verse 13, did that which is good, the law, it's holy, it's righteous is good, did the law then bring death to me? By no means. It was sin. It was sin that brought death. There was sin producing death in me through what is good, sin seizes an opportunity in the law to take us further than we currently are to inflame sin in us. But it was sin producing death in me through what was good in order that sin might be shown to be sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. Look what Paul's saying is that there is a principle cause and an instrumental cause. That's the philosophical language that we would use, a principle cause and an instrumental cause. And you've got to be clear about who bears a responsibility in death coming into our lives. I'll give you some Bible examples, simple Bible examples that I think will make this clear. One, let's talk about brothers named Cain and Abel and a rock. Cain and Abel and a rock. Who killed Abel? Was it the rock? The rock was the instrumental cause. Cain was responsible for the murder of his brother. That's obvious when God shows up, he's not angry. At the rock, he's angry at Cain. Another example, favorite of middle school boys, Ihu'd, the judge, egg glon, a giant obese man and a sword that got stuck in his gullet and went so far into his belly that it couldn't be retrieved. Who was responsible for his death? Not the sword, that's just the instrumental cause. Ihu'd, the judge, was carrying out God's vengeance on this man. Another example, David and Goliath and a stone, who gets the credit for slaying the giant. Did they all applaud the stone? It was just the instrumental cause. It was David who killed Goliath. Here's the question, it deals with the law and sin and death. Is it the law that kills us? And Paul says, no, it's sin that kills you. It's sin that produces death and it seizes an opportunity through the law to bring you under condemnation, to make you a transgressor, to inflame sin in your life. But it's sin that leads to death, not the law. So, those are the questions and we're stopping in mid paragraph to wrestle with this further question. As Christians, what do we do with the law? What do we do with the Old Testament? What role does it have to play in our lives? What role does it not play in our lives? Okay, one great error would be for us to say, we want to use the law to clean ourselves up. That's the law of legalism. You keep the laws to make yourself good and righteous. But Paul's already said it's not going to work, it doesn't work like that. The other extreme, the Marcian extreme, is to say, it sounds like we don't need the law at all. You know, Jesus has come, He's died for us. This is great. We just need to, we don't need to worry about the law of the Old Testament. We can just jettison all that stuff. It's so primitive and some of it's embarrassing. We just don't want any, we want to be done with it, to be anti-nomian, anti-law. And Paul refuses to allow us to make either of these errors in Romans 7 in the verses we're looking at and beyond. So let's think about this rightly. How does a Christian relate to the law? First of all, we have to think clearly about categories within the law. For example, the moral law. The moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments, you'll find them in Exodus 20 and you'll find them repeated word for word in Deuteronomy 5. This is not exhaustively what God's will is for us, but it's a summary of God's will. He cares about our worship, who we worship, how we worship, when we worship, how we use His name. He cares about how we relate to our parents and by extension to authority. He cares about how we treat other people in value life, how we hold up the sanctity of marriage. He cares about us not stealing from each other or lying to each other or coveting each other. He cares about all those things in our words, in our deeds, in our hearts, the moral law of God. You could say it's God's revealed will for the lives of His people, categories. There's also ceremonial law. These are things in the law that relate to sacrifices and offerings and what you can eat and what you cannot eat and things you can touch and things you can't touch. There's ceremonial aspects of the law. And if you look at Hebrews 8, 9, and 10, among other places, the author of Hebrews says we are done with those laws. We are not under those laws. We are not bound by those laws. We are not offering Passover lambs as sacrifices anymore. We're not celebrating the day of atonement with a blood sacrifice. Jesus has fulfilled those things and we're no longer observing those aspects of the law. There's also civil law. How Israel was supposed to function is a theocracy in the old covenant. Those about the nation. It's clear when you listen to Jesus and Paul that today as believers, we find ourselves living under Caesar and we're supposed to pay taxes to him, honestly. Even if we think he's not going to use him well. Give to Caesar what Caesar belongs to Caesar, Jesus says. We're supposed to show respect to the governing authorities. And many people today say well they're not very respectable. And neither was Caesar and Paul's day. Show respect to those who are in power. When your party wins or they don't win, be a respectful person. Show honor to those who deserve it because there's no authority that exists apart from God raising those people up. So don't follow those civil laws anymore. We find ourselves in a different period of redemptive history. But this moral law is still important in our lives. It still has something to say to our lives about how we might honor God and live lives to please him. So categories of the law, let's also talk quickly about functions of the law. And we'll go through these quickly. Functions of the law. One function of the law in the old covenant is that it served as a boundary. And it served as a boundary between Jew and Gentile. It was intended to keep a specific people, the offspring of Abraham, separate. So you have probably, if you've read the Old Testament, found yourself saying, why does it matter what they do or don't do on this day? Why is that moral? And why can't they eat this and can't, I don't understand, some of this seems arbitrary. Part of God's design was keeping a people distinct and culturally separate from the people around them. Separate from the paganism that plagued that place in the world at that time. Taking a people separate so that in the fullness of time, a Messiah would be born under the law who would save us from our sins, inflamed by the law and revealed by the law. It was a boundary. You can read Ephesians 2. Paul says the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile is gone now. There used to be two peoples, now Paul says there's one. God has reconciled us to each other in Jesus Christ. And he says, I don't care if you're Jew, Gentile, whatever. If you put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have access to the one true God by faith, not by virtue of keeping all the ceremonial laws. This dividing wall has been torn down, Paul says. Secondly, the law functioned as a precursor to Christ or a prelude to Christ or a preview to Christ. What did Jesus say in Matthew 5? I did not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. And Paul teases this out in Galatians 3. In Galatians 3, Paul says, the law was our guardian until Christ came. It was our guardian until Christ came. It was our guardian until Christ came that in the fullness of time we would be justified by faith and faith in Jesus Christ. And now that Jesus has come, Paul says in Galatians 3, we are no longer under this guardian anymore. It no longer serves that function because Christ has come. Number 3, the law functions as a mirror. Notice that's present tense, not past tense. It functions today as a mirror revealing our sin. When you look at yourself in the light of the Ten Commandments, not just in the external way of saying, "Well, I've never murdered anyone," but of understanding that the summary of God's law and the Ten Commandments applies to you even on a heart level. When you look at yourself in that mirror, you come away saying, "Yeah, I'm a mess. I'm a sinner. I'm a transgressor. I have broken all of those commandments." Is the work of the law to reveal that to you? It is not the work of the law to clean you up. You have cancer, and you go to the doctor, and they do a PET scan. That PET scan will show you the cancer that you have, but that PET scan will not heal you. That's not its purpose. It's not designed to do that. How foolish a cancer patient, hoping that their PET scan and the results and what it reveals would heal them, you say, "It won't work. It's never going to work." If you receive a letter, a friendly letter from the IRS saying, "You owe them money," that letter identifies a problem, a debt that you owe. It shows it to you. It reveals it. It makes sure that you know about it. You maybe didn't know about it before, but now you know. That letter's not going to pay your debt. That's not what that letter's for. The letter's there to show you your problem. Listen to me. I plead with you this morning. Do not look at the law of God as a way to clean yourself up for God. Do not look at your good works and your keeping of the commandments as a way to earn your way with God. Paul says in Galatians 3 that if you rely on works of the law, you are under a curse, because you haven't kept them and you can't keep them. Not perfectly. And that's not what they're there for. They're there to reveal a problem and to point you to a solution. Last, the law functions as a teacher. Functions as a teacher. What does it teach us? What instructs us about God's character tells us who He is. I'll be honest with you. The notion that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament makes me think that somebody hasn't read either Testament. This is the same picture of God from Genesis to Revelation. God is just as ferociously, holy and an all-consuming fire in the New Testament as He is in the old and He's just as patient and long-suffering and kind in the old as He is in the new. These people that say to you, "We want to unhitch from the Old Testament and be done with this stuff." They are asking you to saw off the branch you sit on. The Scripture teaches us who God is. Creation can tell you that He is, but only the book of Scripture can tell you who He is and what He's like. The Law as a Teacher teaches us about God's character, it also points us to Jesus. It's so odd that people view the Old Testament as this albatross hanging around our necks dragging our faith down like we can't just believe these things. In reality, the Old Testament is a foundation that we plan our feet on and we look forward to the fulfillment in Jesus Christ. It doesn't discourage our faith, it strengthens our faith and bolsters it when you look at the prophecies and the promises and all of the things from Genesis to Malachi that points you forward to Jesus. It teaches us about God's character, it points us to Jesus. Thirdly, lastly, it shows us how to honor God in our lives, how to honor God in our lives, how to clean ourselves up for God and not how to earn our way to heaven, but how to honor God in our lives. Admittedly, we're going to end with a bit of a cliffhanger because what we're going to talk about next week involves that very last point on your notes. How do we honor God in our lives as it relates to the Law? That's what Paul begins to talk about in the next few verses of Romans. Join me as we pray together. Father, we're grateful for Your Word. We're grateful that You have graciously and kindly spoken to us and You've done it plainly. Genesis to Revelation, You have revealed Your character, You have pointed us to the gospel, pointed us to Your Son. Father, we thank You for the work of Your Spirit in inspiring the Scriptures, all of them. Breathed out by God, spirited out by the third person of the Trinity. Father, we confess this morning that we're sinful people. We pray that You would help us to see the truth about who we are as we look into the mirror of Your Law. Lord, we pray that You would help us in a culture that is confused to simply accept Your definition of sin and not to fight for our own definitions or the world's definitions. God, we pray that You would be with us as sin seizes an opportunity using the Law to inflame sin in our lives and to make us transgressors and to take us further than we've gone in violating Your commandments. Father, we're thankful for the Lord Jesus who was born to fulfill the Law in the prophets and who died on a cross and was raised from the dead all in accordance with the Scriptures. We're thankful that He became sin for us, that He died as our substitute, as our sacrifice. And God, we pray that You would help us to think rightly about Your Law. Lord, we pray for those who are here this morning who genuinely think that they can keep Your Law as a means of saving themselves or cleaning themselves up. Father, we pray that You would bring them to the end of themselves this morning and that they would be drawn to the Lord Jesus Christ. Father, as Your people, we want to respond to Your Word. We want to sing and we're going to confess our sin. We're going to acknowledge our sin to You in this song and we're going to express our hope that the Lord Jesus Christ will receive us and forgive us and clean us and give us righteousness. So Father, as we lift our voices, we pray that You would be honored. We pray that Jesus Christ would be lifted up. We pray that Your Spirit would be at work in us and we pray these things in Jesus' name.