Save a sinner from hell.
It is incapable of redeeming a person from his sin, giving him new life in Jesus Christ.
And secondly, the law cannot make a person holy.
It cannot sanctify a person.
What then is the law for?
Would be the question that we're asking.
What good is the law?
If God didn't give it to save people and God didn't give it to sanctify people, why the
law?
What is its purpose?
Well, it tells us that there are four works of the law in our text.
Our text is Romans 7.
I'm going to begin reading in verse 7.
It says, What shall we say then?
Is the law sin?
May it never be.
On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the law.
For I would not have known about coveting if the law had not said, You shall not covet.
But sin taking opportunity through the commandment produced in me coveting of every kind.
For apart from the law, sin is dead.
And I was alive, once alive apart from the law.
But when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died.
And this commandment which was to result in life proved to result in death for me.
For sin taking opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me.
So then the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
Therefore did that which is good become cause of death for me?
May it never be, rather it was sin in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting
my death through that which is good.
That through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
Four works which the law is to accomplish.
What good is the law?
Let me give them to you.
And by the way, all of these are in the life of the sinner, though we're going to make
some application today to the saints as well.
And I would draw your attention to the fact that the apostle Paul is giving a personal
testimony.
Beginning in verse 7, he starts using this personal pronoun, I.
In the verses we have read, he is sharing with us his experience with the law before
he was converted on the road to Damascus.
Now it is true that up to a certain point Paul knew the law, he knew it intellectually,
from a youngster he had been trained in it.
But there came a time when the law did a deeper work in his life.
He shares with us very transparently his own experience.
The first work of the law is that it reveals sin.
The apostle tells us his own experience, I would not have known about coveting if the
law had not said, you shall not covet.
Now he knew the commandment before that, but the commandment about coveting was never personally
applied to him.
That is, he never experienced conviction in his own heart about it until a certain point
when the Spirit of God began to use the law to reveal his personal sinfulness.
And after that Paul could never be the same again.
Up to that point he could boast about the fact he had kept the law externally as people
would look at him.
And yet the Spirit of God now shows him that internally he is vile and perverse, he is
corrupt and wretched.
And that's what he means when he says, I would not have known about coveting.
He would not have known personal conviction for his sinfulness if the law had not revealed
that specific sin in his life.
I believe a person cannot be saved until he first comes to the point of recognizing his
sin.
He must be able to do more than theologically define it.
Paul could have done that as a youngster.
He must come to that place when he senses his personal undone-ness before God.
He has to come to that spot when he senses his shame and his unworthiness before the
Holy God of the universe.
A man cannot simply say, well, I think I'll try Jesus, I've tried everything else.
He can't say, well, Jesus sounds like a good way to go, I'll put him on the shelf with
the rest of my gods.
No way.
A man has to come to the place of his personal bankruptcy before God and turn in faith to
Jesus Christ.
The law must reveal his personal sinfulness.
But the law does more than do that.
It also revives sin, verses eight and nine.
There was once when Paul felt alive himself when the law before the law had done its work
in him.
That is, he was alive to his own righteousness and he felt pretty good before God.
But then the commandment came, the law came to him, and the result was that sin within
him, which he had not recognized to that point, spring to life.
It was aroused by the law.
The prohibition only caused the coveting within him to explode.
Apparently, the commandment revealed one sin of coveting.
And when Paul recognized that, suddenly the curtain was drawn back and he saw his heart
as it really was, defiled with coveting and every other kind of sin.
And that sin began to explode in his life and he was guilty before God.
He says, sin became alive and I died.
You see, he died to his self-righteousness, to his sense of personal well-being before
God.
Man cannot be saved until he experiences the same thing.
As long as a person comes to God and says, well, you know, God, I'm a pretty good guy,
but I'm willing to accept Jesus too, he's not going to be saved.
He must come to God as Paul did, recognizing death to his own self-righteousness.
He must die to what he thinks is good about him, those meritorious things, those pluses.
He must die to those, recognize that they are but, as Paul says, loss, that he needs
Jesus Christ to be saved.
Have you ever done that?
Or are you still dealing with sin and trying to hide it and push it back into the closet
rather than confessing it, repenting of it, and trusting the Savior?
Let me apply this to a Christian for a moment.
Because you know, there are Christians who think that having been saved by grace, they
can now best please God by keeping rules.
That's called legalism.
They think that they can become holy, that they even grow in Christ by keeping certain
man-made, often cultural standards and rules.
And some even go to the point of saying, well, I have to obey the Mosaic Law in order to
please God.
That is what the Bible calls legalism.
And I'd like you to know that legalism will never lead a Christian to true holiness.
Actually, when a person turns to legalism, what it does is to arouse the sin principle
that still is within him, and it only creates more problems for him.
The Galatian believers are an illustration of this.
They were genuinely saved by faith in Christ.
Christ had set them free, says Paul.
But then they voluntarily submitted themselves again to rule keeping.
And they said, now if we're going to please God, we've got to obey the law of Moses.
We've got to go back and do these things as Christians if we're going to please God.
They were very legalistic.
And you know what that produced in them?
Biting and devouring, and they consumed one another.
Did it make them more holy to keep rules?
No.
It didn't make them more holy.
It only unleashed further the sin principle within them.
They went downhill instead of uphill.
It'll happen every time.
Now, I'm not arguing that there aren't rules to keep.
I mean, that's part of life.
There are rules to keep at work.
There are rules to keep for the government.
We just passed one rule, April 15th.
There are places for rules, but my friend, when it comes to spirituality, when it comes
to our pleasing God as Christians, we must recognize we do not do that by keeping rules,
by obeying the law.
How do we please God?
We please God the same way that we're saved, by walking with Him in faith.
We are saved by grace through faith, right?
As we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, that is in the same way, so we are to walk
in Him.
We're to recognize that our relationship to Him is one that is based upon grace, and
we walk with Him day by day in faith, in love and devotion, not out of a sense of obligation
and restriction and rule keeping.
Legalism only revives sin.
Now, let's go to the third work of the law.
Actually, we've been reviewing up to this point.
Last week, we talked about the two works of the law that we've mentioned.
Now we come to the third work of the law that we've not covered before in this series.
The law results in death to the sinner, verses 9 through 11.
Paul concludes verse 9 by saying, sin became alive, I died.
This commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me.
Paul makes an interesting statement.
He says, the law was given to result in life.
Does that mean that God gave the law so that people could be justified by faith and could
have eternal life that way?
No.
Man can't do that.
What does he mean it was to result in life?
Well, God gave the law to Israel so that through their obedience, they would produce a way
of life that was well pleasing to God.
You see, God knows how man can live a full and meaningful life.
He knows how that can be experienced.
And so in the law that he gave to Israel, he established for ancient Israel a pattern
which, if followed, would have produced life for them, a meaningful, satisfying life, one
pleasing to God.
Happiness and holiness are twins.
They go together.
Now the problem is that man is a sinner.
He can't live up to that pattern.
And therefore the sinner cannot know this happiness that can come through the law.
But a Christian can, not by keeping the law, but because the Christian has the law written
in his heart.
Now we're going to get to that in chapter 8, so hang on until then.
But it says there in verse 4 that the righteousness of the law is right now fulfilled in us.
We walk not after the flesh, but after the what?
After the Spirit.
So as I allow the Holy Spirit to empower me and as I obey the Lord, then I may know the
happiness, the life that God intended that the law should have produced.
Only I know it through grace, through the working of the Spirit.
Paul says though that this law, this commandment that was the result in death, actually did
what?
Well, it proved a result in death for him instead of life.
That was because sin used the law.
And notice that word opportunity again in verse 11.
We saw that last week in verse 8.
It means a base of operations, a beachhead.
He says that sin used the law as a beachhead to do two things.
First to deceive him, verse 11, and then to kill him.
That word deceive in verse 11 is a very strong word.
It means to utterly and completely deceive.
It's the same kind of deceit that Satan used on Eve back in the garden.
He says that sin utterly deceives through the law.
What does he mean?
It probably means that because the law seems to say do and live, people think that if they
attempt to do it, that they will live before God.
And that is not true.
Sin is utterly deceitful.
It is subtle.
It is beguiling.
Let me just give you some examples of this from everyday life.
We have learned more about the effects of alcohol on the human system in the last 25
or 50 years than men have probably known throughout history before that.
We know that it kills the brain, that literally when alcohol enters the bloodstream, there
are cells of the brain that are irreparably damaged and destroyed.
We know what it does to the liver and other parts of the body.
And yet do people stop drinking?
Are there liquor establishments going out of business these days?
No.
For even though we know the consequences of drinking, we think that somehow we'll get
by with it.
When I say we, I mean editorially.
People who drink think, well, it's going to happen to other people, but not me.
What about smoking?
We have learned a lot about smoking in the last 10 years.
What it does to the lungs, what it does to the heart, etc., etc.
And yet does that encourage people to stop smoking?
No.
They know the consequences of smoking, but they still smoke.
They're deceived into thinking, it won't happen to me.
It happens to other people.
I have seen people, I remember one man in a hospital bed who had had part of one lung
out, he had envezeme and what he had left, and he was smoking there in bed.
Is that smart?
No, it's dumb.
But the person is deceived.
What about pornography?
People think, well, if I just take a peek, it won't hurt anything.
Stop thinking, not realizing, being deceived, that once that begins to come into the mind,
it starts destroying the character and the thought patterns that are right.
You see, sin is deceitful in life, though we see its consequences, though we experience
its pain and its agony, sin continues.
Sin is deceitful about eternity.
There are people who say, well, you know, I'm a pretty good guy.
I mean, I do the best that I can.
I live up to my moral code.
Not God's, but his own.
He says, surely God couldn't send a person like me to hell?
Why, it's ridiculous to think that I would go to judgment.
No intelligent person could believe that God would send a nice person like me to hell.
He's deceived by sin.
There is a way which seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death,
says Proverbs 14-12.
Sin is deceitful, and sin can even use the law to deceive.
As we've said, the law seems to say do and live, and sin deceives the human heart into
thinking that it can do and live.
It deceives a person into thinking that as long as he doesn't do the deed, he's not
guilty before God.
But the fact is, as Jesus said, if a man thinks it in his heart, he's guilty of it before
God.
Sin uses the law to make us think that it will deliver one thing when in truth it delivers
the other.
We think that it will bring us life, and yet it brings us death.
Sin used the law to kill Paul as well as deceive him.
That's why in 2 Corinthians 3, 16, the law is called the ministry unto condemnation.
Why is that?
Because the law delivers the sinner to judgment, to death.
Paul was alive once, but when the law did its work, he died.
Sin brought him into condemnation.
He was ruined and devastated.
What he thought was pretty good about himself before he suddenly saw his rags before God.
Sin results in death to the sinner, or rather the law results in death to the sinner.
It brings him to ruination.
That's why, my friend, if you are still today under law, not having trusted Jesus Christ,
you are utterly and completely hopelessly lost.
The law that you are now trying to keep, thinking you will please God, will someday deliver
you to the doors of hell and condemnation.
Now let me apply this to the Christian for a moment.
Law keeping results in death for Christians too.
I don't mean losing salvation, but I'm talking about spiritual deadness.
You know, there are a few things that are more dead than a church that is orthodox and
legalistic.
Some of us have been in situations like that, where churches are fundamental, they believe
in the inerrancy of the Bible and all the rest that we believe in, and yet because they
are legalistic, they are spiritually dead, dead, dead.
No life there.
They boast about the rules they keep and the high standards, quote unquote, that they have,
and in their fleshly energy they try to live up to those standards and they fail miserably,
but they don't admit it.
And the result is that there is no spirit in the church.
It is a church of the letter, church of the law, not the church of grace, a church of
the spirit.
And so often in that kind of church, as some of us have experienced, that legalism causes
members to judge one another.
The other guy is not doing what he ought to do.
Now don't worry about me, but he's not doing what he ought to do.
He's not living up to the standard he ought to live up to.
And that finger pointing begins and condemning each other begins, and that results in fights
within the church, and the fights finally mature into splits, and it leaves everybody
bitter.
Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about because you've been to that kind of
a situation, been through it.
Legalism brings death to a church, just as law keeping brings death to the sinner.
I pray God we will forever avoid that.
Oh, there's a time when there have to be rules, and there are in the word of God.
There are standards for us.
But when we think that our spirituality as a church depends upon our rule keeping, or
we think that we're going to grow in Christ by establishing certain man-made standards
and rules, then we're mistaken, and we're heading toward death and deadness.
There's nothing worse than dead orthodoxy.
And a commentary.
The news media is very keen on this, and love to portray dead orthodoxy, which is harsh.
And which is condemning as being what fundamentalism is all about.
So that today that term is used of that kind of legalistic Christianity.
I deny that.
I am not ashamed of the term fundamentalist.
It's too bad that it's been twisted and applied to a certain group of people that are very
legalistic.
But to be a fundamentalist is something not to be ashamed of.
That means that we believe in the fundamentals of the word of God.
Let me go on to point number four before I get into trouble.
The fourth work of the law.
It reveals sin's sinfulness to the sinner.
Verses 12 and 13.
He says, so then the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
We began the paragraph with the question, what shall we say then?
Is the law sin?
And Paul has already said no, the law isn't sin.
And here he clearly says the law is holy and righteous and good.
Now he uses three terms there.
This law that brings the sinner to the point of condemnation, this law he says is holy.
In other words, it comes from a holy God.
And it's holy because it searches out sin.
It probes, it puts the spotlight on.
Actually, the law is the opposite of sin because it shows up sin.
And he says the law is righteous.
In other words, it's just.
It lays just requirements upon men.
It condemns sin righteously and justly.
Sin should be condemned.
Now sin likes to tell us that the law is unfair, that God is unjust in condemning us.
That's part of its deceit, you see.
The sin tells us God isn't fair to do that.
God isn't that kind of a God.
But the law is absolutely righteous.
In fact, the law warns us in advance what the consequences are for disobedience.
That's just.
That's righteous.
In a sense, God gave a law to Adam and Eve in the garden.
He said, don't eat of that tree.
If you do, you will what?
Die.
God warned them what would happen in advance.
But it didn't stop them, did it?
And when they died, was God then unrighteous?
No.
It was absolutely just because God had warned them.
They disobeyed.
They paid the penalty.
It's not the law's fault.
Thirdly, he says the law is good.
The law is good in that its aim, its purpose is to bring life.
Now how does the law do that when one is a sinner?
How can the law have a part in bringing a sinner to life?
We'll turn to a couple of passages with me.
First Timothy chapter 1 will be the first passage we'll look at.
We'll begin reading in verse 8, and Paul says the same thing about the law here.
He says, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully.
In other words, if it's able to accomplish why it was given.
Realizing the fact that law is not made for righteous men, but for those who are lawless
and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who
kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers
and liars and perjurers and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching.
By the way, it could not be more clear there, could it?
That the sins that are mentioned are in contradiction to the word of God?
He says the law was given so that those kinds of things can be exposed and revealed.
That's why the law was given.
By the law comes the knowledge of sin.
Now with that background, turn to Galatians chapter 3, and it is said here so clearly
that a child can understand it.
Why is the law good?
Well, he tells us in Galatians 3, beginning in verse 19, why the law then?
I'll tell you.
He says it was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the
agency of a mediator until the seed should come to whom the promise had been made.
Who is that seed, by the way?
The Lord Jesus Christ.
Now a mediator is not for one party only, whereas God is only one.
Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?
May it never be.
For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, that is impart life in itself,
then righteousness would indeed have been based on the law.
But the scripture has shut up all men under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ
might be given to those who believe.
But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith
which was later to be revealed.
Therefore the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified
by faith.
Now it could not be more clear than in those verses as to why the law is called good.
The law is called good, my friend, because it exposes your sin and mine.
It is used of God the Holy Spirit to convict us of unrighteousness in our lives.
And when we have that conviction bubbling and churning within, when we see the perversity
inside us, the law has actually been a school teacher that brings us to Christ.
So it is good, you see.
The aim of the law is to provide life by bringing us to Jesus Christ.
And it says we are justified, made right with God, declared right before Him by faith.
Not by doing works of the law, but by faith.
So that is why it says the law is holy, it is righteous, and it is good.
But now go back to Romans 7.
I want you to see the real point Paul is trying to make here.
He says, Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me?
In other words, he says, do I blame this death on the law?
May it never be, he says.
God forbid.
Rather, it was sin.
That is where the blame belongs.
It was sin in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that
which is good.
That through the commandments, sin might become utterly sinful.
I believe Paul's main point is this.
Sin is so evil that it takes what God meant for man's good and uses it to bring him to
death.
The nature, the real nature of sin is in this exposed.
It's perversity.
It takes what God intends for good, twists it, and uses it to condemn man.
The law isn't to blame, but sin is to blame.
It's important that we understand how sinful sin is.
That's why I think that we need more preaching about the law, about God's standard of holiness,
because that's what the law is.
It is the revelation of God's moral standards, His holiness.
We need more preaching about that so that we can understand how utterly sinful sin is.
I believe that we as a church need to preach about sin and against sin and be specific
about it.
We need to be confrontive with sin, because until we see sin's wickedness, we will not
oppose it.
A sinner needs to see how sinful his sin is.
So often we think, yeah, it's a bad side of me.
It's a dirty little part of me, but really I think more of me is good than bad.
That's sin's deceit right there.
We think that somehow God's just going to overlook that bad little part of us.
We accept it, and we allow it to be a part of us without realizing how utterly offensive
that sin is to a holy God.
Even one sin will keep a person out of heaven.
Are you guilty of one sin?
If you sin once in your life, then you will not enter heaven except that sin and all the
others that you don't admit be forgiven.
You see, breaking the law, I've heard compared to breaking a pane of glass, it's not that
just a little piece of it's broken and the rest of it's still there.
When it's broken, it's broken.
And we're guilty before God.
My friend, if you've never trusted Jesus Christ today, you are under the law's condemnation.
You have broken it.
It will deliver you unto death, and I mean eternal death in hell, in separation from
God.
It's utterly sinful.
You need to realize how offensive your sin is before God.
But let me apply this to Christians for a minute.
There are so many of us who allow sin to remain in our lives without dealing with it.
I'm talking to Christians.
There are too many of us that have little pet sins that we feed and nurture in our lives.
Oh, outwardly we've got it all together.
We come to church, we sing the hymns, and beautiful Christian.
But on the inside, there is sin that we refuse to deal with.
My friend, when that is the case, when that is the case, there will be no spiritual power
or fruit in your life.
It may be that within you today, you are harboring the pet sin of lust.
Now nobody knows you think the thoughts you do and that you have the thought patterns
you do, and maybe even do some of the things you do.
Basically it's hidden.
It's under the surface, and you are harboring that sin.
You are protecting its turf in your life as a Christian.
I want to warn you about the sinfulness of sin and how offensive that is to God that
you should do that.
It may be that you are harboring bitterness.
Someone has wronged you and you just cannot forgive them.
You say, well, they haven't asked me to forgive them.
It doesn't make any difference.
You're to forgive them anyway.
You're to forgive them in advance.
And yet you struggle with that and you refuse to give up that bitterness.
And it has become like a piece of candy in your mouth and you just kind of roll it around.
You don't want to swallow it.
You just want to roll it around, enjoy that bitterness, get all you can out of it.
And you don't realize it's deceiving you and you don't realize how that is damaging
your life and your family and your walk with God.
We too need to see the sinfulness of sin, my Christian friend.
We need to see what it does to God.
We need to see how offensive it is to a holy God when we allow sin to remain unchallenged
in our lives, when we compromise with it and live with it, when we are, as God Himself
says, spiritual adulterers who claim to love Jesus Christ and at the same time are committing
whoredom with sin.
It is serious business.
What we need to do is to hate sin.
We need to repent of sin.
I want you to know that repentance is not in addition to faith.
But where there is genuine faith, there is repentance.
It's part of it.
What does it mean to repent?
It means to change the mind.
If you've never trusted Jesus Christ, what you need to do is to change your mind about
your sin, to see it for its awfulness.
You need to change your mind about yourself.
God is not pretty well pleased with you.
You're condemned by His law, His just, holy, righteous law.
You need to change your mind about God.
He's not being mean and unfair.
He's a holy God who loves you.
And you need to turn around and come to Him in faith and receive from Him forgiveness
and eternal life.
My Christian friend, you may need to repent too.
You do if there's sin in your life that's not confessed.
If you're harboring sin, you need today to change your mind about that and to see what
it is doing to you and your walk with God.
In Ephesians 422, it talks about deceitful lusts.
In Hebrews chapter 3, it warns us about the deceitfulness of sin.
Do not be deceived any longer.
That little sin that you pit and you hold so dear in your life is bringing you down,
down, down.
And you need today to repent of it and come to the Savior and establish His Lordship again
in your life.
How lost we would be without Him.
Do you love Him today?
Oh, you say, I love Jesus.
A.J.
Gordon said, my Jesus, I love Thee.
I know Thou art mine.
For Thee, all the follies of sin, I resign.
Will you do that today?
Father, I pray today You will help us to deal with sin.
May it be exposed in our lives for the enemy that it is.
I pray that the Holy Spirit will press hard upon our hearts and will bring us to the place
of repentance this day for our sakes.
And in Jesus' name I pray, amen.